Bookends

Someday, Nature willing, you will have a clearly-identifiable marker of something you have been or done for nineteen years.  It will, at first, be the simple fact of existence, but soon, there will be other identifiers, like residing somewhere, preferring a particular sports team, or pedaling a two-wheeler.

If you end up bearing responsibility for a member of the subsequent generation, one such marker will be the point at which they attain their legal majority and choose to cease living under your roof.  You will meet this eventuality eventually and you can reasonably expect it to color your perception of your perceptions.

The Angry Hippy noted, at the first of the evening’s two swims, that our own lives are currently palindromic on that score, as he welcomes into his house a new member the same month I have bid adieu to one who has shared my home for all this time together.

Bookends, if you will, just as last night’s ride was the mirror image of one almost exactly a year ago; same route (thanks to some skilled wayfaring), same destination, and same perfectly bruised skyline to the west along the way.

As Dr. Tittlefitz reminded me at the Lake, the 20th century philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, in his highly-influential essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” argues that the alleged bright line between what we know via experience and what we know via the process of analytic reasoning is not really so bright.

How we define the world defines how we experience it—and yet oddly, the expectation of cycle-swimming is not tantamount to its realization. 

As soon as RZA conceptualized the route, we could predict a set of outcomes—e.g, trail-riding, back-floating, beer-quaffing—but claims about those outcomes would not be true simply by definition; rather, they would have to be experienced for us to know them. 

Bookends may define possibilities; the experience in the middle, (e.g, trail-riding, back-floating, beer-quaffing), however, yields truth.

Fins

According to the New York Times, “on Wednesday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago reported that our hands share a deep evolutionary connection not only to bat wings or horse hooves, but also to fish fins.” Using molecular markers, they found conclusive proof that human beings share a common ancestor with fish and that, ultimately, (or make that originally), we all come from the sea.

So, it’s not surprising that most of the people in the world live near coasts, nor that, by and large, humans are drawn to water, whether it be to swim, surf, boat, fish, float, or any number of other one-syllable activities.

What is unusual, however, is how enthusiastically three dozen or so cyclists can pedal across and to the eastern shore of their city’s most prominent body of fresh water in order to dunk themselves in the drink (and the Lake, as well) and, even more amazingly, do so with sufficient alacrity to arrive in time to catch the last rays of sunlight as our planet’s star sinks behind the horizon on a summer evening almost two months after the longest day of the year.

The glassy surface of the water glowed pink while pale bodies rose above the rosiness like mayonnaise mangroves in a happy human swamp. 

Feet were challenged during the rocky ingress and egress, but if you floated for as long as possible, the worst could be avoided—literally, of course, as well as figuratively.

Fireball gymnastics were assayed without success, but with plenty of LOLs; I myself found it to be an effective governor on my consumption of the whiskey to only allow myself as much as I could handle while floating on my back.

Eventually, the full moon appeared in the east and silvery shadows assembled for the ride back across the water.

Hands and feet that once were fins connected with handlebars and pedals, back from whence we came, onward to the future.

Meteoric

The annual Perseid meteor shower and your weekly Point83 bike ride actually have a lot in common.

Both, for example, are predictable in the broad sense; that is, you know when they’re coming around, every year or every week at the same time.  However, with neither can you forecast exactly when sparks will fly.  You have to keep your eyes open, gently scanning the celestial sphere and wait to be surprised by what you nevertheless have come to expect.

Both, also, are occasioned by a kind of reverse action.  The earth passing through the orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle makes it more likely that bits and pieces of space dust will slam into the our planetary atmosphere and ignite; bicycles moving through darkened park trails and closed roadways increase the likelihood that folks will get lit, especially with the addition of various intoxicants and mood-lifters.

Observing a meteor is kind of a little miracle.  Usually, by the time you realize what you’re seeing, it’s gone.  You get a sort of roller-coaster feeling, an “oooh” escapes your lips, a giggling “wow,” and then it’s over.  Same thing happens as you float atop sandy paths on your bike, taillights winking in the distance and then, before you know it, you’re home.

And, finally, in each case, things really get going once the moon sets.

Of course, there are some differences.  Meteors travel at the speed of 130,000 miles per hour.  Only Fancy Fred, leading the ride away from the park, approaches that velocity. 

Also, all of the Perseid meteors radiate from the same point in the sky.  By contrast, nearly every outburst in Point83 comes from a different source—except, of course, when Derrick is along in full argle-bargle mode.

And unlike bike gang shenanigans, meteor showers occur whether you’re there to observe them or not; they’re a force of nature happening independently of human agency.

Wait.  Come to think of it, that’s another one both share in plenty.

Inconceivable

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that the ultimate passion of the human mind is to think the unthinkable or know the unknowable.

For him, this desire manifests itself in the essential urge to know God, that fundamentally paradoxical effort of the finite to grasp the infinite or the profane to experience the Divine.  Ultimately, for Kierkegaard, the paradox extends even further such that, in the end, the only way for human beings to actually connect with God is through His exact opposite, sin.

Weird, huh?

But you don’t have to be proto-Existentialist Scandinavian Christian theologian to see what he was talking about; you can approach that contradictory mind-state of conceiving the inconceivable on purely materialist grounds, too: just imagine the unimaginable sequence of events that had to have transpired over the course of the last 13.7 billion years for the Universe to have unfolded in a way that makes it possible for 100 or so people riding bicycles to arrive on a warm August evening at a sylvan glade of mighty conifers and—thanks to the application of highly-distilled spirits and globalized capitalism—soon find themselves (due primarily to the largesse of one beloved neon-hued instigator) hurling their bodies down a hundred-foot long sheet of polyvinyl chloride and grappling with each other in a kiddie pool filled with non-toxic biodegradable jelly.

Oh.  And thousands of glowsticks in all colors, too, turning mild-mannered software analysts into psychedelic gladiators from the planet Future.

Kierkegaard’s own mind would have blown to witness the impossible made possible: sunless rainbows, an outdoor interior, and even a lost key ring found. 

Famously, he argues that a “leap of faith” is required for us to realize the Divine; maybe.  But it sure seems like diving headfirst onto an inflatable alligator and careening down a slick plastic hill does the trick, too.

Fourteen billion years after the singularity expanded and here we are: shirtless, intoxicated, and glowing. 

It’s inconceivable.  Unimaginable.  Unthinkable.

And Divine.

Pukesprints

I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Mogen David beverages. 

It was their sacramental concord grape wine, after all, served at Jeffrey Goldberg’s bar-mitzvah, on which I first got tipsy, as did my friend and classmate, Nicole Corregan, leading to our initial make-out session in the darkened recreation room of the B’nai Israel Synogogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sometime in the spring of 1970.

So, I guess I’ve known all along that their products have a performance-enhancing effect, but I guess I never realized how powerful was that influence until last night when, thanks to numerous shots of multi-colored (and allegedly multi-flavored) Mogen David MD 20/20 (aka Mad Dog), a dozen or so bike racers was eventually, after four or five heats, winnowed down to three podium standees (standing, admittedly, a bit wobbly), topped by the very aero Mike Keller, who showed up just in time for the first heat—demonstrating, I guess, just how important warm-up and preparation is for an event like this.

I managed to get eliminated in the first race of the night, meaning that I only got to (had to) down one shot of the “blueberry-flavored” Tidy Bowl-colored fortified wine.  More successful racers were required to consume another round at the start and finish of subsequent heats, meaning that those stalwart souls who made it through to the finals had thrown down something on the order of sixteen or twenty ounces of what basically amounts to over-the-counter cough suppressant marketed as a party drink to college students, but which is also widely consumed by homeless alcoholics in need of maximum alcohol kick for minimum cost.

I don’t know if MD 20/20 has made it onto this summer’s Olympics’ list of banned substances; based on last night’s Pukesprints event, it should probably be prohibited if the event is competitive fun-making; nobody actually hurled (at least on my watch), but I threw up my hands in wonder and joy like mad (dog.)