Ultimate

On the last Thursday of the year, which was also the first Thursday of season on which the days were growing longer, a small contingent of bicycle riders met up by the holiday carousel in Seattle’s downtown retail core and rode downhill and around the corner before ascending for warmth to the topmost top of a concrete structure for storing automobiles in order to enjoy a Viaduct-free view of maritime industry while conjecturing as to the original purpose of a brick smokestack over shots of whiskey and cans of beer.

Soon afterwards, they circled back down the marble raceway, managing, somewhat surprisingly, to avoid hitting anyone’s helmeted head on the low ceiling, and hightailed south for an indoor firepit (and the false promise of singing) to quaff a bit at a place whose name calls forth the spirit of summer swimming pool games where at least a couple of their number got to see how much easier it is to notice differences when a person isn’t distracted by what distracts them.

Eventually, northward movement was effected which eventually resulted in the standard admonition to drink at the bar one shows up to; that happened, and soon enough some who thought they were leaving stayed and vice-versa—a fitting end to the end of a year that had many a fitting end.

The upcoming 12 months promise to hold the promise of better things, presuming our long national nightmare draws, at last, to a close.  As T.S. Eliot (no doubt spinning in his grave at the newly-released theatrical version of his book of practical cats) reminds us in “The Hollow Men,” the world ends not with a bang but a whimper, a state of affairs that doesn’t, apparently, apply to the teens decade of the 21^st century, which seems to be drawing to its conclusion with something more like a cheer, even if said cheer is more of the Bronx-style than the unalloyed encomiums resulting from one final ride of the year.

Cheer

There’s a chapter in Moby Dick called “A Squeeze of the Hand,” in which Ishmael waxes rhapsodic about the sailors’ shared task of squeezing the spermaceti in great tubs as way to soften the globules of blubber into their final unctuous form.  In an ecstasy of Whitmanesque rapture, he sings: 

Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!  All morning long; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.  Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, —Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!  Come, let us squeeze hands all around; nay let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

As it turns out, you can achieve the same feelings of joy and love for all humanity by corralling some three dozen of your longtime and long-lost friends into a bike “race” from one park to another with a wood stop in between, warming an entire shelter space with not one, not two, but three humorously-large fires, and then congregating at a great big college bar to bask in the euphonious song stylings of the absolutely most charming, generous, and bad-assed lyrical Elves ever to grace a holiday season.

If that doesn’t make you eschew any acerbities or ill-humor, I don’t know what would; Santa himself surely has no gift any better in his bag, nor any Christmas miracle any more wonderful.

Who needs clappies when the entire occasion is one for full-throated applause?  

Looking up into their eyes sentimentally, I saw every naughty and nice little boy and girl get everything they wanted and more, “such an abounding, affectionate, friendly loving feeling,” indeed.

Full

I suppose there are better places to live—maybe a $98 million dollar penthouse condominium in Manhattan, perhaps on 278,000 of your own ranch’s acres in Montana, arguably a private island in the Hawaiian archipelago—but it’s hard to beat a spot where you can ride your bike to city park at which a ruined foundation provides hearth and chimney for outdoor merriment, and all for just the price of beer and matches.

You know how it goes: the original plan is to simply show up at the start of things to solicit attendance at the annual disaster, but the arrival of far-flung visitors and the promise of backyard destinations compels you to have one more for the road and more road for the one all the way until midnight and why not?  

It’s spring break, winter version, after all.

If you’re half the world apart from your loved ones, you can look at the moon and know that they’re seeing the same satellite you are; when it’s full, your rise is their set and vice-versa, but if you could plant a sign with the words “I love you” in a crater, they’d be able to focus their high-powered telescope and read it (assuming conditions were right) and although they probably wouldn’t enjoy a 360-degree moonbow like those in Seattle’s out-of-doors did last night, the knowledge that we’re all in phase, so to speak, means you’re never alone, no matter how far away.

The holiday season seems to have people budgeting their revelries, which makes sense, I guess; a person can only take so much amusement (although ongoing investigations into the matter on this end will continue unabated), and so the evening’s slim turnout was not a surprise.

As dry as it’s been, though, it hardly feels like December in the Pacific Northwest, but nothing says holiday like riding past homes emblazoned in seasonal lights, except, of course, the main event, coming up Saturday, don’t miss it!

Ascension

We didn’t get as high as I had anticipated, but there were more highs than I expected, especially the ones associated with riding up switchbacks over train tracks and dodging baby scooters for a dance al fresco in accompaniment to the dulcet tones of the Filthy FemCorps.  You can never go wrong with Madonna and Lady Gaga tunes performed by Seattle’s very own “hot bag full of fierce women who aren’t afraid to be weird, genuine, raw, sweaty, confident, honest, loving and real.”

And while we didn’t all ascend to the highest heights of our fair city, a stalwart handful did manage to get all the way down to sea (or, at least river) level and then gain something like 300 feet or so to the top of one of Seattle’s traditional seven hills only to reconnect momentarily with a few friends who’d gone up and away earlier without us.

The stars seemed aligned for re-commemorating that day in 2012 when cannabis consumption was made no longer criminal in the state of Washington with a visit to the tipmost top of our fair city but alas and alack (and “oh well” and “who cares?” too), other elevations rose up instead resulting in a ride pretty close to the Point83’s titular excursion and this on a December evening that was not only dry but also warm enough for just wool and no shell all night long.

Besides, riding along the Viaduct-less waterfront is still a brand-new thrill that never gets old and having the rent-a-cops turn the red and blue lights of their golf cart on you from behind a cyclone fence is just the sort of humorous theatrics that bring out the surly teenager in anyone no matter what age.

In the end, there are as many different ways of getting high as there are highs of different ways to get there; eventually, seen from above, the upward path is just one more way to get down.

Reconsidered

Dogma dominates the public discourse.  Pundit, politician, persuader, you’re supposed to stake out your position and cling to it like Baby Huey with his lollipop; if you modify your view, even the tiniest bit, you’re castigated as a “flip-flopper” and considered a traitor to your party, your people, and everything that’s holy (or unholy depending on your God.)

But you know what?  There’s really nothing better than having your mind changed.  (Although I could be wrong about that.)  

It’s actually a relief, and a gift, to see things in a new light.  Exhibiting what one of my grad school professors, Bill Talbott, always called “epistemological humility” is liberating.  It allows you to grow and develop as a thinker and a human being (noting that those two are often at odds.)

So, when you arrive at the traditional Thursday night meeting place with a plan in mind, you can either bang your spoon on the high chair until people come to their senses and see things your way, or can come to your own senses and allow the winds of more popular (or, at least, more forcefully expressed) opinion to take you where it may.

And when you do so, (and when you continue doing so, even after an initial destination is discarded halfway through), you’re rewarded with just what you wanted all along—even if you didn’t know it at the time.

The beach was perfect for a fire that could be stood around rather than just in front of, and saving the covered location for another night when—unlike this overcast by dry fall evening—covering would be called, for made perfect sense even to those whose minds were almost made up.

Positions were modified, directions were changed, before you knew it, an offshore breeze was stoking the flames enough to turn strangers to converts.

Eventually, every chair was burned and the assembled re-assembled elsewhere, not what anyone planned for, but a plan perfectly executed nonetheless.

Cackle

Fun doesn’t just happen.  

You have to grab it by the proverbial short hairs (or longer ones if you’re sporting a wig) and shake it into life.  You have to pedal uphill and cackle and scream and pour whiskey down your throat while howling at the new crescent moon seen through a hole in the black sun.  You have to get lost in practically your own neighborhood by being confused about which is east and which is west and whether the twain shall meet.  You gotta have heart; miles and miles and miles of heart, even if the ride itself is only a few kilometers long.

Fun is out there, waiting to be seized, but it expects a bit of effort on your part; it’s not going to just drop into your lap like candy into your Halloween bag in the fancy parts of town where they give out whole Hershey bars and double-packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups.  In order to wallow in fun’s warm embrace, you have to remember that efficiency isn’t the only virtue and that if you like riding bikes, then you like riding bikes and that the extra hill means you get to be rolling around for longer than you would if you weren’t following someone who imagines they know where they’re going, but don’t really—or only, generally, not specifically.

It’s fun to complain, too, of course, which is part of the fun.

I’m not sure you can crash a party if you are the party; I do believe, however, that anyone brave enough to invite an unspecified number of somewhat-costumed cyclists into their home, table, and liquor cabinet, is surely not someone who’s going to be scared by even the spookiest of Halloween-themed goodies and entertainments.  There were treats galore; the trick was all graciousness and hospitality.

Fun was had; made manifest by the dark magic of the season just begun; hocus-pocus, voila: fun and more fun in scary amounts.

Bossy

You get a notion and run, or as the case may be, ride with it--which could explain why you’re convinced that the headwind you’d been fighting all the way from work would place its outstretched hand on the small of your back and propel you up the oldest and fanciest of our seven hills and that wasn’t wrong, at least for that one moment when it felt like it, ignoring half a block earlier when the wind was right in your face, but oh well, a person did get to be outside almost all of an early evening on a fall night where, most of the time, rain pants were suspenders and a belt, and even though numbers were small, commitment was large, if not, on my part, anyway, really all that long-lasting.

A fellow’s got preferences, after all, and even though nobody, except maybe everybody sometimes, wants to be the one who’s least flexible, who doesn’t want what they want?

The problem is, it’s hard to admit—or even recognize—mistakes in the instant, and that’s part of the reason why babies are bottled and crises averted.

One thing, not necessarily the main thing, is to get home safe in more or less one piece.  Whatever that means after all.

And if that means late outdoor fires are missed, so be it; at least, for a time, there was the incendiary pleasure of circumnavigating a mysterious mansion more or less.

In her 1944 Seattle novel, Great Son, set among homes perched like miniature medieval castles on Queen Anne Hill, (hence the original interest in an evening’s ascent), Edna Ferber says of our fair city: “There was too much of everything.”  Two lakes, two canals, two mountain ranges, two rivers, “a colossal feat of Nature,” a “godlike production,” “too much for the average man.”

Of course, that’s obvious out and up on Thursday two wheels; where time and again, even not enough is too much.

Bisected

I feel bad that I disappeared with the twelve-pack of Rainier that Topher mostly paid for, but sometimes, you just get separated, and sometimes the separation is confounding enough that it seems the Universe is explaining to you that it’s time to pedal home even though it’s still well before midnight on an almost perfectly clear perfect night for being out on two wheels.

I lost track of taillights leaving the market and so chose my own adventure to the next bridge but when I arrived it was deserted and so, reasonably (I thought) concluding that I couldn’t possibly have arrived in front, headed to where I thought things were headed afterwards.

I was met only with a fabulous view of downtown, a lonely fire, and an angry dog which, taken together, I took as evidence for homeward bounding and so, soon enough, found myself pulling up in my backyard—warm, dry, and sated.

Half an evening, half a story, and with an unopened half-rack to boot.

Hearth

How good is good?

If you faithfully fulfill the bulk of your professional, familial, and social responsibilities, for more than a fortnight at least, does that earn you the right to several hours of misbehavior?

When the big old guy in the sky with the beard and the book tallies up your score, does He cut you a break for being a reasonably good employee, parent, and friend and overlook the part where you failed to abide by all the requisite local ordinances and traffic laws?

And doesn’t being under various influence of various influences earn you a “Stay Out of Jail Free” card, too?

I took the long way around the Lake to my backyard in order to descend (literally) upon a covey of forest elves (figuratively) warming themselves in the open-air living room of an invisible house.  The quarter moon’s half-pie hung in the west and disappeared behind the trees at about the same time the aforementioned pastoral scene appeared before me.

Fortunately, I had gotten a head start on my own evening’s interior by way of a corporate watering hole painted with football screens in the neighboring hellhole across the pond, and so my own egress was sufficiently lubricated that even Derrick’s jokes were already funny.  Normally, such proximity between home and hearth tends to give one pause, but, at this point, having banked away hours of the commendable, who could give a damn, really, about a few sparks here and there?

Sometimes, it’s the person who doesn’t live nearby who’s the best guide; the everyday route home may not, in fact, be the most efficient and picturesque path to the next thing.  Your own pace, however, will eventually secure your arrival, albeit at your own pace, which is perfectly fine when you know where you’re going if not how to get there.

There might have been more but enough was plenty, a full night packed into half of it, well-deserved rest, well, deserved.

Epoch

We now live in the Anthropocene era, a geological time period that began maybe with the dawn of agriculture, maybe with the Industrial Revolution, maybe with the atom bomb, but surely as the global average of CO2 in our atmosphere passed 400 parts per million, during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.  

We can see that in melting glaciers, rising seas, dying forests, and massive industrial projects like the Three Gorges Dam in China, the Los Angeles freeway system, or closer to home, Seattle’s very own Harbor Island, built in the Duwamish river (itself channeled and straightened by human enterprise), from, as the Wikipedia tells me, 24 million yd³ (18 million m³) of earth removed in the Jackson and Dearborn Street regrades and dredged from the bed of the very river in which it sits.

So, even as we’re destroying the planet, we’re simultaneously making it, the anthill ever growing as we shape and form the very home which will ultimately be our species’ grave in the end as well.

Cool, huh?  

May as well get on your bike and ride to a front-row seat where you can watch a massive concrete structure pivot on its axis and open up and allow passage to a boat as big as a skyscraper carrying a train’s worth of shipping containers and another boat to boot.

It’s oddly satisfying to witness the inhuman dimension of human activity, especially having arrived there on a much more appropriately-scaled piece of machinery, one that carries you all over the manufactured environment on two wheels while still weighing way less than you do.

It seemed to me, as I snaked through the metropolis earlier in the day, that everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere else, but really, what’s the rush?

We’re not getting out of the planet we’ve made, after all; the anthill’s our home; simultaneously ghastly and beautiful, eminently devastating and embraceable at once.

Benign

We live most of the time in the future or the past, fearing the former, regretting the latter.

Only in the momentary lightning flash do we find ourselves in the present, and as soon as it happens, it’s over.

But if you pile up enough of those moments, and riffle them through your consciousness, like a mini flip-book of the mind, the movie begins to emerge and all the excited electrons become a flickering, then wavering, flame.

The Universe and everything in it dances; the heavens open up and you’re drenched.

So, plans change and ambitions reset: instead of the world’s edge, you can ensconce in a parking lot with a roof and that’s plenty, especially given deep-fried pickle slices and spirit animal conjectures.

Unpredictability is a value, (and as armchair quantum physics proposes, probably the way things are anyway), but knowing where you’re headed is a plus, too, for it allows one to travel at their own pace and take detours which offer a view of the neon cartoon futuristic movie set that is our fair city’s skyline viewed from the near north.

Not everything is everything, but everything is something, so there’s that.  Work with what you got, why not?  Live within limits and see that sometimes simply stoking what’s already there and encircling it with fellowship makes for all the heat and light anyone needs at each instant.

And keeps the structure from serious harm, as well! 

The full moon stayed hidden for much of the night but was bright enough on the last leg that a delicate lunar rainbow played the role of celestial lettuce bed or nobleman’s collar, you choose.

Trying to hold onto the few remaining pages of summer is a fool’s errand; you’re either flipping them with regret or flopping them in fear, but when you find that point, right in the middle, balanced on or by two wheels, there’s only the infinite present, forever, eternal, timeless, always still now.

Fantastic

Unless I get creamed by some clueless driver checking Facebook on their phone behind the wheel (a not entirely unlikely scenario, all things considered), I probably have on the order of a thousand more Thursday nights to spend in my life.

Seems like a lot.

On the other hand, (especially as the numbers diminish), each one is precious, and deserves to be spent thoughtfully—or at least not squandered in questionable pursuits like sitting on the couch scrolling through Reddit feeds or watching sports you don’t really care about because “hey the new season!” or prepping for the courses you’ll be teaching this fall quarter when, seriously, there’s still two weeks until classes start, let’s be real, right?

With this in mind, I will count the most recent Thursday evening’s expenditure time well spent, including, as it did, many of the hyphenated components that make several hours of one’s lifetime so full of life.  There was tunnel-yelling and back-floating and story-telling and beer-drinking; there was bike-riding and bar-hopping and friend-shipping and night-swimming, along with weed-smoking, tequila-shooting, booze-vaping, and star-gazing.

Google Maps was our virtual Joeball, (how he is missed!) directing us to yet another semi-secret waterfront pocket park, this one facing west so that immersion was achieved by Civil Twilight under a sky striated by bands of orange, pink, and purple with a waxing gibbous moon rising behind a pane of frosted glass to the southeast.

In her widely anthologized, “The Summer Day,” poet Mary Oliver reflects, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”  And she asks us, in closing, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”

“To be idle and blessed” is her suggestion of what we ought to be doing all day.

Seems legit.

And I’ll take that as guidance as well for how to spend the hours of an evening: so much blessed idling out on two wheels, so wild, so precious, and so alive.

Precision

Word order and punctuation are important.  Consider the difference in meaning between these two sentences:^[1] 

1) “The idiot, previous to him, totally fucked things up.”

2) “The previous idiot to him totally fucked things up.”

When it comes to words, precision can make a big difference.

When it comes to routes, however, one need not be so particular.  It’s a lesson to relearn over and over again: efficiency is not the only virtue.

If you like riding bikes, what’s the matter with riding them, you know?

Who cares if you lose elevation just to ride it up all over again?

And why regret routes taken or not taken when after all, you’re out on a route, after all?

The pocket park could not have been better.  You could walk barefoot on soft pine needles to the lake and when you got there, there were perfect flat rock shelves upon which to lay your glasses and beer.

I will never tire of the experience of floating on my back in Lake Washington staring up at the night sky.  The celestial sphere is the celestial sphere, yep.

K-Sep didn’t guess my charades rendition of “Apocalypse Now.”  That’s probably because it wasn’t very good.  And also because so many of them horror flicks have the scary head rising from below, brrrr.

Moreover, the neighbors not only didn’t mind, they wished us a hearty good evening with the reminder that this little slice of heaven belongs to everyone.

Finally, even the steepest hill can be scaled by traversing.  If it wasn’t likely you’d be run over by always doing so, you would always do so,

In the end, it’s good to be a cliché, so long as the cliché is a good one.  We are what we are and that’s all that we are, which is why the what is the what, what?

Eats shoots and leaves.

Fish, fish fish, fish fish.

That that, this this, see?

______________________________

^[1] Moistra, 2019.8.22 (paraphrase)

Unprecedented

In over 380 Thursday night rides, I’ve been many a (relatively) far-flung place: southeast to the riparian wilds between Renton and Tukwila, southwest to Seahurst Park in Burien, northeast to the Marymoor Velodrome, and even as far northwest (with a little help from a ferryboat) as Poulsbo, Washington, on the Kitsap Peninsula, but never, in all my thirteen-plus years of pedaling out from Westlake Center, had I had the pleasure of the almost due north destination of Haller Lake.

And while Fat Rob’s route was more one Fancy Fred would have devised than the way I would have gone on my own, it was as perfect in every way as the velvety-smooth water of the lake itself, a body of water so quiet and calm that by floating on your back in it and gazing up towards the starry heavens, a person could go ahead and just merge with the Oneness like that, no extra effort required.

A spring-fed body of water, (I was informed by a couple of friendly fishermen who were packing up as we arrived), whose bottom drops off to the deep quite quickly (an appropriate metaphor for so many Thursday night rides itself), which Wikipedia tells me that the Duwamish tribe called “Calmed Down a Little,” for me Haller Lake, on the contrary, “Excited Up a Lot.” 

Who’d have thought one would find such bucolic bliss in the northern reaches of our fair city?

Perhaps the day will come, (and perhaps in the not-too-distant somewhat dystopian future), when gasoline is no longer available and I-5 ceases to carry steel and plastic boxes hurtling over it at a mile a minute and faster; the preferred bicycling route from Westlake to Haller Lake might then be straight up the Interstate; in that event, it might not be more than a decade before the ride returns.

In lieu of that, however, I will duly savor this unprecedented (for me) experience—undeniably worth the wait (and effort).

Sparse

Of course, there were other better things to do: you could soak up some culture at the Capitol Hill Art Walk; or get your sports fix on by catching the Seahawks pre-season football game; or even prepare for the inevitable autumn darkness by sorting your socks and underpants drawer; any of those—and almost anything else—would have been a superior use of one’s time and energy, but yours truly, along with barely a handful of other stalwarts (or, as some might put it, “losers”) combined with a trio of relative and absolute newcomers, opted for Ye Olde Thursday Night Ride and while it didn’t involve several hundred feet of plastic sheeting or a kiddie pool filled with food-grade rasslin’ slurry, by missing it, I would have missed out on a number of notable, (if not remarkable) experiences afforded by the experience, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Voicing my opposition to the Pike Market gum wall as we rolled through groups of startled visitors at Seattle’s most disgusting tourist attraction
• Sharing reminiscences of wool clothing and retro-grouches with my contemporary as we meandered alongside sailboats racing in the Puget Sound
• Following Fred, not down a gravel road, but through a forest path littered with twigs that only he, with his elven carriage, could walk across without breaking
• Enjoying a single beer and a sliver of sunset backlighting the clouds at a semi-secret street-end park at the foot of Seattle’s least dense neighborhood
• Sharing the rest of my tallboy at the one sort of divey bar in the area with a crazed 33 year-old woman going through heroin withdrawal on the mean streets of Magnolia of all places
• Learning that a backed-up sewer in a restaurant has the characteristic odor of Parmesan cheese
• Discussing tattoos over a final nightcap on the patio of the number two karaoke joint
• Riding home along the waterfront and through the city after midnight feeling little, if any, pain

Humans

About halfway through William Faulkner’s occasionally hilarious novel, The Reivers, 11 year-old narrator, Lucius Priest, holds forth on the relative intelligence (which he defines as “the ability to cope with environment”) of non-human animals.

He ranks the rat number one because “He lives in your house without helping you buy it or build it or repair it or keep the taxes paid; he eats what you eat without helping you raise it or buy it or even haul it into the house.”

The mule is second because, among other traits, “he will not enter any place unless he knows of his own knowledge what is on the other side,” and most tellingly, because “he will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once.”

Cat comes in number three; dog is fourth, and horse, “a creature capable of but one idea at a time,” is rated last of the lot.

All of this assumes, of course, that humans possess an intelligence beyond these five, which, at times—give our penchant for self-destructive behavior and our shared fascination with Presidential tweets—seems like a dicey proposition.

On the other hand, (channeling how Lucius himself might have put it):

"No other creature than homo sapiens has such a genius for having fun.

"Ain’t no rats out there that lay down 150 feet of plastic in a sylvan glade to go hurling themselves over its watery surface just for shits n’ giggles.  

"And no mule never done filled a child’s swimming pool with slippery goo so as to rassle around in it with friends and loved ones, that’s for sure.

"And while small rodents will find their way into basement or attic through the smallest crack if you leave a predictable source of food out, I’m sure as shootin’ that none of them ever figured out how to scientifically dose packages of fruit juice with grain alcohol via 30CC syringe.

"Take that, you rats, boom!"

Inevitable

In War and Peace, Tolstoy reflects at length on the deterministic nature of history and the misguided conceit of great leaders, especially Napoleon, who flatter themselves with the idea that they are the ones making things happen.  At one point, he likens Bonaparte to a child inside a carriage pulling on leather strings who imagines he is the one guiding the horses galloping outside.

Sometimes, it’s sorta like that with the Thursday night ride, too.  You think you have a say in where things are headed, but then you realize that the group is moving with a will of its own that is not really any one person’s volition, but rather, the sum total of desires, preferences, biases, inclinations, and momentary urges of everyone involved.  

The dominoes are somehow set up and fall according to natural laws that are themselves no doubt an expression of some deeper underlying principles and so on and so forth, turtles all the way down.

And that’s when, if you ask me, things are most satisfying because it means that all those best-laid plans, like how fun it would be to spy one another across an artificial channel from beneath a weeping willow, simply become data to be observed in how the next destination is arrived at.

Because clearly, no one would really choose to cross among the trees merely to end up on more water across the way, even if it meant absolving oneself for having passed up an opportunity to float one’s back in the water earlier in the evening.

A glowing quarter moon had no choice but to illuminate the celestial sphere with its soft milky glow, but surely, that didn’t detract from its beauty one whit; on the contrary, its inevitability—and our acceptance of that—is what makes its loveliness so poignant.

Somehow, things keep happening, beyond and outside of our control: you’re there and back again, no choice but the choices that can’t not be made.

Itch

Free will is an illusion, of course; human beings are just biological creatures subject to the same physical laws as everything else.  We no more “choose” to do things—from deciding to get out of bed in the morning to agreeing that drinking beer and riding bikes on the first Thursday of summer is a good idea—than does the cottonwood tree “choose” to float its cotton-covered seeds onto the evening breeze at the same time.

Nevertheless, it feels, from the inside, as if we are exercising our agency, deliberating between possibilities, and preferring one option over another, like taking the gravel path instead of the busy road, or opting for a six-pack and a bag of beet chips instead of the usual half-rack and Reese's cups.

That’s why many contemporary philosophers find “compatibilism,” or “soft-determinism” to be the preferred option in the debate over free will; the idea is that human free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.  We can distinguish between choices that are compelled, like when we stop for traffic so as not to be run over by a semi-truck, and those that are deliberated, like when, after looking both ways, we pedal through the red light anyway.  The former, we can say, are not free choices; that latter, by contrast, are.

But the proverbial devil is in the details: did we freely choose to bust up the palette and add it to the already-roaring fire or is that just an automatic expression of our animal natures?  And surely, no volition is exercised when fireworks are ill-advisedly set off in the midst of a crowd; there’s no way that’s not going to happen, right?  The itch will be scratched.

Contemporary philosopher David Sosa has argued that in order to maintain a conception of human dignity, we must preserve some notion of individual agency; I dunno; I like being part of a big cosmic machine that just unfolds according to natural laws; happens every Thursday on bikes, after all.

Victory

Given the trying times in which we live, one finds solace is the small victories, like removing the plastic covering on the new cottage cheese container in a single piece, or successfully diagnosing the rattle on your bike and being able to fix it simply by tightening one fender bolt, or finding out that a multi-year struggle to recover a tiny lakeside park from the clutches of a greedy homeowner had been won by the good guys and the land returned to the people.

That’s cause for celebration and celebrate we did by no doubt embodying said greedy homeowner’s worst nightmare with laughter, libation, and a little bit of bare skin; with any luck they’re spending their day worrying that the first night will be every night, and why not?  The people have four years of access to make up for.

The state of the world is just too overwhelming: everything’s going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, so what else is there to do than take comfort in recreational intoxicants and shared companionship?  And if that can be done via two wheels and al fresco, so much the better.  We’re all gonna die soon enough, so may as well live it up while we can and to do so on newly-liberated public property just makes it that much sweeter.

“A man’s home is his castle” goes the old saw but it’s refreshing to see that this doesn’t necessarily mean he gets to illegally seize all the land around it; many of us may often feel we’re no better than serfs to the 1%, so it’s a rare pleasure to witness the public good triumphing over private property interests.  

Now if we could just do something about corporations and hedge-fund managers paying their fair share of taxes and fossil fuel companies that externalize the cost of doing business onto the environment and gun violence, and racism, misogyny, and on and on, we’d really have cause for celebration.

Loop

It is said that a happy, satisfied man is one who makes twenty dollars a week more than his brother-in-law.

If that’s the case, those poor suckers who live on the east side of Evergreen Point Road in Medina must be in a constant state of dismay and dissatisfaction. 

Imagine: you’ve clawed and scratched your way to the heights of corporate success and can finally splurge your ill-gotten millions on a fabulous contemporary estate in one of America’s most exclusive neighborhoods and yet every day you look out your front window, there it is, staring you square in the face, the looming hedge of an ever-more-fabulous estate that sits right down on the water, mocking your paltry multi-millionaire status with its billionaire nerve. 

No wonder the 1% are so greedy; there’s always someone richer to envy, so you’ve got to keep clawing and scratching until at last it’s you behind that hedge looking west at the Lake with nothing but blue skies from now on.

Or, you could just get plenty stoned and ride a bike around to marvel at the massive concentration of wealth that global capitalism and cheap energy from fossil fuels has made possible, happy that it’s a lovely spring evening with air so soft and velvety it’s like pedaling through a symphony and fully satisfied that the various plant-based intoxicants you’ve imbibed are contributing so well to such an intoxicating scene.

“I saw the eagle dive,” said tehSchkott as we sat together lakeside, harmonizing our individual minds with the Universal Consciousness of which we are all a part, and while he spoke literally, it was clear that we had arrived at a place where the literal is figurative and vice-versa.

Life is a metaphor for life and nothing illustrates that better than how the bicycle takes you right from where you started back to the place you began all over again with the middle in the middle, a looping loop-dee-loop.

Weird

photo by ShowsUpJoe

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the weirdest one of all?”

Obviously, Fancy Fred comes to mind, and I have to admit that flute-playing yours truly is definitely a candidate, but in this case, I think we must give special consideration to the birthday boy himself for, if nothing else, being weird enough to not only schedule and attend each and every one, but also to ride in both directions for almost all fourteen of the eponymous countries that bear his angry hippie moniker and imprimatur.

No clever pun subtitle ever really stuck to year’s version of Ben Country* although that did nothing to undermine the annual weirdness associated with it and the joke that there would be more trucks driving to the site than cyclists pedaling there, while only slightly an exaggeration, was really spectacular since it meant that not only was there a full bar set up (featuring signature cocktails) for tired riders pulling in, but also enough wood to last throughout the evening, and plenty of cab space on Sunday to accommodate lazybones like me for whom one hilly fifty mile ride per weekend is sufficient.

I think the surest sign of human-induced global climate change I’ve observed is that it was dry and clear the whole country-time, but Ben said it’s only been four of the fourteen that have been wet; if that’s the case, it must not include the six I’d been on, each of which required rain gear in some form or another for at least some of the time.

The site, while not nearly as post-apocalyptic as some of the previous incarnations, was actually pre-apocalyptic, as it was formerly a place to disarm torpedoes and other exploding ordnance, which, come to think of it, probably prepared it well for our arrival and revelry.

It’s weird how things are connected like that and even weirder that they continue to be, weird year after year, weird mile after mile.

 *Until afterwards, when Fred dubbed it "Ben Country XIV: Gentle Ben"

Proper

At the south end bar that loved us better last time we were there (but didn’t really mind us this time, either) Moira said that she hadn’t been out on a proper Point83 ride in a while.  

You know, one where, after having ridden double-digit miles to congregate in the great outdoors for beer-drinking and story-telling, you find yourself in a divey joint at close to midnight, even farther from your home, and yet nonetheless, are happily looking forward to pedaling back those double-digits to one final destination for a nightcap and farewells.

Ah, yes.

I know there are plenty other things to do of a Thursday evening in spring: go dancing, see concerts (or “shows” as the kids today call them, I’m told), attend lectures, binge-watch your Netflix queue, but the gravitational force of two-wheeled adventures keeps calling you back; even without an online presence, people show up and somewhat more surprisingly, keep going, in spite of injuries, work, and the impending dystopian future that lies in wait for us all.

The good news is that during the zombie apocalypse following the Big One and Mt. Rainier blowing its top while the boreal forest burns to a crisp in a blizzard and the tsunami rolls inland, you’ll still have a bike to get around, so you can always look forward to showing up on Thursday at that massive smoking crevice where Westlake Center used to be and finding at least a handful of miscreants with whom to wobble off towards some ruined landscape for the sharing of homegrown and moonshine, which, come to think of it, isn’t all that different than how things work now, especially given the aforementioned internet-free rendezvousing.

Sure, it’s nice to wake up on Friday morning without a monkey in your mouth and gauze between your ears, but, honestly, it seems a small price of admission to so vitally prepare for our disheartening tomorrow and to so properly commemorate our delightful today.

Deilberations

The thing about riding a bike is that it’s like riding a bike: your body remembers how to do it and even if it’s been a while, it all comes back in a flash, and there you are, after an initial minor wobble, pedaling merrily on your way, as if you’ve been cycling happily non-stop all along.

The same goes for Thursday night adventures which, even when passed over for the better part of six months, immediately become familiar, right down to the intermittent drizzle and requisite regroup and safety meeting at the usual designated undesignated spot.

Our fair city offers a limited number of covered locations for assembling around a fire in the rain, so it’s not surprising that we ended up on the water’s edge with such a picturesque view of ferry boats literally passing like two ships in the night; nevertheless, on many a similar occasion, the assembled have been daunted by the distance and have opted for something closer to home.  Consequently, we heartily thank the American system of jurisprudence which indirectly made possible such a relatively ambitious endeavor through the good offices of one double-dad performing his civic duty.

No one went swimming and the off-road section of the trip was, though lovely, pretty tame, but for this sojourner, at least, it was all that could be wanted, and quite remarkable if you take the time to remark upon it.  

The world—not to belabor the point—is a huge and varied place: one where at the very same moment, people will, for instance, be performing complex traditional religious ceremonies in ancient temples while halfway across the globe, others will be connecting with their own conception of the divine through the liberal application of bikes, booze, and (non-gendered) brotherhood.  

And what’s thrilling to notice is that, different as they are, the practices are essentially similar; everywhere you look, human beings expressing their essential humanity by overcoming the human through ritual and fire.