Epoch

We now live in the Anthropocene era, a geological time period that began maybe with the dawn of agriculture, maybe with the Industrial Revolution, maybe with the atom bomb, but surely as the global average of CO2 in our atmosphere passed 400 parts per million, during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.  

We can see that in melting glaciers, rising seas, dying forests, and massive industrial projects like the Three Gorges Dam in China, the Los Angeles freeway system, or closer to home, Seattle’s very own Harbor Island, built in the Duwamish river (itself channeled and straightened by human enterprise), from, as the Wikipedia tells me, 24 million yd³ (18 million m³) of earth removed in the Jackson and Dearborn Street regrades and dredged from the bed of the very river in which it sits.

So, even as we’re destroying the planet, we’re simultaneously making it, the anthill ever growing as we shape and form the very home which will ultimately be our species’ grave in the end as well.

Cool, huh?  

May as well get on your bike and ride to a front-row seat where you can watch a massive concrete structure pivot on its axis and open up and allow passage to a boat as big as a skyscraper carrying a train’s worth of shipping containers and another boat to boot.

It’s oddly satisfying to witness the inhuman dimension of human activity, especially having arrived there on a much more appropriately-scaled piece of machinery, one that carries you all over the manufactured environment on two wheels while still weighing way less than you do.

It seemed to me, as I snaked through the metropolis earlier in the day, that everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere else, but really, what’s the rush?

We’re not getting out of the planet we’ve made, after all; the anthill’s our home; simultaneously ghastly and beautiful, eminently devastating and embraceable at once.

Benign

We live most of the time in the future or the past, fearing the former, regretting the latter.

Only in the momentary lightning flash do we find ourselves in the present, and as soon as it happens, it’s over.

But if you pile up enough of those moments, and riffle them through your consciousness, like a mini flip-book of the mind, the movie begins to emerge and all the excited electrons become a flickering, then wavering, flame.

The Universe and everything in it dances; the heavens open up and you’re drenched.

So, plans change and ambitions reset: instead of the world’s edge, you can ensconce in a parking lot with a roof and that’s plenty, especially given deep-fried pickle slices and spirit animal conjectures.

Unpredictability is a value, (and as armchair quantum physics proposes, probably the way things are anyway), but knowing where you’re headed is a plus, too, for it allows one to travel at their own pace and take detours which offer a view of the neon cartoon futuristic movie set that is our fair city’s skyline viewed from the near north.

Not everything is everything, but everything is something, so there’s that.  Work with what you got, why not?  Live within limits and see that sometimes simply stoking what’s already there and encircling it with fellowship makes for all the heat and light anyone needs at each instant.

And keeps the structure from serious harm, as well! 

The full moon stayed hidden for much of the night but was bright enough on the last leg that a delicate lunar rainbow played the role of celestial lettuce bed or nobleman’s collar, you choose.

Trying to hold onto the few remaining pages of summer is a fool’s errand; you’re either flipping them with regret or flopping them in fear, but when you find that point, right in the middle, balanced on or by two wheels, there’s only the infinite present, forever, eternal, timeless, always still now.

Fantastic

Unless I get creamed by some clueless driver checking Facebook on their phone behind the wheel (a not entirely unlikely scenario, all things considered), I probably have on the order of a thousand more Thursday nights to spend in my life.

Seems like a lot.

On the other hand, (especially as the numbers diminish), each one is precious, and deserves to be spent thoughtfully—or at least not squandered in questionable pursuits like sitting on the couch scrolling through Reddit feeds or watching sports you don’t really care about because “hey the new season!” or prepping for the courses you’ll be teaching this fall quarter when, seriously, there’s still two weeks until classes start, let’s be real, right?

With this in mind, I will count the most recent Thursday evening’s expenditure time well spent, including, as it did, many of the hyphenated components that make several hours of one’s lifetime so full of life.  There was tunnel-yelling and back-floating and story-telling and beer-drinking; there was bike-riding and bar-hopping and friend-shipping and night-swimming, along with weed-smoking, tequila-shooting, booze-vaping, and star-gazing.

Google Maps was our virtual Joeball, (how he is missed!) directing us to yet another semi-secret waterfront pocket park, this one facing west so that immersion was achieved by Civil Twilight under a sky striated by bands of orange, pink, and purple with a waxing gibbous moon rising behind a pane of frosted glass to the southeast.

In her widely anthologized, “The Summer Day,” poet Mary Oliver reflects, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”  And she asks us, in closing, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”

“To be idle and blessed” is her suggestion of what we ought to be doing all day.

Seems legit.

And I’ll take that as guidance as well for how to spend the hours of an evening: so much blessed idling out on two wheels, so wild, so precious, and so alive.

Precision

Word order and punctuation are important.  Consider the difference in meaning between these two sentences:^[1] 

1) “The idiot, previous to him, totally fucked things up.”

2) “The previous idiot to him totally fucked things up.”

When it comes to words, precision can make a big difference.

When it comes to routes, however, one need not be so particular.  It’s a lesson to relearn over and over again: efficiency is not the only virtue.

If you like riding bikes, what’s the matter with riding them, you know?

Who cares if you lose elevation just to ride it up all over again?

And why regret routes taken or not taken when after all, you’re out on a route, after all?

The pocket park could not have been better.  You could walk barefoot on soft pine needles to the lake and when you got there, there were perfect flat rock shelves upon which to lay your glasses and beer.

I will never tire of the experience of floating on my back in Lake Washington staring up at the night sky.  The celestial sphere is the celestial sphere, yep.

K-Sep didn’t guess my charades rendition of “Apocalypse Now.”  That’s probably because it wasn’t very good.  And also because so many of them horror flicks have the scary head rising from below, brrrr.

Moreover, the neighbors not only didn’t mind, they wished us a hearty good evening with the reminder that this little slice of heaven belongs to everyone.

Finally, even the steepest hill can be scaled by traversing.  If it wasn’t likely you’d be run over by always doing so, you would always do so,

In the end, it’s good to be a cliché, so long as the cliché is a good one.  We are what we are and that’s all that we are, which is why the what is the what, what?

Eats shoots and leaves.

Fish, fish fish, fish fish.

That that, this this, see?

______________________________

^[1] Moistra, 2019.8.22 (paraphrase)

Unprecedented

In over 380 Thursday night rides, I’ve been many a (relatively) far-flung place: southeast to the riparian wilds between Renton and Tukwila, southwest to Seahurst Park in Burien, northeast to the Marymoor Velodrome, and even as far northwest (with a little help from a ferryboat) as Poulsbo, Washington, on the Kitsap Peninsula, but never, in all my thirteen-plus years of pedaling out from Westlake Center, had I had the pleasure of the almost due north destination of Haller Lake.

And while Fat Rob’s route was more one Fancy Fred would have devised than the way I would have gone on my own, it was as perfect in every way as the velvety-smooth water of the lake itself, a body of water so quiet and calm that by floating on your back in it and gazing up towards the starry heavens, a person could go ahead and just merge with the Oneness like that, no extra effort required.

A spring-fed body of water, (I was informed by a couple of friendly fishermen who were packing up as we arrived), whose bottom drops off to the deep quite quickly (an appropriate metaphor for so many Thursday night rides itself), which Wikipedia tells me that the Duwamish tribe called “Calmed Down a Little,” for me Haller Lake, on the contrary, “Excited Up a Lot.” 

Who’d have thought one would find such bucolic bliss in the northern reaches of our fair city?

Perhaps the day will come, (and perhaps in the not-too-distant somewhat dystopian future), when gasoline is no longer available and I-5 ceases to carry steel and plastic boxes hurtling over it at a mile a minute and faster; the preferred bicycling route from Westlake to Haller Lake might then be straight up the Interstate; in that event, it might not be more than a decade before the ride returns.

In lieu of that, however, I will duly savor this unprecedented (for me) experience—undeniably worth the wait (and effort).

Sparse

Of course, there were other better things to do: you could soak up some culture at the Capitol Hill Art Walk; or get your sports fix on by catching the Seahawks pre-season football game; or even prepare for the inevitable autumn darkness by sorting your socks and underpants drawer; any of those—and almost anything else—would have been a superior use of one’s time and energy, but yours truly, along with barely a handful of other stalwarts (or, as some might put it, “losers”) combined with a trio of relative and absolute newcomers, opted for Ye Olde Thursday Night Ride and while it didn’t involve several hundred feet of plastic sheeting or a kiddie pool filled with food-grade rasslin’ slurry, by missing it, I would have missed out on a number of notable, (if not remarkable) experiences afforded by the experience, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Voicing my opposition to the Pike Market gum wall as we rolled through groups of startled visitors at Seattle’s most disgusting tourist attraction
• Sharing reminiscences of wool clothing and retro-grouches with my contemporary as we meandered alongside sailboats racing in the Puget Sound
• Following Fred, not down a gravel road, but through a forest path littered with twigs that only he, with his elven carriage, could walk across without breaking
• Enjoying a single beer and a sliver of sunset backlighting the clouds at a semi-secret street-end park at the foot of Seattle’s least dense neighborhood
• Sharing the rest of my tallboy at the one sort of divey bar in the area with a crazed 33 year-old woman going through heroin withdrawal on the mean streets of Magnolia of all places
• Learning that a backed-up sewer in a restaurant has the characteristic odor of Parmesan cheese
• Discussing tattoos over a final nightcap on the patio of the number two karaoke joint
• Riding home along the waterfront and through the city after midnight feeling little, if any, pain

Humans

About halfway through William Faulkner’s occasionally hilarious novel, The Reivers, 11 year-old narrator, Lucius Priest, holds forth on the relative intelligence (which he defines as “the ability to cope with environment”) of non-human animals.

He ranks the rat number one because “He lives in your house without helping you buy it or build it or repair it or keep the taxes paid; he eats what you eat without helping you raise it or buy it or even haul it into the house.”

The mule is second because, among other traits, “he will not enter any place unless he knows of his own knowledge what is on the other side,” and most tellingly, because “he will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once.”

Cat comes in number three; dog is fourth, and horse, “a creature capable of but one idea at a time,” is rated last of the lot.

All of this assumes, of course, that humans possess an intelligence beyond these five, which, at times—give our penchant for self-destructive behavior and our shared fascination with Presidential tweets—seems like a dicey proposition.

On the other hand, (channeling how Lucius himself might have put it):

"No other creature than homo sapiens has such a genius for having fun.

"Ain’t no rats out there that lay down 150 feet of plastic in a sylvan glade to go hurling themselves over its watery surface just for shits n’ giggles.  

"And no mule never done filled a child’s swimming pool with slippery goo so as to rassle around in it with friends and loved ones, that’s for sure.

"And while small rodents will find their way into basement or attic through the smallest crack if you leave a predictable source of food out, I’m sure as shootin’ that none of them ever figured out how to scientifically dose packages of fruit juice with grain alcohol via 30CC syringe.

"Take that, you rats, boom!"

Inevitable

In War and Peace, Tolstoy reflects at length on the deterministic nature of history and the misguided conceit of great leaders, especially Napoleon, who flatter themselves with the idea that they are the ones making things happen.  At one point, he likens Bonaparte to a child inside a carriage pulling on leather strings who imagines he is the one guiding the horses galloping outside.

Sometimes, it’s sorta like that with the Thursday night ride, too.  You think you have a say in where things are headed, but then you realize that the group is moving with a will of its own that is not really any one person’s volition, but rather, the sum total of desires, preferences, biases, inclinations, and momentary urges of everyone involved.  

The dominoes are somehow set up and fall according to natural laws that are themselves no doubt an expression of some deeper underlying principles and so on and so forth, turtles all the way down.

And that’s when, if you ask me, things are most satisfying because it means that all those best-laid plans, like how fun it would be to spy one another across an artificial channel from beneath a weeping willow, simply become data to be observed in how the next destination is arrived at.

Because clearly, no one would really choose to cross among the trees merely to end up on more water across the way, even if it meant absolving oneself for having passed up an opportunity to float one’s back in the water earlier in the evening.

A glowing quarter moon had no choice but to illuminate the celestial sphere with its soft milky glow, but surely, that didn’t detract from its beauty one whit; on the contrary, its inevitability—and our acceptance of that—is what makes its loveliness so poignant.

Somehow, things keep happening, beyond and outside of our control: you’re there and back again, no choice but the choices that can’t not be made.

Itch

Free will is an illusion, of course; human beings are just biological creatures subject to the same physical laws as everything else.  We no more “choose” to do things—from deciding to get out of bed in the morning to agreeing that drinking beer and riding bikes on the first Thursday of summer is a good idea—than does the cottonwood tree “choose” to float its cotton-covered seeds onto the evening breeze at the same time.

Nevertheless, it feels, from the inside, as if we are exercising our agency, deliberating between possibilities, and preferring one option over another, like taking the gravel path instead of the busy road, or opting for a six-pack and a bag of beet chips instead of the usual half-rack and Reese's cups.

That’s why many contemporary philosophers find “compatibilism,” or “soft-determinism” to be the preferred option in the debate over free will; the idea is that human free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.  We can distinguish between choices that are compelled, like when we stop for traffic so as not to be run over by a semi-truck, and those that are deliberated, like when, after looking both ways, we pedal through the red light anyway.  The former, we can say, are not free choices; that latter, by contrast, are.

But the proverbial devil is in the details: did we freely choose to bust up the palette and add it to the already-roaring fire or is that just an automatic expression of our animal natures?  And surely, no volition is exercised when fireworks are ill-advisedly set off in the midst of a crowd; there’s no way that’s not going to happen, right?  The itch will be scratched.

Contemporary philosopher David Sosa has argued that in order to maintain a conception of human dignity, we must preserve some notion of individual agency; I dunno; I like being part of a big cosmic machine that just unfolds according to natural laws; happens every Thursday on bikes, after all.

Victory

Given the trying times in which we live, one finds solace is the small victories, like removing the plastic covering on the new cottage cheese container in a single piece, or successfully diagnosing the rattle on your bike and being able to fix it simply by tightening one fender bolt, or finding out that a multi-year struggle to recover a tiny lakeside park from the clutches of a greedy homeowner had been won by the good guys and the land returned to the people.

That’s cause for celebration and celebrate we did by no doubt embodying said greedy homeowner’s worst nightmare with laughter, libation, and a little bit of bare skin; with any luck they’re spending their day worrying that the first night will be every night, and why not?  The people have four years of access to make up for.

The state of the world is just too overwhelming: everything’s going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, so what else is there to do than take comfort in recreational intoxicants and shared companionship?  And if that can be done via two wheels and al fresco, so much the better.  We’re all gonna die soon enough, so may as well live it up while we can and to do so on newly-liberated public property just makes it that much sweeter.

“A man’s home is his castle” goes the old saw but it’s refreshing to see that this doesn’t necessarily mean he gets to illegally seize all the land around it; many of us may often feel we’re no better than serfs to the 1%, so it’s a rare pleasure to witness the public good triumphing over private property interests.  

Now if we could just do something about corporations and hedge-fund managers paying their fair share of taxes and fossil fuel companies that externalize the cost of doing business onto the environment and gun violence, and racism, misogyny, and on and on, we’d really have cause for celebration.

Loop

It is said that a happy, satisfied man is one who makes twenty dollars a week more than his brother-in-law.

If that’s the case, those poor suckers who live on the east side of Evergreen Point Road in Medina must be in a constant state of dismay and dissatisfaction. 

Imagine: you’ve clawed and scratched your way to the heights of corporate success and can finally splurge your ill-gotten millions on a fabulous contemporary estate in one of America’s most exclusive neighborhoods and yet every day you look out your front window, there it is, staring you square in the face, the looming hedge of an ever-more-fabulous estate that sits right down on the water, mocking your paltry multi-millionaire status with its billionaire nerve. 

No wonder the 1% are so greedy; there’s always someone richer to envy, so you’ve got to keep clawing and scratching until at last it’s you behind that hedge looking west at the Lake with nothing but blue skies from now on.

Or, you could just get plenty stoned and ride a bike around to marvel at the massive concentration of wealth that global capitalism and cheap energy from fossil fuels has made possible, happy that it’s a lovely spring evening with air so soft and velvety it’s like pedaling through a symphony and fully satisfied that the various plant-based intoxicants you’ve imbibed are contributing so well to such an intoxicating scene.

“I saw the eagle dive,” said tehSchkott as we sat together lakeside, harmonizing our individual minds with the Universal Consciousness of which we are all a part, and while he spoke literally, it was clear that we had arrived at a place where the literal is figurative and vice-versa.

Life is a metaphor for life and nothing illustrates that better than how the bicycle takes you right from where you started back to the place you began all over again with the middle in the middle, a looping loop-dee-loop.

Weird

photo by ShowsUpJoe

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the weirdest one of all?”

Obviously, Fancy Fred comes to mind, and I have to admit that flute-playing yours truly is definitely a candidate, but in this case, I think we must give special consideration to the birthday boy himself for, if nothing else, being weird enough to not only schedule and attend each and every one, but also to ride in both directions for almost all fourteen of the eponymous countries that bear his angry hippie moniker and imprimatur.

No clever pun subtitle ever really stuck to year’s version of Ben Country* although that did nothing to undermine the annual weirdness associated with it and the joke that there would be more trucks driving to the site than cyclists pedaling there, while only slightly an exaggeration, was really spectacular since it meant that not only was there a full bar set up (featuring signature cocktails) for tired riders pulling in, but also enough wood to last throughout the evening, and plenty of cab space on Sunday to accommodate lazybones like me for whom one hilly fifty mile ride per weekend is sufficient.

I think the surest sign of human-induced global climate change I’ve observed is that it was dry and clear the whole country-time, but Ben said it’s only been four of the fourteen that have been wet; if that’s the case, it must not include the six I’d been on, each of which required rain gear in some form or another for at least some of the time.

The site, while not nearly as post-apocalyptic as some of the previous incarnations, was actually pre-apocalyptic, as it was formerly a place to disarm torpedoes and other exploding ordnance, which, come to think of it, probably prepared it well for our arrival and revelry.

It’s weird how things are connected like that and even weirder that they continue to be, weird year after year, weird mile after mile.

 *Until afterwards, when Fred dubbed it "Ben Country XIV: Gentle Ben"

Proper

At the south end bar that loved us better last time we were there (but didn’t really mind us this time, either) Moira said that she hadn’t been out on a proper Point83 ride in a while.  

You know, one where, after having ridden double-digit miles to congregate in the great outdoors for beer-drinking and story-telling, you find yourself in a divey joint at close to midnight, even farther from your home, and yet nonetheless, are happily looking forward to pedaling back those double-digits to one final destination for a nightcap and farewells.

Ah, yes.

I know there are plenty other things to do of a Thursday evening in spring: go dancing, see concerts (or “shows” as the kids today call them, I’m told), attend lectures, binge-watch your Netflix queue, but the gravitational force of two-wheeled adventures keeps calling you back; even without an online presence, people show up and somewhat more surprisingly, keep going, in spite of injuries, work, and the impending dystopian future that lies in wait for us all.

The good news is that during the zombie apocalypse following the Big One and Mt. Rainier blowing its top while the boreal forest burns to a crisp in a blizzard and the tsunami rolls inland, you’ll still have a bike to get around, so you can always look forward to showing up on Thursday at that massive smoking crevice where Westlake Center used to be and finding at least a handful of miscreants with whom to wobble off towards some ruined landscape for the sharing of homegrown and moonshine, which, come to think of it, isn’t all that different than how things work now, especially given the aforementioned internet-free rendezvousing.

Sure, it’s nice to wake up on Friday morning without a monkey in your mouth and gauze between your ears, but, honestly, it seems a small price of admission to so vitally prepare for our disheartening tomorrow and to so properly commemorate our delightful today.

Deilberations

The thing about riding a bike is that it’s like riding a bike: your body remembers how to do it and even if it’s been a while, it all comes back in a flash, and there you are, after an initial minor wobble, pedaling merrily on your way, as if you’ve been cycling happily non-stop all along.

The same goes for Thursday night adventures which, even when passed over for the better part of six months, immediately become familiar, right down to the intermittent drizzle and requisite regroup and safety meeting at the usual designated undesignated spot.

Our fair city offers a limited number of covered locations for assembling around a fire in the rain, so it’s not surprising that we ended up on the water’s edge with such a picturesque view of ferry boats literally passing like two ships in the night; nevertheless, on many a similar occasion, the assembled have been daunted by the distance and have opted for something closer to home.  Consequently, we heartily thank the American system of jurisprudence which indirectly made possible such a relatively ambitious endeavor through the good offices of one double-dad performing his civic duty.

No one went swimming and the off-road section of the trip was, though lovely, pretty tame, but for this sojourner, at least, it was all that could be wanted, and quite remarkable if you take the time to remark upon it.  

The world—not to belabor the point—is a huge and varied place: one where at the very same moment, people will, for instance, be performing complex traditional religious ceremonies in ancient temples while halfway across the globe, others will be connecting with their own conception of the divine through the liberal application of bikes, booze, and (non-gendered) brotherhood.  

And what’s thrilling to notice is that, different as they are, the practices are essentially similar; everywhere you look, human beings expressing their essential humanity by overcoming the human through ritual and fire.

Expansion

Try this little experiment: Sit quietly (or stand noisily, it doesn’t really matter; you do you) and try to picture in your mind the entire world and all the activity upon it in any given moment.  

Think of all that’s going on every second: human beings engaged in an endless list of activities, non-stop—getting up, going to bed, heading to work, eating, sleeping, fucking, fighting, hoeing a row in a garden, turning the page of a library book, making spaghetti, riding a motor scooter, laughing, crying, puking, farting, writing essays, flossing their teeth, having more babies, growing their consumer products companies by leaps and bounds, riding bikes through city park trails to a place in the woods where beer can be drunk, flames coaxed forth, and opinions shared—and that’s just the homo sapiens component.  

There’s also everything else doing everything, from the tiniest electrons spinning around the puniest nucleus, to vast red giant stars using up the last of their hydrogen and expanding to subsume entire solar systems.

It never rests: that force or drive or energy/activity/process call it God if you want or chi or prana or the three gunas, rajas, tapas, and sattva, engaged in the eternal interplay that gives rise to the Universe and everything in it, or name it some other name that isn’t even a word, just a sound that can’t be heard.

And when you notice this, sitting there, as you are with your legs crossed (or flailing about to Justin Bieber’s remix of Despacito, once again, the form doesn’t really matter) you’ll just have to smile (or weep or giggle or cock a knowing eyebrow) at the delicious absurdity of it all: from the perspective of every one of us, it’s all revolving around our own individual meat-puppet sphere and yet, were we (and when we’re) not here it would (and will) still keep on going, going, going, up, down, in, out, all around, just like on bikes.

Best

Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss had a panglossian perspective on life, meaning not merely was he optimistic about the way things are, but rather, held the view that the world, such as it is, is, in fact, the best of all possible worlds, that no better world could exist, concluding, “they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.”

Embedded in this is a kind of determinism which assumes that nature always produces the ideal results (since God would have it no other way); thus, for example, our noses are perfectly “designed” for us to wear spectacles (which we inevitably do), or because our legs are so uniquely formed for the wearing of stockings, stockings fit perfectly.

The good Dr. P. has long been an object of derision; Voltaire himself was satirizing the optimistic conclusions of the German philosopher Leibniz, who addressed the so-called “problem of evil” by arguing that the actual world, even with all the terrible awful things that happen is, in fact, the best of all possible worlds that God could have created. 

It’s a view that’s worthy of disdain to be sure, especially if you read the news for even a moment, but as Dada pointed out around the legal firepit last night, there’s a certain appeal to it that turns hopelessness into a kind of hopefulness that emerges from accepting that this is as good as it gets, so you might as well carry on without expecting anything more.

And indeed, a world that affords you the pleasures of bike riding through the woods and over metal paths across the cool and boggy wetlands of your city’s largest body of freshwater is surely one that’s right up there.  And if it also gives you the opportunity to harvest a handful of American chestnuts and roast them in a crackling campfire to share with friends, then maybe it really is the best possibility of all.

Angelic

photo by Joeball

If you’re going to crash on your bike and get knocked out for an hour and break your collarbone, probably a rib, maybe a cheekbone, and suffer various and sundry other ailments, including, apparently, an instantaneous, albeit painful, treatment of free orthodontia, as did our beloved fancy colleague and well-known Peter White Cycles critic, Mr. Fred Blasdel, it’s kind of a drag that it should happen on your way to work, at 9:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, while perfectly sober; it seems a waste of all those times when a person is pedaling about well after midnight with a consciousness deranged in one manner or another and somehow manages to make it home perfectly intact. 

I guess that just goes to show that our guardian angels get lazy or inattentive when they figure they need not be so vigilant; and perhaps it’s an argument for more regular applications of wake n’ bake or morning 40 just to keep them on their toes.

In any event, once folks at Westlake were informed of Fred’s mishap, conjecture about ride routes evaporated as it became obvious that the obvious course of action was to pay him a little visit en masse, and even though the sweet little card many of us signed somehow got lost in the four blocks between the Red Apple and his house, it somehow seem strangely appropriate that the empty envelope did happen to make it.

We hugged him gently and hung around long enough to ascertain that although a good deal worse for wear, he’s still our Fred and, not wanting to overstay one’s welcome with an invalid, took the short jaunt over to the industrial views westward accorded by the only park we ever tend to visit on Beacon Hill.

Beers were drunk, stories of other bicycle mishaps were shared, and a souvenir-bat-sized joint was smoked.

As far as I know, everyone made it home okay; guardian angels on the job, vigilant!

Span

Back in the Naughty-Aughties, a goateed guy named Ro used to ride bikes (and sometimes, on camping trips, a motorcycle) with us; he was 67 IIRC, which to me, a wee lad in my early 50s at the time, seemed legitimately old.   During the same period, there were a handful of minors who came out on Thursdays as well; the youngest, Alec, was probably seventeen; charmingly, he would sometimes wait like a faithful puppy outside whatever bar we had holed up in, to join the inebriated for the group ride home.

So figure a span of fifty years between the senior and junior members of said crew; that’s surely the record.

Last night, though, did pretty good: there was, me, yours truly, at, as Fancy Fred pointed out, sixty one-derful years, and our young tag-along capture, Windy City Carlos, who boldly admitted he was just sixteen years old, meaning there was a four and a half decade age span between the firstborn and lastborn riders in attendance.

It’s kind of amazing, and surely heartwarming, as well, that the delights of two-wheeled shenanigans can be enjoyed by folks so far apart chronologically, (in marked contrast, for example, to whatever pleasures attend to one’s choices in music, a point brought home particularly uncomfortably when the youngster kept blasting N-word filled rap songs from his backpack speaker as all us white folk pedaled past houses which—during my lifetime (but not his, admittedly)—only white-skinned people were permitted by neighborhood covenant to own.)

But I guess back in 1973, when I ductaped a transistor radio to the handlebars of my Raleigh Record and blared Led Zepplin’s “The Lemon Song” while riding through the quaint streets of Pittsburgh’s Highland Park district, some guy born 45 years before me, in 1912, wouldn’t have liked it, either.

On the other hand, I’ll bet if he hopped on his penny-farthing and joined in careening down winding streets on two wheels, we'd have both felt like kids.

Sight

Just when you think you’ve seen it all (and thanks to upper air aloft, you actually could see, for the first time in days, all the way from the West Seattle superfund site park to the downtown Seattle skyline), you witness the absolutely unprecedented experience (at least in your own experience) of being denied service at of all places, one of the diviest of dive bars; so what else is there to do but take it as a sign that the bridge should be crossed before further shenanigans occur; the result being, after a look-see at a potential new haunt, you find yourself observing the most familiar of walls, one with mirrors on them, to boot, gazing on that very reflection you’ve reflected upon all of your born days.

I mean sure, a person’s going to be a little tipsy after sharing the traditional twelve-pack at the traditional nut-punching platform above the Duwamish, and yes, I’ll admit that a guy might stumble a bit after hopping off his bike and wandering into a watering hole that requires navigating around a person with a microphone belting out their favorite country music tune, but it’s hard (entirely opaque, honestly) to see what the bartender saw to make it impossible to order even a Coca-Cola, but who knows what they might have been eyeing?  Maybe she just doesn’t like your face or perhaps it’s the new short hairdo.

In any case, it was hardly a blot on an otherwise fine night for observing (and breathing); an almost full moon rising over the industrial wasteland was its standard issue yellow as opposed to “new normal” red, blue sky was visible behind wispy cirrus clouds, and three, count ‘em three! Ryans outnumbered just a pair of Kevins on the way out of Westlake.

So all’s well that ends well, I guess, and besides, it does mean you get to watch the birthday girl drink a mai-tai, a sight, clearly, never to miss!

Leap

Call me a sissy scaredy-cat coward while pointing out that even children and nearsighted tech-nerds braved the attempt and I’d have to agree; nevertheless, discretion (such as it is) remains the better (perhaps only) part of valor for this chicken-hearted chicken when it comes to hurling oneself off a plastic ramp into Lake Washington atop a janky BMX bike after careening down an increasingly wet and slippery runway especially when well-lubricated already with apparently not quite enough liquid courage to overcome the survival instinct part of the lizard brain for yet another year running.

Long story short: as usual, I preferred the view from the water and was rewarded with the sight of one more hilarious splashdown after another as less fearful, younger, or maybe even drunker souls than me piloted the floating two-wheeler into the drink much to the cheers, jeers, and sympathetic groans of the assembled.

It was the perfect night for launching, one of those magical Seattle summer evenings where the lake water and air temperature align so that it’s just as warm to be wet as dry; the watery choice, of course, has the secret advantage of providing a full-time conduit for beer-processing, a point we need not belabor, but bears noting because why the hell not, everyone does and it’s awesome, right?

For some reason, the younger, cuter version of the bike gang declined to stop and join, but oh well, these kids today with their appetites for exposure, more power to them, but this lily-livered old-timer will continue to capture life in the time-honored manner of imprinting memories directly onto the grey matter and then making up stories about them, like the one where Shows Up Joe flies far beyond the handlebars as he splashes down atop the lake’s silvery surface in the waning twilight of the August eve, just at the point where everyone turns into luminous shadows, backlit by reflections, glowing at the edges, walking (and riding) on water.

Plenty

Traditionally, it hardly counts as a Thursday night ride if you’re home in bed before midnight and so, when it’s barely eleven and you’re already laying your head upon the pillow, you might think that a person could just as easily stayed home and not missed a thing.

But you’d be wrong, then, because—even in an abbreviated session—all the boxes were ticked. 

Swimming, check, including back-floating and board-diving. 

Beer-drinking, yep, an entire twelve-pack consumed and shared, quickly enough to stay fairly cold even on one of the warmest nights of summer so far. 

An unnecessarily steep, although as-the-crow-flies direct route to the water: that, too, providing an unusual opportunity to join the throng as opposed to simply thronging ourselves. 

And yes, a stealthy pelaton through the land of milk and honey, although its ingress would probably be characterized more as the domain of nettles and hobo-poop.

So…short, but sweet and fully satisfying in the end (not to mention the beginning and middle, as well), proving that it’s not necessary to stay up so late and overindulge so much that you’re hurling into a garbage can at work the next day.  Of course, there’s a time and place for that, as well, but this time, and those places were sufficient, illustrating, as intended by this somewhat truncated effort, too, that less can sometimes be—if not more—at least plenty for plenty.

Dive

When summer finally arrives in the Pacific Northwest, you want to embrace it.

And that means taking every opportunity to go out of your way to go out of your way. 

Efficiency is once again revealed as an overrated virtue and when the ride goes the long way around to a spot you could have arrived at much more quickly by taking the more direct Shaddup Joe-preferred route, you realize that you’re glad to have pedaled through probably the most familiar of all familiar routes, the one upon which your very existence in this plane of existence depends—albeit in a state of mind of mind that you never go this way in.

It counts as success to get in the water before the festivities even start and if you can follow that up with yet another dunk in the drink, then you’re playing with house money as they say. 

That your entry into the wet entails launching yourself tits over teakettle into the dihydrogen monoxide and precludes a broken neck, even for those youngsters who seemed determined to ingnore the paternalistic rules posted prominently on the danger zone, means that even the invisible magicians were on your side, as well.

When you know you’ve got to early-to-rise it in order to create one-of-a-kind enrichment experiences for the progeny of the ambitious, it does cut into the buzz a little bit and you’re apt to depart early, (although less early than would be the case if you didn’t forget to forget your aquatic attire and have to ride back to scoop it up off the ground), but even give the constraints of common sense, you can nevertheless, enjoy an uncommonly good time under the long-lasting light of summer above the 47th parallel north.

Not everything has to be everything and in many cases, even what is is less than it could be; but even so, it’s plenty plentiful, so let’s dive right on in, the water’s fine.

Filthy

spoke card by Claudia

As the Buddha reminds us, life is suffering, and the source of that suffering is desire; we are liberated from suffering by the cessation of desire, which we achieve by following the Eightfold Path of right intention, conduct, livelihood, and so on.

Sure, that’s one way to do it.

But you can also overcome the inescapable pain of all existence by riding bikes in a group of more-or-less formally dressed miscreants, ingesting and quaffing a variety of mood-altering ingestables and quaffables,  and then dancing in a public park to the absolutely magical sounds of Seattle’s primary all women and non-binary street band, the inestimable Filthy Femcorps, whose sonic stylings inspire even the most buttoned-up of high-school guidance counselors and D&D role-playing nerds to get up offa their things and shake some booty or other relevant body parts.

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood,” goes that old self-help chestnut, but more to the point, it’s also clearly never too late to have an awesome high-school prom, courtesy of the aforementioned all women and non-binary street band, led by their tireless musical director and tenor saxophone goddess on the eve of the anniversary of her birth.

I guess one of the downsides of being so damn entertaining is that you end up being the entertainment for your very own parties, but that hardly seemed to put a damper on things and even led to an encore much to the delight of the assembled and somewhat disassembled, as well.

I had a hard time understanding what all the rush was by those pedaling in the front of the pack on the way there and it confused me that the guest of honor was getting dropped, but what the hell, it all worked out in the end and, in fact, was kind of delightful to see the sprinters come rolling into the park just in time for the show to begin.

Suffering overcome, liberation attained, Filthy Femcorps, huzzah!

Jaanipäev

My colleague, who married a woman from Estonia, told me that summer solstice marks the beginning of Jaanipäev, the biggest holiday in the Estonian calendar.  The way he described it, “Everyone flees to the countryside, builds big bonfires, and stays drunk for 2 days.”

Sounds to me like we’re all Estonians.

And while I can’t vouch for the sobriety, or lack thereof, of my fellow cyclists over the next 48 hours or so, I’m pretty sure that the assembled managed to do a fairly good approximation of Jaanipäev revelers for the better part of the shortest night of the year, complete with what Wikipedia tells is the best-known ritual of the evening: the lighting of the bonfire and then jumping over it.

According to Estonian folklore, this is seen as a way of guaranteeing prosperity and avoiding bad luck.  Who knows?  But one thing’s for sure: the bad luck of falling into the fire and burning one’s private parts was at least avoided, so let’s take that as a propitious omen, shall we?

It must be a deep-seated human impulse, something we’re essentially hard-wired by evolution and genetics to do; otherwise, how are we to explain this confluence of behaviors across thousands of miles and hundreds of years?

Well, it could be the staying drunk part, of course.

But still.

The festivities were also enhanced by the last installment of several year-old remains of vintage Farmer Ito brand cannabis which, while admittedly, just as dry and stale as the eponymous cultivator’s sense of “humor,” still did the trick when consumed in mass quantities and enhanced by gluten-free space cookies courtesy of L. Choi Bakeries, Inc.

There’s no doubt these are trying times; as I’m sure your average Estonian knows, we live in a world where the Balkans are Balkanized, where Finland, is Finlanized, and where people still get Shanghaied by forces far beyond their control.

Fortunately, we can still come together and get Estoniaed out of our minds.