Upgrade

photo by Joeball

Being unable to hear yourself think is not such a bad thing when, as a result, you're able to experience everything in its pure state as the alternative.

Devout adepts since time immemorial have immersed themselves in meditative and reflective practices to still the fluctuations of the mind and turn off the internal chatter; that same desired outcome can be achieved almost instantaneously by eating a cannabis cookie and riding your bike behind tehJobies’ latest incarnation of the music bike, this one fitted out with two rocket-booster shaped speakers delivering an even more face-meltingly loud volume for your cycling and dancing pleasure, despite the initial tune of the night being a perennial front-runner in the ongoing contest for most annoying pop hit of all time.

Still, it’s hilarious to see people come running from all directions and stop in their tracks to point and cheer when the parade of bikes and beats rolls by.  My face hurt from smiling after a mere two or three blocks to go along with the flayed fabric of my eardrums as I experienced something akin to Pure Being or maybe just another Thursday night out on two wheels.

Spring was at its vernal best; the stiff southwest breeze following record-breaking rain had cleared out the skies and it remained warm enough all evening for light wool, especially around the cheery fire at Seward started by the chain-smoking Ito on a bed of firecrackers which happily hoist him by his own petard in its lighting.

The Angry Hippy asked around at Westlake for something to get him started on his drunk for the evening; I’m not sure his request was met then, but by the time, several hours later, he was observed sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk outside karaoketown, one could assume, and not just by the coffin nail, that mission was accomplished.

My peak moment was slightly earlier, pouring from the park to Jello Biafra’s incomparably dulcet tones: Point83 Uber Alles, indeed.

Resurrected

Neither DNF nor DFL; that’s the baseline. 

Then, my metric has long been to take my age and minus the place I come in from it; highest number wins.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” is how I remember Patti Smith putting it.

Resurrection Seven; it’s on the road to being long enough to be its own cult. 

Someday in the future, people will describe Easter as the day after the race and while some moldy old scholar will attempt to review which came first, it will all be chickens before eggs and vice-versa, those oivoid spheres being the ones in which manifests come.

You could tell which ones had directions in them, but only after you’d already picked it up and undone the tape, so it worked just as well to grab randomly, an admonition that’s probably not too far off.

Nor is the one that says just ride them in order, and it might not have been such a bad idea to do so, although I thought my route, surprisingly, wasn’t so bad. 

I got the gluttony over first with a shot of chocolate sauce in Nora’s Woods. 

Then, it was up and over to the Gum Wall where a tourist was even worse than me at using my camera phone; proving that pride goeth before a fall, especially on such an enthusiastically spring day.

I did envy in Queen Anne, although there wasn’t a thing I wished I had that I hadn’t. 

Thanks to the sage advice of Tall Bryan I next got wrathful at Golden Gardens, destroying the shit out of a joint before heading up and over the hill straight up to 85th and a more or less straight shot to sloth in Ravenna, albeit with a five-minute dumbhead penalty for turning the wrong way.

Lust at the Bridge to Nowhere meant holding hands with a damp teddy.

And then: Gasworks; greedily burning wood and drinking around a fire. 

Praise Jesus.

Backwards

Surprisingly, there’s always something you haven’t yet seen, like a blinking cursor that’s always been there, although staying closer to the water in order to ride boats of a spring night on which the sky was three different versions of wonderful (and those were only the ones remarked at and remembered) before ending up at a pond and a bridge in an impressively dangerous public space without a single trash can as befitting something that isn’t a park, but rather a facility, where self-lighting charcoal plays the role of a fire, is plenty, especially when you take into account that not even a hint of rain was dropped and shirtsleeves and a vest were sufficient all evening long; that’s what you ask for, and the fact that it was the most familiar of routes run backwards and under quite different mental conditions than those underway at 8:30 in the morning only makes it that much more satisfying.

Enough really can be enough when you’re given opportunities like this to notice it’s all too much, just like this, less than usual but still more than expected and certainly deserved.