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!"