Anthropologist Underground's Open Salon Blog

Fecal Mythology

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:05:25 -0400

The following may be NSFW and contains possible abuse memory triggers.

Defecation is the great equalizer. Everyone drops trou from time to time. Seriously, everyone. Members of the kingdom animalia, which includes the popular girls in high school, dictators, presidents, attorneys, doctors, supermodels, and Michael Stipe, all need to download some brownware evacuate our bowels occasionally. Even me! It’s the result of metabolism. Speaking only for myself, I tend not to think about this metabolic process much unless I’m sick. However, there are people, at least in Western societies, who fetishize the functioning of their colons and perform all sorts of fascinating rituals to rid themselves of evil feces. Which is exactly why I became an anthropologist. Other people are weird.

Even weird people are complex, and the lines of colonic fetishism for health vs. sexual reasons sometimes overlap. People who enjoy insertive anal stimulation may seek out colonic therapies to achieve orgasm. Klismaphiliacs in particular receive “...arousal from introducing liquids into the rectum and colon via the anus.” Google “enemarotica” for more on this. Of course not all of colonic health fetishization is explicitly sexual.

Alternative colonic health practices all look like purification rituals to me. Proponents imagine a discredited concept called auto-intoxication in which feces stagnate in a closed system continually leaching poisonous substances into the bloodstream. The basic premise is that feces are inherently evil toxic and performing extreme colon cleansing rituals will get rid of the devil toxic stuff, ushering in “true” health and purity. And lower BMI. And cure asthma. And cure halitosis. And improve body odor. And really, who doesn’t want to smell like honey?

On one end of the colonic health spectrum is eating fiber and self-administering laxatives and enemas to assist or achieve ease of elimination. Near the other end is commercial colon hydrotherapy. Here’s a description of that process:

“...a colonic irrigation [also called hydrotherapy] is a procedure where a jet of water is inserted into the colon through the rectum and the whole colon is physically washed for hours with warm streams of water. The procedure takes two to four hours...”

The very latest fad is a bit of an outlier, fecal microbial transplantation, which I’ll get into in a minute.

Figure 1: Ass-Shaped Graph representing my anthropological interpretation of colonic cleansing rituals

There are medically valid reasons for some practices like colon cleansing enema, such as prior to a colonoscopy under the direction of a medical doctor. There is a great deal of potential for harm from the rogue practice of commercial colonic hydrotherapy. People have died from this from a wide variety of fatal practitioner errors including improper sterilisation of equipment. The most common complication seems to be bowel perforation, where there is improper insertion or the pressure from the hydrotherapy ruptures the colon, flooding the abdominal cavity with fecal slurry. This is often fatal. Shooting water, or herbal water, or coffee water into your colon under pressure is not a benign undertaking.

The new holy grail of alternative colonic ritual is fecal microbial transplantation (FMT), for which PubMed lists a number of studies supporting its use for a very specific bacterium which causes severe diarrhea. Dr. Mark Crislip describes the process as it occurs under close medical supervision:

The best therapy, best being the highest cure rate, for C. difficile is the stool transplant [...] The stool of a spouse (although it should be parents or children) is pureed and given either down a nasogastric tube or as an enema. Efficacy is almost 100%. There are worries about disease transfer, as some infections are spread by the fecal-oral route [...] most spouses, unlike other relatives, probably share most infections anyway.

As Crislip said in his lovely Quackcast episode 86 on the subject, most spouses have fecal-oralled, intentionally or otherwise, and are therefore unlikely to introduce a novel infection. In other words, the donor in this scenario is a close relative who is likely to be microbially compatible with the recipient.

Contrast that with a naturopath (not an actual medical doctor) in Portland who has taken FMT well beyond the evidence of safety and efficacy for C. difficile. From Willamette Week:

Portland naturopath Mark G. Davis, who opened the Bright Medicine Clinic four months ago, is using fecal microbial transplantation for other health problems, including autoimmune disease, eczema, asthma, multiple sclerosis and depression.
“What makes me unique,” Davis says, “is that I’m doing it for other ailments.”
[...]
Davis needs “clean” excrement from a donor who hasn’t taken antibiotics or been sick recently. He dilutes the sample in saline, filters the slurry and injects the liquid into the patient via enema.

Note the stress on purity. The donor is a thirteen-year-old boy whose fecal microbial population has never been tainted eradicated by oral antibiotics. He is “pristine.” And his pristine fecal slurry is harvested and inserted into unrelated adults. It’s not clear from the article whether or not this boy has been tested for bloodborne pathogens like HIV or what-have-you that might infect his sample if there is any rectal tearing during elimination. It’s also not clear to me whether he’s been vaccinated against vaccine-preventable diseases, although if his parents refused antibiotics, it’s highly probable that they also refused routine childhood vaccinations. Purity might not mean what this particular naturopath thinks it means.

I recently attended a lecture about human microbial ecology. Oral antibiotics are like rototilling and turning over the soil of intestinal flora. They wipe out the good with the bad. Individual microbial populations are astonishingly diverse, even among relatives. However, our personal microbial ecology evolves over time regardless, and our microbial populations are closely compatible with those who live with us in the same house. There is a great deal of pseudoscience centered around colonic health. I asked about the portland naturopath, and there is cause for concern about introducing novel infections and introducing microbes that are incompatible with an individual’s body chemistry.

The use of a non-relative child donor in the case of the Portland naturopathic FMT protocol skates a bit close to the line between purported health vs. possible sexual reasons for seeking FMT for me. Paying a “pure” child for his feces, liquefying them, and then introducing the slurry into the rectum and colon via the anus seems awfully dubious to me. It reminds me of the myth, prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, that raping a child will cure HIV. Just like the unrelated child-donor FMT, it’s all pre-scientific ideology about using purity as a sword against evil.

Cultural Relativism Disclaimer:
I am comfortable discussing sex in the abstract, but I won’t publicly discuss my own quirks. As long as all participants are adult, consenting, and safe, I say go for whatever it is that makes you feel amazing. Even though I think your kinks are beyond the pale, I will try not to judge. Except when what you are doing is actually dangerous and/or exploitive.

I am not a medical doctor and this article is not intended as medical advice beyond encouraging the reader to seek the advice of an actual medical professional.

*special thanks to my Trophy Husband for help with the graph.

Uncivilized Society

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:02:28 -0500

I don’t know how many of you have.....

...Gay friends......(laughter)

...Black friends.....(laughter)

...Muslims living in your city....(laughter)

...Spanish-speaking laborers....(laughter)

...Wives....(laughter)

...Mothers....(laughter)

...Daughters......(laughter)

But I have one, and s/he’s [negative stereotype]...(laughter)

Funny stuff, this bigotry. There’s so much of it in the everyday noise that we get completely anesthetized to it. It’s very easy to ignore, and it’s really hard to know if speaking out against it is worth the effort. Is it really worth debating racial politics with, say, my mechanic when no matter what I say he won’t ever change his mind? I can always just quietly take my car somewhere else, but silence implies collusion with the bigotry.

The unfortunate reality is that speaking up puts you at risk. When personal ethics threaten your in-group status, or even your physical safety, deciding what to do about a bigot can be very difficult. Marginalizing people who are physically and culturally different than you in order to maintain in-group status is an ancient strategy. It is probably evolutionarily adaptive to quickly identify someone who looks or behaves differently as Other. In today’s global human society, where cultural and economic systems are interlaced, tolerating bigotry has stopped working for the betterment of our species. It’s unfortunate that the instinct to turn Other into Enemy still holds such strong sway in modern human thinking.

...Teh Gay....
Bigotry is certainly a distasteful feature of American politics. Witness presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s rhetoric against gay people. I can’t believe that in 2012 someone who is so profoundly ignorant and hateful is considered a credible candidate for the presidency of the United States. His type of foolishness hurts real people. I was an ethnographic intern with the Laramie police department when University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was tortured and killed because he was gay. The one thing that still haunts me from that crime scene is the shovel bites of blood-soaked soil missing from the embankment at the crime scene.

...Blacks...
A noisy minority of Americans hate-hate brown-skinned people, and President Barack Obama in particular. (See here, here, here, and use Google for about ten-fucktillion more depressingly idiotic and racist examples.) Some political lunatics even publicly pray for the death of our president. This violent rhetoric resonates strongly with the authoritarian Republican base, but it’s appallingly, dangerously, inappropriate in my opinion.

...Swarthy people who are Muslim....
Bigotry against Muslims, another group stereotyped as swarthy, abounds, and often manifests itself in violence.

Growing anti-Muslim bias in America is no secret. Over the past few years, numerous reports have exposed concerted anti-Muslim campaigns that mobilize people to hate their Muslim compatriots. For example, the Center for American Progress meticulously documents seven foundations spending over $40 million to fund anti-Muslim propaganda that has been widely repeated by political leaders, grassroots groups and the media. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an expert on hate groups in America, also reports the apparent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment in America is driven by a small, closely knit cadre of activists. The hate generated by these professional anti-Muslim bigots often leads to violence.

As with bullies everywhere, the victims are often vulnerable women and children. 9/11 bred the fiction that all Muslims are terrorists. This is simply not true. Dangerous lunatics are not limited to any one religion, unfortunately. They come from everywhere.

...More brown-skinned people....
Extreme anti-immigration rhetoric is becoming more mainstream with an attendant increase in violence.

The increase in violence against Hispanics correlates closely with the increasingly heated debate over Comprehensive Immigration Reform and an escalation in the level of anti-immigrant vitriol on radio, television, and the Internet. While reasonable people can and will disagree about the parameters of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, in some instances, the commentary about immigration reform has not been reasonable; it has been inflammatory. Warned an April 2009 assessment from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), "in some cases, anti-Immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent."

Of course, the actual indigenous Americans have dark skin. It’s the Northern Europeans who are the infiltrators. Oh, the humanity!

If you wonder if something is actually racist, check it on this source. The answers are hilarious, and the questions are appalling. You can search for your question or submit it to the author. Spoiler: If you have to ask, the answer is almost always yes.

...People who don’t have penises*....

Men are privileged, and a depressing number of people think that’s as it should be. Below are just a few ways in which sexism undermines social cohesion, productivity, and culture.

My former hometown newspaper printed an article about the state’s appalling wage gap. It is the worst in the nation. From the comments: “Love the cat-fighting going on here with the typical crybabying from the fairer sex.” Yes. “Crybabying” about a fundamental injustice which keeps many women and children in poverty.

According to this source, one out of every six American women has been the victim of a sexual assault. One in six. You know victims. We all do. You just might not know exactly who has been a victim because women don’t talk openly about it. We’re supposed to feel ashamed for being attacked. Some men even believe that girls and women who are impregnated during rape have received a gift from god. I would prefer that god not let any of us, especially children, be raped in the first place.

One in four women has experienced domestic violence. You know victims. We all do. You just might not know exactly who has been a victim because women don’t talk openly about it. We’re supposed to feel ashamed for being attacked.

My own mom died from sexism. In September of 1988 she went to the emergency room with dizziness and a terrible, debilitating headache. The doctor told her she was weak. He accused her of whining and exaggerating the pain. She was terribly embarrassed. The doctor sent her home. Where she died of a ruptured brain aneurysm a few hours later. I would like to think this is an unlikely scenario today, but I’m not so sure it couldn’t happen again.

Even now, in the developed world, circa 2012, bigotry against women thrives. It’s inherent in advertising (link warning: trigger alert and probably NSFW). It’s in the way that society undervalues work in childcare, education, and nursing. It’s in the way people default to male pronouns when talking about CEOs, doctors, justices, soldiers, or world leaders. It’s in the way we automatically assume that teachers, nurses, and waitstaff are women. It’s in the perpetual myth that girls just aren’t as smart as boys. In the fact that standards of beauty are typically about women being fuckable by men. Of course casual sexism just blends into the noise in this environment.

...From externalized hostility to internalized equality...
By marginalizing large swaths of our human capital, we vastly reduce our capacity for technological and intellectual innovation. Tomorrow’s brilliant thinkers may well be women, and/or gay, and/or brown-skinned, or any other variation of our diverse humanity. We need everyone, all of us, working together to solve issues like global warming, to improve our health and extend our lifespans, and to feed, educate, and nurture the children of our species.

It is no longer evolutionarily adaptive to turn Other into Enemy. We can choose to maximize our ability to adapt and evolve, or we can remain mired in our primordial cognitive habits, hastening our own extinction.

Which is why I spoke out last week when I heard a doctor tell a sexist joke in a public lecture hall. This instance seemed like a rare moment when speaking up privately in a non-confrontational way might possibly make a small difference. If nothing else, maybe I saved someone else’s mom.

* I realize that there are myriad variations of gender identity. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m thinking of people whom society labels and treats as “women,” whether or not they have penises.

_{Cross-posted at DTMS}

American Political Dysfunction Explained

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:01:47 -0500

Actors’ representation of American political discourse.

Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler examine major psychological currents that contribute to dysfunction in American politics in their book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.

They gathered a wealth of information from the American National Election Studies data to explain the current polarized disarray of American political discourse. In particular, they sourced a four-question inventory to sort respondents along a continuum from authoritarian to non-authoritarian. The questions have to do with how people view authority and control in parent/child relationships.

Hetherington and Weiler don’t provide a convenient one-line definition of the term authoritarianism because the concept is complex, and they wanted to avoid just the sort of negative bias that I read into it. My understanding, based on the book as well as a bit of Googling, is that authoritarianism appears to be a type of cognitive ~~deficit~~ style.

“The thing that makes authoritarians distinctive is their reliance on established authorities [...] we suspect that those who score high in authoritarianism have (I) a greater need for order and, conversely less tolerance for confusion or ambiguity, and (2) a propensity to rely on established authorities to provide that order. [...]

Specifically, those scoring high in authoritarianism will probably tend to rely more on emotion and instinct than those scoring low because they (I) have, on average, fewer cognitive tools and (2) feel more threat from the often ambiguous nature of the complicated world around them.” _(p.34)

The most difficult thing about reading the book was maintaining my objectivity. It was very easy to read strong confirmation of my own biases into many aspects of the discussion. Of course I scored myself. I’m not good at dichotomous survey questions. After I mentally qualified my answers, “Yes, but....” I estimate my personal score is around -2. Beyond non-authoritarian. Anti-authoritarian.

My impression from the book and my own anthropological observation is that most authoritarians tend to be republican, white, Christian, heterosexual traditionalists. They want things to be the way they have always been. They tend to favor forceful, aggressive political candidates. The world is black and white for authoritarians, and they don’t let a little thing like objective reality get in the way of their opinions. These are the “shoot first, ask questions later” people.

Although authoritarians are generally less rational and more reactive than non-authoritarians, it turns out that even non-authoritarians commit serious errors in cognition when they feel threatened.

While authoritarians tend to feel threatened all the time from the diversity and complexity around them, non-authoritarians tend to remain calm most of the time. Non-authoritarians briefly trended toward the authoritarian side of the spectrum immediately following 9/11. President George W. Bush’s approval rating was around 90% shortly after the attacks. Fear erodes cognition for all of us, but the non-authoritarians return to deliberative calm when the threat recedes.

The republican political elite is masterful at reminding its base to be afraid, very afraid. The more authoritarian candidates are currently arousing the passions of their base with seriously scary issues like these:

Teh Gay:

Teh Birth Control:

At the extremes of the authoritarian spectrum, it really is impossible for authoritarians and non-authoritarians to imagine what the hell is wrong with people on other side. Which is both fascinating and incredibly depressing.

I contacted Jonathan Weiler via email with some questions. Both he and Marc Hetherington were very generous with their time. The discussion follows:

Me: After hearing your recent interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast, I read your fascinating book.

I find the authoritarian paradigm as you and Hetherington describe it incredibly compelling, but I have a few follow-up questions.

1. The issue of climate change seemed to be missing from the discussion. Why?

Jonathan: I agree about climate change. A telling moment during the 2008 campaign - I thought - was Palin's "drill, baby, drill" line, which seemed to represent a pivot from a conservationist approach to such issues (and one which, historically, many conservatives were sympathetic to) to an issue framed by the need for cognitive simplification.

Marc notes as well as that climate change is, assuredly, part of a bigger suite of issues that involve the rejection of science.

Me: 2. How do those of us on the non-authoritarian end of the spectrum rebrand ourselves as having the greater amount of courage because we don't freak out in crises?

Jonathan: number 2 is a great question and I am not sure of the answer, but I will say that Ron Paul has framed his opposition to overseas adventures in terms of strength, not weakness.

Marc notes that non-authoritarians probably do freak out during a crisis - that's what humans do. A difference is that non-authoritarians disposition don't seem to be freaking out all the time. After 9/11, almost everyone was in a high state of anxiety. That state receded for some, but not for others.

Me: 3. Chapter 6 contains this passage: "Republicans seem to benefit by raising the specter of threat, especially as it relates to terrorism. In making this observation, we do not mean to suggest that this is a cynical strategy..." I recall a carpet bombing of terrorism-based political hay in the months and years following 9/11. My bias is showing, but it sure seemed to me like a cynical strategy at the time.

Jonathan: The cynicism statement was us being careful academics. Your bias is well-founded. To my comments about cynicism,

Marc adds that there was likely some real fear among GOP leaders. If you've read Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Solution," you get a sense of this. It's probably not an either/or proposition, even if the motivation was *mostly* cynical.

Me: 4. I've read Nyhan and Reifler's research into the backfire effect.

[The backfire effect occurs when people are so emotionally invested in an opinion that factual counter-evidence causes them to double-down on their misinformed stance. For example, there are some people who continue to believe there were WMDs in Iraq to justify their support of the war. All evidence to the contrary simply reinforces their anti-factual position.]

Are you familiar with this? If so, is there a relationship between high-ranking authoritarians and the backfire effect?

Jonathan: I am guessing you'd be right about the backfire event. It's certainly consistent with what studies, in general, show about how they process information and make it conform to their worldview, though Chris Mooney has noted that progressives are not above doing this themselves (that's not necessarily the same as non-authoritarians, but surely there's some of that among non-authoritarians).

Me: 5. Speaking to the powerful impact of symbolism on people who rank high on the authoritarian index, I'm fascinated by how authoritarian issues play out in everyday situations. I have heard reports of people whose self-reported basis for their political opinions would place them very high on the authoritarian index. These individuals are viscerally fearful of ethnic cuisine. It's racist, of course, but beyond that it's a fascinatingly powerful aversion. It's as if they fear consuming the food of people they fear will turn them into Other. (Other being non-white, non-Christian, college educated, New York Times reading, non-heterosexual, etc.) Have you encountered similar everyday glimpses into the impact of authoritarianism?

Jonathan: Marc has actually looked at some data on the relationship between ethnic food preferences and authoritarianism and, as you might expect, there is much less desire for experimentation/trying new things among high authoritarians.

Me: 6. Where can we follow your analysis of the shenanigans leading into the presidential election?

Jonathan: I write for a few sources - I am a regular political columnist for the Independent Weekly of North Carolina - my columns come out on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month. I write pretty regularly for Huffington Post. Finally, I have started doing regular podcasts with my close friend, Marty Beller, who is the drummer for They Might be Giants. The podcast is called The drummer and the professor. It's not just about politics, but that is a focus, and the most recent one was from Iowa, where I was covering the caucuses.

The book was genuinely fascinating, and I love the idea that there is at least one reasonable explanation for the appalling dysfunction in contemporary American politics. I highly recommend it as a primer for tracking the debates surrounding the upcoming presidential election.

Science is Real!

Fri, 6 Jan 2012 16:01:25 -0500

The accessiblity for writing in public and self-publishing is amazing. I feel very fortunate to enjoy a few venues in which to do this. I have a passion for factual reality, and I want to spread the good news.

In real life I encounter far more diversity of rationality. It’s much harder to communicate. Culture, or psychology, or ideology, or misinformation often gets in my way. Which is both fascinating and incredibly frustrating. I’m also terrible at masking my emotions. “What the hell is wrong with you?” is easy to read between the lines on my face.

How can I convince someone of the fact of climate change when he earnestly believes that a skiff of snow anywhere on the planet is evidence that the climate is fine? How do successful science communicators bring reason to bear in public and private discourse?

DTMS’ own Greg Correll has a fascinating article about graphically representing information. He advocates all kinds of visual shenanigans to enrich the content.

On the 7 November episode of the Point of Inquiry podcast, host Chris Mooney interviewed Bill Nye (The Science Guy). It was a great discussion about how to communicate with people who are either scientifically illiterate or who for other reasons deny factual reality. One compelling example Money and Nye covered was climate change.

Mooney asked Nye to advise scientists who want to do a better job communicating to the public, especially in hostile media venues where interviews devolve into shouting. Nye responded with three points: keep the answers short; listen to the first question; remember that it’s a process and chip away at it.

One problem in the public discourse is that scientists tend to over-qualify their responses, and that leads the general public to infer scientific ambiguity.

Mooney, “I think I’ve seen research showing that the IPCC climate change language that they use, which is meant to convey a high degree of certainty, they say ‘very likely’ at this point. [...] When an average person hears it, they think that it’s less certain...”

Nye, “Oh, man! Absolutely! And the other example is they asked a guy [...] ‘Is this uh, atom-smasher in CERN, the um, Large Hadron Collider, is it going to cause, can it cause a black hole...in Switzerland, that will consume the earth in a matter of hours?’ And he said, ‘That’s very unlikely.’ And by that he meant, whatever the expression is, twenty sigma to the left of anything that would go wrong. But because he didn’t say, ‘Absolutely not!’ in parentheses, ‘you nutcase, you dingbat,’ uh, people just exactly as you said, seized on it. [...]

You have to talk to people. ‘No! No black hole! Not gonna happen! Uh, in order to get a black hole, you need, now I’m not an expert, but roughly the mass of six suns. Six of our stars. We don’t have that, so chill.’”

Another amazingly effective science communicator, Neil Degrasse Tyson, was a guest on the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe November 19th podcast. The interview begins around thirty six minutes into the episode. Podcast co-host Jay Novella calls Tyson a rock star and asks,

“Now I’m the lowly musician that just bought a guitar, and I want to know how to become a rock star. Is it really a huge portion luck, is there a secret that you stumbled on, is there an avenue that we could practice?”

Tyson spends a great deal of time talking about noticing when, why, and where people are interested. He studies people. He tries to figure out what engages people. He watches his audience for pupil dilation and adjusts his presentations to keep them interested. This requires him to arrive over-prepared and loose on his feet with pop culture references and humor to keep his audience involved.

Tyson and SGU host Steve Novella go on to discuss the importance of incorporating multiple sensory modalities into communication and creating graphical and visual references for people that adds information to the content.

Tyson, “My body is drawing a picture, when it can, of the content that I’m delivering. [...] Students learn more deeply the more senses you can excite in the effort of teaching them. [...] I think we should use all available ways to inform the senses that people have brought.”

Steve Novella, “The research backs that up, too. What you learned is backed up by a lot of research that shows, yeah, there’s lots of ways to affect the retention and people’s attention. [...] Every sensory modality you add adds to people’s perception and retention of the information you’re trying to get across.”

Which reminded me of Smell-O-Vision. If I had Smell-O-Vision, you would be inhaling the aroma of reason right now. This smells like very dark fair trade coffee that has been lovingly brewed in a coffee press.

Tyson has been on The Daily Show with John Stewart a number of times and said he did a great deal of research prior to his first interview. He studied the rhythm of the show and calculated the average time before John Stewart interrupted. Tyson tailored his response to the first question (as Nye advocated) to match that (brief) time frame, thus facilitating Stewart’s joke on a complete thought rather than on a fragment. He parsed his information to match the venue. Here’s a clip from 2007. I noticed both the rhythm and the way Tyson used his hands to illustrate his points.

Both Nye and Tyson spend significant time advocating for scientific literacy, and I completely agree. In this age of slick pundits shouting sciencey-sounding opposite-truths, it’s difficult for people to tell fact from fiction. I think it’s up to all critical thinkers to marginalize willful ignorance and celebrate reason. If someone makes a testable claim and a large percentage of smart people doubt it, look it up for yourself. Find the primary sources and watch for conflicts of interest and other red flags. Especially if the claim resonates strongly with your own biases.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Does This Make Sense.

Non-Expert Review: Surly Cross-Check

Tue, 3 Jan 2012 16:01:37 -0500

I’ve had a number of character-building opportunities over the last six months. In late May we had to euthanize our beloved dog. Over Memorial weekend we moved from our little house in a small Wyoming town to a slightly less little house the exponentially larger Denver metro area. My dad died unexpectedly on June 10, leaving me an orphan. Almost to the day that I turned forty (!), the band that provided the anthems of my difficult formative years announced that they are breaking up.

The sum of these events is that I feel a bit disoriented. I’m labeling this vague, discomforting, non-serious angst Midlife Crisis. I have a friend who would dismiss it as a “first-world problem,” and I completely agree. It’s largely superficial, and I just need a little processing time to regain the calm composure that is my typical modus operandi.

My crisis coping mechanism is, as always, to focus on my own life as ethnography. I’m trying to navigate an unfamiliar reality, and figuring out how to get around on a bicycle is going to be a critical assimilation skill. Of course I need a sporty new midlife crisis bike to accomplish this.

I have a fantastic older mountain bike/cargo bike, which I love, for schlepping kiddos and groceries. I ride this bike almost every day on the school run. The long bike is actually faster than a driving in many instances, but it is a bit of a spectacle.

Now that my youngest child is in preschool, I have a five lovely hours alone each week to listen to myself churn. I wanted a faster, lighter, one-person bike for the endless hard-surface trails here. My Wyoming bike mechanic recommended the Surly Cross Check. He knows how I ride and thought this cyclocross bike would be a faster, versatile, bomb-proof bike. After researching, test riding, and talking myself into the birthday splurge, I ordered it in robin’s egg blue with the standard components from my new Denver bike shop. I added a bottle cage, rear rack, lights, and a seat bag for pump, tube, and tools. I ride most comfortably in toe clips, and the pedals are mid-priced metal road bike pedals, which is embarrassingly old-school, but possibly also hipster cool. At least that’s what I tell myself.

When the bike was ready, I rode the light rail to the station near the shop. After we adjusted and adjusted and adjusted the fit, I rode the Cherry Creek bike trail back toward my neighborhood. This is a major ten-mile off-street bikeway that runs from downtown Denver to Cherry Creek State Park. Here’s what it was like on the Saturday I rode home.

A very large percentage of cyclists here display the regalia of uber-elite professionals. They hover grim-faced above their fucktillion dollar bikes and pretend they’re training for le Tour de France. I’m not sure what’s up with that. Status, of course, but what else? Perhaps the spandex restricts their ability to enjoy riding for its own sake. Maybe they’re trying to outrun all the people here.

I spent the next hundred fifty miles or so on hard-surface city trails endlessly tweaking the fit and learning how to ride in the city. I now know to keep my bike the hell out of the way of the silent packs racing past at 80mph and to always signal, but subtly. No room for visible arm signals here, or you might get tangled up with another rider.

In October we took the Surly to the Utah desert. This is one of my favorite places. Here is where I inhale the sunlight reflecting off of the pale Navajo sandstone and drink in ancient vistas. At night I love to watch the Milky Way dance across the sky to the rhythm of coyote songs.

The desert rides were a lot more variable, and I took the bike on packed dirt AWD roads through multiple creek crossings, up vertical high-clearance two-track trails, and on asphalt in Canyonlands National Park.

Mesa Arch, Canyonlands NP

The Cross-Check really is a great all-around bike. It performed surprisingly well in Utah. Surly probably owes me at least one commission. A pair of ATV riders were very impressed when I crested the mesa on the Hurrah Pass trail on a drop-bar bike. The factory tires are efficient on dry hard-surface and packed dirt trails and stable in the rain. They’re too narrow for single-track, and they sink in sand. Fortunately the frame accommodates wider mountain bike tires, so it’s pretty easy to adapt for different rides.

My Surly feels hyper-responsive compared to my long bike. The stiff fork and frame, along with a more compact riding position, contributes to this. The hand positioning is more ergonomic and less fatiguing. If I turn my head to look at a raptor, the bike follows.

The shifters sit at the ends of the drop bars, which is also old-school and possibly hipster. It is easy to bobble the bike when shifting, which would be less of a problem with brake lever/shifter combinations. The bike is so lightweight that I don’t often miss the hill climbing granny gears of my mountain bike.

One Utah trail featured ten creek crossings in a three mile stretch. Once water splashed onto my rear derailleur, it got noisy and shifted poorly. It was fine after it dried, but I have to say that this component seems a bit delicate.

Note that the water is not very deep

The cantilever brakes are old-school cool, but you sacrifice powerful stopping for lighter weight. I think as the professional sport of cyclocross moves to legalize disc brakes, they will become more common on consumer bikes. I’m not sure if my Cross Check has the frame mounts for disc brakes, but if so, I will probably upgrade.

The other thing I need to replace is the saddle. The stock saddle is an inexpensive throwaway, and it chafes in a completely unfortunate and unnecessary way.

Overall the Surly Cross-Check is a quality bike that is versatile, responsive, and surprisingly fast, all qualities that I personally aspire to. It’s tremendous fun to ride. The gripes I described above are minor and easy to fix. As I continue to tweak the fit and function of my new bike along with my own riding and social skills, I’m sure I’ll regain my balance in my new meatspace.

Of course REM had just the song for it:

An earlier version of this artcle appeared on Does This Make Sense.

Update 11.27.11: Bob Pavlica from Surly emailed me with the comments below. The fact that I'm posting an update has absolutely very little to do with the awesome box of Surly swag that arrived in the mail.... Thanks Bob!

Disc brakes on the Crosscheck- we have been kicking the idea around for a couple of years now. In March of 2012 we are releasing the Disc version of the Long Haul Trucker and who knows…A Crosscheck could follow, or not. We really don’t know right now if it’s going to happen or not at this time.

The components-We do a good job of specing our complete bikes with solid, reliable parts at an honest cost. They are not the “top of the line” but they should always do what we say they will. [Many people love the saddle.] Saddles are also a very personal thing for a lot of people out there and it’s usually the first thing they like to change [on any new bike].