Simple

The Big Dark is coming: Seasonally, of course, as the days get shorter, the nights get longer, and our fair city’s annual gloomy half-year approaches (that is, arrives), but also probably from a global climate standpoint, as our planetary environment continues to degrade and the effects of anthropogenic climate change manifest themselves with extreme weather events, forest fires, and millions of human beings displaced from their homes as a result.

What this means—apart from the likelihood of increased spending on consciousness-altering substances—is that every day we’re alive has a pretty good chance of being among the best days we’re going to experience before we die.  As everything careens downhill, today probably has more potential for good things happening than tomorrow, next week, or, almost certainly, three decades from now.

So may as well make hay while the sun shines, as they say, where “hay” means riding your bike across town, down steep hills, and over gravel with a  couple dozen other cyclists, and “sun shines” means having a fire in an officially-sanctioned public fire pit in a park at the top of a hill among a grove of American Chestnut trees, while standing around quaffing quaffables and chatting about the British Imperial Raj, the relative merits of various bike parts, and reminiscences of the humorous errors in judgment of people’s previous selves and how little has changed in their current incarnations.

The doo-wop group The Drifters famously sang about the fun they’d be having under the boardwalk in 1964; it’s nice to know that 57 years later, a different assemblage of drifters can enjoy the amusement which follows from being atop the wooden slats; those oldies crooners noted that they’d be falling in love from below; and while that amorous result is no certainty in the present day overhead, one’s heart can’t help but swell to the beat of bike tires on wood.

Simple truth: yesterday may often surpass tomorrow, but today’s pretty good, too.