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Alumni Updates And Drugs

First of all, someone has actually gone to the wiki page, and written some fan mail. Unbelievable. From Devin Knickerbocker '05, the cycling team alumnus best known for sporting wicked aviator glasses during races:

"matt pech, consider me one of your blog's fans. In principle i don't normally like blogs, seeing as how the genre has the capacity not only to be masturbatory as you mentioned, but also narcissistic. Also, some of them simply suck, and are replete with stupid opinions and subpar sentence construction. I can get behind bad grammar, and sometimes would even argue that breaking these rules can create an interesting sort of poetry. Bad writing, on the other hand, is never acceptable. Please keep pulling hte esoteric out of the mundane, please do not start using the word "got," and good luck plumbing the depths of the human soul."

When you're plumbing the depths of the human soul , your hands will get covered in shit. So wear gloves.

Since we're on the subject of alumni, over at thebikegame.com, there's an update from Todd Yezefski. Here's a sample:

"As some of you know, I’ll soon be leaving the great Chicagoland to—well—ride my bike and hit on freshmen girls up at my alma mater of Dartmouth. I somehow convinced them that it’d be a good idea from them to hire me as the bike gaming coach and they somehow bought it. So after shacking up with Myerson (ed note: aka the Hajj; can be found with 10 drunk strippers on Sunday morning at Julian’s on Broadway B in Providence RI) and mini-Myerson (ed note: refers to alumnus Steve Weller) in Tucson for a little this winter, I’ll be headed up to New Hampshire to perform my duties, which I think include being a dirty old alum who is always around and introducing the Keystone swilling college students to the world of quality beer."

All the young ones will meet Todd in the spring. Ladies-- someone in Kansas called him "man-pretty," so it'll be hard not to fall madly in love with him.

A while back, I said I write about cycling and drugs. Well, here it goes. I recently read "The Botany of Desire," a great book by Micheal Pollan, that follows the history of the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. These two passages from the marijuana section struck a note:

"Andrew Weil describes marijuana as an "active placebo." He contends that cannabis does not itself create but merely triggers the mental state we identify as "being high." The very same mental state, minus the "physiological noise" of the drug itself, can be triggered in other ways, such as meditation or breathing exercises. Weil believes it is an error of modern materialistic thinking to believe that the "high" smokers experience is somehow a product of the plant itself (or THC), rather than a creation of the mind-- prompted, perhaps, but sui generis."

" What if it turns out that the neurochemistry of transcendence is no different whether you smoke marijuana, meditate, or enter a hypnotic trance? What if in every one of these endeavors, the brain is simply prompted to produce large quantities of cannabinoids, allowing us to experience the present deeply? There are many technologies for changing the brain's chemistry; drugs may simply be the most direct. From a brain's point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless."

Why do I find this interesting? Its an interesting idea that your brain doesn't care how a stimulus is generated to release an effect. In this sense, is that euphoric feeling you can get cycling any different from one achieved through drugs? Probably not. Granted, there are toxic side effects that drugs have-- but doesn't cycling or anything else have unpleasant side effects? Is it purely on moral grounds that many drugs are taboo?

matt