Riding the Brain Waves: The Kaczynski Cabin
Ten days ago I hit my head. Immediately upon smacking the tree my vision pixilated, my anxiety shot towards the moon, and not again I thought, not again, not again. Simultaneously my grey matter fizzled and popped, and within nanoseconds I could feel my brain bruising under my bike helmet. It had been about two months since I bumped my head against anything, and about a year since my last major concussion. I was finishing a 90-minute mountainbike ride and rounding the last corner before reaching my garage, on my own damn property. I’d railed around this turn over a hundred times, but this time was different. I never hit my head in this corner before. I was also carrying more speed than normal. I was slightly distracted, about to leap over a two-foot-tall purpose-built log pile, and glowing after such a beautiful ride in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. This last turn is kinda bumpy, and the ground is off-camber, no berm. There’s a handful of trees on the inside of the turn and besides going a bit too fast, I cut a little too much to the inside early in the turn, actually my front tire had slid a little. My left shoulder hit the tree first, sure to be bleeding under my jersey. Then my head bounced off the same tree. Then I got ejected from the bike, but remained on my feet. I swirled my left arm around, checking to see if it was broken, or worse. My neck got yanked around, and my Oakley glass zoomed by my face, landing about five feet in front of my bike on the ground. For several minutes I searched around on the forest floor for the missing arm piece to my glasses, only to then find it stuck inside one of the vent holes in my helmet, which was still attached to my head. The headache flooded my upper body, and I picked up my bike and walked it to the garage.
I was about nine years old when absorbing my first concussion. While trying to master riding wheelies on my bicycle, I fell tail-over-teakettle and smacked the blacktop. Guess I could partially claim to blame my equipment for the beginning of my expansive brain injury resume. The balance required to properly loft and maintain a bicycle’s front wheel in the air is a delicate acrobatic feat, although it looks easy enough in the videos. I claim mechanical deficiencies because my bike at the time was equipped with pedal-backward only foot brakes, a device counterproductive to the cause when attempting to learn the proper tipping point of riding a bike aimed at the heavens. Much of my to-come TBI’s occurred on the bicycle, and for sure it became sort of a thing with me.
With ears a-ringing, sparkly brain flies filling my eyes, and back of skull then bruised, I was more concerned about my possible broken tailbone when hitting the ground keister-first all those times. Not even knowing of the word ‘concussion’, such terminology at the time was probably reserved for medical professionals, not city-dwelling punk ass bitch bicycle boys like me, IDK. Across my lifetime thus far, I’ve gone boom on my butt a few handful of times, and mostly to follow came smacking of my skull against the pavement, hard dirt, or singletrack trail littered with rocks. But for me, the paradigm of the upcoming front-of-face head dart blows proved to be the most damaging of all.
Not thinking my youthful times on the bicycle would ever amount to anything, mostly I was attempting to escape the true trouble at home with my mother, as well as flee my self-fabricated fears. Fantasizing my life as an offroad motorcycle racer, I spent many a days sprinting around on my father’s shitty old three-speed bike making zoom-zoom noises, pretending I was soundly aboard a speeding motocross machine. Time alone for me in the woods created some solace, and factually my only experienced moments of safety and love felt was when amongst the nurturing trees and hills of mother nature.
As a troubled punk child I self-expelled from school at 16, then the following year accepted a fulltime job as bicycle mechanic. Bicycles were kinda cool around then, well, sort of, I guess. The 10-speeds presented as somewhat sexy, in their own sveltely mechanical way. For me however, my heart resided in the woods with my little BMX bike and fantasized motorcycle racer dreams, not on the street amid the lycra-clad wannabe European skinny tire crowd. But then, oh boy, but then, this verifiable fantastic beast arrived on the workplace sales floor one day, a contraption I had been awaiting my entire life but didn’t even know it, the mountainbike. In 1983 I carved precious drug dollars out of my own delinquent drug-dealing pockets as well as stole or finagled additional dollars however I could, so to afford one of these ravishing offroad bicycle beauties of my own.
Caring not about the scrapes, bruises, and additional blows to the head along the route, I finally found myself starting to go somewhere in life, not just deeper down the drug addict rabbit- rabbit hole in search of the ability to cope with teenage lifehood. Once slipping the first of thousands of needles into my arms though, the drugs had their hooks into me but the mountainbike did in-fact afford a parttime escape from my highly unsettled world. After failing in a fantastic way at my first ever mountainbike race, 1983, I self-punished to the point of nearly extinguishing my own breath, twice.
Wearing somewhat pollyanna-colored lenses, I hoped the mountainbike could carry me away from my otherwise shitty-ass loser existence. Recognizing my life had become nothing but a huge disappointment, I teetered on the edge of giving up, or maybe, maybe I should just punish myself more. Maybe more…to laughingly revert to that arena of pain and suffering, hah, that cave of pain where I felt most comfortable. Maybe more pain, yes, maybe more, so I did it, I entered my second-ever mountainbike race to see if the endeavor could kill me, because it just might.
With nothing to lose, I pushed beyond the edge so to stay in the lead of the scary monsters chasing me, aka my own negative emotions. Such positioning served me well during 17 years of racing mountainbikes, then onward amid my global executive corporate career, and as a friend who shy’s not from helping with the dark and difficult life conditions of others. Along the way, athletics have provided an organic counterbalance to my frightful beginnings, awhile gained me access to a livelihood I doubt I would have found otherwise.
I won that second-ever race first place in northern New Jersey, and by way of both the bicycle and the loving embrace of the mountains, I quit all drugs after a frantic 13-year span as addict and dealer in Baltimore. Then trading in the drugs for a professional mountainbike license, I was on my way towards responsible humanhood. The compounding head traumas came fast and furious though, and with each one the recovery time grew, but unbeknownst to me, the upper-story damage compiled. Yet at the time, I cared not for such distracting concerns, no not at all, I was trying to fabricate a life of futures and sustainability, not pausing or caring to tend to my splattermatic brain blows.
Nine years on the professional race circuit produced some amazing results, some critical life lessons learned, and as you might imagine with what you know of me so far, an injury list that is rather embarrassing. Primarily, I committed myself to never quitting another race no matter what, following the abandonment of that first-ever event in northern Pennsylvania, two minutes after starting, because the effort was too hard. Now rivaling Evel Knievel himself, not proudly do I spew the following statistics: 40+ broken bones, and 14 surgeries. Nine times or more I have lost consciousness, lost memory, lost my vision or a combination of the three due to bruising my bird brain. Worst of all was in 1994 during the World Cup cross-country race in Mount Snow Vermont, with all the fastest global mountainbike pros in attendance. My race was going well, hah, until it wasn’t. Afterward I was relegated to sleeping in the basement with window blinds drawn so to block the painful light, and for months slept with one foot on the floor so to keep the room from spinning. Still over two decades later I am having dental instability problems, losing more and more teeth to structural damage, all from landing face first in the infamous ‘Rock Garden’, me trying to beat the studly Bob Roll to the Vermont finish line with one lap to go.
These days as you might already be aware, I’m twice divorced, currently not working, living alone in a small rustic cabin in the woods, and losing executive brain function by the minute. Concurrently I attempt every modern-day brain healing maneuver I can reasonably attempt. I’m on the LDN medicine, aka low-dose Naltrexone 6.0mg daily: 4.5mg with breakfast plus 1.5mg at bedtime, I take four blasts per day of a Synapsin nasal spray and have spent 29.5 hours in the hyperbaric chamber so far. I take 3,000mg of Omega 3-rich krill oil, dose up with vitamin D3, and maintain an expansive daily menu of supplements under the watch of my nutritionist, the masterful Misses Lisa Mase of Harmonized Living in Vermont. I’m reducing my sugar intake so to minimize inflammation, while the while trying to avoid my next concussion, fearful of advancing my half a decade of mounting ‘neurocognitive disorder’ damage.
Tearing the band aid off, I must admit something that many of you already know, intrinsically. Factually my number is far beyond 60 cranial impacts but everyday societal norms don’t understand the phrase ‘hundreds’ of concussions, so I just say ‘more than 60’, it’s easier for everyone that way. Although armchair diagnosed by both my psychiatrist and medical doctor as having CTE aka the NFL football player’s disease, I have decided to try and live my best life, or to ‘Live A Great Story’ as the Instagram tagline from the same name t-shirt company says, hence my effort to face my own hardship, deal with the migraines, retreat from society somewhat, to try my humanoid best, and do not, do not, do not fucking quit.
Love you all, RRB.
