TWS - I hear ya! You’re telling me, but I’ve got it too... My neighbor across the street came over before I had the ignition of my car turned off last night - TWS, he said. “Can we just talk about the Tour for a little bit?” “I don’t know what to do with myself in the mornings now.”

Tour Withdrawal Syndrome.... We are lost, without direction, just lost little lambs - without the sustenance of Phil, or Paul or Bobke - even Trautwig might be welcome. It’s not that we are just without the Tour, we are also without Lance! The owner of the bike shop, where I rent my little upstairs office space, came dragging up the stairs with a big ole six-foot tall cardboard poster of Lance and the Lucky Seven Trek promotion yesterday. He left it sitting in the middle of my office. I guess he thought I needed it pretty bad....

My landlady and I watched the Lance stuff about the Tour de Georgia last night. I was standing right beside Rob and Chris (the OLN camera guys) when they filmed most of it.... When College was hollering with the little boy, I was taking shots of the whole thing. I sent a couple of those pics to College, and he wrote me back to say those were the best pictures he’d ever seen. Well, that made me happy while I was watching it....

One of my friends told me that she is watching the OLN re-runs of Survivor because they have some funny Bob Roll commercials - I guess he’s naked or something - I don’t wanna see it! But it makes her feel closer to the Tour somehow. I taped all the Sirius Faction Lance Armstrong shows while I was away at the Tour, so I have this secret stash of Lance stuff. If it turns out to be a bunch re-runs again, I am throwing my cheap-o boys Nike tennies at the TV screen. Don’t know why, there’s nothing on there but a black screen and Sirius Faction scrolling and wobbling up and down... It’s a RADIO show, dammit....

I’m getting lots of forlorn emails - general theme is withdrawal.... Everybody is watching their tapes, and scrambling for DVDs. World Cycling Productions is probably having a boom in sales. If you’ve gone thru all your Tour resources, you can buy Tour de France for Dummies and highlight the editing mistakes... Ha - not mine.... Hey, how many times can you look at the Tour results on cyclingnews?

So, I guess maybe I better start some kind of Twelve-Spoke Program to deal with all of us being in the grip of addiction and withdrawal from the 2005 Tour - Lance’s Final Super Seven. We can start support groups all over the world to process our feelings about living in a Lance-less cycling world - they must be held in bike shops, tho...