Promenade

photo by mblonsky 0521

One of the things that the eminent philosophical polymath, Bertrand Russell, is known for is the so-called “Barber’s Paradox.”  Russell ask us to imagine a town in which there is a barber who shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves.  But who shaves the barber?  The poor man can neither shave himself nor go to himself to be shaven, thus the paradox, which—as I understand it—is meant to illustrate how there can be no set of all sets, or, more broadly, that the system of explanation—language, for instance—can never fully explain itself.

Ultimately, the paradox reveals the way in which the world is necessarily greater than our ability to describe it, a point which also applies to this year’s .83 Prom Ride, an event so filled with eventfulness that words, (and for that matter, pictures), utterly fail to capture the heartwarming delightfulness that characterized it from start to finish and everywhere in-between.

The outfits alone were worth the price of admission and my own gym teacher/chaperone drag gave rise to another sort of puzzle that might have intrigued Lord Russell: who chaperones the chaperones?  (Unsurprisingly, no candidates for that position emerged.)

An evening counts as a roaring success when you get to swim in two different lakes, and added to that were at least three separate dance venues, including two which were under the stars.  Prom committee chair, LizLemon, organized it all with utmost aplomb and in flouncy polka dots!

It is a truism of adulthood that eventually, you arrive at a point in life where you can choose your own family.  It doesn’t have to be the one you grew up with; you’re free instead to surround yourself with people who love you for who you are, whether related by blood or not.

The same goes for high school proms; my own, forty years ago, was entirely forgettable; last night’s, by choice, I'll never manage to forget.

Bonhomie

The way I remember it, Aristotle identifies three types of friendship: the first is based on pleasure, the second, on utility, and the third on a recognition by both parties of the good in the other.  So first, you’ve got your buddy you see at symposia and share goatskins of wine with, next, the chum who helps replace the broken wheel on your chariot, and finally, your companion in whom you see the virtues you embody represented and who reflects them back to you as an illustration of your own best character.

To that list, we might add a fourth category: people you ride bikes with on an overcast summer night, occasionally splitting up, but then reforming together as one large group to commandeer a skate park, turning it into a temporary outdoor beer garden and revival meeting.  These relationships, even with those whose names continually elude you, encompass all three of Aristotle’s distinctions, with an extra ineffable lagniappe: you get to be part of a rolling clown car of  predictable nonsense combined with cycling routes both familiar and unprecedented, and all this without a cover charge, under greyscale skies etched smartly by nature’s soft charcoal hand.

Two residences were stopped at and at least one offered beer cans; a minor crash was weathered with no broken bones; a light mist fell at some point, but spirits weren’t dampened—in fact, some were even passed around in plastic shot glasses for the assembled to partake of.

Many of the best parts of summer happen in spring: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the Girls of Summer All-Girl Alleycat; these longest days of the year, but as this year’s solstice approaches, all indications portend that the ensuing season will be one to cherish: even if there isn’t swimming on a given night, there can still be dancing, which really is just another kind of swim, especially when you’re surrounded by friends of the fourth type, pleasure, utility, and the good.

Eyeful

photo by Altercator

At one point, I was standing near Joby while he was fiddling with the electronics on the music bike, and when he flicked a switch to return it to its full-throttled volume, the mentioned something about “amperage (I think it was) overload” and it seemed to me that this pretty well summed everything up—in a good way—on a night when being in shirtsleeves was overdressed by at least three items of clothing and on which not only the summer, but indeed, the historical standard for nudity was set, and all this well before the sun ceased glowing in the west.

There was no way I could fully catch up to the level of hijinks, arriving as I did just as the plump of human waterfowl emerged luminescent on the distant dock, so I just took vicarious joy in their glorious naturism and tried to imagine what it was like to be arranged like white stripes on the flag of the lake while an eagle soared overhead; America, fuck yeah!

A somewhat subdued—but still Fancy—Fred arrived via tandem and we lay for a bit with our heads pillowed by the concrete rim of the wading pool to gaze heavenwards at asterisms of our own design; I’m sure I saw plenty of stuff that wasn’t even there but which, nonetheless, reminded me to recall that every single point of light, visible or not, in the night sky, allows us to see into the past, thereby ensuring that nothing we care for ever departs, it just holds its distance overhead forever and ever.

And despite the fact that past misfortune has had an understandable chilling effect on the standing atop of ceilings, it turned out to be perfectly acceptable to take in the view from above, especially with help ascending and descending from colleagues.

Come to think of it, that’s sort of the apt .83 metaphor, although, consistently, more of the assistance inclines towards the upwards.