Peak

If there’s a luckier, more fortunate, more blessed human being than me out there, I’d like to see them.  Because it’s hard to believe that there could be anyone anywhere who gets to enjoy even a modicum of what I get, much less an excess.

You tell me who else is allowed to spend the day with about four dozen friends, family members, and new acquaintances on a perfect spring day for an overthought out and intentionally stupid bicycle “race” featuring traditional ascents and descents in our fair city while also taking the occasion to imbibe, hold forth, and kick back all afternoon and well into the early evening, and not only that, but also to receive about that same number of hand-written messages on beer-carton cardboard cut-outs with advice and admonitions inspired by the celebration of one’s birth, okay?

Who else, I ask you?

If reincarnation is really a thing, I must have been an awfully good person last time around to have earned an opportunity like this; I hope I’m not squandering my karmic riches by having so much fun this time around, but if so, it’s certainly worth it!

(And we did raise over $300 for Planned Parenthood and the Northwest Abortion Access Fund, so perhaps the debits to my account are slightly reduced.)

In any event, whatever the source of such good fortune, I gratefully acknowledge it in giving me the opportunity to:

• Congregate at my favorite bike shop drinking beer and whiskey while one after another familiar face appears
  
  
• Hang out in my backyard while those same familiar faces show up on bicycle to reapportion the excess canned water and write pithy messages to yours truly
  
  
• Reassemble in the courtyard of a local favorite watering hole to acknowledge the efforts of said faces (and legs) for several more hours of fun, jollity, and awe at a real-live bicycle racer who shows you how it’s done without hardly breaking a sweat.

Lucky me!

Hesher

Here’s how time is (or, at least time periods are) an illusion: If you’re doing the same things, talking about the same music, and modifying your consciousness in the same way as you did half a century ago then, for all intents and purposes, now could be then.

If you didn’t know that it was the end of the first quarter of the 21st century rather than nearly the beginning of the last quarter of the 20th, you couldn’t tell merely by observing when what was happening and who it was happening with was happening.

Sure, there would be clues: the bicycles would mostly be sturdy gravel bikes instead of scrawny ten speeds; the conversations about the music would be informed by being able to listen to it anywhere, all by yourself, piped directly into your years instead of having to be in someone’s bedroom sharing the vinyl experience together, and the consciousness-altering delivery system would be hash-infused pre-rolls purchased from a retail establishment rather than seedy ditch weed rolled in American flag papers at your high-school desk, but if you removed all those frames and simply examined the shared consciousnesses, who could tell?

And frankly, who would want to?

If we can time-travel by bicycle back to “simpler times” (that, really, weren’t all that simple what with way more street crime, lakes so polluted they caught fire, a US President resigning for complicity in a crime and its cover-up, plus bike tires that weren't nearly so flat resistant as today’s, even for those who have yet to make the conversion to tubeless), then shouldn’t we take that opportunity?

Even if it means that the “fire” is made from aluminum cans and Girl Scout water instead of driftwood and deadfall; even if it means that the ultimate expression of the irrational number is arrived at too late to do so.

Because that still means that then is now and now is then and all there ever is is.

Theme

I miss the old days when nostalgia was so much sweeter, don’t you?

In other words, we used to be so cool, didn’t we?

Remember how a Thursday night ride used to take you to the farthest reaches of county, through a hidden riparian zone or up some spookily forgotten bluff or over a decaying bridge to a place you’d never even heard of, much less ridden your bike to near midnight and well into the wee hours of the morning when the birds began chirping at the rising dawn?

Nowadays, a little wiggle in and over a familiar wooded trail and up and around to what just might be the watering hole that, in terms of elapsed time, you’ve been going to for longer than any other one in the whole darn town, is sufficient for a first act, and then, the usual back way to what’s become, more or less, the default spot in our fair city for tidy little bonfires, makes for a perfectly satisfactory Act Two in the overall production that, while it may not win an Academy Award this weekend for Best Thursday Night Ride ever, certainly gives you your money’s worth in thrills and chills, not to mention LOLs and chuckles, plus a few poignant reminiscences, as well.

And that’s fine, really, because another benefit of having done a thing for so long is that any comparisons one might be compelled to make with the past are shown to be no more relevant to present satisfaction than are tomorrow’s aspirations to yesterday’s joys; it’s all water under the bridge or sand through the hourglass or whatever other metaphor you want to use; what matters, really, or all that there is, as a matter of fact, is the moment you’re in and if you’ve gotten there by bike, and it includes fellowship and libation, then who cares if it isn’t what it was because it is what it is and that’s plenty.