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.