Summer

It makes it easier to accept the inevitable demise of summer (at least meteorological summer) knowing that it goes out on such a high note.

All of the components are present that have made the season so swell: bike-riding, lake-swimming, fire-fucking, shroom-taking, chest-baring, story-telling, beer-drinking, to name a few.  

And all in such abundance that you just might start to feel guilty about your good fortune given the often-sorry state of the world all over the world, until you consider that given such good fortune, it’s incumbent upon the fortunate to celebrate such good fortune as much as is reasonably possible.

It’s not as if one’s own enjoyment reduces the enjoyment of others in less enjoyable states.  In fact, a good case can be made on Utilitarian grounds that one is morally obligated to maximize one’s enjoyment (just so long as doing so doesn’t cause pain to others).

A world with more pleasure being experienced is preferable to one with less, and so you’d better take that lake swim and float around with your eyes closed to experience the underwater Grateful Dead album cover art dancing on the inside of your eyelids, so help me John Stuart Mill.  

And be sure, as well, to stand around the three-quarters of Christmas tree fire and let its surprisingly warm flames allow the SOC to come out in full force in all its soft, muscular, hirsute, and hair-free incarnations.

It's the time of year when some people (bless their hearts, but not for me) load up cargo vans and car trailers with feather boas, sequins, and tons of post-apocalyptic survival gear to make merry on a barren desert in the middle of nowhere.  More power to them, I say, but for me, the simple joy of a bicycle ride to a serene body of water right in your own backyard is more than enough.

It really takes so little to have so much fun; thanks to summer, all summer long.

Beautiful

You probably believe, as do most people in our contemporary post-modern world, that aesthetic judgments are purely subjective.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” you say.  As long as someone somewhere considers something beautiful, it is.

This is a widely-held and quite reasonable view, especially given the vast divergence in people’s perspectives on what is beautiful (or ugly), which include everything from a Thomas Kinkaid “Painter of Light” painting to a Francisco Goya canvas featuring the Roman god Saturn devouring one of his sons.

But a case can be made for some objective (or at least, universally agreed-upon) standards of beauty.  

Anyone who failed to see the beauty in a civil twilight painted in multiple red, orange, and purple stripes including a high, thin cloud masquerading as a jetliner over Elliot Bay with a cardboard cutout of Bainbridge Island for a backdrop on one side and the glowing cityscape of Seattle on the other would surely be missing something.  

Similarly, you’d be mistaken if you didn’t experience the phenomenon of cloud iridescence, in which a little shaft of rainbow floats in the eastern sky during the waning moments before sunset as one that is as beautiful as it is rare.

Perhaps there’s an evolutionary explanation for this.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose aesthetic sensibilities led them to prefer eating the lovely, colorful berries over the disgusting, gross Mastodon scat probably did a better job of passing down their DNA, so maybe there are some things we’re more or less hard-wired to find attractive.

Moreover, we know by Fancy Fred’s fine example on display last evening, that there are aesthetic choices, at least when it comes to bicycles, which will reliably piss off somebody somewhere, but when you add them all up together, you arrive at a work of art that nobody anywhere could deny is beautiful.

Which is, perhaps, a perfect metaphor for a Thursday night bike ride: something ugly to everyone, yet beautiful for all.

Hippies

 “Have you ever played ‘Hippies on a Hill?’  

It’s the best game ever.  

Everyone wins!”

Wow

One thing that all of us who ride bikes have in common is that we all ride bikes.  (Between driving trucks and cars in some cases, but still…)

Another is that all of us have mothers (living or dead, near or far, compassionate and loving or Joan Crawford, but still…)

And so combining these two features of our shared humanity—especially on a cool summer evening with the air freshened by morning showers with a perfect quarter moon (that is, one which appears as half a moon in the sky) winking through the chestnut trees—makes for a particularly lovely manner of whiling away a few twilight hours in the upper left hand corner of the continent, turned that much lovelier through the largesse of the Point83 Bar n’ Grille, for brighter colors and sharper details and a somewhat easier way to have laughter rise up through one’s body unencumbered by the editor within.

Familiar routes are familiar but can become somewhat exotic with the right degree of pre-funk; even the tried n’ true pathways endorsed by local wayfaring experts offer surprises when one is sufficiently open to being surprised. 

Plus!  A never-before-summitted parking garage (accessed by a brand-new ingress) whose top floor offers a spectacular perspective on our region’s main mountaintop.  Seems a shame that the view is to be mainly enjoyed by parked cars (luxury SUVs to be more precise) and so a case can be made that one is performing an essential aesthetic public service by riding to the top and admiring the vista while enjoying a carbonated beverage of one’s choice.  

And while there may be pockets of our fair city whose challenges lead conservative news organizations to clutch their pearls and contend the place is dying, that’s not the case in parts of town whose property values still support a community gathering spot where friends and relations can warm themselves together in a spirit of wholesome family fun.

Any mom would approve.