It takes a Village of the Damned to raise a British Child

Bikes, Bad Luck, an invocation of mercury and a lesson in gratitude

Of course I'm flying downhill, fast as the wind, when I realize my back brakes aren't working. As in at all. Might as well be squeezing my dick for all the good it's doing me. Add to that its dark, raining and I'm hitting a series of curves that snake sharp, one after the other, along this paticular stretch of the bike trail. All it'll take is a splash through an invisible puddle at one of those turns and I'll be crashing hard across the pavement. Flashes of casts and medical bills race through the mind. Luckily instinct kicks in before the panic. I go to pull hard on the remaining front brake - but then a muscle memory of the last time I did just that in a similar situation freezes my left fist before I go flying over the handlebars. Instead, I veer off the tracks and hit the swail. The mud impact absorbs a good chunk of my velocity slowing me down sufficently, then I squeeze the front brakes trigger slow, turn my front wheel at a 45 degree angle and glide to a slide before stopping.

That's that then... except it's still dark, still raining and I'm three miles away from the nearest MARTA stop.

I flip my Baby over and decide to try to fix her myself.

Normally Bill does this sort of stuff for me. He's my 'satanic mechanic' so to speak and is capable of doing all that working man shit that just normally goes over my head. A quick call would've sent him packing up his tools into the Canyonero and he'd be on his way to help pry me out of, once again, a tight spot.

Except Bill's not here now. I'm all I've got except a drizzle that's just turned into a downpour.

Which means its time I started figuring out shit like this for myself... and stat.

Tracing the brake line from the handlebars to the rear I quickly figure out the problem. The brake hook has come undone from the line, which is why squeezing the brake was like squeezing air. All I have to do is reattach it.

Easier said than done.

I'm squatting in the mud fifteen long minutes with no success.

Its already been a shit day. A shit week in fact. The only reason I came into town was to drop the Magpie off an eleven page scene (involving oddly enough water-boarding and Liber Oz) for the IC2. Grabbed an early dinner afterwards and tried to race the rain to the Civic Center Station.

Starting to get pissed fast. Black coffee oil oozing through a sack of broken glass - that's my nerves right now. I know I should just give up, walk her back to the station and take her in to get repaired as soon as I can afford it. But whether by some accident of nature or nurture, I've got a proud stubborness where most men seem to have been blessed with common sense. Whatever else may go down, I'm not leaving this spot until I figure this shit out for myself.

It is then a sudden orange flash washes over everything, similar to walking into a dark room turning on the lights and having the lone bulb blow out immediately from the sudden surge. A sudden thought emerges without volition, summoning forth a call for mercurial assistance from the depths of a rarely used and poorly understood occult self-education. The prayer dissipitates though as soon as I realize that that's what I'm doing.

I rub my eyes and give it a second.

Another and another passes before I write off Thoth-Hermes as a no-show.

Back to the grind...

... and it is then that what appears to be a brightly lit UFO is coming up the hill towards me.

There is a blinding central white light. Flanking it on both sides are flashing red and orange lights. Behind and just directly above are a series of three steady blue lights. The apparition's much too small for a cop car. I'm still trying to process it all through my befuddled senses when it squeeks to a halt before me.

"Everything okay?" a voice emerges, one spoken soft enough to muffle any discernible sense of gender to it.

"No, not really..." I'm shielding my eyes from the glare, "... the brake lines popped off the back here and I'm not sure how to get it back on."

"Here, let me take a look at it..." A scarecrow silhouette begins to materialize through the illumination haze and I realize that its a fellow bicyclist I'm dealing with.

It's a young man. Skinny. Beige windbreaker, white plaid shirt and a helmet more suited for a scooter with blond locks dangling out of the bubble. He walks over to me, kneels down and quickly assesses the situation.

"Oh it's nothing..." he smiles without a trace of patronization and shows me that I was close, real close and was only about an inch off of where I was trying to reconnect the line. In a matter of seconds he's not only fixed my brakes but taught me how to do it again myself in the future.

I begin thanking him profusely, offering up what few bucks I had in the wallet and admittedly quite baffled by this random act of kindness.

The kid just smiles, waves me off as if it was no biggy, remounts his UFOcycle and takes off into the rain.

One can only imagine how lame this will sound, but at that moment I almost cried... I don't know why. My body was covered in a light dusting of goosebumps and a chill was looping around the spine in a triple helix. All the anger, stress, lonliness... even this lingering sense of self-entitled betrayl... just melted away from me.

"I have to do better..." I promised the kid, the dark, the rain, myself, finding at that exact second no difference seperating us.

Later at the edge of the trail's exit onto Boulevard I watched a young woman, cherub cheeked, bespectacled and wearing a pink rabbit hoodie ride a unicycle past me.

The whole ride home I wondered what happened.

Did I summon something? Did some divine agency take notice of my plight? Am I making too much of a random encounter with a rare samaritan?

I don't know.

Ever since I read about schizotypal behavior a few years back and found one of the symptoms was 'magical thinking' I've often wondered if I might not possess some qualities of such a condition. It would certainly explain a lot.

On the other hand there is an arguement for the school of my eyes and not to dismiss some of the weird and wonderous sights they have seen on the grounds that they conflict with a popular consensus of reality.

Still, whatever it is it is also a reminder. That I'm not alone and if I would but take the time to do so, I could convert this congenital rage into something positive.

Again: I have to do better... if for no other reason than I can.