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.