Exhausted Legs & Churned Crazed – Nicholas Viglietti

March 27, 2026

Glitz, glamour and ruffled madness…things get congested and detested under the smog laced cloak of drowned starlight over L.A. It gets soaked in sunshine and stalked with the grimmest grins on the coastal side of the livin-grind.

Those wide limits make vehicles seem slow in a fast city – wide shoots deep, feet need sleep and seeing the scenes that mean anything to hearts that beat at the speed of inches, get crinkled and confused, burned skin and rattled minds, across the city of angels with an axe to grind. Human brains don’t react well to the trapped turtle pace of heavy traffic.

After your first run through L.A., you learn that ya don’t need to venture far from the spot you stay at when you visit. It’s one of those things you won’t get until you learn it the hard way: the parties start too late, and the bars close too early.

The frenzy reverberates the span of the spine, molecules of pumped insanity, and everybody is tryin’ to get nowhere in a hot rush of a hurry. Always busy, always grid-locked, and the grit gets melted by the sun – one of those rarely true, seaside cities: where you can barely see the beach.

One of them places that thrives on contradictions. All cities have a cadence, and L.A. ain’t no different – it’s a dart-game city, portrayed as bulls-eye precision, like the boasted skills of a bar-edge burn-out, who omits the caveat of better days – he’ll talk slick, overly confident, and he’ll wager beers on dart-board aimed throws, but the shakes from his dry booze crazed bones can’t hold his dick straight enough to nail the water in the bowl.

You’ll find a sheen vapid dazzle on the streets, every form of light, twinkles pretty. It shines bright, it shimmers from a balcony view – radiant paloma straw, sippin’ kind of city. I’ve been on rooftops in Hollywood and drained beer bottles, all the way to last call, at the Frolic Room –cave style holes of the neon grime, a stool fight against the weight of humanity.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m haunted by that major motion city. One year, when I was more beast than bro-migo, the November snows came cold to the deep north state, and these chill-stricken bones evolved from iguana skin – I need warm, sunny air or I get nasty like wakin’ up from hibernation, ya don’t fuck with a hungry grizzly bear.

I didn’t wanna drive a vehicle south, and blow past everything worth gawkin’ at – been there, done that. I had just spent a 6-months of labor, out in the wilderness, for the Forest Service; learnin’ how to live like a bear with the caveat of carrying tools and a house on my back.

When I arrived at a solution to peel off my furry hide and get back to flesh that stands upright – hell, I might even start to feel human, again…I swung up on a steel-frame and cruised the golden lanes.

I was teratosis man meat on the downhill slide of my twenties and the only logical move was to pedal a velocipede all the way down, out of the Sacramento flatland valley, over the East Bay Hills, and make the finish line, at some point – exhausted legs & churned crazed – which was on the sand of a border town beach in America’s Finest city.

You guessed it: a task that would be tough on my taint.

I thought gettin’ to the coast, just south of Santa Cruz, would be an easy two-day roll, which turned into a rough lesson in navigational judgment – it took a week and a half, and lots of tire-tubes.

At last, I hit Highway 1 South, and the view off the handlebars looked like the warped beauty you see after ingesting a heavy dose of magic mushrooms. The jagged cliffs of the golden state, shrouded by ancient, red bark trees like organic skyscrapers.

Hot damn, it’s sublime, and makes the transition from wildland, trail-freak to urbane stud that fits the function of the societal mold.

I was gettin’ cave-man trim on the sweat fueled ramble – sleeping bags are good for the soul. I was suckin a beer-bottle, and chompin’ on a gas-station burrito, and anybody that caught a glimpse of me would have mistaken me for a man from a different time-period in Encino – sportin’ a damn fine, and drive your eyes blind, Hawaiian shirt.

Curbside chillin’ in Guadalupe, CA, a trio of bro-migos from Oregon crossed my path. They invited me to ride with them, but they’d be done in L.A.

“Let’s cruise,” shootin’ a shaka hand signal.

Rides cruise as they do, and on the move, you eventually get where you need to. We hit the slitherin’ sidewalk, on the shine side of a sunny day, and floated the sand on the cement pathway in Venice beach.

We stopped to have a boardwalk beer and celebrate miles that chapped our rears – a woman operating a segue, mesmerized by the ocean’s hypnotic beauty, drove straight on a turn, and to this day, she still eats sand.

We sat on the wall of the boardwalk and basked in the last sips of proud sorrow that follows the end of any crew’s journey.

“Alright, Nico, enjoy the rest of the miles on your way to San Diego, we’re off,” Kyle, the leader of the Oregonian pack, said to me.

We exchanged hugs, numbers, and we’ve never communicated since, and I think some moments are best left where they were – just a reflective fragment in frozen time.

So, on those dead days in your lost mind, when the sky is gray and the sun won’t shine, and everything seems like it’s fallin’ behind, and you find yourself confused on the losin’ end of the livin-grind, you know you had (probably still do) the guts to go nuts, cut the cord loose, and fall free on the wild-side of the abyss; brave face mania on a wild roam learns the secret truths for celestial heart-beats and the prescient trickle in the sands of time.

I straggled the difficult maze of the jam-packed streets in L.A. – even avoided the coroners scrape of becoming a man-meat pancake. On the roll to destiny, you lose the fear that plagues the average grade of humanity, and the risk-it-all mentality becomes the only way to survive and endure reality.

The bike-lanes were slim, or non-existent; nails, spikes, hunks of debris – I felt like I was riding through a landfill. I slid into Long Beach and POP!

Imploded spokes and another fuckin’ flat – hadn’t had one since the first day when I had 9, consecutively, now how ‘bout that. I hunted down a bike shop near Long-Beach State.

It took three hours, and the sunset was about to tip the fade, so I called Sheezer, down in Daygo. “Hola, chill-migo,” he said to me, “when ya cruisin’ into town?”

“Well, I’m delayed, another flat, do we know anybody in the upper recesses of the So-Cal zone…somebody that could lend me a floor to snooze on, I’m so close, I’m almost at the homestretch,” I said.

“Yeah, bro, here’s Rugo’s number – give him a call, he should be able to help ya out, he’s in the O.C.,” Sheezer said, and hung up.

I hit the buttons, and the phone started to ring – I hadn’t seen the chud in a handful of years.

“Hola, Skuzz-migo,” Rugo growled, we chatted, and I explained my predicament, and he said, “sure thing, you can crash with me at Grand-ma’s house.”

“I’m on the roll,” I said, and blasted into the bike shop to inspect the repairs. The fire-apple red Fuji looked as if she could roll the whole Baja Lane to Cabo San Lucas.

“Thanks,” I said to the repair man, “also, how far is Huntington Beach?”

“Ehhh,” his cranium made calculations, “probably like an hour, or like, eh, 45 minutes, if ya pedal fast.”

“Copy that – full speed and God’s got a handle on the rest of what I need,” I said, and ripped off into the blast of a fluorescent pink haze of another day’s dying sun.

The wind wasn’t on my side, but I wasn’t lettin’ that stop my glide. I cruised into Surf City, straight-shootin’ to the location that Rugo had sent me. A bar in a strip mall, across from the pier, where men slid the tubes that changed with the tidal drag by the moon.

I walked in with my bike, saddle bags attached, and a week of stink like a cowboy on a cattle drive. Rugo sat in the patio section with a group of SoCal brutes & babes – 7 empty bottles of champagne, the tepid boil of a blackout night became clear in the dark descended beach-town, illuminated by streetlights

“El-Rugo!” I hollered and hit a chill skid of a break stop – which, admittedly, would’ve been cooler if I was twelve on BMX wheels; the saddlebags are heavy, and mistaks made on cements taks ankle skin clean off.

He beamed a solid jaw-bone smile, like Gaston if he surfed; his shoulders were as big as my head, and I think he subsisted off creatine burritos.

“Oh, Skuzz-a-rito! You made it brah…welcome to the beach-side mayhem, do we gotta night for you,” he said in that way that immediately amped my wild-hair voltage like a fiend that finds a fresh gram-bag on a stroll.

We crushed some drinks, disassembled my bike, and crammed it into his SUV like a storage locker. We lightened our plight with rips from a few jazz-cigarettes, and the whole scene sparkled like neon dreams.

I got loose as a goose and walked on the ceiling of the Goat-Tavern, and we ran through three days, and I still don’t remember what happened, because it took me another week to make it to San Diego.

That’s the best part about cruising this life, the people you meet, the time you made spin away beautifully, and all the memories that you can’t really recall if they happened, but you know they did because you were there, and so were they, and it’s all in your skull, no matter how short or far, you are in the roll of the eternal fade.