This?

photo by joeball

I rode out with the .83 gang last night—a slightly disjointed tour of the west side, from downtown to lower Magnolia, then across the locks to Freelard, up and around the hill to Golden Gardens, back to Ballard for bar-drinking, then finishing up around the Fremont firepit before coming home.
I got pretty stoned pretty early and so, between the pedaling (or, I guess among), had all sorts of deep thoughts that elude me now, but I did fantasize about a vast US government-sponsored program to put bikes on the streets of political hotspots around the world.

Suppose, for instance, instead of spending 300 billion dollars on tanks and bombs, we spent just a pittance of that—say 300 million—and flooded Iraq with people on bikes. Suppose it took five thousand bucks to send a bike and rider to Baghdad for two months; three hundred million dollars would put sixty thousand riders on the streets; wouldn’t that do more to create stability and peace than our current policies?

(Come to think of it, probably nearly anything would; imagine if the US just sent any person who wanted a job, gave them a couple of thousand dollars and a suitcase full of iPods.)

Here, in the cold cruel light of dawn, I’m not nearly as impressed with my plan as I was last night; still, I don’t imagine it’s that much wackier than whatever Gates is scheming to do at the moment; and it’s certainly less outlandish than what has been attempted these last few years by Rumsfeld and Co.

In amidst a couple dozen cyclists, especially fueled by cannabis, caffeine, and wine, I begin to believe that the two-wheeler really could save the world. I guess this would qualify as the paradigmatic pipe dream, but it’s pleasant enough to dream about.

I’m sure I overestimate the potential of the bicycle to heal the world.

No doubt because riding bikes makes me feel so much better.

Yogi

I

photo by Denny T.

was pretty hungover today at yoga practice. (Still am, in fact.)

I went on the .83 bike ride last night and had a wee bit too much to drink. (Now, there’s a funny concept, and one assessed only in retrospect.)

It was a great time, punctuated by two high points:

1) Gliding down First Avenue in tight cycling formation, hitting all the lights right on yellow, one after another.

2) Being led to a secluded observation platform on Harbor Island (I think), hanging out in panoramic view of the Seattle skyline, drinking beer and getting rowdy—at least insofar as people playing beer can baseball with a U-lock and engaging in random nutsacking qualifies as rowdy—while the miraculous Daniel Featherhead miraculously flew (apparently) to the beach below.

So when I woke this morning, dry-mouthed and headachy, at 5:30AM, I thought I might as well get up and go to the studio: I couldn’t feel much worse and perhaps I could sweat out the booze with a few stretches.

I usually practice at home on mornings-after; I tend to go easier on myself in the living room than the shala and I generally skip the inverted poses that really get the hungover head throbbing, but since tomorrow’s a moon day and because with all the morning meetings this week, I’d only made it to the studio once so far, I decided to ride over to AYS.

I’m never quite sure what the respectful gesture is: do I express my devotion to the practice by showing up in whatever state I’m in or do I stay home unless I’m relatively pure?

I was paranoid about sweating beer on everyone, but I couldn’t smell any and even Jen didn’t wrinkle her nose when gave her a good-morning hug back at home.

Oddly, I had a good practice, at least in terms of flexibility. But that could be due to the four Excedrin I popped before leaving the house.

Gang

photo by Denny T.

I ride from time to time with a group of cyclists who go by the name of .83, which I’m told refers to the total mileage covered in one of their early rides, cut short by cold weather and a warm bar. It’s a loose collection of relatively normal but somewhat offbeat folks who like to ride bikes, hang out together, and, as the website says, “tip back a cold one”—although I’ve seen no particular aversion to a lukewarm one, either.
On .83 rides, we tend to have a healthy disrespect for traffic laws; red lights are usually treated as merely “slow down and look” lights and stop signs as simply suggestions. I think this is okay, given that (as I read it) we’re out to have fun and be a bit naughty rather than exhibit exemplary cycling behavior, but also because it seems to me that the slightly higher moral ground one attains by urban cycling in the 21st century affords an agent the right to bend the rules a bit.

This is a contestable claim, of course, and turns on whether cycling does earn you a step (or in the case of .83, a stagger) up morally but consider, for example, last evening when, as a group, we violated the countywide burn ban by having an open fire in the Fremont fire pit. I argued that because, as cyclists, our carbon footprint was smaller than automobile drivers, we had a right to “spend” our credits on a fire. (It was pointed out to me, though than the ban is to protect against wildfires, not global warming.)

But still…

We capped off the evening with a dip in Lake Washington, which broke laws—or at least UW regulations—against after hours facility use and swimming in a boating lane (so the police who rousted us claimed), but no one went to jail or even got a ticket.

That’s because we rode bikes there, of course.