Speechless

The bigger the fire, the larger the circle, but yes, there’s a balance between fuel and oxygen although generally, I think, it’s a good idea to err on the side of the former. 

After all, you can always readjust the conflagration once it’s started, especially when, thanks to the latest technology, everything set alight is, as was mentioned, essentially a wick.

That’s what I like to see: a maximum of involvement at whatever level that means.

Certainly, if you’ve navigated those switchbacks through the forest, you get first dibs on the warmth, right along with everyone else.

There was the moon, shiny in its misnomer: you call it first quarter, but it looks like the half.

And this is what I love about time: inching along, it suddenly turns on the warp drive.  Just moments ago, you were challenging early arrival at the edge of the world; two breaths later, it’s already tomorrow.

I will always have a special place in my heart for Orion’s Belt and there it was patiently abiding alongside our brighter little satellite.  Distance, in such cases, makes way more difference than size.  You can’t believe how long it takes but you’re sure glad for the way it turns out: trails over roads; just do what you think you ought not and in that way, ensure yourself that someone is watching, for sure.

Tommie reminded us what happens when plans hypnotize the next thing; what matters, as Fred pointed out, is that we’d exorcised all car karma of the executive in chief, who couldn’t be there for pretty much that very same reason.  Three flats before the first beer is nearly  unprecedented, although I do recall more than one occasion on which arrival up North took hours upon hours.

That trains still run, though, and bottles heaved skyward continue to make the most satisfying sound of all: the one that’s only possible under conditions like this, the kind that never happen except this way.

Brainiac

According to the plaque on Seattle Prep’s gateway, St. Ignatius admonished us to “Go forth in the world and light it on fire”—and it seemed to me like plenty of that happened even without the literal dimension.

Matches were struck at climbs and so much of what you hadn’t noticed was already there.

Do you see what I mean?

Anyone, anywhere can overlook the obvious.  Is under-looking, even possible, though?

The sky and the lake merged and the lights from Husky stadium and the overpass construction etched golden rectangles on the glossy part of its surface

Lying before us were the foggy moors; it looked you could walk across them, the mist curling about your ankles like a fat housecat.

But that was the sky reflected upon the water; those couple of amber slices and the greenish rectangles.

There is not here, either.

And yet, as you look back on the experience, how could you want it to unfold any differently?  Consider the part where you’re standing shoulder to shoulder in a bar all the while living the example your example purports to refute; I’m told that it’s the brain telling us what to do which makes it sound like we get to be some sort of robots, although ones, some would argue, who wouldn’t be conscious without bodies to have sensations.

I’m not sure about that but I am confident that the sights you get to see via two wheels and the sounds you hear on a peninsula behind a highway have everything to do with what’s going on in your mind even if the whole thing is more like an anthill that solves the so-called binding problem by creating the illusion of a self—and frankly, I’m okay with that if it means there’s an “I” that gets to have these experiences.

It’s like when you’re bouncing down dark rutted trails: is it you or your bike in control or are you simply unbound together?

Incendiary

photo by Josh Trujillo/SeattlePI.com

The so-called “problem of free will” remains one of the most devilish puzzles in all of philosophy. 

After all, human beings are just physical systems, subject to the same natural laws as everything else, so it’s hard to see how it’s any more apt to argue that we make free choices than, say, that evergreen trees “choose” to lose their needles as they dry.

Thus, for instance, it was inevitable that after the burn ban was lifted earlier this week, a vast throng of cyclists would haul discarded Christmas trees from downtown to the beach to ignite them into a huge inferno surely visible from outer space.

And just as inevitably, as soon as someone, somewhere made the 9-1-1 call about flames rising to the heavens inside a circle of several hundred revelers, that the fire and police departments would arrive to carry out their appointed duty to extinguish the flames, even though, as one officer admitted, doing so was part of the 90% of his job he doesn’t want to do but has to.

Given, therefore, that everything unfolded entirely as it had to, one need not mourn what wasn’t, but can give over completely to gratitude for what was, including, among other amazements, that:

•    No one was arrested
•    Not a single tree fell catastrophically from a bike or trailer on the Ballard Bridge
•    Ultimately, all the Christmas carbon was released, albeit quicker and with a more abrupt ending than anticipated
•    A second, and even more surreal, conflagration was ridden to and reveled about, this one complete with more fire dancers, louder music, and friendlier members of law enforcement

A night on which you’re rousted by the cops not once, but twice, and still no one goes to jail has to count as an unqualified success even if there’s no authentic agency at play there.

It’s simply the Universe unspooling as it must; how fortunate we all are to be flickering tongues of flame in this grand cosmic blaze.

Precedent

photo by Altercator

My big sister, Deb, always said that what you do on the first day of the year defines what’s ahead for the other 364 days, so you ought to make it a point to do all the things you want to on January first as a means of preparing for the rest to follow.

If so, 2015 should be a fine one for me—and for a number of beermakers—as a good thirteen hours of steady consumption led to the sort of transcendent weirdness that bodes well for the subsequent fifty-two weeks lying before us.

I’m reminded of how loosely stitched together is the fabric of reality when you poke at it from different directions all day long and above all, how utterly fantastic those hot, greasy curls of potato batter can taste in a parking lot well after midnight.  Details don’t matter too much as long as the general shape of things can be recalled: pedaling, hot-boxing the trailer, standing outside around the flames enhanced by “boy scout water,” and then one last last call; it doesn’t sound like much when you put it that way, but if you consider all the parts that go into such visions, it’s hard not to be impressed, especially given the means of conveyance.

One might wonder, in retrospect, whether it’s worth it, given the day after, but that would be to base one’s assessments on consequences; sometimes, by contrast, it makes sense to focus on intentions rather than results.  If that inclines one toward a deontological perspective, so be it; consider it our duty to live it up in spite of the cold cruel light of dawn and a modicum of curly fry induced dyspepsia.

But really, who’s going to pass up such good chances to harbor minor regrets?  The real sense of loss emanates not from bad decisions made, but rather, from roads not taken at all.   If it means muddy shoes all year long, then sure.