Extant

The Buddha tells us that all is change, nothing is permanent, everything arises and passes away.  The ancient sages of the Vedanta say that ultimate reality is eternal, unchanging, non-dual; pure Being, pure Consciousness, pure Bliss, what appears as ephemeral isn’t really what’s real.

Amazingly, these two contrasting perspectives find perfect agreement when you’re able to rally some three dozen bike-riding brethren (and one two-wheeling sistren) to pedal around town on a lovely early spring afternoon visiting places that no longer are while simultaneously tapping into a feeling of love and connection that seems to have always existed even before we were here and will still carry on well after we’re gone.

The longer you stay on the planet, the shorter it feels like you’ve been.  What first happened some twenty years ago occurs all over once more.  Yesterday’s tomorrow; today still remains; right here is right there, and time disappears.

The dash between birth and death on our tombstone that represents one’s life has a beginning and an end, but if you can keep staring straight on you’ll see it extending forever and what this makes possible is an endless succession of the present moment, and even though you won’t be around to experience it by the time youngsters are as old as you are currently, they’ll pass the very same instant into that endless now which is all there ever was and shall be, as well.

When you have a chance to live your life with the feeling “I could die happy a happy person right now,” you should take it, and when you do you must never forget to remember how incredibly lucky you are to have the chance to do so, especially on two wheels.

A good way to prepare for non-existence is to notice that it’s all too good to be true.  No one can possibly be this blessed, so it can’t possibly be real. 

It never was, and so always will be.

Fortuitous

We should all take a moment to recognize how lucky we are: 

We are fucking lucky!

Because I will warrant that there are very few people in the world who, like us, get to engage in a somewhat questionably legal celebration of the new year (and commemoration of many old ones) that involves a bonfire of countless Christmas trees with flames soaring fathoms up into the night sky which is quickly descended upon by at least a dozen (if not scores) of fully-armed police officers and not only does not a single person—even those who have problems with authority and are apt to voice those problems loudly—gets arrested or worse, but eventually, all of those in attendance along with the men in blue, end up hanging around said bonfire for a good long time, enjoying the lovely, dry winter evening, warmed by the glowing coals and hearty fellowship of the night.

Talk about lucky.

In a world where there is so much strife and conflict and sadness, it’s something of a miracle that in our little corner of the globe that so-called authorities can co-exist so peacefully with self-styled miscreants and everyone gets to go home happily and in more or less one piece.

If that’s not an occasion for the Happy Dance,

I don’t know what is.

Having fun these days is, I think, a vital form of resistance and when it can be had in a manner that pushes against the boundaries of what’s permitted while those charged with enforcing those boundaries can also be flexible, humane, and pretty chill when you get right down to it, then we should celebrate the celebration of that resistance even more.

We’re a couple decades now into this annual conflagration and one of the cops even told me they didn’t want to have to put a stop to such a fine long-standing tradition; talk about abundant good fortune: 

Lucky me.  

Lucky you.  

Lucky all of us!

Bingo

Perhaps we are in the twilight of our shared experience, both locally and globally: as our own days are numbered, so it might be for all of humanity, but if so, it’s heartwarming to see that there still remain opportunities in which that little spark of something that underlies it all still has the potential to flare up into a happy, dancing flame, even just for an evening.

And what an evening it was!  

A perfectly dry (and unseasonably warm) window between the atmospheric rivers meant that for, perhaps the first time ever, the annual Holidayzaster Christmapocalypse was not an opportunity to test out the effectiveness of one’s rain gear, but rather, a rare December chance to go plastic-free and simply enjoy the wooly embrace of the naked club regalia.

And speaking of naked, it must be noted that in spite of best efforts to the contrary, the flying Dravus neither broke, nor drowned, no burned melting plastic into his nude body in earning the central bingo square for full immersion in the chilly waters of Lake Washington.  Huzzah.

In true disaster form, there were routes taken and abandoned, plans made and quickly revised, a long middle period where colliding options meant that some of Santa’s elves went up whereas others went out and around, but in the end, all the reindeer reconvened at the somewhat aspirational destination, despite numerous opportunities for giving up and turning in earlier.

The rolling firepit only made it halfway, but that was plenty, as it fulfilled its role as an attractive nuisance at the pier and ensured that the “shotgun a beer with a tourist” square was achieved.  And “ate the whole cookie” and “fastest joint smoked” added to the delightful confusion, and, no doubt, the misplacing of the bingo card in the end.

Is this the last member of the holiday species before it goes extinct?  One hopes not, but if so, did it go out with a blast? 

Bingo!

Loop

Complain all you want about Seattle’s bicycling infrastructure (and if you’re on Reddit or the Seattle Times “comments” section, you will), one still has to admit it’s pretty incredible that a person can ride their bike about thirty miles from the tip of Lake Washington in Bothell all the way down to the western shores of the Duwamish in South Park on bike paths, routes, or separated-from-traffic trails the whole time.

It's not there won’t be points along the way where speeding cars or distracted 18-wheelers might potentially crush you like a bug, but it’s sure a lot different than 10 or 15 years ago when such points were the norm.  

It used to be, for instance, that getting from the base of the West Seattle Low Bridge at the traditional pee and pot “safety meeting” stop to the start of the Duwamish River trail meant battling SUVs going 20 miles over the 35 mile an hour speed limit and giant garbage trucks rumbling past one’s ears for a good—that is, bad—mile and a half; now, however, there’s a concrete barrier protecting a well marked bikes-only path and to make it even more amazing, getting there from downtown along what used to be a pretty scary scurry along East Marginal Way is now a smooth glide along fresh asphalt completely separated from those fossil-fuel powered behemoths so often out to get you, unintentionally, usually, but sometimes, even intentionally.

Add to this a mid-autumn new moon evening in the Pacific Northwest on which not a single drop of rain was seen to fall, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a lovely night out on two wheels; (well, most of them, anyway; the cannabis cookies and mini-joints along with the martini, beers, and surprisingly delicious pizza recommended highly by all who sampled it contributed to the loveliness, as well.)

All of which is to say that, from this quarter, anyway, no complaints whatsoever, only praise be.

Additionally

32 Reasons Why Bicycling is Better than Sex

And #33: Sex can’t take you across a floating bridge to a beach in the fancy part of town and then all the way around the always larger-than-expected island to a roadhouse bar and then back across that same bridge to another bar that wasn’t quite as ambitious a destination as originally intended but still represents a pretty solid tally of miles and smiles on a perfect late summer evening in the Pacific Northwest.

That is all.

Yes

As we rode past the gate with St. Ignatius’ admonition to “Go forth and set the world on fire,” (ite, inflammate omnia in the original Latin according to the internet), doing our best to embody that very spirit on a somewhat damp evening, Ben mused aloud to me, “Will we be able to just keep getting drunk and stoned and riding bikes forever?” and while literally, that’s impossible, I think that from the standpoint of one’s own lived experience, (within the context of the “forever” that comprises one’s own life and the lives of those in one’s life), the answer is indeed a resounding “Yes!”

I mean, I’ve been doing so since I was a teenager, more than a decade before my interlocutor was even conceived; and if he manages to still be enjoying the enhanced “toke and spoke” when reaching my current age, it’s almost certain I will have re-merged by atoms with the cosmos by then, and if the youngest in attendance—our new friend, Armando—is still doing so when he’s as old as me, it will be the year 2069, meaning that two-wheel shenanigans will have a direct lineage of more than 100 years; again, not “forever” literally, but certainly, close enough for jazz.

Forever is a long time, to be sure, but one can experience it in a mere instant, when that moment has the timeless quality of pure presence, like when you’re descending darkened paths with only your headlight to guide you and there’s no future, no past, only the now of two-wheeled joy connecting you, in that timeless moment, to the teenager, young man, middle-aged person, and old codger who ought to know better—all those selves merging into one.  

If that’s not forever, what is?

As the Buddha reminds us, it’s all impermanent; everything arises and passes away; in the meantime, though, as long as you keep pedaling, the ride goes on and on, forever, right here and now.

Cool

Oh, man, we used to be so fucking cool!

We used to gather a hundred or more of our closest friends and relations in a public park, roll out half a football field length of plastic, wet it with a garden hose, and spend the evening drinking grain-alcohol based party drinks and throwing ourselves down that slippery pathway, pine cones and tree roots be damned!

And we’d grapple in a kiddie swimming pool filled with goo while sporting glowstick jewelry until the cops made us fold up our party and take it to a crowded bar halfway across town where we’d sing karaoke until last call.

We thought nothing of riding all the way down south on one of Seattle’s longest streets to another town just to drink a beer in a pub that’s no longer there.

We would happily cross a floating bridge and head farther and farther east to end up at a real-live bicycle velodrome where we shotgunned beers and raced around until well after midnight.

We’d congregate on bicycles by the dozens and pedal to a fancy city park and cook mountains of waffles al fresco using the publicly-supplied electricity to do so.

We’d carry loads of Christmas trees on bicycles to the edge of the Puget Sound and light them on fire in a conflagration so large that the fire department would be called to extinguish it—and then we’d ride to another park and do it again with the leftovers.

We’d assemble five score or more of us, all dressed in white with red sashes, to gambol in a sylvan glade with people dressed as bulls and matadors.

We’d take a ferry boat and scale a mountain on two-wheelers to eat mushrooms and dance around a fire on a Thursday evening and still be back in time Friday morning for breakfast.

Now, we just ride to a parking garage for sunset viewing and a lake for moonrise swimming.

But that’s cool.

Premier

Maybe “Seattle is dying,” but its bicycle infrastructure sure is vivacious; you can now ride all the way from Belltown down to the waterfront and onto the Elliot Bay Trail (assuming you don’t miss the entrance to it) via a protected bike lane that’s so lovely and well-marked that you feel like you’re just a tiny model of a cyclist in the architectural firm’s 3-D rendering of the project.

And maybe the path itself isn’t meant for speed; you’ve still got to snake around a bit and watch for pedestrians and electric scooters, but it sure beats taking your life into your hands as cars and trucks zoom by you on Alaskan Way underneath a crumbling viaduct.

And maybe it is fairly easy (especially when under the influence of cannabis flower, bubble hash, and sunshine) to miss the slight wiggle to stay on the trail past the ferry building, but who knew there was another pristine bicycle path to the east of the freeway that eventually reconnects farther south just where you need it to.

And maybe the first “Jack” in the traditional “Two Jack Parks” route isn’t all that spectacular of a venue, but when the sun is starting to set and so lays a flaming sheet of gold atop the surface of the Duwamish you can’t help but be a little awestruck at your good fortune to have been able to arrive their on two wheels via such a pleasant pathway.

And maybe the visit to the second of the Two Jacks isn’t unprecedented—in fact, it may be one of the MOST precedented spots—but the view of our fair city from the platform suspended above the Superfund site still never fails to amaze; lots more high-rises and a lit-up Ferris wheel that wasn’t there the first time some twenty years ago; what will it look like in another two decades?

So maybe some Thursday night on two wheels in 2045 we’ll find out.

Oversight

It’s comforting to know that the One-Percenters out there are consistently looking out for the health and welfare of our fair city, especially when it comes to keeping a watchful eye out for fire.

I’ve come to this conclusion based on the observation that the last four times (at least) that the miscreant bicycle gang has been visited by representatives of the Seattle Fire Department, lights flashing and sirens—if not blaring, at least sounding—it’s been because some rich people somewhere have called in the alert.

Whether it’s old money in Queen Anne, slightly newer, but still longstanding bucks in the Denny Blaine neighborhood, mid-century modern cash around Laurelhurst, or more nouveau riches phoning it in from Seattle’s fanciest dining establishment, it’s always the wealthy and entitled who, clutching their pearls, pick up the phone, and ring the tocsin to summon the hook and ladder crew to come out and investigate where the flames are coming from.

In this most recent case, it was a simple box fire that had burned up the box it came in, so I guess that make sense, but at least no one was naked (for very long) in the place where nakedness seems to be the real source of pearl clutching (and phone picking up) of late.

In spite of the alarm, none of it was particularly alarming; the firefighters themselves, were pretty sanguine about the whole thing and yours truly, under the influence of plenty of edible influence found the proceedings entirely delightful, right down to the just-stepped-off-the-pages-of-the-firefighter-calendar fireman who responded first to the call.

Plus, who wasn’t basking in the glow of seeing a fallen comrade restored to vertical, plenty to warm one’s heart even without the extra-judicial flames.

Thanks to the aforementioned influential influences, I kept getting separated from the group on the ride over, but with the beacons alit, I was confident about reuniting; if rich people can confidently tell where we are, so can I.

Wonder

I will continue to wonder why I am so fortunate as to be able to enjoy such an absolutely stunning spring evening and do so on a bicycle, riding slowly enough that the evening lingers long and then end up on the edge of a grand urban lake around a campfire made in the preferred teepee shape, while all over the world, people are suffering beneath the same crescent moon that, from the perspective of this down-below, was an upturned smile in the crepuscular glow, but which must mean something quite different to others in strife.

So, thanks to whatever series of past events have ended up with these events, and remind me never to forget how lucky we are and how fragile is the human body.

Hundreds of such spins, but never before has a tiger in a shopping cart blown past me; see how you never know?

One can pay homage to those who are fortunately still with us even when they are not.  Taking the steep way and the going forth and setting the world on fire through the woods, while classic, is not to be discounted for that; some things are classic because they are.

Notice how easily arise internal complaints about the lack of cycling infrastructure, but then when you’re finally on it, the only shortcomings are user error.

Finding the place that is always a little farther away than you remember requires remembering to remember, but there it is, just as remembered.

Can a single lovely evening make up for a whole week of turmoil?  

Perhaps it’s not a balance like that; after all, the total amount of loveliness experienced and paid attention to in those few hours surely outweighs all the rest of the days put together and makes you wonder all over again why, in this world with so much ugliness, are we showered with such shimmering beauty, and not only that, but it happens by bicycle, as well. 

Muse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homage

One screenshot equals 327 words (well, down to 313 including this.)  Thanks, Dr. Ian!

Primo

Merrick was right: we had been to that parking garage before and it didn’t have rooftop access that time, either.

The mind is a strange beast; what goes in doesn’t always come back out; but the good news there is that if you don’t remember something, then doing it once more is like doing it for the first time all over again.

I suppose that’s the promise of advanced senility: every day is brand new; you can do the same thing repeatedly and never get bored.

Which is pretty much the program for Thursday night rides; now entering into my 20th different year of doing this, it still can be fresh; while I’m sure the route to Georgetown is one that I’ve taken before, it remains nevertheless remarkable not to have to take the bridge over the tracks—as far as I can recall, anyway. 

Who knows what the new year will bring; perhaps a two-wheeled spin around the industrial heart of our fair city is a way of avoiding the inevitable; or maybe things will proceed pretty much as they always have, and I suppose that as long as you can keep on doing what you’ve been doing then there’s really not that much to complain or worry about, especially when the rain holds off until long after you’re home abed and the annoying sound emanating from your rear wheel that you thankfully diagnosed and treated never returned, making you fall in love with your bike all over again—the theme of the evening once more.

At this point, what’s behind is way more than what lies ahead, but that doesn’t weigh you down; it just creates a solid foundation for ascent.  We are our histories, but we’re also our futures; where we’ve come from points the way to where we’re going.

Will there be beer in heaven?  Will there be bikes?  No one can say for certain, but surely it’s heavenly that they’re here now.

ChristmaidekaphobiApocalypseDisaster

Friday the 13th is supposed to be bad luck and yes, that was true when it came to the weather, at least insofar as wetness is bad, as it was surely the rainiest evening we’ve seen in some time, although not quite the deluge of that one year when holiday festivities began at the Beacon Pub during an authentic Pineapple Express.

And sure, scheduling a holiday event for the end of a workday when all those frustrated commuters are trying to fit their cars into long lines of traffic over bridges and underpasses is probably less than ideal, but at least you’re on a bike and can take the sidewalk to get where you want when you want to.

It doesn’t really require all that much to overcome whatever residual bad juju comes along with the date; frankly, a bicycle trailer mounted mobile fire pit is plenty to get things going and if that means initially, the race has to follow the flames rather than the other way around, then isn’t that perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the event, which is all about dumb choices and unexpected outcomes, right?

Good, clean, Christmastime fun is what it comprises: racing bicycles through dark, muddy forests, drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, leg-wrestling old friends, and everyone talking at the top of their lungs simultaneously; if this isn’t what Jesus had in mind when He immaculately conceived, then Santa doesn’t wear red and slide down people’s chimneys bringing toys to all good little boys and girls.

Turning water into wine is easy; it takes a real holiday miracle to turn the shittiest night of the year into the best times for everyone.

Gifts were exchanged, trophies awarded, and all the problems of the world were solved in conversations that aren’t remembered in the morning.  

Two thousand and twenty four years after the miraculous event upon which all this is based, it keeps getting better, or dumber, at least.

Scorchy

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

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

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

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

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

Authentic

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

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

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

 

Audible

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

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

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

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

Happy Hallowe’en!

Discretion

Apparently the pandemic really is over since, as it turns out, there actually ARE some rules for acceptable public behavior, at least in the fancier parts of town.

Prior to this latest iteration, we tried to tote up all the instances at which the friendly Fire Department has invited us to move along while extinguishing whatever sort of conflagration of some size around which we’d assembled: there were those two in one night in the heady high days of Christmas tree burning, that one time atop Weathertop thanks to the one-percenters at Canlis, an occasion that I seem to recall also included some law enforcement at Anarchy Point, the one in Laurelhurst that featured only amused cops but no firefighters, and maybe one in Georgetown near the airport that was really just everyone going their separate ways before the authorities actually arrived.

So, maybe this makes seven, which is pretty good, all things considered, in almost twenty years; what good citizens we all are, after all!

Perhaps there will comes a time, and perhaps it’s right on the horizon, when Thursday night shenanigans will go extinct, but in the meantime, they still persist, albeit in reduced numbers, but not, if last night is an indication, in reduced nonsense.

I take that back: cooler heads DID prevail when it came to exercising discretion as to the location of the merry little blaze.  The initial idea to illuminate the most popular tourist destination for observing our fair city’s downtown was eschewed in favor of one just a little more feasible—and it turned out to be just that until some rich person, no doubt, decided that their old-money backyard needed to remain just their backyard rather than one for some interlopers from the flatlands.

But enough was enough, anyway, and given how friendly those big strong men with flashing lights were, and given we were down to coals, anyway, it was the perfect time to exercise discretion and disperse.

Aurora

Just because you can’t see something with the naked eye, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

And this includes not just celestial phenomena, like those caused by the interaction between electrically charged particles from the sun and Earth's magnetic field, but also intangible concepts like fellowship, adventure, and surprise, all of which are invisibly visible when cranks are cranked and two wheels turn.

The plan was to stay close to light rail, and while an initial proposal to extend the club’s “bounding box” via public transit was eventually discarded due to the prospect of too many disappointed National Football League fans, that particular desideratum was, in fact, adhered to, partly thanks to one of our fair city’s newest pieces of bicycling infrastructure curling under the vast Montlake interchange, just a hop-skip-and-a-jump (or crank-turn and pedal-spin) from the deepest of the Partial Underground’s underground stations.

And speaking of the invisible made apparent (if not visible), here’s another one: Cross-cultural exchange!  

As my father sometimes pointed out (in a probably not entirely culturally-sensitive way), “A billion Chinese couldn’t care less about this or that” (usually something I was whining about according to Dad), but as it turns out, at least forty or so Chinese students from the University of Washington DO care about the aurora borealis and are willing to walk through muddy trails and across rickety metal bridges to get somewhere hoped to be dark enough to see it.

And what’s even more surprising is how many of them were even more delighted to run across an unexpected little bonfire by the side of a lake, especially when it was stoked higher and higher through the addition of liquid plastic.

The flames were visible, but the warmth they inspired just had to be felt.

Apparently, time-lapse photography could render the greens and purple of the aurora on people’s phones, despite one’s eyes not being able to.

Sort of how bikes make possible joy that would otherwise never be seen.

Success

There are many ways to measure success: an Olympic gold medal, a McArthur Fellowship, landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely back to earth, but sometimes, it’s enough just to bring your dear friend to the top of a parking garage you’ve failed twice before to manage. 

Or earlier, simply to note the Meth-odd acting of a couple tweaked-out street performers.

Standards are surely important, but lowering one’s standards to what may reasonably be accomplished on an early fall evening in the Pacific Northwest, where the meteorological adumbrations of what’s in store start adumbrating at the beginning but then, back off considerably for the rest of the evening, is a tried-and-true strategy for satisfaction. 

We’ve got to calibrate our expectations with what can reasonably be expected.

Still, the secret places are places in part, because they are secret.

As John Stuart Mill asserted, one of the keys to happiness is not to want more from life than what life is capable of bestowing and so, if it bestows upon you the opportunity to safely surpass the historical danger spot, to do a little nose-thumbing at the big brother store, and to observe how the heteronormative economy on which society depends is still doing fine, then who wouldn’t want to celebrate it in the best way they know how.

A friendly parking garage rooftop is a civic amenity; in California, all beachfront access is public, right?  (Anyway, it should be.) The views atop those places ought to be available to all, not just us.

The most comfortable place, out of the wind, is not always the best place to be.  And radar isn’t always the final answer. Every dashboard has to be interpreted.

Wherever you are, there you go; and when you do that by bicycle, you’re never alone unless you expand the definition of you.

In which case, you and your bicycle are one.

And one still finds success on two wheels.