I got sadly sucked into the news today. It was surreal. I felt like I was reading about a country that had become increasingly unfamiliar and, frankly, disappointing—Kirk, Kimmel, MAGA, the Christian Right, Christian nationalism, a thousand tiny outrages stitched together into one blistering garment. I had enough. I could feel the heat of it behind my eyes. So I did the only thing I know that works: I clipped in, rolled out, and let Lady Bird Lake take me someplace else.
By late afternoon the world was the color of a fever. The loop became a lens set to false color—no soft white infrared here; this was harsher, stranger. Reds pulsed where green should be. Purples bled into teal. The lake shimmered like a bruise. I wasn’t seeing the city so much as feeling it; everything around me looked like a projection of whatever was burning inside my chest.
A City Made Strange
The water glowed purple and green, the shoreline trees outlined in crimson veins. The trail snapped in black-and-white, sharp as a film negative. Downtown towers pulsed with neon light instead of sunset gold, while bridges arched in teal fire. Even people on the path looked spectral, half-solid, glowing faint around the edges.
This wasn’t the Austin most people see. It was the Austin that mirrored the inside of my head—distorted, humming, restless.
Heat Beneath the Surface
That’s how angst works. It doesn’t arrive with a headline. It seeps in. It shifts the spectrum. Suddenly the ordinary looks off, wrong, overheated. Reflections quiver. Buildings vibrate. Faces glow with some unnamed intensity.
Riding Through the Fever
People ask why I ride when I’m restless. Because words can’t always metabolize what I carry. But motion can. Pedal by pedal, the fury turned into rhythm. Breath by breath, the sharpness dulled. It didn’t vanish—it translated. That’s what infrared does: same light, different register. Same city, different spectrum. Same me, different way of bearing what I couldn’t say.
The Soft Gut Punch
Midway around the lake came the gut punch of recognition. The colors weren’t random—they were my feelings mapped onto the world. Red for anger. Purple for grief. Teal for the unease I can’t shake. Black and white for the binaries everyone keeps demanding.
It wasn’t the kind of gut punch that floors you. It steadied me. It whispered: Yes, it’s heavy. Yes, it burns. But keep going anyway.
Silence as Survival
I wanted to post. To publish. To hurl words into the fire. But the trail taught me something else: silence can be survival. Not cowardice—clarity. Choosing not to feed the machine. Choosing to let my body process what my tongue refused. The ride gave me that option.
Back to Ordinary Light
By the time I closed the loop, the false colors faded. Purples bled back to blue. Reds dimmed to amber. The skyline softened into ordinary glass. Lady Bird Lake looked like itself again.
But I wasn’t the same. My legs ached, my shirt clung with sweat, but my chest was open. The heaviness hadn’t disappeared, but it had been moved through, translated into something I could carry.
The Escape Valve
Here’s the truth: we all need escape valves. If we don’t bleed off the pressure, we’ll explode. Some people find it in running, painting, or prayer. For me, it was a two-hour ride around Lady Bird Lake, through a fever-dream spectrum of red, purple, teal, black, and white.
I came back lighter. Not because the world had changed—God knows it hadn’t—but because I had. The bike gave me what the page couldn’t: a way to ride out the storm without detonating.
We need these escapes. We need ways to let our angst burn in false colors until it bleeds back into something survivable. That’s the only way forward.
I felt so much better after my ride. The world was still heavy, still burning. But I had pedaled through another spectrum and returned intact. And sometimes, that’s enough.
Jack.
