Balanced

We live in the middle of everything: poised between the future and the past, neither here nor there, enduring in that dashed line separating birth from death, so it suits us well, as creatures in a Universe that exists ever since never and always, to experience those couple days a year when day and night effect a truce and neither prevails over the other, (specifically, of course, right in the middle.)

Tradition, such as it is, often finds us at those transitions points between the seasons, circling around flames where land meets water; amazingly, there continue to be relatively untapped routes to get there, which just goes to show that if the journey really is the destination, then you never haven’t arrived, have you?

Wikipedia tells me this: “The point where the Sun crosses the celestial equator southwards is called the first point of Libra. However, due to the precession of the equinoxes, this point is no longer in the constellation Libra, but rather in Virgo.”  But we all knew that, didn’t we?  As time goes on, the same thing that was is no longer, even if the song remains the same.

No need to mourn the changing cast of characters, though; rather, we celebrate the relentless movement of all things and hang on, brakes squealing in dissonance and harmony simultaneously.

An injured, but on-the-mend Angry Hippy rolled from his nearby lair to mark the occasion, another in-the-middle example, halfway between broken and fixed.

Or take drinking beer, too; the whole point of it characterized by what happens in the space between full and empty, see?

By the time I was making my slow and solitary way back, the Moon had risen from the east, and was perfectly half-illuminated; it edges softened by gauzy clouds, the offset semi-circle looked more like the half-and-half cookie it has inspired than our planet’s satellite itself.

Life imitates art imitating life and there we are, halfway home, still and always.

Comic

Humor is a delicate critter.  If you dissect it in order to find the funny, you inevitably kill the beast.

Take a joke (please!) like “Fancy Fred told me to bring a picture of my junk; so I took a photograph of my basement!”

As soon as you point out that, for example, he said “genitals,” not “junk” or that there was a footnote legitimizing “stuntcocking,” you’ve let the air out of the humor (assuming it wasn’t deflated already).

That’s why it’s better to actually experience the LOLs, primarily by riding your bike in a group of three dozen or so cyclists on a perfectly mild Indian Summer evening in the Pacific Northwest with an all-but-full moon so bright it casts shadows of the cranks (and of their spinning cranksets, too, hah!) as the group switchbacks up a topographically and archeologically significant lookout point and later bushwhacks over to a sentimentally and pornographically meaningful riverside all in the space of a couple hours that seem much longer with the addition of edible, quaffable, and smokeable additions.

Sooner than later, there’s someone in the tree and eventually, feet are flying over the fire and since no one loses an eye or breaks their neck, it remains all in good fun throughout.

Playing cards are played with and ogled at askance; no doubt many find their way into the cleansing flames, as well.

Seattle-based art critic Jen Graves wrote that the Tukwila hill “has been preserved for the purpose of telling you a juicy story,” called "The Epic of the Winds," which is the earliest recorded tale of the weather in Seattle, all about how the North and South wind vie with each other for meteorological dominance.

Now, that’s some serious shit, but if you ride behind a palette-sized human in the tipsy paceline, it doesn’t matter which direction it’s blowing.

Here, of course, you could dissect jokes about breaking wind, or alternately, just pedal, laughing all the way.

Recollection

It was 20th century British philosopher Bertrand Russell, I think, who pointed out that it’s impossible to disprove the statement, “The world was created just ten seconds ago with everything just as it is.”

If you refer to, say, fossils as evidence, one simply points out that ten seconds ago, when the world was made, those fossils were put there just as they are, in all their fossil-like glory.

Same goes for memories: If I were to respond by saying, “Yes, but I remember yesterday and the day before and the day before that, so clearly the world has existed for longer than ten seconds,” the rejoinder is again, to assert that when the world was created ten seconds ago, those memories were created as well.

So, perhaps it is the case that we live in a world that is less than half a minute old, but if so, I must commend the creator for installing in my head memories of last night and for choosing today as the start date so I can effectively recall not just one, but two birthdays to celebrate so soon after inception.

Of course, we can’t prove that Monica and Gabe, like all of us, didn’t only come into existence mere moments ago, but it’s nevertheless swell to recall celebrating their “birthday” with a return to childhood pleasures like bike-riding, sight-seeing, and playground zip-line swinging. 

There weren’t a lot of miles overall, but if you convert the distance to furlongs, we can be confident that the total surpasses their combined “ages,” so count that as a win, for sure.

Additionally, it’s delightful to recollect that subsequent to the outdoor amusements, celebrants assembled for birthday Chelanigans and were rewarded with something straight out of a David Lynch movie, complete with stock characters, haunting melodies, and a birthday boy whose “mom” couldn’t possibly have been unless she was and if so, wow, cue the dancing midgets.

At least that’s how I remember it.