dementia's a possibility

i mean, i'm not a young man. it could be the long, slow, incremental deterioration of the myelin sheathing of nerves in my brain caused by free radicals acting on carbon-hydrogen bonds that has led me to sign up for the gnarliest bicycle race going. maybe forty years of higher levels of antioxidants in my diet would have prevented this...

whatever, i'm doing it. five hundred eight miles through the desert in less than forty-eight hours. at least i'm part of a team of four. some idiots do it solo, some of them even do it on a fixed-gear bike, like the homicidal/suicidal big city bike messengers ride. unicycle, anyone? with six billion humans, even a serious weirdo living five standard deviations from the mean has plenty of company, and lots of uber-weirdos out past six. i'm guessing our z-score is above 4, though. lunacy? dementia? like it matters. we're nuts.