Amblin'

It’s fun to note how much fun you’re able to have in a little over 24 hours.

From the very first moment when you arrive and can begin your day by amblin’, not ramblin’, around the vast marketplace stocked with all sorts of delicacies from Asia and around the world to enjoy breakfast sushi and inari, along with friendly kibbitzing and joshing, the enjoyment begins.

And it’s always amusing to be the first vehicles on the ferry, two wheels good, four wheels bad—or at least slower.

Surreptitious spirits and canned beer on the float over to the the Peninsula always bring a smile to one’s face, especially when they afford one the opportunity to remotely toast an onboard wedding celebration.  Yay.

Sure, the harrowing several miles along the glass and nail strewn freeway aren’t so great, but when they’re almost immediately followed up by a cold tallboy at the somewhat unfortunately named bar and restaurant, all is good.

Bike touring is fun, in spite of the heat and cars, at least when you’re ramblin’, not amblin’, on old forest highways with a state park as your initial destination.  It’s so nice there, you could take a nap; only the promise of more fun on two wheels impels you onward.

And here’s what really a gas: swapping your human-powered vehicle for a gas-powered one just before the hills become really steep and exposed.  And what’s fun about that is it means you’ve got plenty of energy in camp for more amblin’, not ramblin’.

Thanks to Mother Nature for producing the mycological molecules that turn even the silliest of phrases even sillier: “Ketchup or die!”  “I teach 4th graders!” “Bungie cords hate bikes!”

And doing a little bit of Ian Anderson for the birthday boy: is that fun, or what?  Yes!

Moreover, in the morning, it’s still not over.  Beer, bud, and bacon for breakfast.

Country music and Exile on Main Street in the packed pickup home.

Fun!

Blithe

 

Percy Bushe Shelly’s inspired poem, To a Skylark begins with the line, “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!” which inspired the title of Noel Coward’s inspired dark comedy, Blithe Spirit, thus demonstrating that inspiration often comes from inspiration, especially when that inspiration is inspired by time spent among the inspirational glories of nature.

The internet tells us that the poet and his wife, Mary Shelly, (author of Frankenstein; or A Modern Prometheus, and daughter of the early feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft) were wandering among the lanes in Livorno, Italy one summer evening and heard the caroling of a skylark.  

The poet puts it like this:

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 

 

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run;

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

Pretty good stuff to be sure, but one has to wonder how much more lyrical old Percy would have been able to be had he and the missus had bicycles to ride that night, especially were they pedaling not around the hedges and bowers of a port city in Tuscany, but rather, through the industrial core of a port city in the Pacific Northwest with that warm spring light lingering late and making shadows grow long.

In that event, he might have waxed rhapsodic over the way the sun sank to a perfect point behind the Olympic peninsula with the skyline of Seattle in the foreground and he could have directed his apostrophe not to a skylark, but perhaps towards a seagull, whose crepuscular cries may not inspire such pathos as those of the genus Alauda, but which nevertheless offer a perfect accompaniment to the view.

Bring it home, Perce:

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Instead

Surely, there are better things to do.

You could devote your evening to the cause of global human rights, taking whatever means necessary to curtail widespread human rights violations under El Salvador’s “State of Emergency,” or in Ukraine, where Russian forces tortured detainees in the city of Izium, or in India, where police killings are routine and endemic.

Or you could make music.  Or art.  Or write the next Great American Novel—or at least Pretty Good Local ‘Zine.  Or whip up a delicious four course meal using only items procured by bicycle from your local Farmers’ Market.

You could watch a hockey game.  Or some basketball or baseball.  Or surf the Worldwide Web for videos of cats.

You could even just take a nap—with or without having had a few drinks beforehand.

Instead, however, you ride your bike to the usual Thursday night meeting place, quaff a lukewarm brew while noting the musical choices of the resident hobo DJ, and then spin across the manmade industrial waterway to climb up a parking garage whose football-field sized roof affords a stunning view of one slice of our fair city just as the sun sets behind purple, fuchsia, and pink cirrus clouds.

You then skim the University and public transportation’s space-age infrastructure to meander on two wheels along the usual meandering path before provisioning up at the generous local retailer.

And then, along the taken-for-granted trail through the woods to the giant park where frogs sing your welcome and all are reunited for a short wiggle along the water to the secret glade.  And that’s where you congregate for the next little while or longer, enjoying the unseasonably warm evening in what’s shaping up to be a remarkably remarkable spring, at least in the weather department.

So, you could have made the world a better place.  Or cooked a spectacular feast.  Or seen your favorite team lose or prevail as the case may be.

But this instead.

Stimulation

Perhaps death really is an illusion and our dearly departed loved ones are hanging out watching us from behind that gossamer veil separating two worlds, one for the living and one beyond.  

If so, then they, too, would surely enjoy the view from the highest and most classic of our fair city’s concrete temples devoted to the storing of automobiles, with the added bonus, for them, of not having to decide whether to experience the full 360 degrees out in the elements or a more constrained horizon behind the protecting parapet.

Such trade-offs mean nothing to an ectoplasm through whom the spring bluster blusters freely.

Sometimes, it makes sense to only plan ahead one step at a time; you can trust your future self to come up with something it will prefer when the opportunity presents itself.

Our hopes and dreams make reality real; if we love hard enough, anything may be possible, even reanimation; revitalization is certain even without the metaphysical baggage.

The lowering of the Lake, just over a century ago means that here in the 21st century, we are walking on water our hundred year-old selves would have had to; and if that’s not miraculous enough, consider, in the fullness of time, that the moon is so, as well.

Some days just overflow with sensations: a familiar cycling route made easier due to the power of anticipation; a classroom where real connections are made; local infrastructure working as designed for crosstown access lickety-split; dreamers dreaming onstage and a little luncheon to boot; the usual usual, as usual; happy hour feeling happy; then up and over all over again.

It’s a good thing that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs.  While this may, as Mom knew best, cause minor hiccups or even upchucks in a literal smorgasbord context, metaphorically, it’s all for the best, as it means that no matter how much you see, you can always see more, just beyond that infernal curtain.

Midway

 

“Half a loaf is better than none.” (Anonymous)

“Well begun is half done.” (Ancient Greek Philosopher, Aristotle)

“It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.” (Seahawks Football Coach, Pete Carroll)

“If you’re having half as much fun as me, then I’m having twice as much fun as you!” (Comedian, Ralf Leland)

So, you see, it doesn’t matter—at least half the time—to miss the start, as long as you can find your way to their middle, even if doing so requires you to ride a route that you would never have ridden if you weren’t on the lookout for the assembled.

But: 

“All’s well that ends well.”  (Poet and playwright, William Shakespeare)

It wasn’t the longest of rides (for me), nor was it the warmest of fires, but it was still plenty of everything, with some water, some fire, some air, some earth, and even some ether: all five elements coming together to be plenty enough, even halfway.

Just like this.

Slow

Thanks to the gusting southerly wind—and the traffic lights—it was the slowest descent of Second Avenue ever.

But that’s okay.

Because that same gusting wind—although not the traffic lights—was responsible for stoking the smallish campfire to a forge-like hotness, and gave rise, ultimately, to the always hoped-for, but only occasionally-realized, fountain of boiling accelerant: always a marker (though neither a necessary nor sufficient condition) of a swell night out on two wheels.

It was the last nighttime meet-up of the year, thanks to the imminent arrival of this weekend’s springing forward, which means for the next six months or so, it will be just a little trickier to find a place to relieve oneself early on during the ride, which might be TMI, as it’s called, but is, nevertheless, an observable fact of life in the Great Northwest.

Just as the observation that—at least in my experience—it had been months, if not more than a year, since Ye Olde Wading Poole Firepit by the shores of Lake Washington, just south of Thee Poison Oak Farme had been visited, led to the observable fact that there was probably no better place to be at the time, if I do say so myself, and I do.

So many possibilities present themselves at the outset of an evening and you’ve got to shuffle through the options until one escapes the deck and presents itself.  

It can be less-than-exotic to find oneself, therefore, on a well-trodden (that is, pedaled) route, but there’s something to be said for rolling down streets that are familiar to one’s daily responsibilities in a different frame of mind.  

With the right perspective—and the proper dosage of various varieties—the usual can seem quite unusual, and unusually attractive as a result.

And, at the end of the evening, if there you are, slowly grinding up a street you grind up several times a workweek, you're going plenty fast enough.

Karma

In an Chapter 7 of his introduction to Vedic philosophy entitled An Idealist View of Life, Sarvepali Radhakrishnan, the esteemed philosopher and former president of India, argues that the doctrine of karma is compatible with human freedom because, although karma links us to our past lives, we still have the creative power to shape our life though the choices we make.  

He uses the analogy of a hand in the card game Bridge to elucidate this. We are dealt a hand at birth (due to our karmic debt from previous incarnations), but we can play our hand as we wish (we have free choice to do so, within the constraints of the cards we’ve been dealt).  

Radhakrishan concludes by observing that belief in karma makes us more compassionate toward the less fortunate.  We should not feel superior to those who are faring badly because we share the human frailty that, through karma, led to their misfortune.

All of which is to say that anyone who has the opportunity to ride their bike around Seattle on a reasonably warm and mostly dry evening in February, and end up at the shore of our fair city’s great lake to enjoy a cheery little bonfire, with beer, conviviality, and friendship, ought to be especially compassionate and deeply grateful to their previous incarnation, who must have been a pretty good person to have afforded them the opportunity, in this incarnation, to be able to do so.

Whoever I might have been last time around was likely a way better human than I am this time around; otherwise, how could I have ended up so lucky?  Makes me aspire to be as kind and compassionate as I can so that whoever I am next time around gets similar opportunities for two-wheeled shenanigans; one can only do their best and hope.

And who can say, anyway, whether reincarnation really happens.  I’ll just enjoy and appreciate this hand I’ve been dealt, and ride on.

Exactly

Back during the years of the Obama Presidency, when I was a wee lad in my fifties, it was rare that a Point83 ride wouldn’t have me finally arriving home around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.  

There were many miles to pedal and several watering holes to get to before the night was over; sometimes not one, but two outdoor fires, with often a final one after the bars closed at the beloved Fremont Firepit where people would pass out or nap for a bit before their eventual wobble home.

Ah, youth!

These days, by contrast, I’m satisfied with an evening that hits all the high points and checks the requisite boxes: some sort of street-level nonsense at Westlake, a ramble along the waterfront, a new parking garage in which to quaff a (apparently stolen) cold one, a massed-up bridge crossing, a very quick, but highly-enjoyable conflagration, and finally, a single bar, for just a little bit.

Back home in bed well before midnight, but it’s plenty.

And these days, who needs a full 327 words?  About half that is fine.

Good

One of the wisest aphorisms, if you ask me, is “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

All too often, this admonition is forgotten, and you refrain from actions that would be just fine—or even better—simply because they don’t stack up to some preconceived notion about what ought to be.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that you don’t have standards; it’s just means you don’t use those standards as a cudgel to crush opportunities that present themselves, warts and all.

Case in point: 

Sure, the Platonic Form of post-holiday combustion events involves something like a hundred fir trees stoked up into a massive conflagration sending sparks and embers several furlongs into the sky.  

And yes, in the proverbial perfect world, every single rider would arrive at Westlake with some flammable remnant of the Christmas season strapped to their body or bike.  

Moreover, the idealized version of the evening wouldn’t include even a minor crash occasioned by the embrace of pine needles rolling down the avenue.

However.

The real world isn’t like that.  If life gives you lemons, as the great Beyoncé reminds us, make lemonade.

Or, in this case, a perfectly imperfect bonfire.

There was that ten-minute span, when the first few of the apparently sparse offerings were giving up their carbon, while the rain came down in sheets, making you feel like the idiot your mom always said was too dumb to come in out of the weather, and it seemed like that was all there was, night over.  

At that point, you might have concluded that since this wasn’t all that, then it wasn’t anything, and gone home, blinded by your vision of what should be to the wonder of the actual.

But in doing so, you would have missed at least a dozen more contributions to the communal pyre and a full moon so bright it made double moonbows in what became a perfectly dry night sky.

Perfect.

Liminal

That state between states, the zone of neither one nor the other, and both: Not quite raining, not quite dry, asleep and awake all at once.

We were there, then we weren’t, and then we were all over again. And again.

Christmas comes but once a year, but the spirit lasts for decades.  If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results, then you’d have to be crazy not to enjoy the predictable thrill occasioned by this routine application of usual suspects, favorite intoxicants, and preferred mode of transport during the holiday season.

And how’s this for a holiday miracle: no broken bones and just one mechanical!  

Santa had time for everyone and melting clocks were real.  The giant hat and boots provided some shelter but hardly was it needed; actual rain booties stayed in the bag all evening.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving and let the games begin: cigars were smoked, bottles emptied, and legs got wrestled.  

And presents, real presents, were present.

Could it be that a baby in a manger was the start of this all?  Or maybe just the animal experience of coming to feel that the light is on its way back?  In any event, the event’s its own story, the greatest one ever told, so they say.

Which is why switchbacks through the woods, and thrilling descents via powerlines, and shelter beneath bombers is a thing.  

It sure takes a lot of space to build airplanes; thankfully, the humble human-powered bicycle navigates those distances with ease, just as Santa’s sleigh goes ‘round the world in an instant.  

Reindeer may, as the song says, really know how to fly; there’s no doubt, however, that two-wheelers, on this December eve, did so, as well.

Naughty or nice and everything else, see how this works? As long as you don’t fall asleep you need never wake up.  And so the holiday(zaster) dream forever rides on.

Salt

According to the BBC, (and some dude I forget who mansplained it to me years ago), smell is the most primitive sense.  Such experts assert that olfaction has its “origins in the rudimentary senses for chemicals in air and water—senses that even bacteria have. Before sight or hearing, before even touch, creatures evolved to respond to chemicals around them.”

So, it makes sense to “follow your nose” when pondering an evening’s destination; you can count on the sense of smell to point you towards the most basic and fundamental sort of human experiences.

Similarly, since olfaction probably evolved somewhere in the vicinity of when those early slime molds began oozing from the primordial soup and making their way upright on land, heading for the water’s edge goes right along with the devolutionary theme.

Moreover, wasn’t the so-called “New World” in which we reside kinda sorta “discovered” by intrepid adventurers on the lookout for a more efficient route to new scents and flavors, especially, probably, that most universal of sensory enhancers, the one that comes from the sea, just like us?

All of which is to say that a simple aspiration to “smell salt” can thus lead to a nearly perfect night out on two wheels, one that includes a seaside destination, a chill plenty chilly enough to complement huddling around a fire sufficiently hot to melt aluminum, reminiscences about reminiscences; eventually, the sound of waves (although ripples might be more accurate), and best of all, no hike-a-bike.

In fact, the only snag in an otherwise ideal fabric of the night was a hasty departure of the assembled which led to a more solitary return home than anticipated, but, of course, you’re never alone when you’re with your bicycle, so ultimately, no harm, no foul.

So many things in the world these days just stink: war, climate change, national politics, unemployment, Twitter, etc., etc., by contrast, cycling retains its primitively sweet fragrance—smells like bike spirit! 

Spooky

The scariest part of the evening for me was feeling that I’d missed out on the opportunity to costume, so I was really glad when Zach enabled me to dress up as a peckerhead.

After that, riding straight up the hill was no problem, even though the electric bike offered no assistance.

Three bananas did not split from beginning to middle, but did, for the most part, inspire smiles from the start to the finish.

The thing about mushrooms is that languid feeling. I’m already asleep, but still mostly awake.

Kindness is not always received as such; with some regularity, what’s irregular is regular.

And then we got to where else could we?

Wanna talk scary?  Yep.

I very much appreciate how ideas are overcome by experience.

And, get this: a pouch makes possible whatever it makes possible.

More importantly, here we are, in the middle of the middle, and everyone is everyone at the same time.

What is a ghost other than the lived experience of someone who’s no longer with us?  What’s weird is that they’re there whether you imagine they are or not.

I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the world, from almost the start.  Remember how windy it was?

Sometime, the less you care about things, the more likely they are to turn out okay.  For example, here’s an idea, while, at the same time, everything you could want is already there.  (Except Halloween costumes, given that, apparently, from the standpoint of Capitalsm, it’s already Christmaas.)

And even more: you are surprised by the surprising.  You are compelled by the compelling. You carry on out of love and/or habit or both.

Most, if it not all of us, will notice that this is not all of that.  And, in doing so, will.

Words are just one more instance of the instantaneous experience of the instantaneous.  Notice how you’re still riding a bike all the time you’re still riding a bike. 

Smoke

 

It's here, all right, you just can't see it through the haze.

Pointless

Of course life is pointless.  Everyone knows that.

We live in an accidental Universe, devoid of purpose, without rhyme, reason, or design.

The human condition is absurd.  Condemned to be free, we flail about, fruitlessly trying to make our lives meaningful in what is an essentially meaningless existence.  

Every instant, like Sisyphus, we roll the rock upwards, only to have it roll back down again, our feeble aspirations squashed like a bug, our lives rendered empty by the emptiness of it all.

We’re born, we live, we die, alone at the beginning and at the end, our so-called “accomplishments” as futile as the whole human experience, ultimately nothing more than a random collection of atoms randomly arranging themselves amidst the vastness of time and space.

Party on.

What else are you going to do, really?

May as well ingest mind-altering chocolates and tell shaggy dog story jokes that are so unfunny that you cackle with laughter at the delightful stupidity of it all.

May as well climb hills on your bike you don’t need to and marvel at the vista while drinking whiskey from a paper bag.

May as well go up to go down and down to go up and circle around underneath to arrive on top of the scary bridge that isn’t so scary at all when you’re in a pack of cyclists cycling behind balloons whose reason for being only emerges in context of the moment.

May as well visit a closed zoo and realize, naturally, that the strangest animals of all are on the outside looking in.

May as well take over a bar and cram yourself into one tiny table and then another, interior or exterior, what’s the difference?

May as well order another pitcher of beer and another and one more after that.  And oh, may as well finish that mind-altering chocolate.

May as well make plans for more but decide to head home since nothing matters anyway.

May as well.

Cowboys

A pair of boots that don’t match seems an apt metaphor.

And in the taste test of Japanese beers, Kirin is Rainier; Sapporo is Bud.

The moon was swell, too.

That is all.

Lucky

It’s crazy to think about: 

You could be in Ft. Myers, Florida, half-drowned and digging out of your hurricane-ruined home, but instead, you’re standing atop a deserted parking garage, seven stories up, drinking beer and marveling at the crescent moon hanging over a baseball stadium where fireworks have just been set off to celebrate a home run by the home team on the verge of their first playoff appearance in more than two decades.

Or, you could be in Ukraine, without water or power amidst the rubble, defending your homeland from military aggression by one of the world’s nuclear powers, but instead, you’re hanging out at a secret gazebo in an arboretum, surrounded by native and exotic trees and shrubbery, (also drinking beer) and contemplating life, death, and everything in between including rock stars with a small but enthusiastic group of cyclists, some of whom have made the classic blunder of carrying their bikes down the steps, but that’s about the worst of it, to tell the truth.

Or, you could be in Wittenoom, Australia, a town so polluted by asbestos that it became a carcinogenic time bomb as mining waste products known as tailings were brought there, paved into roads and scattered in playgrounds to suppress dust, but instead, you’re bombing down a hill free of cars, thrilling to the speed of descent and laughing maniacally just for fun.

So many places in the world touched by so much tragedy and loss, and yet here you are, on a Thursday night in the upper left hand corner of the American map having nothing to really complain about, but rather, nearly everything to celebrate: cycling, fellowship, gentle intoxication, the unseasonably warm and dry weather, the simple, unparalleled joy of pedaling through the woods to someplace wonderful, casual banter and the occasional joke at someone else’s expense, and all of this for free (more or less).

It's enough to make a person cry.  Or laugh maniacally.  

Or with luck, both.

Enthused

I think Bertrand Russell put it best.

Take it away, Bertie: 

“Prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life.  The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence.  In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence has destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations.  The Bacchic ritual produced what was called ‘enthusiasm,’ which means, etymologically, having the god enter into the worshipper, who believes that he became one with the god.  Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion.  Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous.”

Although William James was no slouch, either.

On you, Billy:

“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.”

Almost like they were there.

Infrastructure

Maybe not quite there, but you can see it from here: biking the entire way from Pike Market to South Park on cycling infrastructure.  

It isn't all newly-paved and striped separated bike lanes, but can you imagine how awful it would be to ride on West Marginal Way at night, with cars literally racing by, without the Duwamish Trail to take instead?  It may not be all that scenic from start to finish, but it sure beats getting creamed by some dude in his souped-up sporty car.

Old skool Thursday: First and only stop an old favorite watering hole, now with outdoor Parisian café motif rather than Airstream hotbox.  Plenty fine, though, including an impressive sandwich and ice cold tallboys.

Got a little confused on the parking garage egress at the beginning; thanks to those with a greater willingness to descend for finding the way out.

No more hot sunset rides until March; Civil Twilight and arm warmers does the trick for now.

The low bridge opened exactly on cue; aspirations to explore its bigger brother were set aside, probably for the best; no swims were passed up, at least.

What can you say that hasn’t been said?  In all likelihood, not much.  Traditional admonitions are nevertheless worth repeating: lock to locks, not bikes; don’t eat the whole cookie (eat two!); bring a sweater, and don’t consume anything bigger than your head.  Repeating does not always mean following.  Obviously.

I would offer this, however: an intoxicating evening sure makes the ride up through the International District and Jackson Street much easier.  May just be a matter of short-term memory loss, but that works.  

There’s an old philosophical thought experiment that asks whether you’d rather pay a thousand dollars for a major surgery with traditional General anesthesia or five dollars for the same surgery without anesthesia, but with a drug that makes you completely forget the experience.

If you can’t remember, it never happened.  Or did it?

Last

If it were my final Point83 ride (not in forever, but for a while, and not including, of course, signature events like the Christmas Disaster, Ben Country, and the Professor Dave race, which surely warrants a three and a half-hour drive across the entire state of Washington to commemorate the start of spring, just sayin’), I would want to ride to Carkeek Park.

After all, no spot more reliably offers—and has historically offered—the opportunity to savor so many of the peculiar delights one reliably (and historically) savors on a Thursday night out on two wheels, including a route there that’s just a little too long, with a bridge across a body of water shimmering in the late summer sunset, some unnecessary climbing but which results in a thrilling bomb downhill, a twisty, turning, dark descent into an old-growth Pacific Northwest forest, and a final destination of a classic firepit replete with freight trains passing by for rock-tossing and LOLs.

I would want, as well, to take a spin around Ye Olde Seattle Center Ghettodrome, because, really, what’s more Seattle than that, unless it’s Dick’s Hamburgers, which would show up, too, in a bag in a mouth, according to that old joke.

I’d also take the opportunity incite the good-natured ire of an old friend with an imperfectly executed practical joke resulting in some sticky residue to remember me by and ultimately, absolution all around.

Plus, I wouldn’t mind the chance to provide some care and solace to a fallen comrade, especially if they weren’t injured too badly after all, whew!

And, as long as I’m dreaming here, I’d also want there to be a visually (if not astronomically) full moon rising up so bright that it would make a subtle rainbow in the pocket of clouds it peeks through.

Finally, when the fire burnt down, I’d do the classic “Irish Goodbye”, so even though I was gone, it would always be like I’d never left.

Loop

No doubt there are equally marvelous cities in which to ride a bicycle: 

• Amsterdam, surely, where you could pedal on separated bike lanes all the way to Germany, probably
  
  
• Portland, of course, where you could gather under a freeway overpass with five hundred or so of your closest friends for some sort of post-apocalyptic cycling dance party with fire dancers and gladiators
  
  
• Perhaps even the new mecca of Spokanistan, where it seems like all your dearest friends will be living and riding bicycles within a decade
  

but it’s hard to imagine a better place to be out on two wheels than our fair city of Seattle, which affords you the opportunity to:

• Pedal over grand span at sunset with water and mountains on both sides
  
  
• Continue—on a striped bike lane—through the kind of “geography of nowhere” which characterizes so much of suburban America
  
  
• Meander along a converted rail-to-trail path alongside a cemetery for maximum peace and quiet
  
  
• End up at a spring-fed lake on a dead end near some lucky folks’ backyards for immersion into the smoothest water in town
  
  
• Then return, to more or less where you started almost twenty miles previously, via an almost continuous downhill through much leafier and less car-centric streets
  
  
• So, you can officially commemorate the end of the pandemic by enjoying what has long seemed to be the final nail in its coffin: the sharing of a common microphone among strangers for belting out favorite tunes to the amusement—and, in some cases, if truth be told, amazement of those in attendance
  
  
• Before heading out on nearly-empty city streets to home and hearth, a greeting from the dog, and a soft bed in which to repose, your head filled with glorious images of the waxiemoon late summer evening out on two wheels to color your bicycling dreams all night long.

Take that, Amsterdam! 

 In your face, Portland!  

Yo, Spokanistan, top this!

Home sweet Seattle home, always sweeter by bike.

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.

Happy

One of the objections to Utilitarianism that John Stuart Mill takes on in the titular 1861 essay, “Utilitarianism” is the worry that happiness is not possible, “for if no happiness is to be had at all by human beings, the attainment of it cannot be the end of morality, or of any rational conduct.”

But as he points out, this is to misconstrue the nature of happiness.  “If by happiness be meant a continuity of highly pleasurable excitement, it is evident enough that this is impossible. A state of exalted pleasure lasts only moments, or in some cases, and with some intermissions, hours or days, and is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame.”

So, yeah, if we’re talking pure bliss all the time, then, sure, happiness is beyond the reach of human beings.  

But, as he goes on to explain, once we properly conceive of happiness, then we can see that it is an attainable, and thus, worthy, goal.  

In one of my favorite all-time philosophical quotes, he proposes that happiness is “not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.”

Is that a perfect description of what a summer evening bike ride is like or what?

Moments of rapture, check: the instant you dive off the dock into the smooth warmth of Lake Washington’s watery embrace.

Few and transitory pains, check: climbing up the switchbacks through the trees, already done!

Many and various pleasures, check: the actives ones certainly predominating over the passive.

Not expecting more from life than it is capable of bestowing, check: on such a night, life so easily exceeds all expectations that one is incapable of expecting more than it already bestows.

Incline

According to the internet’s #RideShimano magazine, the Tour de France’s infamous Alpe d’Huez ascent is “characterized by 21 hairpins which unusually count downwards, making each turn a recognizable achievement of pain and glory. It is a 13.2 km climb, ascending 1104 m with an average gradient of 7.9% and a max gradient of 14%.”  

And yet those superb professional cyclists in the Tour, including 22 year-old Thomas Pidcock, who won the mountain stage this year, routinely make the ascent in under three quarters of an hour!

It would take your average advanced recreational cyclist more than twice as long and I’m sure yours truly would need a minimum of two hours not including all the time necessary time for stopping to hold what we used to call a “safety meeting’ by the side of the road for inspiration and analgesic on the way to the top.

But who wouldn’t do it if they had the chance, right?

Because hills are what cycling is all about.

Just ask anyone who goes from riding their bike in a place like Seattle, which affords one plenty of ups and downs, to somewhere like Chicago, where all you ever need to pedal harder against is the wind, and they’ll tell you how much they miss all the bruising ascents and thrilling descents.

Grinding uphill may be a grind, but it’s honest work, and flying downhill really is flying.  

Give me a seven per-cent grade over a twenty mile per hour headwind any day.  At least there’s an end in sight.

So, even if your climb is just several stories up a city parking garage or your descent is merely one steep block down to a lakeside pocket park in one of the tonier sections of town, that’s plenty good enough.

Gravity is our friend, whether we’re ascending or descending.

Whatever goes up, must come down, except our spirts, which keep rising with every single turn of the wheel on our bikes.

Swing

To transcend the endless cycle of death and rebirth, what the Buddhists call samsara, you’ve got to eliminate desire.  

Easier said than done, and there’s also that tricky paradox of how go about eliminating the desire to eliminate desire.

But the toughest nut to crack, if you ask me, is that it’s not just a matter of addressing the desire to avoid pain; what’s really difficult is overcoming the desire to grasp for what feels good.  

Equanimity means that we’re equally unmotivated by both pain and pleasure.  We’re able to sit in the middle of either and simply observe without running away from the former or running towards the latter.

This is why I’ll probably be back around for another go at it after this lifetime.  In spite of all my efforts (and effortless non-efforts), I just can’t quit all the delights that are afforded to us in our human forms right here on planet Earth.

Chief among these are those made available via the bicycle, which include, but are not limited to seeing your shadow animate on the railing of a freeway bridge as you soar over eight lanes of traffic on a perfect summer evening in the upper left-hand corner of the continent.

Or arriving, thanks to the kindness of compatriots with better navigating skills, at a lakeside grotto that not only makes possible the summertime holy grail of water and fire combined, but also affords ingress into submersion via a rope swing, just like in the movie version of life.

Or having more watermelon than can be consumed, even though it’s presented for consumption in multiple ways, including as a globe for individual teeth-sinking in one’s own favored longitude and latitude.

All these (and more) are why I’m pretty sure that at the instant of death or soon after, when faced with the opportunity to merge into the Oneness of All, I just don’t see how be able to pass up one more ride.

Tech

Consider humanity’s greatest inventions: language, the written word, fire, germ theory, the scientific method, music, art, the wheel, agriculture, and rounding out the top ten, of course, the bicycle.

You’d have to get down to around number fifty or so, in the realm of innovations like the waterbed or kimchi before the cellular phone showed up—and way farther down the list until you’d arrive at software applications for said phone.

(In fact, phone-based social media applications would probably show up in the top ten of humanity’s worst inventions, right around there with the internal combustion engine and nuclear bombs.)

Nevertheless, there is a time and place for everything (except, of course, the aforementioned nuclear bombs), and so I’m not going to complain (any more than I have already) about a piece of software that potentially keeps a person from being ditched by the group before the dangerous egress to one of Seattle’s most dangerous egresses (albeit one affording an absolutely stellar view of our own nearest star’s setting to the west on a lovely and clear late spring evening, albeit one scored a mere 4 out 10 by the New Hampshire judge).

If my little round face, crossing the front of another person’s little plastic rectangle means that I’m better able to catch up to the favored group of itinerant miscreants, then so be it; I’ll accept that.

But let us not come to depend on such technological mediations at the cost of our innate abilities to connect using only what nature has given us: eyes, ears, loud mouths, olfactory clues, (especially for those riding behind a person puffing away at a cannabis cigarette), and even those extra-sensory perceptions that somehow allow a person to show up later in the evening just by following their intuitions—(and well, sometimes by making a phone call or checking the so-called twitters.)

Technology or not, as long as we keep pedaling, we’ll meet up where we’re going, wherever that is.

Nature

Tom was holding forth about some podcast or something where they talked about how birds can regulate the incubation of their eggs to time their hatching to correspond with the instant when some caterpillars emerge; that’s pretty cool, for sure.

But it’s not really the birds doing it, is it?  

It’s really nature, in all its multitudes, doing its natural thing so that everything keeps wiggling, as Alan Watts put it.  

“Nature is wiggly.” He wrote.  “Everything wiggles: the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracts of streams. It all wiggles.” 

Good old Dr. Bronner put it right there on the side of his soap bottles: “All is one.”  

And even though Bertrand Russell, in his famous essay, pointed out that that the logic of mysticism which underlies this claim about the unity of all things is faulty, it’s hard (and maybe impossible, which is why, for the most part, the logic is faulty) to deny that everything is everything, (right down to the obvious scientific point that all the atoms in the entire Universe—from those making up stellar nebulae to those comprising peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or little Covid-safe mini-joints, “P.D. bidis” as they will be called if and when I get to follow in the steps of Snoop Dog or Cheech Marin and have my own Professor Dave-endorsed cannabis line) is to overlook what is probably the most essential truth of all, right?

So, yes, each of us individually pedals their own pedals and climbs to the top of another new parking garage, this one offering a view of some others one might hope to scale some other day, but at the same time, and more essentially, it’s the Universe pedaling all of us as one.

We’re just the wiggles wiggling all together as the Universe wiggles itself; it’s all the same thing hatching itself at the only always perfect time.

Sweet

A one-log fire is still a fire (even if the “log” doesn’t come from a tree, but from a factory where sawdust is pressed into log-shaped “logs” and wrapped in waxed paper).

If you douse it in enough lighter fluid while it’s already burning, so that the somewhat vile-smelling flames rise high enough to light up your impromptu firepit, you can manage to eke out a little warmth and enjoy the experience, slightly augmented, elemental to the human experience, of congregating around a heat source at night to share observations and stories.

A short bicycle ride is still a bicycle ride (even if the “ride” includes standing atop a newly off-limits parking garage for just as long as it takes for the rather accommodating security guard to shoo you away for not even one in your midst being an employee of the organization for which said garage is meant.)

If you navigate the upward chicane, slip through the open gate, and spin around to the top, the city opens wide; it just takes a little imagination, trust in wayfaring, and willingness to put fun in front of perfect behavior.

And a relatively small group for such a mild and colorful spring evening is still a group, (even if the “group” grows smaller pretty quickly and disbands fairly early; like an argument requiring only two statements, one of which is the conclusion, the other being a premise that purports to support said conclusion, it doesn’t take much to fulfill the criteria and thus imply, as does an argument, a logical (or, in this case somewhat illogical) relationship between what is being argued for and the alleged evidence for it.

All of which is to say, (and which has likely been said before), that having fun requires a bit of effort, but in fact, and where two-wheelers are involved, not really that much.  A one-log fire, a short bicycle ride, a small group and there you have it: sweet.