All Comments on 'Bike Trip'

I kept reading hoping that you would get somewhere but you never really disk.

Oh, for crying out loud, it's a pedal, not a peddle.

Too much. Too many characters, too much backstory, too much detail, too much rambling in search of a plot...just too much.

but it didn't. Sadly it was boring.

I discovered Tarkatony on literotica.com sometime this week and have been reading every day since. I love these stories. I love the notion of physical intimacy as a transformative power; it's become a lens for how I see my life, and a tool for doing life.

Whenever I hear or read the word transformation, it always conjures up a change that's more dramatic and complete, more discrete in time, than anything I experience. I always want to believe that a promised dramatic event will instantaneously replace a set of personal attributes with an opposite, much more positive set and ever after I'll be whole.

Tarkatony's stories show us that transformation is gradual change, a progressive change, a change with 2 steps forward and 1 step back. What makes Tarkatony's stories about transformation is intentionality. Intentionality, not a dramatic external event, defines transformation and separates it from entropy and aging.

Of all the Tarkatony stories so far, this one, perhaps because it leaves us with a commencement provides a rush of hope and expectancy. I'm really looking for Jimmy and Harriet to transform 10x, 100x, over what they already have and I'm imagining what it will be like. I think I'll be imagining it for a long time.

One corrective note: It's "pedaling" and "pedaled" not "peddling" and "peddled". The latter are what peddlers do as they hawk their wares.

Similarly the prep for the bike trip was pretty simplistic. Jimmy and Harriet will experience broken wheels, rack fasteners that fall out, and dozens of failures both mechanical and experiential. Someplace in Missoula, they'll be having a broken frame repaired at a shop that really understands loaded touring. And that will be transformative.

She should have just become a lesbian (since she liked sex with Lisbeth so much) and he should have grown a backbone and directly told her he wasn't going with her. The whole "Find a way to convince her that she shouldn't go with him" was ridiculous, he needed to just tell her no, he was right that he was a wuss because it seems he couldn't say no to any woman in his life. Not even a romance, more an erotic coupling, nothing in this story was romantic unless offputting characters who begrudgingly get together is supposed to be romantic.