Muse

I’ve been writing these post-Point83 ride reports in 20 consecutive years now, and I keep thinking I ought to stop.  Enough is enough and all that.

But one could say the same thing about the rides themselves and while, occasionally, you hear rumblings about the demise of Thursday night shenanigans, here they come again, complete with stoney pedaling, convenience store nachos, illicit firepits, and the prospect of the authorities arriving rather than just roaring by, flashing lights and sirens ablaze.

I started this practice in part as a way of letting the world know that I had survived the ride home, often quite inebriated, from some far corner of our fair city to the central area in which I reside.  

I imagined that it could be an open question for some as to whether Professor Dave arrived home safe and sound, and so, in somewhat of the same fashion as I always (except on those very few occasions when the Bolivian Marching Powder has been marching) send a midnight text home to confirm my salubrity (if not sobriety), I took to penning (well, keyboarding, to be precise), these little 327-word post-mortems as a kind of message in a bottle that I wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere or squashed flat by an 18-wheeler somewhere within Seattle’s vast industrial core.

I could stop, I really could, but then how could I so easily reference events from the past, like that mock funeral for a now long-lost friend, may he rest in peace, or that other time, on the occasion of the bachelor party of his “sister,” perhaps my favorite of all these hundreds of postings, because of what it didn’t say, not what it did.

Point83 has been a reliable muse for me all these years, encompassing, at one time or another, all nine of the classical Goddesses, although it’s probably the one responsible for comedy, Thalia, who predominates.  

Still laughing after so many years, aren’t we all?