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?