Monday, August 24, 2009

Accidents

First off, let me state unequivocally that I didn’t mean for the Obama mask to end up at the bottom of Lake Union; that said, I also have to admit that I wasn’t really sad to see it go.


I’m not sorry that I winged it over my shoulder; I do apologize for drowning it and for any pain or sense of loss experienced by its owner.



I throw myself on the mercy of the court. What can I say? 



Accidents happen.




Just ask anyone who hit the curb of the “ghettodrome” in Seattle Center and fell on her wrist breaking it bad enough to misplace a debit card; or somebody else who imbibed Jello shots and woke up with a mouth tasting of cat shit; or consider all those, yours truly, included, who spun out on the wet grass of South Lake Union and are regretting the way their groin muscles feel today.



Accidents happen.



“The best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry,” wrote the poet Robert Burns, and when you’ve got a drunken bike gang whose plans, such as they are, aren’t so much lain as thrown down in a heap like a giant bike pile outside of a nightclub, then you’ve got to expect that sooner or later, in the course of an evening, the unanticipated is going to occur.



“Boom! Take your drawers off!” wrote the rappers The Lamborghiniz, and when you’ve got a got a white guy in a blackface mask slithering around stage, it can’t help coming off a little racist awkward, don’t you think? So if my ire at the Obama mask was slightly over-the-top, I can’t help thinking that it wasn't entirely misplaced.



Besides, on a purely aesthetic level, the thing was just bad: when I first saw it, I thought it was a Nixon face with a phoney spray-on tan.



Here’s the lesson I take: we can all do better, mask-makers, wearers, and tossers. 



That’s no accident.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Unreal

photo by joeball
I wonder if in the future people will look back on nights like the one I got to have last night and doubt such things could really take place. 



In the post-apocalyptic Mad Max-scenario dystopia, when humans have scorched the skies, cities lie in ruins, and the lakes have all been drained for bottled water, who will believe that you could congregate a gang of about three dozen bike riders and pedal across town under a luminous and non-lethal sunset, roll up to a liquor store and supermarket right next to each other for provisions and libations, and make it, just as dusk is settling in, to a smooth-as-glass body of non-toxic water, whose temperature is just warmer than the velvety night air, swim, dive, and paddle about, before wobbling ever so slightly through quiet residential streets to a bar called the Monkey Pub, that seems right out of Central Casting’s version of a divey college watering hole, then manage somehow to find yourself later, still en masse, around a blazing fire that no one even fell into, although, I believe, some arm hair got singed?



Won’t it seem impossibly quaint to our descendants, like stories of goin’ downriver on the Mississippi on a homemade raft, or pickin’ out a piece of gingham for Molly at the ol’ general store?



I kept having the Truman Show moment, where it was all too impossibly perfect to be real, although if it was just another episode in the series, the one thing I wish the director would have done differently was the end of the night, where it seemed to me that the departure home was like ball bearings dropped in a skillet, people scattering off in all directions, so that my route back to bed was far more random, solitary, and beset with concerns for my fellow revelers than anticipated, and did make me wonder, even in this day and age, whether all that had happened was really real.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Magnanimity

The way I learned it, Aristotle identified two different virtues related to the disposition to share with others. 



For regular folks, it’s generosity; among the hoi polloi, the virtuous person willingly gives to others in need, helps out friends, buys the occasional Real Change newspaper from the vendor on the street. 



For the leading citizens of Athens, though, it’s called magnanimity; among the oligarchy, the virtuous person makes grand gestures in support of the people: finances the building of temples, supports the Olympic games, hosts the season’s bacchanal for all who attend.



That’s the virtue I kept thinking Joby the neon-demon embodied last night as he pretty much single-handedly threw for us the most fucked-up and wonderful 12 year-old birthday party bike ride imaginable. 



There was more booze than people could drink (in such a short amount of time so early in the night, anyway), then something like 800 linear feat of glowstix, that in a most charming display of hippy-dippy bicycle craft activity was eagerly zip-tied to everyone’s rigs, each in our own special and characteristic way, then groovy black-light dayglo dance music roller skating for anybody who wanted to—(and once we got a look at it pretty much everybody did.)



And while the aspiration to stay up for 5:00AM bicycle breakfast wasn’t universally fulfilled, the Technicolor nonsense did continue well past Last Call, even though bridegroom Ben, who I enthusiastically pedaled crosstown to fete on the eve of the eve of his wedding, probably won’t recall.



But I’ll remember, long after the light of the glowstix on my bike fades, well past the time my roller-skated hips stop aching, and the image that’s going to shine longest, I think, is the view of some three dozen hard-core heavy-drinking hobo bike gang delinquents going all Martha Stewart on the grass while decorating their two-wheelers; talk about good-clean wholesome all-American fun; I didn’t even really need that magic cookie; magnanimity made for psychedelia all by itself.