It was the infancy of the internet. AOL charged by the minute for on-line time. I had a very slow dial up modem with a black and green monitor hooked to a dot matrix printer. Just back from an overseas tour and an exhilarating bike trip up the Pacific Coast, an adventurous reward for my effort, I was home again, living upstairs in my newly built ‘tree-house’ above the cabin where my renters still lived. The times were good, despite the fact that I was unemployed.
Naturally I joined a few chat groups, the most frequented being the triathlon, travel and Grateful Dead sites. Mixing it up with those three diverse groups provided moments never dull.
I spent my days in serious run, bike, swim sessions along with martial arts and strength training, all the while working on my art project, aka The Cabin. At night I would spend hours searching the possibilities and potentials of this world wide web thing. It was 1993.
One night we were exchanging digital notes on endurance training and nutrition, at the time the debate wasn’t so much about carbs vs protein as it was the ratio of fat>carb>protein. The preferred and widely accepted ratio became 40/30/30 and we followed it with a religious fervor.
I am sitting on my physio ball, it had replaced the task chair for my sitting sessions, and I get a response on the thread from someone with the handle of The Bear. Immediately he starts in with an extremely detailed and sophisticated account on the connection between the human body, diet and exercise. His essay, suffice to say that I was enthralled not only due to the fact that he was opening new doors, but because it was not just any bear, this was THE Bear. Augustus Owsely Stanley III bear, he of LSD, Grateful Dead and the wall of sound Bear, friend, confidant and cosmic brother to Garcia, Kesey, Cassidy, Babbs, Leary, et al. THAT Bear.
I was stunned to have such a celebrity, literally one of my heroes, commenting on my post.
We exchanged notes, he pointing out physiological and anatomical facts and I using the old carbs for endurance pitch, and as our exchange played out I suggested that he had received a bum rap from the .gov for his arrest and conviction for the sole crime of trying to open the minds of our biased, bigoted, backwards society through the use of a new chemical tool specifically designed to turbocharge our sloppy consciousness.
He offered a humble yeah, thanks, and went right back to his diet and exercise thoughts.
Food, I always felt, for thought.
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