New Moon in Pisces

Derek drove his Stinky McStinkster Huffalicious moped thing and what was most striking, aside from just how fucking loud and stinky it was, was how when he disappeared off onto some other route, it took me a while to realize that I wasn’t hearing or smelling it, that the buzzing in my ears and itching in my nose had gone and only the relative silence of gears clicking and chains turning remained.

But it’s an adorable toy and I even enjoyed skitching a ride along Alki after beers at the Beveridge Place Pub where it was old home week for a pitcher or two with the crew from ABR and Aaron and Joby in the same room without hardly an epithet hurled or past action begrudged—just another expression of the evening’s open-arm policy of welcoming all, even the motorized.

We had climbed the super steep but not too long “Snake Hill” to Langston’s home among the forest of new condos on High Point and then bombed down to Fauntleroy and I was marveling how what had begun, on my commute home from Bothell, as a cold and rainy winter night, eventually turned into a lovely spring evening. And apart from misplacing my wallet and then having the adreline rush of being sure it was gone followed by the sighing relief of finding it again something like three times in a row, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

I took it very slowly from West Seattle to Magnolia for Ben and karaoke at the Boxcar, but not so much that I didn’t catch up twice, once during plastic cheese nachos at the Seven-Eleven and once as the folding bike’s tire was attended to just east of the bridge. No nine-toed angry hippies were drunk enough to sing and me neither, so ultimately it was over the Ballard bridge behind the Huffalicious all the way to Fremont where it ran outta gas and I headed home in blessed silence.