Yep

Every day, especially on Thursdays, I thank my lucky stars for how fortunate I am in almost every way.

My life is an embarrassment of riches: I have my health; I’m loved by people I love; I have a safe and stable place to lay my head every night and all the food in my cupboard and refrigerator than I ever need; I have the best dog in the world and a job that I like pretty well which pays me more than adequately; in summertime, my days are filled with yoga, meditation, reading fiction, dining al fresco on my back porch with my darling wife, taking naps in the afternoon, swimming in the lake, smoking weed, and riding my bike all around what is probably the most beautiful city in America; plus, I never have to worry about being killed by the police.

Life is fucking good.

So, I have a special responsibility to be grateful for my good fortune and to behave in ways that recognizes this and which, insofar as I am able, makes the world better for those less fortunate than me, or, at the very least, doesn’t contribute to making it harder for them in any way.

I have it good, so I’m obligated to be good.

This doesn’t mean that I can never break any rules, like jumping into the lake next to a sign that says, “No swimming or diving,” or hanging out at night in a park that closes at dusk, but it does mean it’s incumbent upon me to be mindful and aware and as kind and understanding as I can be and to pick up after myself—a small price, after all, for the benefits which accrue to me given my race, gender, age, education, and a host of other qualities that just happened to come my way, no effort on my part required.

Nobody’s perfect, least of all me, but the better I am, the better.

Meteoric

I only saw a single shooting star, but given the state of everything these days, that was plenty. 

I’m all about lowered expectations during the pandemic, so I’ll give my experience of this year’s Perseid meteor shower a solid “A-plus;” I made my wish as a glowing ember streaked across the night sky and it came true right then and there, with a perfect evening for a bike ride, a roaring fire, and more of the usual suspects social distancing together than have assembled for months.

As strange as this year has been, the earth still makes its way through the through a debris cloud left behind by the giant comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle right on schedule; the Universe doesn’t care about any turmoil in the human world; gravity keeps on doing its thing and our planet’s elliptical path around our star maintains its yearly routine, one that enables homo sapiens on this third rock from the Sun to gaze upwards on August evenings and be rewarded with a bit of celestial magic that is really just dust on fire.

And if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is: what are our petty little existences but energized dust lit up for an instant as we self-immolate in our planet’s atmosphere, right?

Of course, we get to do all sorts of things before we’re extinguished, like relive past versions of ourselves by swinging balls of light around, or amaze our friends and new acquaintances with feats of strength, or just lie on our back allowing eyes to adjust in order to see as much of the vastness as possible in hopes of being surprised by one’s hopes being fulfilled even once.

It’s been what seems a long time since I found myself miles from home and reasonably convoluted at midnight; my bike, though, remembers the way and how it’s done; you just wish upon a falling star and keep on pedaling till your house shows up,

Simple

What a difference a year makes.

In 2019, on the occasion of the first Thursday in August, which for more than a decade, has been an occasion to mark another occasion, something like a hundred bike-riding revelers gathered in Seattle’s favorite old-growth tree city park to load up on grain alcohol-infused juice boxes before throwing themselves down a basketball court-sized sheet of plastic amidst countless plastic glowstix and wrestling with each other in a tub of vegan-friendly goo.

In 2020, barely a handful of riders pedaled to the same location, simply to mark the occasion by standing around a fire quietly drinking beer and reflecting on the efficacy of vaccine trials and the prospect of someday being able to enjoy the sort of grand shenanigans that are mere memories these days in the days of the pandemic.

Nonetheless, a reasonably good time was had by all, which does beget the question, “Why not?”

It’s hard to understand how quickly things have changed and one can’t help wondering where everyone has gotten to and if they will someday return.

I, for one, keep doing pretty much the same things I’ve always done, albeit with a bandana wrapped around my face, so I’m a little bit surprised to see how the behaviors of friends, acquaintances, and relative strangers has changed so much.  I’m sure they have better things to do, which is just another illustration of how easily I’m satisfied by inertia and habit.

Still, it’s still grand be outside on a cool summer’s evening in the Pacific Northwest and while it’s too bad you aren’t able to enjoy the wonderful excess that has characterized the date since back in the early days of the Obama administration, these days, it’s almost, relatively speaking, just as excessive to be hanging out with three or four people who don’t live in the same house as you do.

A person can get used to almost anything; but almost anything’s unusual via bike.

Imperfect

I should have ridden to the College Inn Pub from Foster Island.  Vanishing Seattle, and all.  I’m not sure why I didn’t other than that I don’t know how to be with people anymore.  After just five or six months.  What will happen after two years?

Maybe not all that much if at least you get to do something like this: a quick swim in the least pastoral lake, followed by an urban jaunt to surprisingly open food truck if that’s what you want and then, a rendezvous on top of a covered freeway.

And so why not take the most reasonable route through the forested part until descending to the main lake and the impatient car route to the museum of trees?  There’s only one way into the promontory and what a nice place to hang out wondering together about statues and history.

I keep thinking about how we often define ourselves by our oppositions; one has to have standards and there’s got to be some ontological principle that determines differences; hard cases make bad law as they say, so no doubt we agree about a lot more than we disagree about, even though the latter make for better rants.

Here’s a thing as I see it: you can recognize that there are options that would have been better while still accepting what happened when given the context for it.  Most decisions are probably made at the moment they were made and as long as, on balance, they were an instance in a larger collection of decisions that produced something valuable, we can bracket that decision in context of the context it was made.

For instance, Abraham Lincoln was a great human being and also one, from all that I’ve read, a greatly human being.  We want to recognize his imperfections while still recognizing that, in spite of those imperfections, his efforts were good enough—so long as perfection doesn’t become an enemy of the good.

Lots

A majestic bald eagle, soaring over the vast industrial plains of Seattle’s global import/export shipping hub at sunset seems like an apt metaphor for the good old U.S. of A, especially, when you look a little closer and see that the mighty bird is being mobbed by dozens of seagulls and at least one random crow; having attained this perspective by rolling up ten, count ‘em ten, floors of a virtually-deserted urban car park (that, for the life of me, seems ideally-suited in these days of rampant homelessness for being converted to covered camping spots for the unhoused), frames the imagery with an ironic border that turns it from stereotypical cornball pap into a unique and poignant commentary on the state of the world today; plus, you could easily social-distance on the football-field-sized platform in the sky and drink beer al fresco on yet another long-lingering evening in the heart of the glorious Pacific Northwest summer.

And that was just the first of three parking structures scaled; albeit the best of the lot(s).  The next, while it featured tighter turns and ultimately, a more close-up view of what was once the tallest building west of the Mississippi, but is now merely a quaint anachronism, was mainly notable for being unprecedented, and the third, which, although it has apparently been voted the coolest parking lot in the country, was really only special for affording one the opportunity of recreating the iconic Leonardo DiCaprio scene from James Cameron’s Titanic.

Having availed ourselves of so much concrete, the logical subsequent choice was to head for the water, where our small group met up with a much bigger contingent of far cooler cyclists; the electric bike earned its keep by transporting the resupplies and compelled the assembled to stick around a little longer, which meant that a person was able to get their swim on, in water no colder than the night air; “America,” as the eagle reminds us, “Fuck yeah.”

Enough

One of the things I like about getting older is that I’m more easily satisfied.  I can enjoy more with less; I find adventure in what isn’t so adventurous as all that.

I don’t have to swim (although that would be nice); I’m satisfied with just a couple of acquaintances (although many were missed); when serendipity occurs, it doesn’t even have to be very serendipitous (but it still is).  Just the possibility of possibility suffices.

I remain puzzled as to what is permitted and what one should permit of oneself.  When someone asks you for a light, and you check all your pockets except the one in which it is, so be it.  If it doesn’t happen, it couldn’t have been your destiny, anyway, as I learned from the fictional Voltaire on TV.

Maybe I’m the only person in the world who did the two-Jack Seattle park loop last night: west to Block and then back east and south to Perry; both afforded crepuscular marvels, the former including a slowly scintillating solar decay over one’s shoulder, the latter, a Nautical Twilight, that mingled with the arc lights of industrial aspiration, was bright enough to inspire memories of a sun-drenched afternoon when bicycle dreams performed to the score of wholesome abundance.

Maybe this is the harbinger of the vast reset that must occur for humanity to persevere into the future; if so, one of the main lessons, it seems to me, is that enough is enough.  But, of course, then the hunger for enoughness becomes the currency and so, there we are, all over again.

In spite of ourselves, we can’t help competing in the accident Olympics, even though winning is losing and vice-versa.  Getting home in one piece might not earn you the podium, but at least, you get home.

After a certain point, you can only go your own pace.  Work, I’m told, equals force times distance. So, I reduce my force to go farther, right?

Still

Thursday is still Thursday. 

Spring is still spring, especially when it’s nearly record-breakingly warm, and you can ride your bike in shirtsleeves all the way along the Lake, all afternoon long.

The flowering cherry trees, the magnolia bushes and their friends the camellia, the early azaleas and ambitious rhododendron, the forsythia and hydrangea are still bursting with color just like they do every year around this time.

We’re still here; we still drink beer, may as well get used to it!

Like this year, April 9^th was Thursday in 2009; Point83 rode to Jack Block Park.  

Daniel Featherhead flew alongside as we pedaled down the Alki trail and he somehow managed to levitate from the Superfund site beneath the park platform right back next to where we stood gazing at the Seattle skyline, which still included the viaduct back on those days.

That night was all about the visuals: the sun breaking through the clouds as we waited and argued in the liquor store parking lot in SODO; the loveliness of the Duwamish water even though the waters themselves aren’t so pristine; the sight of the Angry Hippy breaking into a confused but happy smile after getting stoned; and the unusual view afforded by standing around in an industrial wasteland by the side of a deserted highway while someone fixed a flat—stuff you would never see otherwise than being out and about on two wheels.

Last night, I mostly eschewed the virtual experience having had, like many of us, I would bet, my fill of the Brady Bunch faces-on-the-screen thing in my professional capacities all these many recent weeks.

It still was nice to see a few friendlies, though, and inspired me to drink up and take a quick spin around the neighborhood.

I mostly noticed what wasn’t there, which is funny to think about if you think about it.

These days, we’re seeing lots of what we don’t see; still glad to see it, though.

Normal

A bit of normality helps.

The usual Thursday: before the way home from Bothell along the Burke, you eat a pot cookie.  By the time you get to Matthews Beach, the riding is smoother, the colors are brighter, and you have all kinds of great ideas for everything, few of which stand up to the cold, cruel light of dawn, but sure are fun to think about at the time.

So, it was satisfying and heartening to experience that familiar end-of-the-school week experience —even though the part where you were at school was simply a matter of feeling like a cat burglar or maybe James Bond as you key-carded yourself into the totally empty building on the completely deserted campus to slide into your darkened office for a few books and things—and honestly, look forward to what constitutes the Thursday night ride these days: getting drunk in front of a virtual pastiche of faces of friends and acquaintances; it ain’t enough to be sure, but it’s better than nothing, and oddly, nothing is better than something that isn’t possible at the present time, oddly enough.

When the apocalypse hits, if it hasn’t already, you may as well ride your bike around; you’ll notice that the converted rails-to-trail trail is crowded with more people than you’ve ever seen before.  Apparently, when the gym is closed, people decide that running is the best option, although what they’re running from is invisible; could it be the virus?

Also, day-drinking parents seem to have simultaneously come to the conclusion that the family bike ride is a good idea.  More power to them! 

And to all those little kids discovering the joys of two-wheeling, one of which is the opportunity to pedal way ahead of their tipsy mom and slalom back and forth on the tarmac, yay!

Someday, all this will be over and we’ll be able to hug each other around a fire. 

Until then, embrace the abnormal as normal.

Virtual

So, is this what it is now? 

Bike rides are cyclists on trainers pedaling into webcams?  Bars are rows of tiny heads sharing picklebacks online?  Standing around a fire means reclining in your living room while gazing into the warming glow of your computer screen?

Okay, I’ll take it; it’s better than nothing IMHO; IIRC I LOL’ed IRL a lot, so there’s that.

I did get out to pedal a bit, too. 

First, I did a fly-by the usual meet-up spot, making sure to maintain my social distancing, in order to simulate the usual experience.  Having been assured by the expert with the public health degree that riding around on the eerily empty streets had essentially zero probability of increasing my risk factor, I felt relatively confident I wasn’t a bad person for enjoying the opportunity to take all the lanes as I headed home through neighborhoods that looked more like 2:30 in the morning on the way back rather than 7:30 in the evening on the way out.

Then, after an hour or so around the virtual water cooler, becoming increasingly amused by different views and perspectives made possible by the tiny camera eyes, (and increasingly intoxicated by available intoxicants), I rolled out for a little spin around the deserted neighborhood, stopping in a nearby pocket park for a quick smoke just to remind the Universe that we haven’t totally given up; life goes on during the plague even if we’re plagued by doubts and worries.

I guess we can get used to this and I guess we have no choice but to, at least for now. 

And anyway, as philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “simulation hypothesis” contends, we’re all just simulated minds thinking we’re biological ones anyway, so what’s the difference if what’s happening isn’t real; it isn’t real anyway.

Of course, the ancient Vedic rishis knew this, too.  All of it—me, you, bikes, parks—is just Maya; all is Brahman, man, and Tat Tvam Asi.

La-Dee-Da

If you didn’t know it was happening, you wouldn’t know it was happening. 

The trees sure don’t care; they are as pink and beautiful as they are every spring, especially this one.  And if you can ride all over town during the second week of March without your raingear, that’s as swell as it is unusual.

Tonight I learned that some people think that the moon is a titanium sphere, supposedly proven by the claim that when the Apollo 11 astronauts blasted off from our satellite’s surface, they dropped a wrench and it “rang like a bell.”

Also, apparently, the Masons did everything and all of it was good.

It sure seems like these are historically weird times, which is all the more reason, I think, to keep it all in context.  Just because never before have all of society’s systems—health care, banking, government, education, etc.—caved simultaneously, is no reason to think this is unprecedented, even if it is.

Fortunately, it’s easiest enough to maintain the requisite 6-foot “social distance” on a bicycle, which doesn’t account for what happens when you stop pedaling and start standing in the shared firelight with a quartet of youngsters drinking rum and not falling down.

It’s the way we have all acquiesced to the mandates of the moment that is most striking to me. 

The virus in our minds has made way more difference than the virus in people’s bodies, which is why, in part, standing around an increasingly large fire in the out of doors offers such satisfaction.

No one knows precisely what the future holds; one thing we can be relatively sure of, though, is that the bicycle emphasizes its charms when you get to ride in lanes not usually conducive to the charms of bicycling.  We got out in it and that’s plenty.

Perhaps it’s the end of the world as we know it, if so, embracing what we do know is entirely sufficient for now.

Team

Riding a bike is inherently somewhat dangerous; I learned that the very first time I got on one and pedaled across my neighbor’s driveway, veered down their side lawn and ran into the drainpipe on my own house.

That was only a skinned knee and injured 6 year-old pride but it still stung.

Nevertheless, I got back in the saddle and continued riding all these years since, despite numerous other spills, resulting in sprained wrists, chipped teeth, bruised ribs, skinned chins, bloody appendages, and various aches and pains that generally have taken on the order of 6 to 8 weeks to have me feeling better.

I’ve also had the distinct displeasure of seeing several friends and acquaintances crash with injuries much uglier: busted faces, sliced-open foreheads, crumpled fingers—no, sir, I don’t like it, couldn’t we just turn back the clock a few minutes and try this one again?

But in each of those unfortunate incidents, I’ve also seen the best in the characters of the characters I’m with, imperfect people to be sure, who in those moments of need, behave with perfect competence and compassion, stepping up to help a fallen comrade with patience, care, and a sobriety you wouldn’t expect given the overall sense of bacchanalia with which events had been transpiring.

I hope I will never be the one with my bloody head in the lap of another rider as the paramedics attend to me; I hope no one will ever be that person again! 

But if I were (and here I’m burning some sage and spitting in my palm so as not to jinx myself), I would want to be among the usual gang of imperfect subjects, people who would stay with me from the beginning, would see I got to the hospital safely, would collect my bike and stuff, and who would, I hope, seeing I was on the way to mending, pedal on to the bar and toast my health together.

Recall

In spring of 1976, I was living in the attic of a ramshackle cottage near the end of the N-Judah streetcar line at Sunset Beach in San Francisco that I shared with my multi-pharmaceutical abusing roommate for $175.00 a month including utilities.

I had two hits of LSD in my pocket given to me by my glam-rock sort of boyfriend at the time who a few years later turned punk and became Larry Livermore of Lookout Records fame.

As I sat on the trolley waiting for it to start on its route to downtown, I began making eye contact with the only other passenger, a raven-haired beauty with a heart-shaped face who was curled up in the back-corner seat of the car.

Emboldened by love at first sight, I got up the courage to introduce myself with the opening line, “I’d hate myself forever if I didn’t come over here and say ‘hello’ to you.”

This being 1976, after all, I proposed that we drop the acid and go see the show that evening at the Laserium in Golden Gate Park. I don’t recall much about the lasers, but I’ll never forget returning home with my new acquaintance, a mysterious Italian woman, and sitting together under the parachute fabric in my bedroom as we came down from tripping, writing notes to each other in French.

I scrawled, “Est-tu une sorciere?” and I remained so bewitched by her that for weeks after our one magical night, when she had moved me into what wasn’t then called “the friend zone,” I would camp out in the pedestrian tunnel that ran under the highway in front of her apartment building and play my flute, imagining that she could hear me from her third-story window in which a candle burned.

Last night’s ride wasn’t quite so magical, but still, was pretty good, with an outdoor fire at an apparently doomed pit, no rain whatsoever, and old stories told, new stories made.

Moist

If fear of the weather is what kept a person from the traditional Thursday night bicycle ride last evening, then they blew it.  

For most of the time, conditions were swell: a soft and gentle mist (at most) enveloped riders in a sweet Cascadian caress; wool sans shell was plenty and you could even enjoy a previously un-enjoyed park beside the mighty Duwamish without hardly fogging up your glasses.

This is how I remember late January rain in Seattle: the worst of the season’s storms are over and what falls from the heavens now is the first harbinger of spring.  Crocuses are peeking from the soil, robins have begun appearing everywhere; the Lunar New Year rings in and with it, the promise of fresh growth, or at least the hope that one’s cycling gloves will no longer smell like cheese all the time.

A scant assemblage braved the mean streets around Westlake Center; riders were almost outnumbered by cop cars closing the barn door after the horse had already left McDonald’s yesterday; maybe the solution to gun violence should be to have a trade-in program of six-shooters for two-wheelers; pedal-pushing instead of trigger-pulling, how about that?

Not that cycling is a balm for everything: some people in SUVs sure get angry when a handful of bikes slow them down for all of three seconds; I couldn’t take the pissed-off lady’s exhortations seriously because, for the life of me, I thought it was Derrick in his truck pretending to be mad—that’s how incoherent and over-the-top her rage seemed to be.

I get it though; my blood would boil too if I had to be encased in a metal cage with only podcasts and Googlemaps to keep me company on such lovely night to be in plein air.

After all, there are people who come out for the ride from all the way on the other side of the world; proof that missing out really is missing out.

Ageless

It seemed strangely appropriate that my reason for planning on missing a Thursday evening out on two wheels was my intention to see a lecture at the library on “successful aging,” when, after all, my main strategy for not going gentle into that good night for the last decade or so has been to head out bike-riding and beer-drinking and dope-smoking at the same appointed hour.

The speaker, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, earned his Captain Obvious stripes with the central claim that the key to brain health in one’s later years is to stay active and engaged; “Don’t retire!” was his concluding point.

Duh.

In any case—and consequently—imagine my delight when, on my route home from the event, I spied a small collection of bicycles, (including a brightly-colored carbon-fiber French model whose appearance always warms my heart), outside my favorite local watering hole.  Here, right before me, was the unexpected opportunity to enjoy at least a little time actively engaging in the very same (now scientifically-validated) means of successful aging I have relied upon all these many years.

Solely in the cause of neurological well-being, mind you, did I stop in, to be rewarded with a small, but welcoming group of familiar brain health nuts, who eventually joined me for a quick jaunt up and down to the lake where further synaptic activity was stimulated.  And, as additional proof of the salubrious effects of such activity, I managed to lose a beloved Jannd reflective ankle strap en route*, a clear demonstration of how the healthy mind plays tricks on us if given half a chance.

“Sharp as a tack” is the phrase often applied to an old person who still has their wits about them; I’m not sure I aspire to all that.  I’d settle for being no duller than, let’s say, a butter knife.  That way, I can still do an adequate job of spreading joy, just like successful aging on Thursday nights has consistently done.
___________________________________________

*Found!  By retracing the day after, mind blown.

Hot

And there was a full moon!

And it didn’t rain at all until right at the very last instant as I pedaled into my back alley!

And sinfully delicious hot cocoa drinks spiced with Everclear, vodka, rum, and whatever else was in the bottom of booze bottles at our magnanimous host and hostess’s liquor cabinet!

And the music bike with new and improved sound or maybe one just forgets how loud and clear it is even from a block away!

And re-usable cups, only a couple of which ended up in the mighty conflagration!

And a solid collection of old friends and familiar faces, including many a far-flung or rarely-seen companion, plenty of whom stuck around all the way through until the dying embers!

And Point84!

And a fire-totter!

And surely the fastest trip ever to the secret location, including a police escort!

And a gold star to Chester who kept me and the trailer company on the Ballard Bridge so I wasn’t even really that mad about being left behind even though it was fun to get all cantankerous and curmudgeonly about it at first!

And no one burned their private parts, at least on my watch!

And rum balls and (nearly) the final batch of the Christmas weed cookies!

And the requisite overawed strangers who couldn’t believe their good fortune at stumbling upon the event!

And conversations about Little Women, both the movie and the book—which, in spite of its moralizing, (or perhaps because of it), is really quite charming; Jo, especially would be the sort of character you’d see out on two wheels of a Thursday night around a twenty-foot high Christmas tree blaze!

And only one blinkie lost!

And a U-lock found if anyone’s looking for one!

And one more tree!  At least three times!

At lots of laughs and a little singing and everyone talking at once but sometimes listening, too!

And no fire department!

And did I mention: a full moon!

Premier

You know what they say: “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning.”

The same principle applies to bike riding every Thursday night of the year.  Unless you make it out to the first one, you can’t have a perfect record on your annual Point83 drunken shenanigans scorecard.

A quartet, at least, however, are still in the running, and while it’s hardly a goal to which any sensible person would aspire, nor is it an accomplishment you’d want to highlight on your curriculum vitae in applying for fellowships abroad, it is worth noting that, as an inebriated Lao-Tzu would surely remind us, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single stagger;” in other words, a gold star for perfect attendance may still be awarded at year’s end, including special commendation for fixed-gear category.

It was pointed out over whiskey at my very own neighborhood bar, that many a favored route over time has been a result of someone essentially leading the way back to their own neighborhood, a strategy that I only somewhat intentionally adopted, although there were several detours along the way for cannabis consumption and view admiring and the requisite interaction with a lost soul who assured us that he “wasn’t always broke” in his repeated efforts to sell someone a set of Bluetooth earbuds in the shadow of Hermon A. MacNeil’s monument to “Seattle’s Foremost and Best Beloved Citizen,” Judge Thomas Burke, of Burke Museum and Burke-Gilman trail fame.

According to Wikipedia, “Burke frequently organized subscription drives to raise money for Seattle projects, to the point that he often described himself as a ‘professional beggar,’” which seems to me an admirable profession and one we might all aspire to one way or another in the coming twelve months, especially in support of causes earning encomiums like Burke: “patriot, jurist, orator, friend, patron of education, first in every move for the advancement of city and state.”

First and foremost.

Ultimate

On the last Thursday of the year, which was also the first Thursday of season on which the days were growing longer, a small contingent of bicycle riders met up by the holiday carousel in Seattle’s downtown retail core and rode downhill and around the corner before ascending for warmth to the topmost top of a concrete structure for storing automobiles in order to enjoy a Viaduct-free view of maritime industry while conjecturing as to the original purpose of a brick smokestack over shots of whiskey and cans of beer.

Soon afterwards, they circled back down the marble raceway, managing, somewhat surprisingly, to avoid hitting anyone’s helmeted head on the low ceiling, and hightailed south for an indoor firepit (and the false promise of singing) to quaff a bit at a place whose name calls forth the spirit of summer swimming pool games where at least a couple of their number got to see how much easier it is to notice differences when a person isn’t distracted by what distracts them.

Eventually, northward movement was effected which eventually resulted in the standard admonition to drink at the bar one shows up to; that happened, and soon enough some who thought they were leaving stayed and vice-versa—a fitting end to the end of a year that had many a fitting end.

The upcoming 12 months promise to hold the promise of better things, presuming our long national nightmare draws, at last, to a close.  As T.S. Eliot (no doubt spinning in his grave at the newly-released theatrical version of his book of practical cats) reminds us in “The Hollow Men,” the world ends not with a bang but a whimper, a state of affairs that doesn’t, apparently, apply to the teens decade of the 21^st century, which seems to be drawing to its conclusion with something more like a cheer, even if said cheer is more of the Bronx-style than the unalloyed encomiums resulting from one final ride of the year.

Cheer

There’s a chapter in Moby Dick called “A Squeeze of the Hand,” in which Ishmael waxes rhapsodic about the sailors’ shared task of squeezing the spermaceti in great tubs as way to soften the globules of blubber into their final unctuous form.  In an ecstasy of Whitmanesque rapture, he sings: 

Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!  All morning long; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.  Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, —Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!  Come, let us squeeze hands all around; nay let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

As it turns out, you can achieve the same feelings of joy and love for all humanity by corralling some three dozen of your longtime and long-lost friends into a bike “race” from one park to another with a wood stop in between, warming an entire shelter space with not one, not two, but three humorously-large fires, and then congregating at a great big college bar to bask in the euphonious song stylings of the absolutely most charming, generous, and bad-assed lyrical Elves ever to grace a holiday season.

If that doesn’t make you eschew any acerbities or ill-humor, I don’t know what would; Santa himself surely has no gift any better in his bag, nor any Christmas miracle any more wonderful.

Who needs clappies when the entire occasion is one for full-throated applause?  

Looking up into their eyes sentimentally, I saw every naughty and nice little boy and girl get everything they wanted and more, “such an abounding, affectionate, friendly loving feeling,” indeed.

Full

I suppose there are better places to live—maybe a $98 million dollar penthouse condominium in Manhattan, perhaps on 278,000 of your own ranch’s acres in Montana, arguably a private island in the Hawaiian archipelago—but it’s hard to beat a spot where you can ride your bike to city park at which a ruined foundation provides hearth and chimney for outdoor merriment, and all for just the price of beer and matches.

You know how it goes: the original plan is to simply show up at the start of things to solicit attendance at the annual disaster, but the arrival of far-flung visitors and the promise of backyard destinations compels you to have one more for the road and more road for the one all the way until midnight and why not?  

It’s spring break, winter version, after all.

If you’re half the world apart from your loved ones, you can look at the moon and know that they’re seeing the same satellite you are; when it’s full, your rise is their set and vice-versa, but if you could plant a sign with the words “I love you” in a crater, they’d be able to focus their high-powered telescope and read it (assuming conditions were right) and although they probably wouldn’t enjoy a 360-degree moonbow like those in Seattle’s out-of-doors did last night, the knowledge that we’re all in phase, so to speak, means you’re never alone, no matter how far away.

The holiday season seems to have people budgeting their revelries, which makes sense, I guess; a person can only take so much amusement (although ongoing investigations into the matter on this end will continue unabated), and so the evening’s slim turnout was not a surprise.

As dry as it’s been, though, it hardly feels like December in the Pacific Northwest, but nothing says holiday like riding past homes emblazoned in seasonal lights, except, of course, the main event, coming up Saturday, don’t miss it!

Ascension

We didn’t get as high as I had anticipated, but there were more highs than I expected, especially the ones associated with riding up switchbacks over train tracks and dodging baby scooters for a dance al fresco in accompaniment to the dulcet tones of the Filthy FemCorps.  You can never go wrong with Madonna and Lady Gaga tunes performed by Seattle’s very own “hot bag full of fierce women who aren’t afraid to be weird, genuine, raw, sweaty, confident, honest, loving and real.”

And while we didn’t all ascend to the highest heights of our fair city, a stalwart handful did manage to get all the way down to sea (or, at least river) level and then gain something like 300 feet or so to the top of one of Seattle’s traditional seven hills only to reconnect momentarily with a few friends who’d gone up and away earlier without us.

The stars seemed aligned for re-commemorating that day in 2012 when cannabis consumption was made no longer criminal in the state of Washington with a visit to the tipmost top of our fair city but alas and alack (and “oh well” and “who cares?” too), other elevations rose up instead resulting in a ride pretty close to the Point83’s titular excursion and this on a December evening that was not only dry but also warm enough for just wool and no shell all night long.

Besides, riding along the Viaduct-less waterfront is still a brand-new thrill that never gets old and having the rent-a-cops turn the red and blue lights of their golf cart on you from behind a cyclone fence is just the sort of humorous theatrics that bring out the surly teenager in anyone no matter what age.

In the end, there are as many different ways of getting high as there are highs of different ways to get there; eventually, seen from above, the upward path is just one more way to get down.

Reconsidered

Dogma dominates the public discourse.  Pundit, politician, persuader, you’re supposed to stake out your position and cling to it like Baby Huey with his lollipop; if you modify your view, even the tiniest bit, you’re castigated as a “flip-flopper” and considered a traitor to your party, your people, and everything that’s holy (or unholy depending on your God.)

But you know what?  There’s really nothing better than having your mind changed.  (Although I could be wrong about that.)  

It’s actually a relief, and a gift, to see things in a new light.  Exhibiting what one of my grad school professors, Bill Talbott, always called “epistemological humility” is liberating.  It allows you to grow and develop as a thinker and a human being (noting that those two are often at odds.)

So, when you arrive at the traditional Thursday night meeting place with a plan in mind, you can either bang your spoon on the high chair until people come to their senses and see things your way, or can come to your own senses and allow the winds of more popular (or, at least, more forcefully expressed) opinion to take you where it may.

And when you do so, (and when you continue doing so, even after an initial destination is discarded halfway through), you’re rewarded with just what you wanted all along—even if you didn’t know it at the time.

The beach was perfect for a fire that could be stood around rather than just in front of, and saving the covered location for another night when—unlike this overcast by dry fall evening—covering would be called, for made perfect sense even to those whose minds were almost made up.

Positions were modified, directions were changed, before you knew it, an offshore breeze was stoking the flames enough to turn strangers to converts.

Eventually, every chair was burned and the assembled re-assembled elsewhere, not what anyone planned for, but a plan perfectly executed nonetheless.

Cackle

Fun doesn’t just happen.  

You have to grab it by the proverbial short hairs (or longer ones if you’re sporting a wig) and shake it into life.  You have to pedal uphill and cackle and scream and pour whiskey down your throat while howling at the new crescent moon seen through a hole in the black sun.  You have to get lost in practically your own neighborhood by being confused about which is east and which is west and whether the twain shall meet.  You gotta have heart; miles and miles and miles of heart, even if the ride itself is only a few kilometers long.

Fun is out there, waiting to be seized, but it expects a bit of effort on your part; it’s not going to just drop into your lap like candy into your Halloween bag in the fancy parts of town where they give out whole Hershey bars and double-packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups.  In order to wallow in fun’s warm embrace, you have to remember that efficiency isn’t the only virtue and that if you like riding bikes, then you like riding bikes and that the extra hill means you get to be rolling around for longer than you would if you weren’t following someone who imagines they know where they’re going, but don’t really—or only, generally, not specifically.

It’s fun to complain, too, of course, which is part of the fun.

I’m not sure you can crash a party if you are the party; I do believe, however, that anyone brave enough to invite an unspecified number of somewhat-costumed cyclists into their home, table, and liquor cabinet, is surely not someone who’s going to be scared by even the spookiest of Halloween-themed goodies and entertainments.  There were treats galore; the trick was all graciousness and hospitality.

Fun was had; made manifest by the dark magic of the season just begun; hocus-pocus, voila: fun and more fun in scary amounts.

Bossy

You get a notion and run, or as the case may be, ride with it--which could explain why you’re convinced that the headwind you’d been fighting all the way from work would place its outstretched hand on the small of your back and propel you up the oldest and fanciest of our seven hills and that wasn’t wrong, at least for that one moment when it felt like it, ignoring half a block earlier when the wind was right in your face, but oh well, a person did get to be outside almost all of an early evening on a fall night where, most of the time, rain pants were suspenders and a belt, and even though numbers were small, commitment was large, if not, on my part, anyway, really all that long-lasting.

A fellow’s got preferences, after all, and even though nobody, except maybe everybody sometimes, wants to be the one who’s least flexible, who doesn’t want what they want?

The problem is, it’s hard to admit—or even recognize—mistakes in the instant, and that’s part of the reason why babies are bottled and crises averted.

One thing, not necessarily the main thing, is to get home safe in more or less one piece.  Whatever that means after all.

And if that means late outdoor fires are missed, so be it; at least, for a time, there was the incendiary pleasure of circumnavigating a mysterious mansion more or less.

In her 1944 Seattle novel, Great Son, set among homes perched like miniature medieval castles on Queen Anne Hill, (hence the original interest in an evening’s ascent), Edna Ferber says of our fair city: “There was too much of everything.”  Two lakes, two canals, two mountain ranges, two rivers, “a colossal feat of Nature,” a “godlike production,” “too much for the average man.”

Of course, that’s obvious out and up on Thursday two wheels; where time and again, even not enough is too much.

Bisected

I feel bad that I disappeared with the twelve-pack of Rainier that Topher mostly paid for, but sometimes, you just get separated, and sometimes the separation is confounding enough that it seems the Universe is explaining to you that it’s time to pedal home even though it’s still well before midnight on an almost perfectly clear perfect night for being out on two wheels.

I lost track of taillights leaving the market and so chose my own adventure to the next bridge but when I arrived it was deserted and so, reasonably (I thought) concluding that I couldn’t possibly have arrived in front, headed to where I thought things were headed afterwards.

I was met only with a fabulous view of downtown, a lonely fire, and an angry dog which, taken together, I took as evidence for homeward bounding and so, soon enough, found myself pulling up in my backyard—warm, dry, and sated.

Half an evening, half a story, and with an unopened half-rack to boot.

Hearth

How good is good?

If you faithfully fulfill the bulk of your professional, familial, and social responsibilities, for more than a fortnight at least, does that earn you the right to several hours of misbehavior?

When the big old guy in the sky with the beard and the book tallies up your score, does He cut you a break for being a reasonably good employee, parent, and friend and overlook the part where you failed to abide by all the requisite local ordinances and traffic laws?

And doesn’t being under various influence of various influences earn you a “Stay Out of Jail Free” card, too?

I took the long way around the Lake to my backyard in order to descend (literally) upon a covey of forest elves (figuratively) warming themselves in the open-air living room of an invisible house.  The quarter moon’s half-pie hung in the west and disappeared behind the trees at about the same time the aforementioned pastoral scene appeared before me.

Fortunately, I had gotten a head start on my own evening’s interior by way of a corporate watering hole painted with football screens in the neighboring hellhole across the pond, and so my own egress was sufficiently lubricated that even Derrick’s jokes were already funny.  Normally, such proximity between home and hearth tends to give one pause, but, at this point, having banked away hours of the commendable, who could give a damn, really, about a few sparks here and there?

Sometimes, it’s the person who doesn’t live nearby who’s the best guide; the everyday route home may not, in fact, be the most efficient and picturesque path to the next thing.  Your own pace, however, will eventually secure your arrival, albeit at your own pace, which is perfectly fine when you know where you’re going if not how to get there.

There might have been more but enough was plenty, a full night packed into half of it, well-deserved rest, well, deserved.

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).