Scorchy

Back in the Aughts, the only way to meet up with the ride after it started was to just vibe it.  

You’d have to consult your inner bicycle beacon to just feel in the little two-wheeled center of your body where the group was headed.  This led to some wild-goose chase rides all by yourself to random corners of our fair city, but it also provided a few instances where you just happened to get it right, like that time you just knew that the costumed shenanigans would be taking place at the karaoke joint on Capitol Hill or that instance where you homed in on a bike pile outside of a watering hole in your neighborhood more or less.

A bit later in the century, during the early Teens, you could stop at a payphone and place a call to Joeball and he’d ring you back with coordinates to follow; that ended when payphones stopped allowing incoming calls—curse you, drug dealers!—and so, subsequently, you had to finally get a flip phone in order to stay abreast of where to head to.

Nowadays, in the bright future predicted by Dick Tracy comics and Star Trek, you’ve got an online beacon to appeal to and the little dot on your screen tells you just where to go until, as was always the case, you see the fire glowing in the dark and hear laughter and voices carrying on about bike parts, trips abroad, masculine names, and movies from the 1970s set in Seattle with car chases like the famous one from the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt.

The Seattle skyline in that film looked a fair bit different than the one we see today, but to the trees in Ravenna Park, it all appears to be just about the same.  A few more rings in the core to be sure, but no matter how one finds ones way there, it’s still best to arrive on a bike.

Authentic

Four years from now, when you peek through the bars of your prison cell in the Federal Detention Center for Dissidents and Critical Thinkers, at the smoking wreckage of a formerly-great republic, at least you’ll be able to recall a perfectly mild and dry autumn evening in the Pacific Northwest when you were once free to peacefully assemble with about a dozen unarmed men and use non-fossil fuel burning transportation to congregate at a city park around a cheery bonfire brought to life by igniting scavenged wine boxes from the parking lot of a well-stocked grocery store which still permitted the sale of organically-grown produce and alcoholic spirits, and you’ll reflect again how utterly amazing it was to have experienced such times, not just once but on several score of occasions in the preceding years, and note how it never failed to result in laughter, hijinks, and fond fellowship without even a single train passing by.

You’ll remember how at that time, before the Internal-Combustion Engine Mandates were ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court and the President-for-Life’s Storm Troops hadn’t yet started rounding up anyone who had ever read a book or contributed to Planned Parenthood, there were still many places one was allowed to ride bikes to and recall that sure, you could have taken the short and easy way to the pretty little lake that hadn’t yet been drained for the now ubiquitous municipal gas fracking rigs, but much better to hold out for that most paradigmatic of Thursday night destinations where fireplace logs and construction leftovers could join with balsa wood packaging and failed spawn to warm even the most despairing of souls just days after that final federal election in our lifetimes.

The AI-powered Tesla prison guards will, of course, soon come by to strap you back into the Behavior Modification Module for further reprogramming, but even though they’ll keep taking away your freedom, they’ll never make off with those memories of such authentic two-wheeled liberation.

 

Audible

Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you’re already on the way somewhere else.  

That’s what happened last night, a fitting tribute to the holiday and a too soon-to-be-departing comrade.

Mission accomplished on a short night for yours truly, not unlike this post, only wetter.

And yet, as is almost always, wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Happy Hallowe’en!