Zone

photo by joeball

“Wherever you go, there you are,” say the Buddhists (or was that George Carlin?); “You’re never lost as long as you have nowhere to go,” was how some wag around the fire put it.

And why would you have any other destination in mind, anyway, when everything a person could need is right at hand: all the beer you can drink, so many marijuana cigarettes you have to smoke two at a time, a toasty fire whose banked-up coals warm your slowly-spinning body from bottom to top, conversations in every direction to dip into and sometimes nervously back away from, all presented way out in the apparent middle of nowhere under a sky filled with shy constellations peaking out between painterly clouds and not a raindrop in sight.

Of course, at some level, we’re all lost, always, all the time, wandering through a meaningless accidental Universe absurdly in search of some sort of meaning, but if it is possible to find oneself, it’s more than likely to happen in circumstances such as these: in a place that feels familiar but new, wondering how you got there and relying on the kindness of well-known strangers to lead you away, needing nothing else for the time being other than what’s in arm’s reach.

A riparian zone is defined as the area of interface between land and a river or stream; perhaps it’s in such buffers where the secrets of existence are to be found: the moving patch where rubber meets the road (or gravel); the white-hot point at which fire clings to wood; those fleeting moments when words ignite laughter; or an evening whose limbs stretch out in both directions, transitioning smoothly from summer to winter, a perfect autumn instant balanced between the billions of colors behind and the infinite grey-scale ahead.

And even though, I’ve seen it before, I still believe in wormholes and magic carpets; how else can we get so lost and still find ourselves home?

Dicks

photo by joeball

Many will bemoan the loss of tradition, complaining about the way, for instance, that the true spirit of Christmas—or Superbowl Sunday—has been forsaken; and while it’s important to venerate that which has brought us here, it’s also vital to respond to the world as it is.

We live, as the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti reminds us, in a universe of thought, and it’s easy enough to take those thoughts as the only way the universe can be and so it’s good, I think, to allow the past to influence the present without being utterly beholden to the way things went before.

We can come to appreciate, therefore, how Santa eventually usurps Jesus (at least for the time being) or over time, how fries become burgers while the commemoration of freedom remains intact.

Think of what our human brethren around the world might give for the opportunity to pedal to even one such bountiful purveyor of local delicacies; but four? 

I marveled at the way bicycles braved routes built mainly for cars and nearly fainted when our friend Mr. Double-Truck was somehow avoided by dozens of tiny two-wheelers in Wallingford.

One of the characteristic human dilemmas is to rectify the map with the territory, the plan and the present, our expectations and reality; how we do so depends upon principle.

Democracy may be, as Churchill put it, the worst form of government except for all other forms that have been tried, but that doesn’t mean it works in situations where nobody really knows what he or she wants in isolation.

That’s when it’s sometimes better to simply stipulate, based on a standard of inclusion, what comes next.   (Even if an Angry Hippy is literally begging for an alternative.)

Because, after all, it’s much easier—in keeping with the Descartes’ well-known admonition—to change ourselves rather than the world at-large.

And in the end, if you get to swim one last time in this summer’s lake, you do.

Forecast

photo by joeball

There are lots of good reasons to miss a ride—illnesses, wedding anniversaries, band practices—but in my experience, the weather is almost always a poor excuse.

Which means that deciding to stay home based on merely the forecast of inclement conditions is surely a road to regret.  Moreover, it’s remorse of the worst kind: the type that emanates from something you didn’t do rather than something you did. 

After all, it’s one thing to feel bad the morning after for carrying on the Nutpunch Park tradition of nutsacking a relative stranger in the balls, but it’s another experience altogether to be kicking yourself (in the nuts, no doubt) for missing the opportunity to be there enjoying lightning strikes and bulletballs just because you looked at colored maps on the internet earlier in the day.

Apparently, pretty much everyone knows that the bark of the Douglas Fir tree is resistant to fire, but it seems there are some folks who forget that human beings are not made of sugar and while—as any Angry Hippy will attest—rust may never sleep, it moves slowly enough that even a sustained drenching is unlikely to result in the immediate destruction of a steel bike much less one constructed of aluminum or carbon fiber.

Elsewhere, thunderbolts skipped off the helmets of motorcyclists, but on the favored platform suspended above the Superfund site not a single one of Zeus’ throws hit its mark, which I realize has nothing to do with rubber-soled shoes but I like to believe so, anyway.

And should you think you’ve seen it all, here’s a surprise: a locked gate and the unprecedented teamwork of two-wheelers, including burly touring rigs, being passed over barbed-wire fences, so no one, not even drunken nutpunchers are left behind.

Sure, the final spin home is drenching, but at this point, you’re feeling very little pain (and only a modicum of regret, just as you might have predicted had predictions been predicted.