Waffle

photo by Denny T.

Last night,.83 conducted this year’s version of what is now an annual tradition (“tradition” meaning anything you do twice): the WWW or Winter Waffle Wide.

Some thirty riders loaded up their messenger bags, panniers, and Xtracycles with flour, eggs, syrup, camp stoves, waffle irons, distilled spirits, and cases of PBR then rode to a park on Mercer Island that, for some strange reason, features—in its picnic shelter—electrical outlets that are full of juice all year long. There, batter was mixed, butter was melted, and dozens of waffles made and consumed.

I missed the start of the ride from Westlake Center because I was at school listening to a frightening lecture by Red Cavaney, who is CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. As you might expect from someone who is the public face of Big Oil, his talk was mostly about how we’ve got to all pull together as Americans to ensure that we have a steady supply of burnable hydrocarbons for many years to come. The good news, from his perspective, is that if we can just get Congress to lift those silly restrictions on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, we can count on being able to keep sucking crude from the ground at an increased rate until way off in 2030, by which time, he assured us, “technology” will have found a replacement energy source that conveniently will use the same infrastructure already laid in place by Exxon, Shell, et al.

By the time he was done, you could have powered a Hummer off the steam pouring from my ears.

A bike ride through the streets of Bellevue, then west on the I-90 trail to Mercer Island was an ideal pressure release; to then come upon my fellow cyclists creating a shared outdoor feast was perfect.

I had forgotten all about Red Cavaney by the time I finished my first waffle; way before the bottle of Maker’s Mark was spent.

Up

How do beliefs and outcomes work together?  Ever notice the way anticipation plays with what ends up?

I don’t know how not to be committed to the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, though I couldn’t possibly believe that, could I?

Yet, there you are with waffle irons perfectly matched to people’s attitudes in times when not enough is too much rather than the converse.

Here’s some of what I think I know: the rain never came but often seemed possible, yet becalmed.

So many new folks: at least three.

And, I still think, might have happened: a tailwind in both directions.

Could this be the Ninth Annual Waffle Ride?  What else have you done for so long?

I kept being unsurprised by people’s ages: we’ve done this since childhood.  And some, like Derrick, for several of them.

No one climbed the rafters, but there were enough attention spans to make possible two separate theaters, both of which complemented another.

A warming fire was constructed vertically and many, if not most, had an opportunity to enjoy.

When you stepped out from under the shelter and its soothing fog of waffle vapor,  there was Orion’s Belt: you’d be happy with a single star, but there they are, all three of them, dotting the heavens.

The possible and actual are in continual dialogue.  There’s what you think it’s going to be and what it is, which is determined, in part, by what you think it’s going to be.

And then, it’s something different than either of those, but no less expected or unexpected.

Ground-level fireworks in the tunnel made for especially voracious vocalizations on the way out there; heading west was all about drinking it in; I let the corridor sing me.

Although among the last to leave our home away from home across the water, I’ll bet I was among the first to sleep; my more than sufficient capacity for fun, more than fulfilled.

Full

Nobody climbed the rafters as in years past; nor were numerous waffles flung like Frisbees across the park shelter’s interior; and we all missed, no doubt, Derrick Ito throwing batter everywhere and antiquing folks with unmixed pancake mix and handfuls of flour.

Nevertheless, this year’s annual (13th annual to be exact) Point83 Waffle Ride was just as enjoyable, and every bit as remarkable as in every other of its dozen previous incarnations.  I woke to find my shoes coated predictably in dried batter, my nostrils filled convincingly with the scent of country breakfast, and my mind overflowing happily with images that while familiar, remain as unbelievable and precious as they have been for over a decade.

Where else will you see eight bike-hauled waffle irons, including the Hello Kitty model in all her pink-clad glory, steaming away merrily in a public park for the late-night dining pleasure of three or four dozen cyclists?

Or when else do you get to witness what surely began its life as a canoe paddle (or maybe Cricket bat) being used to stir the pot, so to speak, the “pot” being a six gallon bucket loaded with the raw materials of deliciousness soon to be pressed between hot metal plates?

Or how else can you find yourself in the delightful quandary of having to choose between balancing chocolate-covered coffee beans in every or every other square of the waffle before consuming?

Additionally, there was fire, sorta, and hot chocolate mixed with your liquor of choice, (or what was left over, eventually); plus, it never even rained or was so cold you couldn’t hold your beer without wearing gloves.

And once again, electrons got busy, free of charge, to make the extravaganza possible, thanks to the technical prowess of our resident organizer and the organizing prowess of our resident technician, huzzah.

No one crashed on the bridge heading home, either; a perfect topping to a night as full as our bellies could be.

WR5

I thought I stayed pretty late; (it was after midnight when I got home and my clothes smelled reassuringly of breakfast), but apparently, I missed the real shenanigans where people got doused with batter and thrown out of bars; even so, it was a night as full of hilarity as stomachs were full of waffles and as trash cans are of empty containers this morning at that odd little corner of the universe where electricity flows all year long for, as teh Jobies pointed out, “recreational purposes,” an end admirably pursued on this, the Fifth Annual .83 Waffle (The Empire Strikes Back) Ride, the current version, a bit earlier in February than in years previous, but still so hungrily anticipated that no one could possibly have held off another week, even in spite of the nationwide Eggo shortage.

I managed to catch onto the ride just as the line of—I’ll say about 60—bikes laden with fixin’s, toppings, and intoxicants—began pouring through the I-90 tunnel, riders screaming echoes east to west and then there was that heartwarming sight of taillights dotting the entire length of the bridge before all of a sudden a picnic shelter fully lit up from inside and an eight-pack of waffle irons steaming and a pitcher of Manhattans pouring and pork strips frying and some sort of scary-looking sausages spinning slowly on an even scarier mini hot-dog circus cart.

And eventually, of course, people were hanging upside-down from the rafters and spitting bourbon at the fire and a Frisbee-shaped waffle was turning to mush in the rain and then, just as miraculously as things appeared, they eventually were packed up and, although I bet the maintenance workers are scratching their heads this morning over what went down last night, I’m sure the imprint on my memory is more than ours upon the park, though less than the iron upon the batter making those sweet squares that you fill and fill you.

Waffling

The season’s been shuffled around this year, with winter coming late (and so far, hardly at all), so it’s no surprise, really, that February appeared in January—as evidenced last night by the full flowering (or, make that “flouring”) of the annual .83 Waffle Ride some four weeks before it usually rears its square-patterned head.

But that’s mere testament to the turn-on-a-dime flexibility of the drunken bike gang, able, in just a moment’s (well, two days’) notice turn a proposed Christmas tree conflagration event into one where the fires (such as they were) occurred on griddles rather than sand, and the objects of carbon release happened to be something edible as opposed to adornable.

In short, it was all about fire in the sky morphing into fire in the belly, and I for one, endorse such transformations even if they run counter to tradition, untraditional as it may be.

Hard-core miscreants may scoff at the idea of shit-canning an activity whose legal standing is already questionable just because John Law says “don’t do it,” but if it means that there can be two hall-pass worthy events in back-to-back weeks, I’m all for it.

Besides, think of how what another week of drying will do for the combustability of all those evergreen bombs currently stashed in people’s back yards and alleys.

tehJobies once again worked his electrical magic, breaking the park’s circuit only once in powering up half a dozen waffle irons, including the beloved Hello Kitty model, and Wreyford Senior got his week’s upper-body workout battering the batter into submission, the result of which was enough griddle cakes for all with plenty left over for flinging and burning as usual.

And, of course, Derrick managed to so effectively antique the trail home that riding behind (at least until the I-90 bridge) was like pedaling through a snowstorm, so, all in all, another successful evening of bike-fueled shenanigans, and to boot, now an open spot on Feburary’s calendar.

Waffle II

I like a ride where you just show up on your bike and you’re invited.

Everyone brings something—at least an appetite—and shares in the end.

My tradition (two years running) for the Waffle Ride is to take the bus to Bellevue from an evening in Bothell and then pedal through that unfamiliar yet nightmarish downtown across the magical intersection where cars can’t go straight and suddenly, you’re cruising through wooded suburbs to the lake.

I got a tiny bit lost, as is also my pattern in the suburbs (and, for that matter, the city), but eventually found my way from the QFC to the park, where—a good deal earlier than I expected—many were already set up and serving waffles; thus, my sense of urgency as I dished out ice cubes to plastic glasses and filled them 1/3rd to the rim with vodka, then almost to the rim with orange juice, floated Galliano on top, before finally dropping in a marischino cherry, yum.

I had read in the Times that the Harvey Wallbanger was making a comeback, so I got the fixings, and lo, Jen and I were completely underwhelmed with a batch the other night, but this evening they worked very well: with the juice and the proprietary formula, each one tasted almost healthy; I could imagine why it may have been the surfer beverage of choice for a while.

A fancy drink also contributes to the festivity of the event; I know that after the several rounds it took me to get (or taste as) the mixture just right, I sure was more animated.

Although I wiggled, too, because I was freezing. A dry evening, but as we stood near that crest on Mercer Island, the wind whistled through my bones.

Even fortified by 70s cocktails and geometric cake, I needed to get home, and a reasonably frightening windy crossing of I-90 was the very Galliano afloat my own fancy drink of an evening with .83.

Scrubbed

In my experience, the toothbrush has a life-cycle: It begins in your bathroom, for brushing of teeth, then off to the kitchen for cleaning the grout, and finally ends up on the workbench, for scrubbing cassettes.

There’s a class system here to be sure, but since so many make the transition, value judgments are set aside.  After all, flossing the teeth of a Shimano Megarange is no less noble an enterprise than getting into the spaces between molars. 

Your average toothbrush is just happy to have a role in life; it doesn’t matter whether it’s the penthouse or the outhouse, what matters to it is being used, performing its function, expressing its purpose, or as Aristotle would say, its telos.

Shirts in my house follow a similar trajectory as above: they start out as items in the weekday wardrobe, then become articles to sport on the weekend or in summer; finally, I figure I can put them on for a Thursday night ride without caring whether they end up with a burn hole or smeared with waffle batter or, as was the case most recently, shredded on the forearm due to an unexpected dive at the gravel path following an overzealous attempt to avoid a blackberry bramble hanging over the trail to Foster Island.

Nobody likes crashing, but I am pleased that my helmeted head slid under the park bench rather than landing on top of it, which is what I’ll try to keep reminding myself if the pace of sore shoulder recovery drags in the coming days.

And while I might regret the carelessness en route, at least I’ll be glad for thoughtful preparation: heading out on the ride, I swapped the nicer shirt I’d gone to lunch with for one already showing a few holes near the hemline, no great loss in its loss, after all.

Nobody minds when the workbench toothbrush falls to the floor; you just pick it back up and keep scrubbing.

Best

photo by Altercator

The idea that this is the best of all possible worlds is usually ridiculed. 

Generally attributed, in the Western canon, to the 18th century German philosopher, Leibniz, it was famously parodied by his French contemporary, Voltaire, who created, in his novella, Candide, the character, Dr. Pangloss, who went around espousing the view at every opportunity. 

Hence the term “panglossian,” which is usually used as a pejorative, as in, “Professor Dave is so stoned he has a panglossian attitude on things; doesn’t he realize that this can’t be the best of all possible worlds, what with so much needless suffering, pointless violence, and country-rock music?”

Yes I do, and have been certainly, but that still doesn’t convince me that things couldn’t possibly be better than they were, even if the mist kept turning to drizzle and in spite of not getting to follow Fancy Fred out of the park in the most unusual way. 

In the first place, the fire got hot enough that you could continually dry yourself by rotating slowly (and in doing so, manage to actually launder away some of the waffle batter crust from last week on one’s vest) and in the second, it’s probably just was well the evening out ended at the point it did given that it’s only the very first day of spring break and there will be plenty of other opportunities to go shirtless and yelling over the next couple of weeks.

We did without a moon on the Thursday closest to the equinox, what with it being the night before the day of the new one, but there was plenty of lunacy abounding nonetheless. 

The Angry Hippy remarked that pretty much everyone standing around the fire is the weirdo at their work, which means that the weirdoes among the assembled are the weirdoes squared.

You know who you are (but, of course, if you do, then you’re not—just like the world which is best isn’t but is.)

Batter

Photo by Joeball

Even if it’s true, as tehJobies surmised, WE are getting old,IT remains as new as ever, and time stands still in honor of the 8th Annual Waffle Ride, returned this year to its traditional time of year when the Sun is in Aquarius.

The promise of free carbohydrates compels even better than free beer as three score cyclists set out from Westlake on a crystal clear evening that one wag called, in deference to New Orleans’ upcoming “Fat Tuesday,” Seattle’s “Get Fat Thursday.” Hah.

In spite of—for those not affected, anyway—the requisite culpability-free bike crash en route, the yearly horde successfully descended upon the Island Oasis and proceeded to produce breakfast at night in under an hour with not a single broke breaker.

Take it as an illustration of the principle that everyone is happiest when they’re helping each other, which is why tehJobies gets to consistently enjoy too much of a good thing.

Langston opined that this was the shortest fair-weather .83 route ever; even if that’s true in terms of mileage, it’s false when it comes to experience. Keep in mind that the ride is almost a decade long even before starting and that before it was over, there were two bridge crossings, multiple tunnel-screamings, innumerable paths along routes unfamiliar to many, and countless intangible places that pedaling parties can take you.

At the end of my night, as I lay in bed with the smell of bakeries wafting through my nose and the dulcet tones of tehSchott’s moving karaoke rendering of “Stand by Me” drifting through my brain, the phrase “Fun is work” bubbled up in my mind and it occurred to me that the phrase is a palindrome--if by “work” we mean something like tehJobies’ tireless efforts at the irons.

And I realized that by such tautologies that the Universe comes into being; something from nothing, existence via identity.

Looked at that way, such fun ain’t old, it’s eternal.

WR4

photo by joeball

Evolutionary psychology is all the rage these days. That’s where you can explain any human behavior in terms of its adaptive fitness, so you get people telling “Just-So” stories about how, say, the fad of wearing baseball caps backwards can be made sense of according to how it allegedly confers an evolutionarily adaptive advantage on males who turn their brims around such that our hunter-gatherer ancestors who did something similar were more likely to pass on their DNA by doing so.

Frankly, I’ll be glad when the fad passes and we go back to Freudian rationales for our human quirks, but even so, I do love me any event where I get to feel like I’m reliving something like the kin group experience that our ancient forbears enjoyed out on the savannah tens of thousands of years ago.

And here, of course, I’m speaking of how swell it is to be amidst a gang of about four dozen self-propelled homo sapien sapiens who descend upon a public space, light fires, cook food, and intermingle for a couple hours before packing up and heading out, leaving only a few drops of uncooked batter and some bacon grease in their wake.

Waffle Ride IV went off last night in fine form, with tireless cooks churning out literally hundreds of textured griddle cakes which were greedily consumed under layers of everything from whipped cream and blueberries to guacamole with peanut butter.

I met up with the group en route by the I-90 tunnel and shared gingerbread spaceman cookies which, serendipitously, turn out to have built-in calibration markers: eat just the head and that’s where you feel the effect, add the body and you can count on a more corporeal response; finish up the legs and feet and you might have to sit down.

I snacked on slightly more than one man over the course of the evening; I doubt whether it was evolutionarily advantageous, but it sure tingled my DNA.

Battered

It counts as success if you wake in the morning on the downstairs couch, your glasses nowhere to be seen, with a sore wrist and pain in your quadriceps that must have been occasioned by some sort of impact you can’t quite recall.

What you do remember, however, is how lucky we were to have a bit of drizzle that encouraged the assembled to congregate under cover, and while there wasn’t a fire, you could, by standing close to the makeshift kitchen, be plenty warmed by the steam rising from a phalanx of irons, at least one of which made spider designs on the outcomes, the others content to merely produce warm pastries perfect for the application of butter, jam, Nutella, syrup, whipped cream, or nothing at all.

After eleven years, you can almost take this shit for granted, but that would be a mistake; I’m sure if the space aliens landed atop the covered freeway, they wouldn’t believe their multiple eyes, but the report back to Alpha Centuri would be accurate: a hundred or so homo sapiens on two wheels arriving at a spot that still doesn’t fail to deliver.

Electricity is a naturally-occurring phenomenon; you just have to direct it.  Picture Old Ben Franklin out in the storm with hit kite and key: I’m sure he never could have envisioned this sort of application of his discovery, but I’m also positive he would have adored it.  Early to bed and early to rise may make someone healthy, wealthy, and wise; however, in doing so, they would miss the opportunity to stand on a picnic table and see patterned pancakes make like Frisbees across the crowded shelter to the delight of many a butter-fingered reveler surprised by deliciousness saucering their way.

We should all thank our lucky stars that technology, combined with competence and a unique set of skills makes such events possible; a single waffle would be plenty; a decade-plus of them is pure astonishment.