Imagine my surprise when, as I wander through the inbreeder-infested lands of my youth, I find a beautiful visage hiding amongst the toothless and the tattooed, the ugly and the undesirable, the dirge and the dross.

Many of you know what I love and love not. I shall clarify and state that, no I did not meet my ex girlfriend, nor did I meet her twin sister. As I hear it, both are now married. No comments, please.

So what is it that can captivate me so, cause I to remain stationary in these surroundings? What under the sun holds the power to alleviate the misery I feel in such god forsaken lands as these - haven for NASCAR, wrestling and all that is brought out by the society of the genetically pathetic?

It is flow magazine and it is pure bliss. It soothes the burning of my unused quads and eases the stiffness of my unweighted neck. It is the balm that heals the emotional wounds that inflict me for their physical lacking.

What trickery is this? "The devil that looks within knows well the angel's face." As I sit here I still know not if I have found this publication by force of good or ill. I know it inspires in me the desire to push myself towards a freedom that cannot be named for all it is known. yet also do I feel a sickening torment that leaves my desire sated by the inadequate parallel to mental masturbation. it calms me for the time I experience it in all its enthralling ecstasy; yet when I am through, still do I crave and hunger and lust.

The journey to this treasure led me amongst the lowest of the low, reminding me just why I left the entrapment of my youth. wandering aimlessly through the local welfare cesspool, I pass a couple with the wife gray and listless as the cheap beer and grease stains upon her husband's wife beater. I do not deign to see the obese monstrosity carrying her equally disgusting children through the ice cream aisle, beadily eyeing the freezers as a vulture might purvey a pontzer. each squalling justification of a night's lust and a life's sloth making the cart in which it rode more a sty than any number of piglets could ever do.

To slake my thirst for obliviousness I lose myself in the magazines. I find more wrestling, racing and tasteless porn than any thousand men should see in their lives. Then I dig behind the overly obsessed Angelina Jolie, her disgustingly fat nightcrawler lips gracing the cover of some unrefined portrayal of what every base man craves in his ignorance. would that I could waste my time leafing through those pages, seeing what the carnal desires of the unenlightened find so incredibly desirable about this media darling's whorish statuette. Then would I have truly sunken to the pits of the abyss and my glorious find would have uplifted me even more. but that did not happen, and so I am left to tell of what euphoria I found that day.

I lift the mag up and so my spirits lift as well. The cover rising to reveal a studly youth, fully extended in an impressive superman seat-grab. He and his chameleon share the honor with nothing save the treetops and the sky. The breadth of the cover astonishes me more than the rider upon it and quickly does my mind harken to the brief but glorious days of plush. Neither before nor after has Mt biking seen such a gorgeous cover until now. as usual I turn to the back cover and flip open the pages in reverse. so greedily do I yearn, that I cannot stop to take in the pages, I merely let them fly past my eyes marveling that each and every one shares the same glossy brilliance as its keepers do. Advertisements are spread throughout the entirety of the 120+ pages yet they cannot detract from the images of rider after rider doing what they seem to do best: pushing themselves. Be it stair gaps, big air, the vert ramp or the first backflip bar-spin I have ever laid eyes upon. that visage alone held me breathless for several seconds. the scope of what this magazine is all about can be summed up within that full page spread. as our sport changes and evolves, it seems that there is somewhere now that we can turn to and see it captured for us. It is very unlikely that I will ever get enough air to do so much as a simple x-up much less a bar-spin, yet so long as I am restrained others will be freed and I can follow them through their journeys and see how they evolve and express themselves in the saddle.

The mag does not stop at the eye candy and call it good enough to go to press. the pages are littered with info on products and events with over 50 products spanning everything from floor pumps to 6" single crown forks and full bikes. In all that I only found one bogus write-up and was surprised to find a lot more diversity than I expected. Rider interviews are all over the mag with a lot of emphasis put on younger riders and the changes that they are bringing to the sport as well as riders coming from other types of riding such as BMX and MX. there is even a lengthy interview (one of three in the issue) with glover's favorite superhero, josh bender.

I sit here in all my boredom and still know irrevocably that I cannot possibly exasperate this issue. I have never before seen a magazine so vast in scope that actually has something worth reading coupled with images that bring you back again and again. I long ago forsook the likes of MBA and Mt bike. I keep the rag cause they have a presence I can see and feel in my regular riding, but I ditched bike after they forgot that the mind needs stimulation other than pictures.

I long to live more than just vicariously through these pages. I sit here a mere six miles from the biggest air of my life and an eternity away from reliving those three stupidity-filled runs. I am lost amidst those whom hate me for lending my voice to call down the Mt biking = dirt roads attitude. That mine eyes have seen and my heart known more than this merely twists the knife in my wound. That my journeys have led me to abandon and forsake the dirt I know and love cannot be overlooked by any amount of joy on the part of those whom are happy in lacking my presence.

Finding this magazine has been a journey for me, a small journey no doubt but a journey nonetheless. That it brings me to reflect upon the larger journeys of my life further reinforces to me what any publication in our sport should do. So I sit here and look at a magazine about "freeride, street, downhill & dirt culture" as it reads across the cover and realize that even though there is nothing about XC and climbing in there, I think I’ve found my way to the pinnacle of post plush Mt bike journalism.