It's all timing about

If humor … you know what? Hold on.

Digression #1: Is it just me, or has the word "humor" come to be so earnest and academic that it puts you on guard more than it relaxes you? You see it up there and right away you're ruined for anything like a joke. You start girding your funny bones for a clinical discussion about how something "amusing," like an "anecdote," eases stress and lengthens your life and realigns your synapses when all you really want to do is crack up. Humor relaxes you abstractly; comedy, done right, makes you pee a little, right then and there. Anyway,

If humor or whatever is all about timing, I'm going to have to find a new line of work. I've got a whopper of a week ahead of me as I squeeze a week and a half of work into a shortened week between Cleveland's Friday Night with Frazz and this weekend's appearances at the Seattle Bike Expo. Which is all well and good and entirely expected and, I really have to point out, entirely worth it on the basis of the Cleveland event alone.

Digression #2: Oh, man, what a great evening. (Check out photos here.) Century Cycles' Rocky River store absolutely packed the house with very cool people who were extremely nice, really bright, universally good-looking, passionate about cycling, very generously enthusiastic about Frazz and Trizophrenia and my other work, and tolerant to the point of sainthood of digressions and slow-moving lines while I carried on more conversations than Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Tony the Paranoid Mailman (another digression for another time) combined. Plus they had great food and drink (some of which was prepared in a bicycle-powered blender) in a truly beautiful space (a refurbished post office, in fact). When I recommend that you ever check the place out if you're in Cleveland, it's not shameless product endorsement - it's a tip, a favor to you readers. I know I'm headed there the next time I'm in Cleveland, and partly because it was such an adrenaline-filled, busy-till-the-wee-hours night that I did just about everything except actually shop. Maybe I could have done that Saturday morning, but instead I went for my first outdoor bike ride of the year (I'm the one in the red and yellow), and that was awesome, too.

So I'm fine with working full tilt, and I'm even fine with sacrificing some training to get it done, because that's life and I'm not a pro triathlete and I can deal with it. My timing problem is that, one week after the biggest, heaviest, wettest snow of the year, it's supposed to get up into the 50s and sunny for the next few days. That's bad timing. That, or delaying whatever gag I had in mind with two long digressions until I forgot whatever punch line I had in mind in the first place. I think maybe it was something about "… so a nearsighted gymnast walks into a bar." It all too often is.