Esteban Hernández was stirring pasta, an old radio quietly crackling some cumbia rhythms from a nearby shelf in the small kitchen, when he heard the door of the telephone booth outside close.

Over the weekend, the crows had pecked through the screens of the presidential palace, one of the four hundred that had been built, and, with their wings, disturbed the stagnant time inside. On Monday morning, the city woke from its lethargic state by the sound of multiple gunshots, and the desperate flapping of wings above, and clangorous clatter of birds hitting the metal roofs of the palace, and the dull thudding of the small bodies on the cobblestone pavement below, and then by the languorous smell of dead crows’ corpses baking in the sun. It was six thirty in the morning and the heat was already unbearable.

How strong is the lonely cyclist? Riding at morning, at noon, and at night. From a distance, he seems nothing more than a shrivelled, hunchbacked creature with deeply ragged breath and a face etched and pockmarked by pain and effort. Nothing more than a rattle bone ghost, then, gliding along the landscape as if a tear in space-time sucked him ever-forward. What could possibly compel someone to ride a contraption like the bicycle and brave the tepid, stifling heat of an oven sun where lungs and eyes and skin both bake and burn. Or to fight steep inclines, amidst the tops of the cordillera and their volcanic heights, where there is barely enough oxygen to breathe, much less fuel mountain misted calves and quads.

How do you take the measure of a page? Of a block of fictive text? Words, words, punctuation, story. Do you count, block by chunk Tolstoy style, merit based on some scoring system like a sports game ruled and scored, subjectively, arbitrarily, feeling like a teacher criss-crossing and short form noting in stark red amidst the scrawly hand of a high schooler’s piece of creative writing, written last Wednesday in period seven for M(r)(s). X, you, hypothetical teacher judge? Or do you own one of those bookmarks with a ruler on them and so find yourself reading inch by inch, sometimes two centimeters at a time such that, at the moment your eyes have traversed the last sentence on the last page, the end, you've read over fifty meters. Is that good? Fifty meters a week? Is it enough? What is enough?

What is a bicycle? Two wheels. A frame. Pedals. A saddle. A handlebar. And freedom. 

There's this moment that happens on a fixed gear bike. You're motoring along at pace and suddenly you feel it. It's subtle, at first, and you're unsure of what it is, but It's there, deep in your legs, in your bones and muscles, winding its way to the pit of your stomach. 

123 kilometers. 4 hours and 17 minutes. 880 meters climbed. 2600 calories burned.

All done on less than 30 minutes of sleep in the past 24 hours in five degree celsius weather with steady rain and a frigid wind constantly assaulting me. Why would anyone do this? But let's back up for a moment. 

When I arrived at the theatre, the line was out the door. Correction: lines - one going left, the other to the right. Out the door, around the sizeable front parkade, around the side of the theatre and then doubling back on themselves. And this was for ticket holders only. All huddled in the cold. It bordered on the absurd: excited fans dolled up, shuffling forward a few small steps at a time in some weird expectant pantomime. Some twenty or thirty minutes later I find myself past the entrance so I peruse the merchandise, not really intending to buy anything, and then head to my seat. Because this is what I was here for. It was already ten minutes past the show’s start time. By the time the lights dimmed, it would be another twenty minutes after that. But this is not my first Prince concert so I’m expecting it’ll start late.

It’s easy, you know. It’s all Flashdance, pick-up and play, sudden success easy - that’s the American Dream. The funny part is that it is as un-American as slavery. The sad part is that this "dream" applies equally everywhere and to - almost - everyone. I’m talking about being good at something; being a capital M, Master - musician, painter, mathematician, athlete, doctor, whatever. The difference between today and the past, when it comes to mastery, is that our culture is so connected, news spreads so fast, that we have taken something that takes an inordinate amount of time and made it even more difficult to learn by trying to fit it in a small box labelled “Instant Gratification,” and, in the process, continued the lovely Cult of the Genius.

It has become my custom to, four or five times a year, ride out with the sole intention of meeting the Man with the Hammer.

I'm about to turn thirty. This generally puts people in a pensive mood, folds their thoughts to a reflective bent and, soon, questions about the self, the future and other insecurities arise. But this is not a strange state of mind for me. Trained in philosophy, I'm used to constantly checking myself, forcing myself to face situations in a deeper sense and trying to understand what's beyond the particular in those interactions to perhaps gleam some partial truths that I can live by. And so today, instead of turning inward, I'll do the opposite, turn outward, and share some of the things I've come to believe are key for living a life that has both the certainty that a stability of character brings along with the ability to continue to evolve - intellectually, emotionally, spiritually - in the face of the world and your relative position to and in it. I want to emphasize that I don't mean this in the universal, omniscient way that advice is often given in; I'm feel far too unqualified to do that. Rather, I'd equate it more to weathered signposts along a lonely, sun-baked highway that give someone unfamiliar with the territory a rough idea of where some sort of civilization can be found.