Once

In under a minute, and simply by pointing out a quartet of their extended cohort who were celebrating  high school graduation with a dip in the Puget Sound, did Joeball induce the cheerleader to utter what apparently is the rallying meme of the Class of 2012, “YOLO!” which doesn’t mean, as Soyoung had me believing at first, “You Obviously Love Owls,” but rather, is code for “You Only Live Once,” a truism which, though trivial, is not a bad principle to keep in mind when considering alternative courses of action on the nearly longest day of the year, especially when it’s a rare mostly sunny evening on what has been a typically dreary season so far.

Case in point: the knowledge that this current life is our one and only probably helped inspire us to ride up the steepy-steep from Alki to the secluded green space down the extra-gravelly path in order to better admire a sunset so lovely that when a sailboat crossed its golden rays on the water, a person was hard-pressed not to read the scene as a clichéd image painted by a Grandma in her first water-color class.

And the awareness that this time around is all there is no doubt also helped persuade the gang to climb even higher afterwards for a glimpse of the villa at Sunset and Seattle before riding the neighborhood spine down to Lincoln Park for the aforementioned Sound-watching among matriculating adolescents; and it certainly mitigated the annoyance I felt when I sunk my shoes not once, but twice into the sewagey bog behind the picnic tables.

Finally, knowing that I won’t experience Nietzche’s eternal recurrence, but will only get one shot at what the universe has to offer, was all the persuasion I needed to bomb brakeless down Genessee, a thrill that, though I have experienced it before, never fails to make me feel so alive that one life, even if it’s all I’ve got, is plenty.