Elfin

The Monkey was telling me that he expected to feel poorly in the morning while I tried to convince him that this was no reason to modify one’s behavior the night before, and although my powers of persuasion no doubt left something to be desired, I do think I set a reasonable example of my point, as evidenced by the empty wallet and creative bike parking in the storage shed that greeted me in the A.M.

But it was to be expected, as the holidays kicked into full gear beginning with a winter wonderland at Westlake and culminating with Sugarplum Elves in the coffee house on Capitol Hill.

In between, there was a mass ride on the Aurora Bridge, plenty of whiskey at the playground, and a couple of noobs lured into the fold despite the challenge of hauling around a gallon of milk.

When I was about 8, I had a dream that I was running down the street, ahead of all the kids in my neighborhood, including local god, Steven Harrison, a seventh-grader, who ruled the cul de sac.  It took me years to figure out that it hadn’t actually happened, but the memory lingers on and occasionally gets re-animated by moments like the one where suddenly, thanks to my favorite short cut and a dawdling pelaton, I found myself at the head of the pack as it emerged from the I-5 Hobo Trail.

Holiday magic!

Not surprisingly, I didn’t make it back with my calendar, so I’ll just have to suffice with memories, hazy though they may be.  Fortunately, the velocipede is a gyroscope once it’s moving and the lizard brain’s survival mode knows the route home, so there’s still some functioning gray matter for pictures of blinking tail lights high above Fremont and piles of bikes framing singing Elves to reside in.

Never fear the morning the night before; what we remember tomorrow will always make what we did tonight well worth it.

Elemental

You get to ride bikes through the woods at night to a secluded beach near the northwest corner of the continent where the waves, though just squirrel-sized, are actually crashing on the shore, stand around or apart from a cozy fire drinking beer and telling lies; the stars are out and rotating gently around or so it seems from your vantage point on planet Earth; you’re there long enough that the tide comes in, the flames die down, and eventually, you’re treated to a long solitary uphill that’s just familiar enough to be sufficiently confusing to turn into a nice little adventure on the way out of the park and eventually to the bar where friendly faces abound.

And you might have passed that all up for what?  Sports, television, or the internet?

I suppose I could understand the first option, at least if the Steelers were playing, a fun fact about my character that the Angry Hippy duly appreciated when we chatted about the bleeding of Black and Gold at the Boxcar, but even a hometown victory pales in comparison to the Big Dipper overhead and sand beneath your feet, arrived at via two wheels, under the cover of a chilly, but remarkably dry, November evening.

Plus, there was the futuristic thrill of pedaling over the luminous space-age magic carpet not just once, but twice, including what may be the new go-to route home from Magnolia, especially after dark.

For tens of thousands of years, our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the region probably gathered at the very same spot we did; you could feel their ancient spirits among us (or maybe that was just me, celebrating the passage of Initiative 502, albeit a month or so early).

Suffice it to say that homo sapiens’ evolutionary connection to the experience of flames on that windswept corner of land by the  Sound go way deeper than even the bond one might feel with a Steel Curtain.

Immaculate reception, indeed.

Spectrum

Standing around the fire’s dying embers talking about the late afternoon’s double rainbow—which, to my way of looking at it, arched from Windermere to Kirkland for over an hour on my ride home from school—with Darcy and Paul, both of whom had documented their views of the phenomenon on cellphones, it occurred to me that I’d found the perfect metaphor for the human psychological condition:

We’re all at the center of our own rainbows.

Wow. Heavy.

Photographic evidence demonstrated that the same heavenly arc that to me spanned Lake Washington was, from another standpoint, over Lake Union, and to another, behind Beacon Hill.  So, even thought I thought the pot of gold was to be found somewhere around Magnuson Park, someone else would be just as certain it lay near the Hutch and someone else, insistent its location be by the Jose Rizal Bridge.

And this would also explain why there are some many treasures to be found in our fair city; case in point, the aforementioned blaze in Seward Park, upon which I happened thanks to the directions of vintage bike gang rider, Evil Mike, whose path crossed mine as I pedaled down Lake Washington Boulevard in search of drunken bike idiots.

It was a jewel of an evening, the waning gibbous moon shining diamond-bright in its center, several dozen bike riders loosely arrayed around a cheery campfire in the southern part of a Northwest city, each and every one, like me, at the center of his or her personal rainbow.

Even Joeball.

And then, eventually, as the coals’ glow faded and the beer ran out, it was back north, until like moths to their proverbial flame, we arrived en masse (albeit in stages) at the International District clubhouse where Dead Baby Terry and Fancy Fred with the Professor Dave Orchestra customized the Commodore’s hit ballad “Easy” in three-part harmony, heard, of course, from within the central perspective singer’s personal audio-visual rainbow.

Wow.  Heavy.