Friday, October 28, 2016

Wiggy

photo by Officer Ride Bikes
One marker of really good pot is that you can smoke enough to be unable to smoke any more. 

It’s not like getting too drunk, where you stumble around trying to find your beer and then spill it before it reaches your lips; the governor here on your behavior is mental, not physical.

The whole enterprise simply becomes too fraught with meaning: maybe you could have another hit, but maybe not.  If you do, then the entire course of history from here on out will change, resulting in a possible world where anything is possible, but if you don’t, then why is everyone looking (or is it not looking) at me and howcome my socks feel so funny and how do you work this lighter, anyway?

By contrast, one marker of a truly excellent Thursday evening bike ride is that you can keep going on to the next thing even while the thing you’re doing is still going on and there’s still plenty of time for biking and boozing, the night is still young.

Derrick’s crop of Fremont Homegrown didn’t quite get me to the point of total uselessness, but it sure improved my appetite for whatever was next, whether that be sculpture-ogling, pathway-pedaling, palette-burning, or even karaoke-singing.

(Unfortunately, the bar’s rendition of my costume character’s theme song didn’t match the one I grew up with, but thankfully, it only lasted a minute and two seconds--although due in part to the aforementioned homegrown, it seemed rather longer.)

In any event, the second annual “Smoking of the Bowls Halloween Edition” surely counts as an unqualified success even though a number of the costumes were suspiciously of the “I’m a Dude Who Works in an Office and Commutes by Bike to Work” ilk. 

Props to Pooh Bear for showing up and to yours truly for availing himself of another opportunity to wear a wig and a dress; learned to keep my money in my sock and didn’t lose it neither!

Friday, October 14, 2016

Soaked

It’s always better than it looks; you catch the rain in the streetlight and it seems like you’d have to be crazy to be out there, but when you are, it’s way more like an expensive facial treatment had for free.

The future oppresses us in our imaginings; when you wait for it to arrive before passing judgment, it loses some of its power to incite panic.   Once you’re willing to see plastic as a viable fire-starter, the embrace of the available begins.

Pleasure is overrated at least to the extent that pleasure means “what’s pleasurable.”  Or “pleasing,”maybe.   Anyway, it feels good to be kind of miserable in the rain.  Bedragled rats.  Very handsome bedragled rats.

It took a Goldilocks-like two shelters to find the one that was just right, but it was, and the kindling kindled into the cheeriest blaze you could ever hope for on a night that it took just such a fire to counteract the water, giving rise to plenty of steaming garments even before two levels of flames had been achieved.

You surely have to like riding bikes to like riding bikes on a night such as this; on the other hand, what’s the alternative?  In general, you come to regret the things you haven’t done rather than those you have, although you can certainly regret a few of those, as well.

Tonight, however, there’s nothing really you’d take back: your route home admittedly isn’t the most efficient, but, in any case, there you am, warm and dry on the living room couch while the wind wails outside. 

You could have had that all along, I guess, but then, you’d have missed out on the opportunity to find solace in the maple leaves that carpeted your route home through Ye Olde Byke Traile; to be once again impressed with the mini-wormhole that spills you out on the other side of the hill; soaking in being outside and the experience of experiencing the outside.