VeloNews | Boonen tests positive for cocaine

Paris-Roubaix winner and former world champion Tom Boonen has tested positive for cocaine, Het Laatste Nieuws reported on Tuesday.

The newspaper said that the 27-year-old Boonen tested positive for the drug three days before the Tour of Belgium on May 25, although anti-doping officials say the rider will not face suspension since use of the drug is not specifically banned except in competition.

Boonen and his Quick Step squad have scheduled a news conference for Wednesday at the team’s headquarters in Wielsbeke, Belgium, promising “an annoucement regarding the current situation.”

More on the Boonen situation on VeloNews here and here, Eurosport, and the Guardian UK.

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this. I can certainly understand the allure of cocaine … when I was younger, I did a fair amount of “experimentation” with various illicit chemical substances, cocaine amongst them … I know firsthand what the effects are, how it makes the user feel, and why someone would want to continue using.

Thankfully, after a really bad night in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco involving glass pipes, getting robbed (twice), and the offer of needles (with other substances, which I turned down), I wised up. I have been clean since August 1991; almost 17 years at this point.

This is not some huge confession that I’m putting out here … I’ve never really hidden this from anyone, and have discussed it fairly freely when the topic has come up. I’m certainly not proud of it, but nor am I ashamed of it.

To me, there is a huge difference between taking drugs to cheat, and taking drugs to escape. What I did, and what Brother Boonen has been doing was seek an escape from the pressures of our lives. Different pressures I’m sure, but not always easy to admit and seek help for.

Hopefully, this will be Boonen’s wake-up call, and he’ll seek the help he needs, rather than continue down the same path that Marco Pantani and Jose Maria Jimenez have traversed, to their unfortunate and tragic deaths.

And lest anyone worry, based on other posts on the blog over the past year or so, as bad as my life sometimes seems to me now, it’s not nearly as bad as it was in the last 1980s and early 1990s … I am in no danger of falling back into old habits.

I’m not even drinking really … a beer here and there, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a real cocktail. It certainly wasn’t at home. I still have the same 4 unopened bottles of vodka in the freezer that I’ve had since posting about the The Great Vodka Taste Test last fall.

FOR MILES

Your sound is faultless
    pure & round
        holy
    almost profound

Your sound is your sound
    true & from within
    a confession
    soulful & lovely

Poet whose sound is played
    l lost or recorded
    but heard
    can you recall that 54 night at the Open Door
    when you & bird
    wailed five in the morning some wondrous
    yet unimaginable score?

  — From GASOLINE, by Gregory Corso (1929 - 2001), American “Beat” poet.

REQUIEM FOR “BIRD” PARKER, MUSICIAN

this prophecy came by mail:
in the last murder of birds
a nowhere bird shall remain
and it shall not wail
and the nowhere bird shall be a slow bird
a long long bird
somewhere there is a room
in a room
in which an old horn
        lies in a corner
like a handful of rice
wondering about BIRD

        first voice

hey, man, BIRD is dead
they got his horn locked up somewhere
put his horn in a corner somewhere
like where’s the horn, man, where?

        second voice

screw the horn
like where’s BIRD?

        third voice

gone
BIRD was goner than sound
broke the barrier with a horn’s coo
BIRD was higher than moon
BIRD hovered on a roof top, too
like a weirdy monk he drooped
horn in hand, high above all
lookin’ down on them people
with half-shut weirdy eyes
saying to himself; “yeah, yeah”
like nothin’ meant nothin’ at all

        fourth voice

in early nightdrunk
solo in his pent house stand
BIRD held a black flower in his black hand
he blew his horn to the sky
made the sky fantastic! and midway
the man-tired use of things
BIRD piped a varied ephemera
a strained rhythmical rat
like the stars didn’t know what to do
then came a nowhere bird

        third voice

yeah, a nowhere bird —
while BIRD was blowin’
another bird came
an unreal bird
a nowhere bird with big draggy wings
BIRD paid it no mind; just kept on blowin’
and the cornball bird came on comin’

        first voice

right, like that’s what I heard
the draggy bird landed in front of BIRD
looked BIRD straight in the eye
BIRD said: “cool it”
and kept on blowin’

        second voice

seems like BIRD put the square bird down

        first voice

only for a while, man
the nowhere bird began to foam from the mouth
making all kinds of discords
“man, like make it somewhere else,” BIRD implored
but the nowhere bird paced back and forth
like an old miser with a nowhere scheme

        third voice

yeah, by that time BIRD realized the fake
had come to goof
BIRD was about to split, when all of a sudden
the nowhere bird sunk its beady head
into the barrel of BIRD’s horn
bugged‚ BIRD blew a long crazy note

        first voice

it was his last‚ man‚ his last
the draggy bird ran death into BIRD’s throat
and the whole building rumbled
when BIRD let go his horn
and the sky got blacker… blacker
and the nowhere bird wrapped its muddy wings round BIRD

        fourth voice

BIRD is dead
BIRD is dead

        first and second and third voices

yeah, yeah

        fourth voice

wail for BIRD
for BIRD is dead

        first and second and third voices

yeah, yeah

  — From The Vestal Lady on Brattle, by Gregory Corso

Okay. I admit it. I have a tool obsession. Bike tools, mechanics tools, hand tools, power tools, or measuring tools, I love them all.

Whenever I need to go out and buy a tool to fix something, my wife calls it “going to church”. I think she got that from the Sweet Potato Queens, or something like that, but it doesn’t matter. Buying a new tool is almost a religious experience. Or pornographic. I haven’t decided which yet.

This past weekend, while I was out riding with my clubmates from the Cutthroat Racing team, the sink in our laundry room exploded. Not literally, of course, but it did start spewing water. So, as I was debating whether or not I should actually attempt to climb Capitol Hill to check out a couple of members’ new house, my cell phone is ringing in my back pocket.

I get home and strip out the old faucet, then head off to “church” … the denomination this week was Home Depot, but sometimes I worship at the alter of Lowe’s, occasionally at the local Ace Hardware chapel … but my favorite is the Craftsman Tool Cathedral at Sears. Or at least it was until today.

Today, I got a book in the mail. A big book. A very big book called “The Big Book” from MSC Industrial Supply Co. I think this book has every tool known to man inside. They don’t carry Snap-On and they don’t carry Craftsman, but they’ve got just about everything else.

So I’m sitting here, leafing though this 4700 page catalogue and drooling. Do I want electronic dial calipers from Starrett or Brown & Sharpe? Or do I want a Vectrax CNC Mill?

Like I said, an almost religious experience. Or pornographic. But I still haven’t decided which yet, and the floor is getting wet from all the drool. Maybe I should get rubber floor mats to protect the carpet; MSC Industrial Supply carries them as well.

Then I start to think about tools in another sense. Tools as metaphor. The following quotes are good illustrations:

“The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.”
  — Confucius

“Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.”
  — Julien S. Huxley