TIBOR!!!

You guys!  Huge news!  Remember a while back I said not to leave bikes locked up in Kensington?  And then quite recently I said that I was having recurring dreams about my bicycle that I'd had for over a decade that was stolen in Kensington in October?  Guess what!  I found Tibor!  Yesterday!  I found Tibor, seven months later!  I think this is a clear indication of remote viewing being a real thing.

Ok, some background.  I'm moving out of Philly at the end of the month, but for all I's and P's, after tomorrow, I'm gone.  I'll be out of town from Thursday to Monday, packing Monday, then leaving the city Monday night.  As part of my going away process, I've been having a lot of farewell meals.  Yesterday's was a farewell lunch on Penn's campus.  After the lunch, I walked my co-eater back to their office on Drexel's campus, and headed west on Market St, an intersection I seldom ride by.  I turned left at 34th, heading towards Spruce, when I noticed a shiny, silver bike locked at the corner to a light post.  Having been on the lookout for Tibor ever since he was stolen in October, looking at every bike I pass is not an uncommon thing for me to do.  Anyway, I turned back to get a closer look, and holy crap, it was Tibor!  Whaaaaaaaat???  He was stolen in Northern Liberties, what was he doing down here???

Tibor!!!

After some checking and double-checking I confirmed that it was, in fact, Tibor.  Almost all of the original components were intact, which I found funny because the thief had taken the time to scrape some of the turquoise paint off the fork and pinkish paint off the stem (not all, just some) in an attempt to disguise the bike, but left on the easily recognizable gold Salsa grips and wolf-insignia'd WTB saddle.  He was a little beat up, with a thoroughly rusted chain from being locked outside and a non-drive crank arm dangling from the bottom bracket, but nothing that couldn't be fixed.  I was so excited I could have exploded like a giant firework, spraying happy guts all over University City.

So I called the cops.  I'd filed a police report back in October and I wanted to resolve this the proper way.  I called back an hour and a half later after no one showed up.  After two and a half hours, two calls, and still no cop, a friend of mine came down with a hacksaw and we took Tibor back ourselves.  I couldn't tell if the cops weren't showing in the hopes that the thief would appear, a confrontation would ensue, and then they'd have something real to attend to, or what.  In any case, no one paid any attention to us slowly and unskillfully cutting through a cable lock with a dull hacksaw on a busy street corner around rush hour.

After ghost riding Tibor home from my three-speed Ross, I was able to take a good look at the damages.  The seat post had been cut down to accommodate a shorter rider, the chain was shot, the BB and non-drive crank needed replacing, my wooden crate and bungee net were gone, the brakes were worn to nubs, and most annoyingly, the steel fork that had been sanded down to hide his identity was now covered in rust.  Could have been way worse, as the expensive wheel set and high end tires were intact and undamaged, though woefully underinflated.

Based on his somewhat dilapidated state and the location of recovery, here's what I think happened.  Tibor was stolen by a Kenzo junkie looking to get high (I hope their veins fall out).  They sold him to some shady-ass pawn shop under the El for $10 (I hope their store gets broken into by a junkie).  That pawn shop then sold it to a Penn student for $50 (I hope they get buried in student loan debt).  Then, as Penn move-out was last week, that student abandoned Tibor when they left town for the summer.  Just call me Sherlock.

Regardless of everything else, finding Tibor in the 11th hour before my departure (leaving just enough time for repair work) was clearly my going away present from the City of Philadelphia.  Thanks, Philly.  That was a nice going away gift, even if it kind of was a re-gifting.

Is anyone in the market for a three-speed Ross?

Tibor Dreams or Remote Viewing: You Tell Me

It's been almost seven months since Tibor, my city bike, was stolen during a brief visit to Northern Liberties.  Since then, I've moved through the seven phases of grief pretty quickly, lingering on anger for the longest (and most creatively, as I had caught and forced penance upon the thief many times over and in many different ways in the perfect justice system of my mind), but given enough time and a dirt cheap replacement bike, I've gotten over it.  The theft didn't really hit me in the pocket, just in my bike heart.  Tibor was a bit of a Frankenbike, having been fixed up and decorated over the years, not a financial investment.  If anything, it was an emotional theft, as I'd been riding him for over a decade.  The hardest part for me to get over was the fact that he is likely sitting in a scrap yard currently, as even a pawn shop would have trouble moving him (he has a crank arm that falls off every ten miles that I was eventually going to fix but it was fine for my needs and I usually just carried a 10mm hex wrench to fix it on the go).

What kind of Kenzo junkie monster would steal that bike?

Months had gone by, life had settled back into place, and Tibor thoughts had faded into the background.  I had finally settled into the Seventh Phase.  Good for me.  And then last week I had a freakin' dream that I found Tibor just leaning unlocked against a bike rack in the city.  Actually, I think it was down on Kelly Drive, just west of the Falls Bridge, except in the dream the Falls Bridge was in the city.  I grabbed Tibor and rode off reunited into a sunny day, but then I woke up and Tibor was gone again.  It was an unexpected dream, but I shrugged it off.  Dreamland is where the subconscious deals with the deals that are still undealt with, so I clearly had some unresolved feelings buried beneath the topsoil of my mind even if I couldn't see them under the vegetation.  If anything, that was probably the dream that would clear my mind of the remaining Tibor cobwebs that still hung in the corners.  Cool.  Not the best dream, but not the worst.  When I was little I had a dream that a large fish kept leaping up from the ground and trying to swallow my arm whole.  I'd shake it off and it would keep leaping back up, its mouth sliding all the way up to my shoulder.  That dream is still the worst.  Close second is the one where the big orange monster from Looney Toons was chasing me around my house.

Figuring my Tibor trauma had finally been resolved, I was surprised to then have another Tibor dream only a few days later (a few days ago).  What was going on?  I hadn't given a single conscious thought to Tibor (other than the ones prompted by the previous dream) for months.  Why was I having another dream about him?  I was flummoxed and looking up pro bono therapists when I stumbled upon a possible answer.  

There's a podcast I listen to now and again called Astonishing Legends.  I love supernatural tales, especially when told in a non-fiction format, as this allows me to properly suspend my disbelief.  A suspension which has provided plenty of terror over the years.  Thanks, Fire in the Sky.  Don't let children watch that movie.  And don't let them listen to Whitley Strieber's Majestic on cassette in the middle of the night at Boy Scout Camp.  I still don't know how I've never been abducted by aliens.

Anyway, Astonishing Legends did an episode back in April about Remote Viewing, and I finally got around to listening to it just the other day.  I listen to a lot of podcasts and it had slipped down the priority list, so the delay wasn't a reflection of interest level.  Remote Viewing is a fairly hip paranormal phenomenon that has found its way into pop culture whether you know it or not.  There are books about it, movies based on books, and it's how Eleven spies on Russians (and finds terrifying creatures) in Stranger Things.  Those pop references are mostly based on the Stargate Project, a declassified CIA study in the use of the phenomenon for spying purposes.  Briefly, Remote Viewing is exactly what it sounds like, a way to look places where you're physically incapable of looking, usually over far distances.  This is done while in a meditative or hypnotic state with the help of guiding questions.  While the exact mechanism isn't really understood, it could have something to do with the Jungian Collective Consciousness or just that all matter/energy in the universe is interconnected by way of its humble beginning as an ultra dense mass that exploded outwards making all of us.  Or maybe it's just the result of people wanting to believe in something so much that mind overtook matter.  Or maybe it's all a hoax.

In this episode, the AL guys talk to Lori Williams, a renowned Remote Viewer that teaches classes on Viewing and has done private work for companies all around the world.  While talking about the basics of RV and how it's used to find missing people or understand unexplained events (the episode focused on its use in determining what happened to Flight 19), it occurred to me that maybe my dreams about Tibor weren't actually dreams, but remote views into his current whereabouts.  Hear me out on this...  the gist of RV is that it creates a bridge between your conscious and subconscious, and while bridged your conscious mind can tap into this universal information that the subconscious can always access.  Normally the Collective Consciousness would blow your mind to pieces, so the subconscious acts as a buffer, but in the hypnotic state, the buffer leaks a bit and your conscious mind can sneak some peeks.  Going from there, when else do the conscious and subconscious minds intermingle like that?  Oh, I don't know... maybe when we're asleep?  I don't think it takes too much of a leap of faith to say with complete confidence in science that this clearly points to my dreams being direct visions into the location of my missing bike and has nothing to do with unresolved feelings regarding its theft and the sense of personal invasion and vulnerability that all theft leaves us feeling.

That said, if everyone can just keep their eye out for my bike and when they see it be sure to maybe put up some sort of subconscious red flag for me so I can find it at night while I'm sleeping, that would be just great.  Include as many landmarks as possible in the surrounding area and try to not cloud the memory with symbolic representations of childhood traumas as I will not be able to find that tree from back home in Tennessee where you and your brother hid while your parents fought after pappy drank too much because the factory laid him off (for his drinking) when I'm looking around in Kensington.  Real trees only, no symbolic trees.  Thanks!

Ringing Rocks County Park

Last week was Spring Break, which meant a lot of Bike Tours.  For parents, Spring Break must be a nightmare.  Not only are your kids no longer absent from the home, they're also no longer someone else's daytime responsibility.  To make matters worse, the weather has finally shifted from unpredictably cold to manageably warm, meaning severe pangs of guilt for plopping the kid down in front of the TV all day.  As a bicycle tour guide, this means a steady flow of families seeking out a way to keep the kids educationally occupied while also managing to wear them out.  Long bicycle tours in historic cities are great for that.  You should take one sometime.

My only weekday sans-tour group was Thursday, allowing me to tag along with a friend of mine and her two kids for a different but similar sort of Spring Break day trip: day hiking + camping.  Hiking is a spectacular way to wear out children.  They get so excited to be permitted to run around swinging sticks and throwing rocks that they never catch on to the fact that it's all just a clever ruse to get them to put themselves to bed without a fuss.  I don't know, can you pick up that giant rock?  Only one way to find out!  Wow!  You did it!  But I bet you can't carry it all the way to the end of the trail...

So Thursday morning, with education and exhaustion in mind, we set out for Ringing Rocks County Park in Upper Black Eddy, an imaginary town in Bucks County (home to fabulous Ringing Rocks Jewelry).  What is/are Ringing Rocks?  Great question.  Ringing Rocks County Park is a small, 128-acre park that is home to a giant rock river unlike any other rock river that I know of, though my knowledge of rock rivers is fairly limited as I can only think of two local rivers of rocks: Hickory Run and Hawk Mountain.

Plenty of places for kids to hurt themselves.

Regardless of my limited rock river knowledge, I do know that Ringing Rocks is special.  Not so much in size or composition, but in that its rocks, when struck by a hammer, can produce chimes similar to that of a bell.  The other rock fields I know of definitely cannot do that.  Observe:

Now, only about a third of those rocks make sounds, and each of those rocks has its own pitch.  As far as I could tell, pitch was entirely unrelated to rock size, as smaller rocks sometimes possessed the deepest tones and vice versa.  And as far as scientists can tell, there's nothing special about these rocks, as they appear to be made up of the same iron and aluminum mixture as most of the rocks in the general area.  The do have a bit of a rusty color to them, though, so for the sake of a lack of empirical evidence, let's just say it's the iron that does it.  In any case, as it's impossible to tell which rocks will ring based solely on appearance, the only way to properly appreciate the park is to jump from boulder to boulder striking them with a hammer.  What kid wouldn't want to visit this park?  Not only do you get to run and climb over giant rocks, you get to hit them with hammers making different bell tones.

After taking a fair amount of swings, and the ten-year-old breaking a hammer, we made our way down the rocky path to a nameless offshoot of the Delaware River.  While only a shallow creek this early in the season, the giant boulders along the wide river bed let us know how powerfully the water could flow during the wet season.  Tired of the precarious boulder balancing act, especially with the added difficulty of maintaining rocky footing while holding hands with a five-year-old that wanted nothing more than to run off on her own even though she would most definitely face-plant if allowed to do so, we hopped off of the rocky path and out onto the slimy river bed.  From there it was onward and upward past a series of small water falls and flowing puddles until eventually we reached the big mama waterfall.

We maintained a positive waterfalls to human-falls ratio.  Not too shabby.

Not particularly spectacular in April, it was nice to be able to stroll around underneath it without worry of death.  If you'd like a more spectacular waterfall experience, I'd recommend Ricketts Glen.  Regardless of its magnificence, a waterfall was still a bonus after all the rock hammering.  Also, the top of the 30' waterfall is, for all I's and P's, the end of the loop that started at the ringing rocks.  Only a few miles in total, Ringing Rocks is an easy day for adults, but a real workout for the kiddos with all of the boulder scrambling and slime navigating.  I'd recommend Ringing Rocks to any parents in the Philly area with kids under 15.  There's even a nearby, family-friendly campground if you'd like to extend your vacation by a day so as to include a visit to nearby Nockamixon State Park.  Also, if you go on an April 13th of any year, all Wawa coffee is free (and there are more than a few Wawas on the way up), so like, maybe go then?