Resourceful

Nature is healing herself in response to the pandemic: lilac runners are shooting up in the garden, the grass needs mowing every couple of days, and my sunflowers and potatoes are happily reaching their fronds toward the sky.

Not only that, but human beings have begun appearing in greater numbers at the usual time in the usual place than in many a month; I know we’re not out of the darkness yet, but these glimmers of hope give one hope for a more hoped-for tomorrow.

Plus, further evidence of making lemonade out of life’s lemons: 

1. Scavenging “firewood” (I guess any wood is “firewood” if the fire’s hot enough) from a hole in the ground that used to be the world’s slowest supermarket;
2. Sourcing firestarter from a convenience store rack of auto-supply products; 
3. “Discovering” a new and actually quite reasonably-placed firepit on the shores of our fair city’s fairest watering hole; and
4. Reinventing a midnight tradition by holding it earlier in the evening and on bikes with electric motors rather than fixed-gear drive trains.

The 18^th century British Empiricist philosopher, David Hume, wrote: “Let the course of things be allowed hitherto ever so regular; that alone, without some new argument or inference, proves not that, for the future, it will continue so.  In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past experience.”

In other words, we can’t predict the future from past events; just because the sun rose today, yesterday, and all the way back to the beginning of time, doesn’t guarantee that it will do so tomorrow; we can’t be certain about any of our scientific predictions, no matter how accurate they have been so far.

That said, I’m not surprised the evening’s events abounded in such nonsense and shenanigans; every other time I’ve broken Rule #1 and listened to You-Know-Who, things have gone this way; no reason to expect they won’t next time, either, as well.

Lambent

 We’ve had the warmest seven-day stretch of sunshiny spring weather in Seattle’s recorded history, giving us a little bit of July in April, perfect for a waterfront spin from bay to breakers with a couple of stops in-between to admire the humorously-beautiful vistas that abound in our fair city.

I did a little solo pre-funk at the new and improved Pier 62 and watched as a cargo ship belched out bus-sized plume of black diesel smoke which dissipated first to a giant heart-shaped cloud of disgusting and then eventually, just merged into the smoggy edges of the sky; once you couldn’t see it anymore, it was like it never happened, no doubt just what the owners of said vessel had counted on all along.

And so, the invisible ugliness disappears, leaving only the glorious for us to appreciate, of which there was plenty, including the perfect mirrored upside-down trees in the seaside lagoon, several herons blending into the twilight, and a quarter moon winking out from behind the newest brand-new skyscraper, much to the intentional or unintentional joy of the project’s architects and realtors, even if the latter are quaking in their wingtips over the prospect of the final boom in Seattle’s current moment before our next inevitable bust.

The bicycle allows you to access those places that park designers probably imagined would be easy walks to get to, but in reality, are just a little bit farther way that the alleged 10 thousand steps most people claim to aspiring towards; so much the better.  It keeps the riff-raff out, or perhaps more appropriately, allows the riff-raff to assemble within with hardly a civilian in sight, apart from magical youngsters and their benignly-neglectful parents.

I marvel at how lucky we are to be able to feast our eyes on aesthetic marvels time and again.  Sure, we’ve been to this place more times than can be counted, but these eyes never tire of drinking all of it in.

Fragrant

 The olfactory sense gets the short end of the stick if you ask me; like being a faculty union president or the tech support for your company, it mainly gets noticed when there’s a screw-up, for instance, when you cut the cheese in the receiving line or have dog poop on your tennis shoes in the carpool to Little League.

Occasionally, though, the nose knows.  

When spring has really finally sprung, and the magnolia trees are heavy with flower and scent, and the Japanese cherry trees have exploded into white and pink blossoms all up and down the street, and Camellia bushes sport saucer-sized blooms for your nostrils to drink in as you ride by, that’s when smelling smells best.

Combine that with a waxing gibbous moon that grins the perfect Chesire cat grin in a sky that holds its crepuscular amber highlights well into Nautical Twilight above a quiet and tranquil Puget Sound, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a perfect evening out on two wheels, especially when combined with surely the best showing of old and newish-timers for a non tree-burning event in over a year.

There are familiar ways that become becomingly unfamiliar with the passage of at least twelve months: at times in the past, the route through the Forest Yoni salmon carcass sculpture could be dismissed as routine, but when the global pandemic has kept you from twisting and turning through the urban forest for so long, such relative mundanity seems as fresh and new as the spring air.

And besides, there were a few novel options, such as when as the typical energy of the archetypical Zodiac sign of the season led straight up a new hill, and led us all, eventually, to a brand-new firepit created on the spot in a literal depression, not the figurative one we’re used to of late.

And you know escape velocity's been achieved when the street light is snapped off; smells like victory!

Honest

 My goodness.  Time flies when you’re having fun.

Fun being: maybe the most theatrically-perfect fire pit this side of The Goonies, some extra pep in your step courtesy of another classic circa 1985, earlier cameo appearances by the next generation and a dental professional, spring in the air and a cliff no one fell off of, not a single drop of rain all evening long from start to finish, and what a ride up and down, but mostly, the opportunity for actual in the flesh humanity talking shit and real talk my bruddah; no wonder it went from 10:30PM to 3:00 in the morning before you even noticed; wow.

One of the five yamas, the moral precepts in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra pertaining to our interactions with others (and, by extension, our selves) is aparigraha, which, roughly translated, means something like “non-graspingness;” the practice teaches us to regulate our desires—sort of like the virtue of temperance in Aristotle’s virtue ethics—and, as Pattabhi Jois writes in Yoga Mala, “not desiring things of enjoyment which are superfluous to the physical body.”

Yes, of course, but as the Angry Hippy is fond of saying, “everything in moderation, including moderation.”  If you can’t go overboard from time to time, stay up way past your bedtime, and even—sorry—forget to check in as usual at midnight, then how can you really tell what’s on board?  

It’s smart not to fall over the cliff, but standing near the edge lets you see where it is all that much better.

And maybe it was something in the air, too; my dog, I learned, got up on the table and ate an entire block of cheese right around the same time, so perhaps we can chalk it up to the heavens (or earth).

All I know is that whatever remorse we might feel over our past self’s behavior is mitigated by our current self's vicarious enjoyment of such enjoyment--honest, for real.

Celebrity

It’s wonderful when a friend or acquaintance gains some well-deserved notoriety for being wonderful and it’s even better when they show up on a cargo bike with two old rescue dogs who apparently take it pretty well to go faster than any dog their size has ever gone before.  

With that in mind, the evening was already a success before it even really got started, and even though it was, for me at least, a pretty short evening, it was plenty packed with plenty of the sort of enjoyments that have been rare to enjoy these past 12 months or so, including seeing familiar and less familiar faces (albeit masked), cracking wise with wiseguys (and gals), and quaffing lukewarm beer in a public park after dark.

We stood near the monument to Thomas Burke: “patriot, jurist, orator, friend, patron of education.” 

When I die (probably after the evening’s birthday boy, but, according to some of the assembled last Saturday, in all likelihood, after e-bike aficionado, DerekIto), I wouldn’t mind being eulogized in a similar matter, as long a “patriot” refers to being patriotic about what’s best about our native country (including the freedom to ride bikes and drink beer in a park) and not so much about owning military-grade firearms.  

I don’t think I want a statue built in my memory (not that I imagine anyone is planning on that), but it would be swell to have some kind of willow tree like those around Burke’s memorial for friends to sit under and remember me.

Or not; it doesn’t matter once you’re dead, does it?

But it does matter—before we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil—to have opportunities like those experienced in the hours between 7:00 and 10:00 on a Thursday evening in spring to gather together—socially-distanced still, of course—to spin uphill through the woods together; to celebrate successes, triumphs, and another year around the sun; all bodies on bikes, all of the time.