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"