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.