Assclowns

When an evening of bicycle riding includes an interlude where somebody agrees to launch not just one, but two—(consecutively, not simultaneously) bottle rockets from his ass and it’s still not the most memorable part of the night, you have to chalk it up as a bona fide disaster (in the old sense of the word, the one that refers to the alignment of the stars, which must have been exerting a truly strange attraction on us all to result in such an odd and calamitous collection of events).

Or maybe the shortbread space cookie I had before leaving home had something to do with it.

In any case, more than once I got to feel like Walter Brennan meets Mr. Magoo as I stood slightly apart from my cycling comrades both dismayed and elated at the behaviors that swam before my eyes, which included surreal karaoke singing, random tossing of things that gosh darn it you kids, you better stop throwing, so help me, don’t make me come over there, fisticuffs, which I completely missed, thank god, the wearing of orange rubber fishing overalls, and a surprising amount of bicycle riding when you tallied it all up in the end.

And it was one of those times when, in some ways, the best part turned out to be the long solo route home, where the combination of sensory stimulations over the course of the night came together to make for an especially delightful ride, the front of my front wheel eating up the pavement slowly but surely all the way across town.

We had set out for Nickelsville, the homeless encampment near Georgtown, to bear witness to the authorities evicting the residents, but never made it past Goldies on Airport Way, which turned out to be just fine since the threatened removal didn’t take place although it did seem that, at some points, our butts were this close to being kicked out from where we were, too.