Al Macy

Drive, Ride, Repeat: The Mostly-True Account of a Cross-Country Car and Bicycle Adventure (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Author Al Macy is a character and a tightwad with a unique sense of humor. He and his wife squirreled away enough money to retire early, do interesting things, and take unusual trips. As he puts it:

"Every day I wake up with nothing to do, and by the end of the day, I've only gotten half of it done."

During his working life, Macy was a neuroscientist, computer game programmer, jazz trombonist, chef, CEO, piano player, clam digger, and technical writer.

The book is a journal of a car/bicycle/camping trip from California to St. Louis and back, but Macy promises that "if it starts sounding like one of your brother-in-law's boring slide shows, I will stop this book, and we'll turn around and go home. I mean it."

Interspersed with the journal chapters, you'll find thought-provoking life tips, stories from the past, and descriptions of Al's wacky inventions. You'll hear poignant anecdotes about what happened when doctors discovered a golf-ball-sized tumor in his wife's brain and how everything they owned burned.
Here's an example of one of those chapters:

Chapter 47 - Puking in a Thunderstorm

Here's a mishap that illustrates the saying "You're on an adventure when you wish you were home wishing you were on an adventure."

In 1982, Lena and I were visiting her folks in Sweden, and we went on a ryggsäcksfotvandringtur. To speak Swedish, all you do is take a bunch of English words, screw around with them, and squeeze them together. For example, in the big word in the last sentence, the only real foreign part is "rygg" which refers to one's back. Other than that it's just "Back - sack - foot - wandering - tour," meaning "wandering around on foot with a pack on your back," or "backpacking."

Apparently we have 1,019,729.6 words in English (.6 really?). In Swedish, the total depends on how you count them. Is "ryggsäcksfotvandringtur" one word, or just five words stuck together? Most Swedish dictionaries have around a half-million entries, but if you count words that are Velcroed together, it has many more.

Speaking of Velcro, it was discovered when Georges de Mestral went for a fotvandringstur, and noticed the burrs that stuck to his pants. The word "Velcro" was added to our dictionary in the year nineteen something-or-other. I've learned that the phrase "Velcro forehead" refers to the overly dramatic gesture of tilting your head back and holding the back of your wrist against your forehead ("Oh, woe is me!"). Can you tell that I'm worried that this chapter is too short, and I am desperately looking for stuff to add?

So anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, Lena and I were on a shortbackpackingtripinthemountainsofsweden. On our route to the more desolate sections, we passed houses that had sod growing on the roof. And when I say sod, I don't mean the neat, well-mowed stuff you buy at the nursery. I mean long messy grass, other small plants, cuckoo birds, and gophers. And these weren't museum displays put up for tourists, people were really living in these things. It's where we get the saying "People who live in sod houses should throw stones, but no stones from the roof, please."

This was a great place to foot wander, but when we were the farthest from the car, Lena got sick (really sick), and both Lena and the heavens opened up at the same time. It gave me a case of Velcro forehead, and my main memory of that trip is of continually taking tiny plastic snack bags of vomit out and dumping them in the streams of water surrounding the tent.

Luckily Lena's Scandinavian constitution won out over the bugs, and the next morning she was all better and ready to drag me home, out of the wilderness. So, we had a generalgoodtimedespitethepukingadventure.

If that kind of humor appeals to you, you need to buy this book.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Al Macy
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Juni 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781497556164
• Artikelnr.: 48716253

Autorenporträt

Al Macy's story begins millions of years ago in a cave in Eastern Siberia. Wait. What? I don't have space for that much detail? Now you tell me! So much for the story about the saber-toothed tiger that was a little too friendly.

When Macy was a kid, he could never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. OK, let me interrupt a second. I'll let you in on a secret about author biographies: Most of them are written by the authors themselves. They just use the third person to make it sound like they have some kind of highfalutin public relations team. Unless they are, like, Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway, in which case they actually do have a public relations team. That's especially true for Hemingway, since he's dead.

So, just to let you know, while reading this bio, that when it reads "Al Macy did this" and "Macy did that," [whispering...] it's really just me saying that I did this or that. OK?

Where was I? Oh, yeah, Al Macy (wink, wink) couldn't decide what to do with his life. He was pretty good at music, but he was better at science and math, so he started studying engineering at Cornell. But then he changed his mind, and finished his degree in physiological psychology. After a PhD in neuroscience at University of Michigan, and a post-doc at UC Berkeley, he changed his mind again, and started writing educational computer games for a living.

OK, this is getting boring for me now -- I mean for Al Macy now. I'll skip ahead, and tell you that Macy retired in his early fifties, and switched back to having music as his main hobby. He played jazz trombone and jazz piano in local venues, and, as he puts it, "Worked hard to get bettter before anyone noticed how bad I was."

Recently, he started writing books. His goal is to write many books in totally incompatible genres to insure there will never be any carryover success from one of his bestsellers to another. Thus, his first book helps people play the piano, the second book is a story about a bicycle trip, his third book will help people format books, and his fourth will be a science fiction thriller. Get the idea?

And that's all you need know all about Al Macy! Isn't he a great guy? Now, about that saber-toothed tiger...