Wild Goose Chase
If I had a cell phone, tonight wouldn’t have happened.
While I take that as something I believe but cannot prove, I still think I can put forth evidence that supports my claim that things actually happened as I report them.
It’s like how the other day I was sitting on the bus near downtown Bothell and some guy was talking to himself in ways that only he and I paid any attention to whatsoever. But that was a human moment even though I was the only one who noticed it.
I had a vague plan, earlier in the evening, that I might run across my .83 mates, and so I toured by all the usual haunts: the Knarr, the CIP, the Nickerson, and even, given the evening’s shittiness, the Owl and Thistle, but none of these yielded a single familiar face. I also swung by the shelter in Gasworks Park, but all I saw was a couple of hobos chuckling and dancing in relative comfort out of the rain.
Consequently, I was a bedraggled and somewhat lonely little rat as I peeled off my layers of gear for an end-of-evening beer at the Elysian, when who should appear but Evil Mike, out for a nightcap himself. We ended up going through at least three pints apiece, covering a variety of topics, from Buffy Season Six to a Foucaultian analysis of one’s virtual presence in cyberspace.
But see, had I a cell phone, I could have phoned someone who was out on the Thursday night ride and met up with the gang, enjoying a potentially more convivial but certainly more predictable course of events. I take this not, as a I often have, as an indictment of the portable wireless telephone, but rather, as a celebration of many other such evenings in my past where I’ve wandered around looking for something or someone only to eventually discover that it wasn’t what I was searching for all along.
While I take that as something I believe but cannot prove, I still think I can put forth evidence that supports my claim that things actually happened as I report them.
It’s like how the other day I was sitting on the bus near downtown Bothell and some guy was talking to himself in ways that only he and I paid any attention to whatsoever. But that was a human moment even though I was the only one who noticed it.
I had a vague plan, earlier in the evening, that I might run across my .83 mates, and so I toured by all the usual haunts: the Knarr, the CIP, the Nickerson, and even, given the evening’s shittiness, the Owl and Thistle, but none of these yielded a single familiar face. I also swung by the shelter in Gasworks Park, but all I saw was a couple of hobos chuckling and dancing in relative comfort out of the rain.
Consequently, I was a bedraggled and somewhat lonely little rat as I peeled off my layers of gear for an end-of-evening beer at the Elysian, when who should appear but Evil Mike, out for a nightcap himself. We ended up going through at least three pints apiece, covering a variety of topics, from Buffy Season Six to a Foucaultian analysis of one’s virtual presence in cyberspace.
But see, had I a cell phone, I could have phoned someone who was out on the Thursday night ride and met up with the gang, enjoying a potentially more convivial but certainly more predictable course of events. I take this not, as a I often have, as an indictment of the portable wireless telephone, but rather, as a celebration of many other such evenings in my past where I’ve wandered around looking for something or someone only to eventually discover that it wasn’t what I was searching for all along.
posted by Professor Dave at 10:45 AM
2 Comments:
Dave, you might appreciate this piece in yesterday's NY Times, then:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/fashion/06spy.html
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you might be overly optimistic about your ability to track the ride even with a cellphone. they are slippery buggers and unless you can outflank them it can be tough to catch up. i've spent more than a few nights lagging just one stop behind.
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