Cheer

According to the Seattle Times FYI Guy, a new survey from the U.S. Census Bureau found that, in November, just about half of Seattle-area adults were dealing with feelings of depression.”  So, check out the friend you’re with; if they look happy, chances are, you’re feeling blue.

And, of course, for good reason.  

Honestly, if you’re not depressed these days, you’re not paying attention.  

The pandemic, rampant unemployment, homelessness, climate change, a lame duck Presidential administration that’s intent on rolling back every environmental protection it can and executing every brain-damaged mentally-ill prisoner on Federal death row before its term finally runs out on January 20^th (at last!), and of course, the darkness which descends upon the Pacific Northwest this time of year—any right-thinking (or even wrong-thinking) remotely-sensitive human being should be feeling down given everything that’s going on or not going on in the world and one’s own life.

But somehow, for a few hours at least, those feelings of depression can be mitigated.  

All it takes is a bicycle, a handful of masked-up and socially-distancing friends, a 12-pack of beer, a brand-new waterside fire pit, and around one and half Farmer Ito brand cannabis Christmas cookies, and the season’s gloom transforms into an authentic occasion for joy, if perhaps not, as the song goes, “to the world,” but, in any case, to this little piece of it, in the upper-left hand corner of the nation on just one evening—the final darkening one of the year, if you want to look on the bright side.

The word “enjoyment,” I’m told by the internet, comes from the Old French enjoir "to give joy, rejoice, take delight in;” it suggests an active approach, a giving and a taking; to enjoy something means you’re making other people happy and drawing from their happiness for yourself.

Sounds about right. 

These days, enjoyment is hard to come by; so, may as well take it (and give it) where you can.

Flap

Who knows how to socialize anymore, really?  

All it’s taken is nine months of quarantine and isolation to override a lifetime of hanging out with friends and loved ones so that, before you know it, you’re opening up your mouth to all sorts of information and stories probably just as well left unsaid in the name of connecting more closely to connections made over decades (well, at least two) just because of overexcitement (and liberal applications of Farmer Ito brand cannabis) occasioned by a non-atypical bike ride from the usual meetup spot through the admonition by St. Ignatius to “Go forth and set the world on fire” along Seattle’s oldest bike path to down behind the stadium and over the river and through the woods to not exactly Grandmother’s house, but definitely one in which a kooky grandma could—and maybe does already—live.

It’s sort of amazing how easy it is to lose your beer for a while even in a relatively small space, (although one large enough to afford the appropriate social-distancing around a relatively large fire hot enough to make its container glow red-hot), but that’s a small price to pay for the chance to keep looking for it amidst the assembled; just being near human beings rather than little square pictures of them on your computer screen these days sparks joy, even without a Rainier in your hand.

What an odd first week of December this year, with nary a drop of rain, so missing out on a bit of pedaling along on even perhaps the most mundane of all the possible routes would have been a real loss.  As it was, a solid handful of actually fairly responsible citizens, plus Derrick, as well, enjoyed some up and down, a modicum of gravel, and an enjoyable climb (at least by my route) to our final destination.

A good time was had by all; that’s enough said, unlike ‘round the fire, where gums keep a-flapping.

Grateful

Everyone knows that the current state of things pretty much sucks donkey dick.

Not being able to celebrate Thanksgiving with a big group of family, friends, and loved ones is only part of it.  There’s also climate change, a lame duck President in the White House who is congenitally unable to admit defeat, and, to top it off, the Thanksgiving evening Steelers game that could have made this year’s non-turkey Turkey Day somewhat palatable was cancelled due to an unkindness of the hated Ravens players being unable to follow simple Covid-19 protocols.

Nevertheless, there is still much to be grateful for at this time of thanksgiving.  As long as you have your health, a bicycle, and the ability to ride around even just a little bit on a Thursday evening, then hosanna!  It’s all good.

Thanks, Universe, for making all this possible.

And, of course, a word of appreciation also goes out to Farmer Ito for this year’s crop which makes up in abundance for whatever shortcomings it has in taste and potency.  A pipeful or three turns the colors brighter, the hills a little less steep, and the view from another previously-untapped parking garage all that much more interesting.

It’s strange and more than a little creepy how deserted the city streets are; one is grateful for that, too, by the way, not just for public health reasons but also because it is pretty cool to be able to sit at the top of Union Street at just 9:00 in the evening and gaze down all the way to Madrona without seeing a single automobile coming at you.  Wild.

If Point83 were a person, it would now be old enough to drive.  Presumably, though, it would decide to ride a bike instead, taking advantage of our favorite RCW, now proudly emblazoned on the latest club schwag, not just Fancy Fred’s top-tube.

My very first Thanksgiving ride! 

Grateful for that, too, if’n you catch my drift.

Hallowed

If you think about it, everyone is always already wearing a costume, and that includes even the bellicose fellow trying to impress his Tinder date by getting aggravated at a group of cyclists standing nearby in a public park, so you can cut yourself a little slack if you’ve arrived at the traditional meetup location on the traditional costume-wearing evening sporting your traditional daytime garb; at the same time, however, you have to admire the pluck of colleagues who arrive bedecked in gladiator garb, or Burning Man-approved onesies, or with reference to hobgoblins from foreign cultures, or sporting a ghost on the back seat of their tandem, and commend them for carrying on the traditional nonsense in the traditional ways at the traditional time.

Hear-hear!  Huzzah.

Eventually, the assembled arrived at the spooky outdoor living room with the nearly-full moon illuminating the spindly autumn trees in all their skeletal glory; a cheerful fire in the unbricked-in fireplace crackled like a witch’s voice while the voices of those in every costume rose and fell and rose again in spite of admonitions by the usual wet-blanket to keep it down, why doncha?

Apparently, the holiday has mostly been cancelled, at least for little kids wanting free candy, so it’s heartwarming to note that, in some form or another, treats and tricking carries on, in spite of it all.  

Putative grownups still clamor for their own preferred goodies and continue to enjoy the opportunities for clamor; I’m sure the indigenous spirits and the spirits of whatever settlers settled in the spots we settled in for a time had their own ectoplasmic dances going on, as well.

Who knows what the near future may bring, right?  It’s possible—well, always possible, but even more so now—that we could have seen the final two-wheeled shenanigans of our lives just then; if so, the loss will be deeply mourned but not as much as the events themselves are celebrated.  

In costume, inevitably.

Mature

“It never gets old” says the three-story tall video billboard outside the strip club on First Avenue.  

And while I don’t know about that—honestly, I do think “making it rain” for live nude girls is something that does get old pretty fast—it’s clear to me that certain aspects of bicycle riding on Thursday nights with a small platoon of cycling miscreants has greater staying power, evidenced by the fact that it still hasn’t seemed to get old yet after upwards of a decade and a half of doing more or less the same sort of things, including:

• Riding down a nearly-deserted Second Avenue, hitting all the lights, to the heart-breakingly beautiful vocal stylings of Whitney Houston as she belts out her signature “I Will Always Love You” from the powerful speakers of Dave the Pedicab Guy’s beefy tricycle pedicab.

• Peddling around the industrial wasteland along the Duwamish River, looking for a place to burn palettes and being convinced by something like the voice of reason time and again to keep looking elsewhere until the more pyromaniacally-inclined among the assembled insist on ignition, inspired by what could be a burnt-out husk of a car, but could have been an art installation, we’ll never know.

• Drinking beer, anyway, at spots that you would never find yourself in unless it was on a Thursday night with fellow bike riders, enjoying the less-than-perfect spot for all its perfect mix of industrial waste and bright quarter moon smiling at a particularly rusty-looking Mars.

• Being shocked and amazed at how what once and not too long ago was a relatively deserted riverside spot for hobo-style fires has now become a huge encampment of motor homes and tents, home to way more residents than cyclists, prompting a quick turn-around and departure from said two-wheelers.

Things keep on changing, not always for the better, but as long as some semblance remains, it’s good.  

We may continue getting older, but this never gets old.

Exemplar

According to the ethical theory known as “virtue ethics,” a view that, in Western philosophy, we trace to Aristotle, the question, when it comes to matters of right and wrong, isn’t, as with other theories, “What makes right acts right?” (“And wrong acts wrong?”); it’s “What sort of person should I be?”

Virtue ethics is concerned with the development of a virtuous character.  The idea, basically, is that acting ethically is a matter of training and habit; a person should develop the proper dispositions to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way.  Thus, the virtuous life is the happiest life, because the virtuous person takes the most pleasure in behaving virtuously.

Because ethics, then, becomes a matter of character, not principle, developing a virtuous character involves, at least at first, emulating the behavior of truly virtuous people.  On my road to becoming a better person, I should follow the lead of my moral exemplar, or what is sometimes known as my “paragon of virtue.”  

When faced with a question about how I should behave in a given situation, I should ask myself, “What would my paragon of virtue do in this case?”  By following their lead, I will train myself to develop a kind of moral “muscle memory” so that, eventually, I will automatically choose to do the right thing is such situations—and I’ll take great pleasure from doing so.

All of this is to explain why I advocated for visiting the newest Seattle city park along the north side of Portage Bay last evening.  “What would Moira do?” I asked and the answer was obvious.  This paragon of virtue when it comes to riding bikes would have led us to a new public space, I’m pretty sure, and she would have, as we did, taken one of the least efficient ways to get there, with as many hills as could be built in as possible.

See how fun virtue is?

 

Seventeen

Strangely, one of the things you miss most during the pandemic is strangers.  Not being able to strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know represents a real loss.  

Consequently, it’s delightful to run into a loquacious new acquaintance on the east, (not west, as I mistakenly described it) side of one of our fair city’s toniest neighborhoods, and hear her complain proudly about her 17 year-old son, all the while holding on to the leash of her dog, Gary, who seemed to enjoy sniffing out a gaggle of aromas new to himself, as well.

Seventeen was something of a watershed year for yours truly: I took my first philosophy class and was wowed by Descartes’ Discourse on Method.  I had my first serious girlfriend which resulted in, sometime in the summer of that year, the loss of my so-called innocence at last.  I started journaling with regularity, a practice that has continued to this day and which, to no small degree, helped set the course of whatever it is one might call my career.  And, of course, I rode a bike—a Raleigh Record, to be precise—all of the city of Pittsburgh, which also, in its own way, has helped define a good chunk of my life, such as it is, to this day, as well.

Come to think of it, many of the best parts of my life today are the same as were back in those halcyon days of 1974; venturing through alleys and tossing beer cans to neighbors, smoking weed and admiring the view, chatting up strangers in city parks, reading and thinking about philosophy, loving one’s loved ones, and, of course, tooling around the city on a bike with friends and by oneself, turning the pedals and seeing what rolls up.

The son of our garrulous new acquaintance probably doesn’t know how good he has it, but if he keeps going through 2066, he’ll have it as good as me.

Remains

I heard on the news that the port of Seattle is calling on the public to submit new names for a handful of Duwamish river parks.

That’s cool, but it’s too bad that Jack Perry Memorial Park is not one of them.  I would submit that its name ought to be officially changed to “Bread War Park” in honor of the time Joeball almost lost an eye after being clocked in his peeper by a ciabatta roll. 

Last night, there weren’t such dangerous shenanigans afoot despite the presence of a hazy full moon, the first of two this month, impressive in its full glory, albeit probably not as special as the bloody blue one coming up on Halloween.  Nevertheless, a good time was had by all, as we sat aside our city’s industrial core and reminisced and reflected upon global capitalism and its mighty tools.

It’s hard to believe that is was just—or maybe only—11 years ago when, of a summer day, the charming Bicycle Belles performed in this selfsame spot.

Time passes slowly for, and along, the river; images of yesteryear dance again in our heads and the moonlight.

I was reminded again, in conversation, how fragile life is and how fortunate we are to be able to do whatever we do and so, we embrace all the risks in spite of themselves.  You thank your lucky stars that you can thank your lucky stars and pay respect to whatever gods or goddesses help you through the night (and day), especially out on two wheels in the naked city.

Getting older’s not so bad, in fact, it’s pretty swell when it includes the chance to reach across the decades and feel younger than you were way back when.

Every minute you spend riding your bike adds a minute to your life; as long as you keep pedaling, you need never go gently (or not so) into that good old night.

Aged

My new best friend, the 80 year-old autodidact sage, Maroca (IIRC), counseled me that I am aging prematurely, as evidenced by my full head of gray hair.

I appreciate the concern, but I’m gonna push back a bit; as far as I can tell, at age 63, I’m aging right on schedule.  Granted, he’s got 17 years of experience on me and if I’m still hale enough in a couple decades to hang out with squid-jiggers on seaside dock to give unsolicited, albeit reasonable, advice to strangers, I’ll count it as a success.  

Still, it’s not all about quantity in my mind.  I can’t say that I’ll be satisfied with merely existing into my ninth decade if I’m not able to still ride my bike around at night to city parks in order to get asked impolitely to leave by angry dudes complaining that my friends and I are keeping his 83 year-old mom awake, even though it’s only 9:00 in the evening.

That’s the kind of fun that makes life worth living, right?

“When your heart's on fire…smoke gets in your eyes,” sang the Platters and they could have been talking about Seattle’s air quality of late, overlooking the part about it getting in your lungs, as well; surprisingly, the only thing that took my breath away was the fingers of lights extending into the void at the edge of the world; even if I hadn’t already been tripping the light fantastic, it would have been a sight worthy of a second look; as it was, aided by visual aids, I got to be mesmerized over and over with each shared observation.

These days, you take joy wherever you find it, and if that turns out to be a parking lot just outside a closed beach, so be it.  Who knows how many more chances you’ll have to do anything anywhere in the coming years; the older you get, the younger you should act; right Maroca?

Solace

 The West is on fire; the pandemic rages world-wide; economies everywhere are in free-fall; our country’s President is a liar and buffoon ranting crazily online while the nation suffers; the stupid professional football season has actually started with fans in the stands; and to top it off, I boiled over the milk making my coffee and covered the stove in a mess.

 

Everything is fucked.

 

Almost.

 

You can still ride your bike to more than one lake in the city and dive in the water to paddle around, lie on your back, and practice water yoga of a sort; you can still drink beer outside on a late summer’s evening; you can still listen to stories about nothing in particular from people you’ve known for a while; and there remains the entertainment of seeing familiar faces make spectacles of themselves in familiar ways.

 

We’re all going to die, perhaps sooner than later, so may as well enjoy whatever enjoyments are available while they’re available, and if that includes congregating at a small street-end park and talking a little louder than the nearby residents probably prefer, well, then, so be it, since, after all, it’s still early and you won’t be there longer than a beer or two anyway.

 

Responsibility looms for me in the coming week, so I was glad to be relatively irresponsible for at least one more time before the hammer comes down.  And it was delightful to see a good measure of less responsibility in operation as well.

 

I’m tired of being oppressed by the future; perhaps one antidote to that is to embrace the present, warts and all, and try to make the best of a bad situation.

 

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, as Beyoncé reminded us; if life gives you fire, may as well then make light; if life gives you pandemic, then there’s feeling better together; if life insists on being so crazy, may as well go crazier, too.

Paradise

The commonly-held conception of heaven has never held much appeal for me: there you are, up in the clouds, surrounded by all your relatives, with, as far as I can see, nothing really to do besides hanging out in each others’ divine presence; it’s always struck me as the worst version of a Thanksgiving holiday, without even football, beer, or mashed potatoes.

In Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel, Gilead, the aged Presbyterian preacher, Reverend Boughton, surmises that to conceptualize heaven, we need simply imagine all the pleasures in life times two; and while that’s sort of like a Doublemint gum version of paradise, it’s easier for me to make sense of, mainly since it’s not unlike actual experiences a person can actually have, simply by cycling to a lakeside park on a clear and warm late summer evening in the Pacific Northwest.

When the moon rises like an orange mushroom cloud behind the tree-lined hills of wealthy suburbs and paints an amber racing stripe over the surface of the region’s largest freshwater lake, and you can lie back in the water and see constellations of stars from one end of the celestial sphere to another, and the temperature of the air and that of the liquid in which you lie are so close that two of the four traditional elements merge into one; meanwhile, the third of that quartet dances merrily in a wading pool turned firepit so that summer’s holy grail combination of warmth and wet is achieved, well, then, it surely seems like all the pleasures available to a person living on planet Earth have been doubled already.

If heaven means “it doesn’t get any better than this,” then, all right then, mission accomplished..

In Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, Lucifer famously declare, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”  To each their own, I guess. 

If you ask me: “Better to bike on Earth than sit around in Heaven;” paradise found, right here.

Yep

Every day, especially on Thursdays, I thank my lucky stars for how fortunate I am in almost every way.

My life is an embarrassment of riches: I have my health; I’m loved by people I love; I have a safe and stable place to lay my head every night and all the food in my cupboard and refrigerator than I ever need; I have the best dog in the world and a job that I like pretty well which pays me more than adequately; in summertime, my days are filled with yoga, meditation, reading fiction, dining al fresco on my back porch with my darling wife, taking naps in the afternoon, swimming in the lake, smoking weed, and riding my bike all around what is probably the most beautiful city in America; plus, I never have to worry about being killed by the police.

Life is fucking good.

So, I have a special responsibility to be grateful for my good fortune and to behave in ways that recognizes this and which, insofar as I am able, makes the world better for those less fortunate than me, or, at the very least, doesn’t contribute to making it harder for them in any way.

I have it good, so I’m obligated to be good.

This doesn’t mean that I can never break any rules, like jumping into the lake next to a sign that says, “No swimming or diving,” or hanging out at night in a park that closes at dusk, but it does mean it’s incumbent upon me to be mindful and aware and as kind and understanding as I can be and to pick up after myself—a small price, after all, for the benefits which accrue to me given my race, gender, age, education, and a host of other qualities that just happened to come my way, no effort on my part required.

Nobody’s perfect, least of all me, but the better I am, the better.

Meteoric

I only saw a single shooting star, but given the state of everything these days, that was plenty. 

I’m all about lowered expectations during the pandemic, so I’ll give my experience of this year’s Perseid meteor shower a solid “A-plus;” I made my wish as a glowing ember streaked across the night sky and it came true right then and there, with a perfect evening for a bike ride, a roaring fire, and more of the usual suspects social distancing together than have assembled for months.

As strange as this year has been, the earth still makes its way through the through a debris cloud left behind by the giant comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle right on schedule; the Universe doesn’t care about any turmoil in the human world; gravity keeps on doing its thing and our planet’s elliptical path around our star maintains its yearly routine, one that enables homo sapiens on this third rock from the Sun to gaze upwards on August evenings and be rewarded with a bit of celestial magic that is really just dust on fire.

And if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is: what are our petty little existences but energized dust lit up for an instant as we self-immolate in our planet’s atmosphere, right?

Of course, we get to do all sorts of things before we’re extinguished, like relive past versions of ourselves by swinging balls of light around, or amaze our friends and new acquaintances with feats of strength, or just lie on our back allowing eyes to adjust in order to see as much of the vastness as possible in hopes of being surprised by one’s hopes being fulfilled even once.

It’s been what seems a long time since I found myself miles from home and reasonably convoluted at midnight; my bike, though, remembers the way and how it’s done; you just wish upon a falling star and keep on pedaling till your house shows up,

Simple

What a difference a year makes.

In 2019, on the occasion of the first Thursday in August, which for more than a decade, has been an occasion to mark another occasion, something like a hundred bike-riding revelers gathered in Seattle’s favorite old-growth tree city park to load up on grain alcohol-infused juice boxes before throwing themselves down a basketball court-sized sheet of plastic amidst countless plastic glowstix and wrestling with each other in a tub of vegan-friendly goo.

In 2020, barely a handful of riders pedaled to the same location, simply to mark the occasion by standing around a fire quietly drinking beer and reflecting on the efficacy of vaccine trials and the prospect of someday being able to enjoy the sort of grand shenanigans that are mere memories these days in the days of the pandemic.

Nonetheless, a reasonably good time was had by all, which does beget the question, “Why not?”

It’s hard to understand how quickly things have changed and one can’t help wondering where everyone has gotten to and if they will someday return.

I, for one, keep doing pretty much the same things I’ve always done, albeit with a bandana wrapped around my face, so I’m a little bit surprised to see how the behaviors of friends, acquaintances, and relative strangers has changed so much.  I’m sure they have better things to do, which is just another illustration of how easily I’m satisfied by inertia and habit.

Still, it’s still grand be outside on a cool summer’s evening in the Pacific Northwest and while it’s too bad you aren’t able to enjoy the wonderful excess that has characterized the date since back in the early days of the Obama administration, these days, it’s almost, relatively speaking, just as excessive to be hanging out with three or four people who don’t live in the same house as you do.

A person can get used to almost anything; but almost anything’s unusual via bike.

Imperfect

I should have ridden to the College Inn Pub from Foster Island.  Vanishing Seattle, and all.  I’m not sure why I didn’t other than that I don’t know how to be with people anymore.  After just five or six months.  What will happen after two years?

Maybe not all that much if at least you get to do something like this: a quick swim in the least pastoral lake, followed by an urban jaunt to surprisingly open food truck if that’s what you want and then, a rendezvous on top of a covered freeway.

And so why not take the most reasonable route through the forested part until descending to the main lake and the impatient car route to the museum of trees?  There’s only one way into the promontory and what a nice place to hang out wondering together about statues and history.

I keep thinking about how we often define ourselves by our oppositions; one has to have standards and there’s got to be some ontological principle that determines differences; hard cases make bad law as they say, so no doubt we agree about a lot more than we disagree about, even though the latter make for better rants.

Here’s a thing as I see it: you can recognize that there are options that would have been better while still accepting what happened when given the context for it.  Most decisions are probably made at the moment they were made and as long as, on balance, they were an instance in a larger collection of decisions that produced something valuable, we can bracket that decision in context of the context it was made.

For instance, Abraham Lincoln was a great human being and also one, from all that I’ve read, a greatly human being.  We want to recognize his imperfections while still recognizing that, in spite of those imperfections, his efforts were good enough—so long as perfection doesn’t become an enemy of the good.

Lots

A majestic bald eagle, soaring over the vast industrial plains of Seattle’s global import/export shipping hub at sunset seems like an apt metaphor for the good old U.S. of A, especially, when you look a little closer and see that the mighty bird is being mobbed by dozens of seagulls and at least one random crow; having attained this perspective by rolling up ten, count ‘em ten, floors of a virtually-deserted urban car park (that, for the life of me, seems ideally-suited in these days of rampant homelessness for being converted to covered camping spots for the unhoused), frames the imagery with an ironic border that turns it from stereotypical cornball pap into a unique and poignant commentary on the state of the world today; plus, you could easily social-distance on the football-field-sized platform in the sky and drink beer al fresco on yet another long-lingering evening in the heart of the glorious Pacific Northwest summer.

And that was just the first of three parking structures scaled; albeit the best of the lot(s).  The next, while it featured tighter turns and ultimately, a more close-up view of what was once the tallest building west of the Mississippi, but is now merely a quaint anachronism, was mainly notable for being unprecedented, and the third, which, although it has apparently been voted the coolest parking lot in the country, was really only special for affording one the opportunity of recreating the iconic Leonardo DiCaprio scene from James Cameron’s Titanic.

Having availed ourselves of so much concrete, the logical subsequent choice was to head for the water, where our small group met up with a much bigger contingent of far cooler cyclists; the electric bike earned its keep by transporting the resupplies and compelled the assembled to stick around a little longer, which meant that a person was able to get their swim on, in water no colder than the night air; “America,” as the eagle reminds us, “Fuck yeah.”

Enough

One of the things I like about getting older is that I’m more easily satisfied.  I can enjoy more with less; I find adventure in what isn’t so adventurous as all that.

I don’t have to swim (although that would be nice); I’m satisfied with just a couple of acquaintances (although many were missed); when serendipity occurs, it doesn’t even have to be very serendipitous (but it still is).  Just the possibility of possibility suffices.

I remain puzzled as to what is permitted and what one should permit of oneself.  When someone asks you for a light, and you check all your pockets except the one in which it is, so be it.  If it doesn’t happen, it couldn’t have been your destiny, anyway, as I learned from the fictional Voltaire on TV.

Maybe I’m the only person in the world who did the two-Jack Seattle park loop last night: west to Block and then back east and south to Perry; both afforded crepuscular marvels, the former including a slowly scintillating solar decay over one’s shoulder, the latter, a Nautical Twilight, that mingled with the arc lights of industrial aspiration, was bright enough to inspire memories of a sun-drenched afternoon when bicycle dreams performed to the score of wholesome abundance.

Maybe this is the harbinger of the vast reset that must occur for humanity to persevere into the future; if so, one of the main lessons, it seems to me, is that enough is enough.  But, of course, then the hunger for enoughness becomes the currency and so, there we are, all over again.

In spite of ourselves, we can’t help competing in the accident Olympics, even though winning is losing and vice-versa.  Getting home in one piece might not earn you the podium, but at least, you get home.

After a certain point, you can only go your own pace.  Work, I’m told, equals force times distance. So, I reduce my force to go farther, right?

Still

Thursday is still Thursday. 

Spring is still spring, especially when it’s nearly record-breakingly warm, and you can ride your bike in shirtsleeves all the way along the Lake, all afternoon long.

The flowering cherry trees, the magnolia bushes and their friends the camellia, the early azaleas and ambitious rhododendron, the forsythia and hydrangea are still bursting with color just like they do every year around this time.

We’re still here; we still drink beer, may as well get used to it!

Like this year, April 9^th was Thursday in 2009; Point83 rode to Jack Block Park.  

Daniel Featherhead flew alongside as we pedaled down the Alki trail and he somehow managed to levitate from the Superfund site beneath the park platform right back next to where we stood gazing at the Seattle skyline, which still included the viaduct back on those days.

That night was all about the visuals: the sun breaking through the clouds as we waited and argued in the liquor store parking lot in SODO; the loveliness of the Duwamish water even though the waters themselves aren’t so pristine; the sight of the Angry Hippy breaking into a confused but happy smile after getting stoned; and the unusual view afforded by standing around in an industrial wasteland by the side of a deserted highway while someone fixed a flat—stuff you would never see otherwise than being out and about on two wheels.

Last night, I mostly eschewed the virtual experience having had, like many of us, I would bet, my fill of the Brady Bunch faces-on-the-screen thing in my professional capacities all these many recent weeks.

It still was nice to see a few friendlies, though, and inspired me to drink up and take a quick spin around the neighborhood.

I mostly noticed what wasn’t there, which is funny to think about if you think about it.

These days, we’re seeing lots of what we don’t see; still glad to see it, though.

Normal

A bit of normality helps.

The usual Thursday: before the way home from Bothell along the Burke, you eat a pot cookie.  By the time you get to Matthews Beach, the riding is smoother, the colors are brighter, and you have all kinds of great ideas for everything, few of which stand up to the cold, cruel light of dawn, but sure are fun to think about at the time.

So, it was satisfying and heartening to experience that familiar end-of-the-school week experience —even though the part where you were at school was simply a matter of feeling like a cat burglar or maybe James Bond as you key-carded yourself into the totally empty building on the completely deserted campus to slide into your darkened office for a few books and things—and honestly, look forward to what constitutes the Thursday night ride these days: getting drunk in front of a virtual pastiche of faces of friends and acquaintances; it ain’t enough to be sure, but it’s better than nothing, and oddly, nothing is better than something that isn’t possible at the present time, oddly enough.

When the apocalypse hits, if it hasn’t already, you may as well ride your bike around; you’ll notice that the converted rails-to-trail trail is crowded with more people than you’ve ever seen before.  Apparently, when the gym is closed, people decide that running is the best option, although what they’re running from is invisible; could it be the virus?

Also, day-drinking parents seem to have simultaneously come to the conclusion that the family bike ride is a good idea.  More power to them! 

And to all those little kids discovering the joys of two-wheeling, one of which is the opportunity to pedal way ahead of their tipsy mom and slalom back and forth on the tarmac, yay!

Someday, all this will be over and we’ll be able to hug each other around a fire. 

Until then, embrace the abnormal as normal.

Virtual

So, is this what it is now? 

Bike rides are cyclists on trainers pedaling into webcams?  Bars are rows of tiny heads sharing picklebacks online?  Standing around a fire means reclining in your living room while gazing into the warming glow of your computer screen?

Okay, I’ll take it; it’s better than nothing IMHO; IIRC I LOL’ed IRL a lot, so there’s that.

I did get out to pedal a bit, too. 

First, I did a fly-by the usual meet-up spot, making sure to maintain my social distancing, in order to simulate the usual experience.  Having been assured by the expert with the public health degree that riding around on the eerily empty streets had essentially zero probability of increasing my risk factor, I felt relatively confident I wasn’t a bad person for enjoying the opportunity to take all the lanes as I headed home through neighborhoods that looked more like 2:30 in the morning on the way back rather than 7:30 in the evening on the way out.

Then, after an hour or so around the virtual water cooler, becoming increasingly amused by different views and perspectives made possible by the tiny camera eyes, (and increasingly intoxicated by available intoxicants), I rolled out for a little spin around the deserted neighborhood, stopping in a nearby pocket park for a quick smoke just to remind the Universe that we haven’t totally given up; life goes on during the plague even if we’re plagued by doubts and worries.

I guess we can get used to this and I guess we have no choice but to, at least for now. 

And anyway, as philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “simulation hypothesis” contends, we’re all just simulated minds thinking we’re biological ones anyway, so what’s the difference if what’s happening isn’t real; it isn’t real anyway.

Of course, the ancient Vedic rishis knew this, too.  All of it—me, you, bikes, parks—is just Maya; all is Brahman, man, and Tat Tvam Asi.

La-Dee-Da

If you didn’t know it was happening, you wouldn’t know it was happening. 

The trees sure don’t care; they are as pink and beautiful as they are every spring, especially this one.  And if you can ride all over town during the second week of March without your raingear, that’s as swell as it is unusual.

Tonight I learned that some people think that the moon is a titanium sphere, supposedly proven by the claim that when the Apollo 11 astronauts blasted off from our satellite’s surface, they dropped a wrench and it “rang like a bell.”

Also, apparently, the Masons did everything and all of it was good.

It sure seems like these are historically weird times, which is all the more reason, I think, to keep it all in context.  Just because never before have all of society’s systems—health care, banking, government, education, etc.—caved simultaneously, is no reason to think this is unprecedented, even if it is.

Fortunately, it’s easiest enough to maintain the requisite 6-foot “social distance” on a bicycle, which doesn’t account for what happens when you stop pedaling and start standing in the shared firelight with a quartet of youngsters drinking rum and not falling down.

It’s the way we have all acquiesced to the mandates of the moment that is most striking to me. 

The virus in our minds has made way more difference than the virus in people’s bodies, which is why, in part, standing around an increasingly large fire in the out of doors offers such satisfaction.

No one knows precisely what the future holds; one thing we can be relatively sure of, though, is that the bicycle emphasizes its charms when you get to ride in lanes not usually conducive to the charms of bicycling.  We got out in it and that’s plenty.

Perhaps it’s the end of the world as we know it, if so, embracing what we do know is entirely sufficient for now.

Team

Riding a bike is inherently somewhat dangerous; I learned that the very first time I got on one and pedaled across my neighbor’s driveway, veered down their side lawn and ran into the drainpipe on my own house.

That was only a skinned knee and injured 6 year-old pride but it still stung.

Nevertheless, I got back in the saddle and continued riding all these years since, despite numerous other spills, resulting in sprained wrists, chipped teeth, bruised ribs, skinned chins, bloody appendages, and various aches and pains that generally have taken on the order of 6 to 8 weeks to have me feeling better.

I’ve also had the distinct displeasure of seeing several friends and acquaintances crash with injuries much uglier: busted faces, sliced-open foreheads, crumpled fingers—no, sir, I don’t like it, couldn’t we just turn back the clock a few minutes and try this one again?

But in each of those unfortunate incidents, I’ve also seen the best in the characters of the characters I’m with, imperfect people to be sure, who in those moments of need, behave with perfect competence and compassion, stepping up to help a fallen comrade with patience, care, and a sobriety you wouldn’t expect given the overall sense of bacchanalia with which events had been transpiring.

I hope I will never be the one with my bloody head in the lap of another rider as the paramedics attend to me; I hope no one will ever be that person again! 

But if I were (and here I’m burning some sage and spitting in my palm so as not to jinx myself), I would want to be among the usual gang of imperfect subjects, people who would stay with me from the beginning, would see I got to the hospital safely, would collect my bike and stuff, and who would, I hope, seeing I was on the way to mending, pedal on to the bar and toast my health together.

Recall

In spring of 1976, I was living in the attic of a ramshackle cottage near the end of the N-Judah streetcar line at Sunset Beach in San Francisco that I shared with my multi-pharmaceutical abusing roommate for $175.00 a month including utilities.

I had two hits of LSD in my pocket given to me by my glam-rock sort of boyfriend at the time who a few years later turned punk and became Larry Livermore of Lookout Records fame.

As I sat on the trolley waiting for it to start on its route to downtown, I began making eye contact with the only other passenger, a raven-haired beauty with a heart-shaped face who was curled up in the back-corner seat of the car.

Emboldened by love at first sight, I got up the courage to introduce myself with the opening line, “I’d hate myself forever if I didn’t come over here and say ‘hello’ to you.”

This being 1976, after all, I proposed that we drop the acid and go see the show that evening at the Laserium in Golden Gate Park. I don’t recall much about the lasers, but I’ll never forget returning home with my new acquaintance, a mysterious Italian woman, and sitting together under the parachute fabric in my bedroom as we came down from tripping, writing notes to each other in French.

I scrawled, “Est-tu une sorciere?” and I remained so bewitched by her that for weeks after our one magical night, when she had moved me into what wasn’t then called “the friend zone,” I would camp out in the pedestrian tunnel that ran under the highway in front of her apartment building and play my flute, imagining that she could hear me from her third-story window in which a candle burned.

Last night’s ride wasn’t quite so magical, but still, was pretty good, with an outdoor fire at an apparently doomed pit, no rain whatsoever, and old stories told, new stories made.