Incognito

There are (at least) two schools of thought when it comes to Halloween costumes. 

On the one hand, you can create an outfit that fits your personality, perhaps highlighting some feature of yourself, like your essential nerdiness or eclectic taste in music, art, or even, if you have some skill with papier maché, videogames.

On the other hand, you can choose a costume that allows you to express a personality trait or way of being in the world that’s entirely different than your usual mode of expression; you get to fantasize about being someone (or something) else and don accoutrements that illustrate this difference flamboyantly.

It turns out that, for me, dressing up as Garth Alger, Wayne Campbell’s sidekick on the eponymous “Wayne’s World,” does a little of both and, perhaps not surprisingly, when combining that with a Thursday night bike ride featuring loud music and costumes galore, both the fit and the flamboyance are revealed.

Appropriately enough, for those for whom 1990s late-night television and low-budget film comedy references are less than top-of-mind, the Garth costume can alternately serve as a costume of me at age 17: same hair, same ripped jeans, same flannel shirt tied around the waist. 

Oh, and while the weed is better these days, that kid had also probably ridden his bike to some park with friends and was sharing what we called in those days, a “dube.”  “Plus ca change,” as they say in France, “plus c’est le meme chose.”

Which also sort of the same, but different, when it comes to Point83. 

It was surely, after all, at least the 10th time I’ve seen Winnie the Pooh on a bike, and multiple times that that I’ve enjoyed the face-melting pleasures of riding behind the Music Bike while Icona Pop’s “I Love It” bathed me in sound, and many multiple times that that I’ve stood around a fire drinking beer with drunken cyclists, all dressed up, whether in costume or not.

Convergence

It’s pretty remarkable that human beings have evolved to be creatures who can stand around a fire conversing about evolution.  There’s something delightfully circular about that, like the mind observing the mind, or riding your bike to ride bikes.  Natural selection, the “blind watchmaker,” as Richard Dawkins refers to it, sure has done a good job of enabling itself to observe itself, even with those sightless eyes.

Moistra and Softcore were debating, debunking, and splitting tiny hairs on points almost as miniscule as the genes to which they were referring, but the notion that stuck with this layman was the idea of convergent evolution, whereby similar structures evolve in organisms whose last common ancestor didn’t have them--like how wings show up on everything from dragonflies to bald eagles or how so many creatures in the ocean turn out to be streamlined.

The same principle applies to Thursday night rides, of course, as so often, by different pathways, we eventually find ourselves drinking beer and whiskey around a campfire.  Westlake Center, then, can be seen as those first amino acids coming together in the primordial soup but then the tree branches off in myriad directions, north, south, west, and as it did last evening, in a sort of easterly direction to first pay brief homage to interred ancestors and then take relatively familiar routes to the fanciest of our hometown’s official wood-burning venues.

Numbers dwindled along the way, but that’s evolution, right?  Nature prefers efficiency, but it also seems to adore excess, otherwise, there’s no way there could be peacocks and pandas, not to mention humans on bikes, at firepits, talking about genetic drift among other things.

Or this, from French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."

Lunar

photo from Squirrel's video

The “Harvest Moon,” the internet tell us is the full moon nearest the start of fall or the autumnal equinox.  The “Harvest Moon,” says the Old Farmer’s Almanac, “isn’t like the other Moons. Usually, throughout the year, the Moon rises an average of about 50 minutes later each day. But near the autumnal equinox, the difference is only 30 minutes.”

All right then.  That explains why the luminous orb began appearing behind the Starbucks building as we pedaled along the industrial waterfront right after sunset, providing the first of the night’s many opportunities for howling at our planet’s shimmering satellite and also, I suppose, why it cast such remarkable shadows in Japanese Gardens, abandoned roadways, and alongside one more goddamned hill throughout the course of the evening’s festivities.

What it fails to make sense of, however, is how delightful each and every one of these opportunities turned out to be, even in the face of a certain bittersweet quality at the imminent departure for points south of a longtime OG member of the clan, whose fire-riding skills were on display one last time to the amusement of all and the detriment of his rear tire after the third time through the glimmering coals.

Speaking of things unlike other things, it was the first time, in my recollection, that the assembled have ever been chastised by a hobo, (as opposed to merely screamed at in passing), and the point was probably well-taken, (although given that the forest wasn’t ever set afire, perhaps superfluous).  Ultimately, no disrespect to outsider art was intended and given that, as our homeless interlocutor pointed out, all of the land upon which we were convening was originally Duwamish people’s territory, I think we can all agree that enjoyment of it around a hearty bonfire would be an appropriate homage to spirits both past and present.

One thing is certain: it was a ride as full of it as the moon, shine on, ride on.