Friday, November 3, 2017

Shout

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and although I’m pretty sure I’d not be particularly interested in experiencing any of them, I do appreciate the sentiment and am pleased to draw the analogy with bike ride planning.

There’s certainly more than one way to (dis)organize a group of cyclists for a Thursday night of beer-drinking and pedal-spinning.  One possibility, for instance, involves a theme that is stuck to and played out in a variety of forms; another, for example, envisions a destination and figures out how to get there one way or another; still another, by contrast, depends on costumes!

But all, pretty much, as Shahan pointed out at one of the half-dozen stops on the route he more or less commandeered last evening, are mostly a matter of shouting the loudest.  Point83, whatever it is, is at least not a democracy, a form of governance that, if I recall correctly (and why would I), Winston Churchill called “the worst form of government…except for all the others.”

Perhaps we might refer to the way decisions are made, then, as “Shoutocratic;” the person who shouts the loudest makes the rules, a “Shoutacracy” if you will.

With that in mind, the chief Shoutocrat, Shahan, had a plan, which essentially comprised quick stops at half a dozen outdoor venues, one for each beer in your virtual (or literal) six-pack.

More than one was a pea-patch, although one of those was modified to be a well-timed respite inside the parking garage while a brief thunderstorm drenched the uncovered.  And a couple were spots I’d never been to, an eventuality that becomes less and less likely with every passing year (although soon enough, I’ll start forgetting where I’ve been, so eventually, it will get easier.)

We can think of this mode of organization as process-oriented; instead of heading somewhere, we did something; wherever we were, we’d already arrived then; I’d call it a very successful “shout-show.”

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