> There is a reason that the stone facades of Egypt, Greece, Persia,
> India, China, Mexico, Peru stand against everything else ever
> accomplished. These are obsessions in time, where time is defeated in
> space by an endless labor in stone.
Your satire might be a little too successful. Some of us irony-impaired folks might think you actually believe that degradation is healthy for the soul, and that pharaonic Egypt was a model of a progressive, labor-friendly state...
> Have you ever cycled so long and so hard that you passed out and fell
> over? Have you ever climbed so many pitches that you had to crawl on
> all fours for the last several hundred feet? Have you ever run so long
> that the road began to seem like the side of some miraculous tunnel?
> Has the cold and ice and exhaustion ever turned your vision white and
> colorless? Have you ever cross-country skied and got lost? Wondered
> for hours in the darkening woods, sullen, silent, as the light falls
> into night and finally found the empty road in the moonlight? Have
> you ever labored so hard, you day dreamed of your own death just so
> that you could sleep?
...or that extreme sports is in any way comparable to being forced to do manual labor for a living...