Olden

I came to my old hometown of Minneapolis to do some revamp with my old writing partner on an old book of ours and couldn’t resist checking out the old neighborhood where Jen and I used to live when she was a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design way back in the old days of the very late 1980s and early 90s.

Things around here look pretty much the same as always although I don’t quite remember traffic being so bad, but that could be because of how infrequently I drive nowadays and how low my tolerance has become for sitting in a car behind other cars. Tooling around the Twin Cities in my friend’s two-seater convertible, which sits so low to the ground you’re pretty much at the tailpipe level of most SUVs, impressed upon me how much I used to drive when I lived here and how unsatisfying a way to spend one’s time that is, or at least is for me, now.

Minneapolis turns out to have miles and miles of freeways all of which seem to lead more or less to the same places, and all of which seem to be equally crowded at all times of day. I really don’t know how people live like this, but then again, most of them are in air-conditioned vehicles with the windows rolled up, while I was mostly melting like a Hershey’s Kiss in a frying pan with the heat turned up to high.

Yesterday, with the temperature close to one hundred degrees and the humidity about 80 percent was more challenging today when the thermometer has dropped all the way down to the mid-eighties, but because I spent more time driving today, it mostly felt worse.

I never get nearly so overheated riding a bike, although I’m going to test that out in a little while with a spin on my pal’s bike around his suburban neighborhood.

Yah sure, you betcha.