Friday, July 27, 2018

Plenty

Traditionally, it hardly counts as a Thursday night ride if you’re home in bed before midnight and so, when it’s barely eleven and you’re already laying your head upon the pillow, you might think that a person could just as easily stayed home and not missed a thing.

But you’d be wrong, then, because—even in an abbreviated session—all the boxes were ticked. 

Swimming, check, including back-floating and board-diving. 

Beer-drinking, yep, an entire twelve-pack consumed and shared, quickly enough to stay fairly cold even on one of the warmest nights of summer so far. 

An unnecessarily steep, although as-the-crow-flies direct route to the water: that, too, providing an unusual opportunity to join the throng as opposed to simply thronging ourselves. 

And yes, a stealthy pelaton through the land of milk and honey, although its ingress would probably be characterized more as the domain of nettles and hobo-poop.

So…short, but sweet and fully satisfying in the end (not to mention the beginning and middle, as well), proving that it’s not necessary to stay up so late and overindulge so much that you’re hurling into a garbage can at work the next day.  Of course, there’s a time and place for that, as well, but this time, and those places were sufficient, illustrating, as intended by this somewhat truncated effort, too, that less can sometimes be—if not more—at least plenty for plenty.

Friday, July 13, 2018

Dive

When summer finally arrives in the Pacific Northwest, you want to embrace it.

And that means taking every opportunity to go out of your way to go out of your way. 

Efficiency is once again revealed as an overrated virtue and when the ride goes the long way around to a spot you could have arrived at much more quickly by taking the more direct Shaddup Joe-preferred route, you realize that you’re glad to have pedaled through probably the most familiar of all familiar routes, the one upon which your very existence in this plane of existence depends—albeit in a state of mind of mind that you never go this way in.

It counts as success to get in the water before the festivities even start and if you can follow that up with yet another dunk in the drink, then you’re playing with house money as they say. 

That your entry into the wet entails launching yourself tits over teakettle into the dihydrogen monoxide and precludes a broken neck, even for those youngsters who seemed determined to ingnore the paternalistic rules posted prominently on the danger zone, means that even the invisible magicians were on your side, as well.

When you know you’ve got to early-to-rise it in order to create one-of-a-kind enrichment experiences for the progeny of the ambitious, it does cut into the buzz a little bit and you’re apt to depart early, (although less early than would be the case if you didn’t forget to forget your aquatic attire and have to ride back to scoop it up off the ground), but even give the constraints of common sense, you can nevertheless, enjoy an uncommonly good time under the long-lasting light of summer above the 47th parallel north.

Not everything has to be everything and in many cases, even what is is less than it could be; but even so, it’s plenty plentiful, so let’s dive right on in, the water’s fine.