327 Words

Teatime

2012-01-24T19:16:00.001-08:00

Maybe it’s all the Edith Wharton and Henry James I’ve been reading (even though they’re both Americans), or perhaps it’s the latent influence of last year’s trip to India (now a year ago!) but, of late, I’ve been enjoying a cup of tea in the afternoon—at teatime, more or less, if truth be told (and why shouldn’t it; this is hardly a thing about which to dissemble.)

Not to worry: I haven’t given up coffee (and, indeed, the idea of starting my day with boiling watre poured over leaves instead of grounds makes me shiver just to consider it) but I am willing to admit that I’ve come to appreciate the charm of a nice cuppa, especially if it’s accompanied by a book and a nap on the couch.

And fear not: I’m not at all inclined to start making pots of tea, or using loose leaves, or, heaven forfend, to start drinking Japanese green tea from ceramic bowls while wearing a kimono.

Nope, it’s Earl Grey in a bag, left to steep for no particular specified amount of time, and then augmented with Half and Half (or milk) and plenty of sugar. Basically, I’m drinking a hot, fatty Red Bull made from plants instead of plastic or petroleum or whatever it is that stuff is fabricated from.

I suppose this could be construed as another one of those changes coming with age; historically, if I wanted a little early evening lift, I’d have just brewed another pot of coffee, but the couple times I’ve done that of late, I’ve found myself lying abed at two or three in the morning over-planning the upcoming day.

So, here I am, having my afternoon tea, enjoying it even in the absence of sweet little cakes and cucumber sandwiches with their crusts cut off.

But maybe that’s what comes next. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find myself branching out to Chai, or Darjeeling or English Breakfast, or even Lapsang Souchong.

Normal

2012-01-22T16:56:00.001-08:00

Barring a freak storm (like the Flipper Boy and the Bearded Woman falling from the sky) the world starts again tomorrow and although it’s going to cut into my afternoon nap time, I’m ready to be back in the classroom opening impressionable as opposed to climbing the walls of my living room popping the tops off wine bottles.

It’s not like the unexpected week off wasn’t a treat, but it did make me realize that in order to really relish one’s freedom, a person has got to be prepared for it. Too much liberty, especially when it’s unplanned ends up making a fellow feel more unemployed than unencumbered and contributes to something more like anomie than enjoyment.

But maybe this is more a matter of being bored than it is being conscientious; it’s not exactly like weather and road conditions have lent themselves to a serious of thrilling outdoor adventures over the last five days. I have, of course, gotten into a good dose of family time and Edith Wharton’s The Reef has carried me through a number of relatively down hours, but even if the new day means I’ve got to rise before down in order to get a full primary series practice in, I’ll take it.

Now, no doubt I’d feel differently had the Steelers still been in the Superbowl hunt; I’m sure I could have designed the last fortnight around this morning’s AFC Championship game. As it was, however, watching was merely an intellectual exercise as opposed to a full-on emotional roller coaster.

I’m glad I’m not a Baltimore Ravens fan, in any case; had I been when their kicker, Billy Cundiff, muffed an easy cheap-shot that would have sent the contest into overtime, I’d had to have starting drinking so heavily and with such reckless abandon in order to drown my sorrows that I’m sure I would have needed another couple of snow days--if not another whole snow week--to recover.

Forecast

2012-01-19T16:36:00.000-08:00

The weather people have been falling all over themselves for the past few days trying to predict how much snow is going to fall in the 24 hours or so after they make their predictions.

Pretty much all of those prophecies have turned out to be more or less mistaken and most of the plans that have been made based on those forecasts have under or overestimated the impact of the weather on events, adding to a kind of mini-hysteria that could probably have been avoided by simply making decisions by looking out the window or taking a walk around the block.

Now, I realize that predicting winter weather, especially in this part of the Pacific Northwest, is remarkably tricky and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I regularly check the National Weather Service website and celebrity meteorologist Cliff Mass’ blog.

But seriously, to rely too heavily on claims about the future based on analyzing the present is, as 18th century British Empiricist, David Hume, reminds us, to use fallacious and even circular reasoning. We conclude that the future will behave as the past has because the future has always behaved like the past, but if we establish uniformity of nature by relying on the uniformity of nature, that’s cheating.

So, even if the weather data suggests that what’s going to happen is predictable, just because it has been predictable is no reason to conclude that it will be predictable again.

That said, I can’t complain overly that the Seattle Public Schools have again cancelled classes for tomorrow; this means that the evening around the homestead can unfold more slowly and gently than it would otherwise. Or, at least that’s how it’s worked in the past.

The forecasters tell us that the winter storm will be over by tomorrow afternoon, but then again, that’s what they said yesterday. This time, though, school closures don’t depend on what they’re saying, so I guess I’ll believe it.

Enough

2012-01-18T16:56:00.001-08:00

If a sure sign of being an old fogey is hoping that you don’t get another snow day (and, no doubt, it is) then I guess I qualify.

Even though I’ve enjoyed this extended Martin Luther King Day holiday, I’m feeling like I’d like to get back in the classroom at some point this week, even it’s a somewhat treacherous journey out to Bothell tomorrow.

But, we shall see.

I had a pleasant ride around the neighborhood this afternoon; on the side streets, where everything is all packed down, pedaling is no problem. Turning through intersections, where snow is piled up and chunky is a bit of an adventure, but with my two and a half-inch wide fatty tires with the air let out to about 25psi, I can stay upright through pretty much all of it.

Once I made it out of my alleyway, it was all pretty smooth sailing. Or cycling, that is.

We just got a phone message that Seattle Public Schools are closed tomorrow; these kids today are lucky they don’t have to get up early and press their ears to the radio in hopes of hearing that classes are cancelled, like we did back in the day. I remember having to sit through Barbara Streisand singing “People” at like 7:30AM in order to hear the good news.

Also, like plenty of other old fogies, I can easily go off on how low the bar is set these days for closing things down. Back when I was a wee lad, and had to tromp five miles through the drifts, uphill both ways, in sub-zero temperatures, we’d only get the day off if snow blocked the second-story windows of Kerr School.

So, I suppose it’s no great wonder that I’m more or less hoping I’m required back at Cascadia tomorrow; there’s philosophy to do, folks, and as long as our brains aren’t completely frozen, we ought to take the opportunity to do so now.

Privilege

2012-01-17T14:28:00.001-08:00

What with today’s scary-forecast induced snow day, I got an extra Sunday this week, albeit one without any football games to linger over.

So I availed myself of the opportunity to perform my usual beginning-of-the-week shopping expedition, including enjoying a couple cups of coffee and a dill scone at the coffeeshop, although instead of reading the New York Times as is my typical wont, I finished up Carson McCullers’ lovely The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and am now inspired to read or re-read everything else she ever wrote.

I’ve tried to see this relatively free day as a special gift and really appreciate the privilege it’s afforded me to do an extra-long yoga practice, linger over my morning coffee, sit on the couch and read fiction, noodle with my entry for this year’s Filmed by Bike Festival, spend some time perusing my latest book on Indian Philosophy, ride my bike downtown to the Army-Navy store for a new pair of gloves, pay a few bills, and best of all, not have to get up at 4:30 in the morning for my 8:45 AM class.

I could get used to this four-day weekend thing and if the predictions for Snowpocalypse come true, it’s likely it may morph into five days before the roads in Bothell are clear enough for students to arrive on campus in sufficient numbers to hold classes.

We shall see.

Jen and I were talking the other day about the epistemological status of future claims. Suppose, for instance, I say, “I know that school will be cancelled tomorrow.” Strictly speaking, that can’t, at this point, be a true statement; it will only become so if indeed campus is shut down.

And yet, it seems reasonable to say that if it becomes true, then it was true at the moment I uttered it.

Frankly, it’s a puzzle, and at this point, I’ll see it as one that’s a privilege to be able to puzzle over.

Waffling

2012-01-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

The season’s been shuffled around this year, with winter coming late (and so far, hardly at all), so it’s no surprise, really, that February appeared in January—as evidenced last night by the full flowering (or, make that “flouring”) of the annual .83 Waffle Ride some four weeks before it usually rears its square-patterned head.

But that’s mere testament to the turn-on-a-dime flexibility of the drunken bike gang, able, in just a moment’s (well, two days’) notice turn a proposed Christmas tree conflagration event into one where the fires (such as they were) occurred on griddles rather than sand, and the objects of carbon release happened to be something edible as opposed to adornable.

In short, it was all about fire in the sky morphing into fire in the belly, and I for one, endorse such transformations even if they run counter to tradition, untraditional as it may be.

Hard-core miscreants may scoff at the idea of shit-canning an activity whose legal standing is already questionable just because John Law says “don’t do it,” but if it means that there can be two hall-pass worthy events in back-to-back weeks, I’m all for it.

Besides, think of how what another week of drying will do for the combustability of all those evergreen bombs currently stashed in people’s back yards and alleys.

tehJobies once again worked his electrical magic, breaking the park’s circuit only once in powering up half a dozen waffle irons, including the beloved Hello Kitty model, and Wreyford Senior got his week’s upper-body workout battering the batter into submission, the result of which was enough griddle cakes for all with plenty left over for flinging and burning as usual.

And, of course, Derrick managed to so effectively antique the trail home that riding behind (at least until the I-90 bridge) was like pedaling through a snowstorm, so, all in all, another successful evening of bike-fueled shenanigans, and to boot, now an open spot on Feburary’s calendar.

Over

2012-01-11T17:52:00.001-08:00

Three days later, I’m no longer mourning the Steelers’ stunning overtime loss to the Denver Broncos at the hands of the despicably holier-than-thou Tim Tebow in Sunday’s NFL Wild Card game.

In fact, looking back on it now, I scoff at why anyone would care at all about the outcome of a mass-produced “sporting event” featuring overpaid specimens of testosterone-poisoned human beings running around in spandex for a couple hours chasing an inflated pigskin up and down a field made of plastic.

With some distance on the thing, I sure don’t.

But damn, right afterwards, it sure felt like a punch in the gut.

Of course, it was all my fault.

Although I did pick up all the dog-poo in the backyard, I never took out the vacuum cleaner, preferring instead to tidy up the rugs and hardwood using my brand-new carpet cleaner. Lacking the use of electricity, it apparently doesn’t produce the same salubrious effect upon the gridiron play of the Black n’ Gold; now I know.

And even though I did lay out my dearly-departed mom and dad’s rings atop their watches on the Terrible Towel (in the second half, mind you, thereby precipitating Pittsburgh’s furious comeback from two touchdowns behind), I made a critical error at the start of overtime, when I stepped away momentarily from the game to grab one final wee dram of rye whiskey to calm the shattered nerves. Returning to the television screen, I was just in time to see Demaryius Thomas streaking for the end zone, much to my disbelief and horror.

Now, Cousin Seth tells me that championship teams will overcome missteps like mine and I wish I could fully buy that. Unfortunately, I can’t shake the feeling that if only I had waited to turn my attention away from the game that the outcome would have been different—or at least not so stunningly quick and agonizingly terrible.

Not that I care about it or anything, anyway.

Dark

2012-01-08T15:28:00.001-08:00

I recall one summer morning in Pittsburgh, circa 1972; I had a dentist appointment at 10:30AM and so had to be up and out several hours earlier than I usually rose at that time of year. It seemed weird to me that the world was still carrying on every day in my absence. What were all these people doing up and about? Did this really happen every day? And if so, why?

I’m having a similar sort of experience this quarter as I show up at the bus stop around 7:15 in order to get to my 8:45 class; it’s still pitch dark at that time but these streets are full of fully-dressed human beings hurrying about on their ways to somewhere. I find it hard to believe that this has been happening on a daily basis all these many months or that it continues when I’m not around, sleeping peacefully, or more typically, lying in savasana at the end of my yoga practice.

I realize that this is a kind of solipicism, but, as a solipcist, why should I be bothered? After all, if that’s the case, anything I might be bothered by is just a product of my own mind, so I might as well ignore it.

On the other hand, suppose that the external world really does exist; that would do a better job of explaining why all those people from Tacoma get off the train just at the moment my bus arrives and clamor aboard, taking up all the good seats.

It’s not that I mind the early morning; as my daughter Mimi pointed out to me, a quarter to nine isn’t really all the early for your average school kid; she’s in class every day at 8:00 after all.

Still, I remain unconvinced that all the activity I observe during those AM hours is actually real; it seems equally possible that it’s some sort of dumbshow those stops when I’m asleep.

Resolutions

2012-01-02T16:21:00.001-08:00

Probably the best New Year’s resolution is to resolve to make no resolutions. That way, you paint yourself into a paradoxical corner from which escape is only possible by sitting in a corner reading Wittgenstein in the original German.

But since, as we know, the world is all that is the case, and because that case, in my case, is a basket case, I can’t help myself from considering at least a few things I might do this year to improve upon my performance in 2011, at the very least in hopes of earning the kind of bonus that my friends in the one percent are used to receiving at year’s end.

So, for starters, I hereby resolve to eat healthier in the next twelve months. What this will entail is not entirely clear, but I do think it precludes indulging in my penchant for sprinkling my breakfast cereal with botulism and ebola, oh well.

In a similar spirit, I guess I’ll also resolve to drink less coffee; I pair this, of course, with a resolution to sleep more and smoke more crack. Or not.

I also resolve to exercise at least three times a week; the one starting the third Sunday in June should work fine.

I hereby resolve to be kinder and more compassionate to my fellow human beings—fucking assholes though they be.

I’m going to ride my bike more this year than I did last; I guess that’s more of a prediction than a resolution, though.

I also resolve to lose five pounds—at the current exchange rate, that comes out to about seven dollars and seventy-five cents. Hopefully, it’s not cheating to lose it at playing craps.

I resolve not to care so much when the Steelers; it should be no problem as long as they win the Superbowl.

Finally, I resolve above all, to be a much better person; so, for Halloween this year, I’m going to go as Mother Teresa.

Better

2011-12-31T16:58:00.001-08:00

I generally contend that 1987 was my favorite year:

I got married, came this close to publishing my first novel, wrote most of an unpublished second, spent seven months living in Paris and the south of France with my blushing bride, and basically got to live out most of the dreams I had about life at that time.

I usually consider 1997 a close second:

I became a father, bought a house, finished my Master’s Degree in Philosophy, co-wrote a second self-help book with my friend and co-author Richard Leider, started doing yoga pretty seriously, and basically took the important foundational steps to becoming the version of an adult that I am today.

I’m putting 2011 right up there, though:

I travelled to India to study yoga for two and a half months, wrote a soon-to-be-published book on doing Philosophy with young pre-college students, co-rewrote the third edition of Repacking Your Bags, the book Richard Leider and I wrote that has sold something like 300,000 copies worldwide, survived the 13th year of my daughter’s life, rode my bike at least 7000 miles, sold five Haulin’ Colin trailers, managed to bend myself into Marichasna D with almost daily regularity and in general, got to do everything I wanted most of the time.

Lots of people claim—and many with ample justification—that things are getting worse in the world year after year. That may be—and certainly is from an environmental standpoint, for instance—but in my little life, at least, the possibility of improvement still exists.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever have a year to top ’87 and I can’t see ’97 falling out of second place, but if these past 365 days are any gauge, it’s not impossible that there will be other times upon which I can look back as fondly as I do these.

Here I am, getting nostalgic for the present; how odd. I can see shedding tears for auld lang syne, but new?

Home

2011-12-23T11:14:00.000-08:00

Ironically, on my first Thursday night out in a many a moon (well, probably only about one and a half to be precise), the ride went so close to my house that had I been there, I probably could have pedaled out, stood around the fire, and been back in my living room reading Edith Wharton before even my dog would have noticed.

As it was, however, I got to enjoy the full menu of delights on the evening’s agenda, including hot buttered rums, warm peppermint patties (the liquid version), tunnel screaming, Pioneer Square bar-shopping which resulted—on a successful search to locate a “historical” watering hole—in having our very own subterranean clubhouse christened beneath Seattle’s oldest drinking establishment, and then, a short, but bracing spin to what’s become, more or less, the “go-to” spot for belting out tunes, although, admittedly, I only lasted a beer’s worth before heading home right about pumpkin hour.

Motormouth Matt provided the warm libations in honor of the day Seattle’s first municipal ordinance (against drunkenness and disorderly conduct) went into effect and so it seemed particularly appropriate that most of the evening was spent breaking those constraints, but what I noticed was that in spite of this, no matter where we went, it was all about spreading the love, from some random neighbor walking his dog just about to run home, grab his bike and join in, to the bartender at our underground hideaway who was all but ready to give us keys to the joint for next time we came back.

“There’s no place like home for the holidays” goes the old Perry Como classic and though uncontentiously true, it therefore comes down to what qualifies as home. Family comes first, natch, but then there’s the extended-play version which includes all those undiscovered and rediscovered routes through our fair city that routinely involve fire and fellowship and lead through history and hijinks to home’s traditionally preferred location, the heart.

Content

2011-12-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve got everything a guy could want in life: a loving family, a good job, a lovely little house in the best neighborhood in town; and I get to ride my bike pretty much every day.

The only thing that’s missing—and not always, mind you—is a bit more of the unexpected. Not that I’m asking for it, but I do find myself kind of at a loss when someone asks me “What’s new?”

As it turns out, not much.

I’m happy with that for the most part; quite honestly, like anyone who’s being honest with himself, I fear change. Give me pretty much the same thing day after day and that’s fine. For example, I’ve eaten basically the same breakfast for the last three months and am not bothered a bit by it.

Still, this does make it difficult when I’m scanning about for something to write about; I used to have no problem writing about anything—or even nothing—but these days, I feel like if I’ve got no news to report, then why report at all?

I’ve missed my main source of content, the weekly .83 ride, for more than a month now. Time flies during this time of the year, what with the quarter ending the holidays now in full swing, but it’s hard to believe it’s been so long.

Fortunately, my commute from school has given me some opportunities to simulate the experience, albeit all by my lonesome—which makes the reporting of shenanigans highly unlikely.

Last night, even though I didn’t join in the two-wheeled holiday festivities, I did manage to pedal to a nearby watering hole where I drank a couple drinks, eyed the hipsters, and enjoyed a brief, but slightly tipsy ride back to my house.

Not much to write home about, but then again, not much to complain about either. Besides, now that’s school’s out for winter break, who knows what’s in store: mystery, adventure, Santa Claus.

Holitacular

2011-12-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

One of the standard proofs for God’s existence is the so-called “Fine Tuning Design Argument,” which begins by observing the innumerable universal constants that had to be just right for our Universe to come into existence and ultimately support life, and concludes that the likelihood of this happening is just too infinitesimal to have happened without a designer—namely God, who therefore, exists.

As it turns out, people make a similar argument when, at the finish of a bicycle “poker run” in celebration of the winter holidays, you show up with a hand featuring all eights which—even though they weren’t wild as would have befitted the event’s .83 sponsorship—was immediately judged as too perfect to have resulted from mere chance.

“That’s a cheater hand,” is how the Angry Hippy put it, which, of course, raises the question of what actually constitutes cheating among a group of miscreants for whom rules are anathema.

And although I’ll admit that I did do some persuading of the good people handing out cards at the checkpoints, I don’t think the mere implausibility of my perfect deal is alone evidence that it couldn’t have arisen naturally.

After all, even a royal flush is not nearly so unlikely as what went down overall: a rain-free December evening in Seattle, complete with often-visible full moon; several dozen drunken fools on bicycles scattering blindly through a public park at night without a single broken collarbone; feats of strength including not one, but two, skinny dippers in the freezing Puget Sound; an hilarious holiday bacchanalia with prizes for many and gifts for all; live music by the Summer Babes, gratis; all this organized and made possible with no motive other than good, clean, and sometimes embarrassing fun by nonsense-makers of the highest order, for just four bucks a head.

You want to talk unlikely? That anyone, anywhere should be lucky enough to do shit like Holitacular 2011.

And even more improbable? Six years running.

Reality

2011-12-07T14:54:00.001-08:00

Reality is overrated. Really.

On the other hand, this may be a meaningless claim given that it’s not at all clear what reality is.

Let’s stipulate that when we use the term “reality,” we’re talking about our everyday experience of the world, unmediated by any consciousness-altering substances or experiences.

But, of course, that begs the question (in the appropriate sense of the term, circular reasoning), because now we’re left wondering what such substances and experiences might be.

Does coffee count? Sugar? How about an hour and a half of yoga practice? Or what about if I get less than my usual eight hours or so of sleep a night? It seems like it’s going to be very difficult to establish what qualifies as “everyday experience.”

Suppose, then, we take some average as the baseline. Call “reality” something like “the everyday experience I have of the everyday mostly every day.” Fair enough.

In that case, then, yes, “reality” is indeed overrated. Granted, it is when one gets most of one’s productive work completed; it also provides a foundation for identifying what doesn’t qualify as reality, but I do think there’s still much to be said for stepping outside it on a fairly regular basis, at the very least for the opportunity to look in on it and see what’s going on from a different perspective.

Let it be understood that I’m not advocating any sort of questionable or illicit behavior here; I’m simply suggesting that what counts as “real” isn’t the only place to spend one’s time.

Naturally, there are innumerable ways to step outside the commonplace; it’s incumbent upon each of us to decide for him or herself how to do so. An extra cup of coffee in the morning, maybe; perhaps two spoons full of sugar instead of the usual single serving; who knows?

I’m going to try pedaling extra fast on my next bike ride home. Commonplace, no way. Unreal? I guess we’ll find out.

Justdoit

2011-12-01T21:02:00.001-08:00

Three times during the last few weeks I’ve been semi right-hooked by cars and twice, at least, parked vehicles have pulled out in front of me as I’m passing them.

But this being Seattle, where everybody’s “Seattle Nice,” they’ve each stopped in the middle of their dumbfuckery and gone all apologetic, as if the fact that their three thousand pound vehicle sitting there in front of me making me have to slam on the brakes is somehow to be overlooked and I can magically continue on even though my path forward is blocked their door panels and fenders.

So I say to them: “Thanks, but no thanks.”

If you’re gonna run me off the road, just go ahead and do it already; don’t pretend that stopping halfway through your cluelessness makes it any less clueless.

I mean, I’ve already prevented myself from slamming into you; you might as well continue your turn and get the hell out of my way sooner rather than later.

Sure, I appreciate that you’ve recognized that you fucked up, but wouldn’t it have been better not to have done so in the first place? Now that you’re sitting there blocking my way, what’s the point? I’m sure you’re a lovable human being in your own way; maybe you’re just a douche behind the wheel of a car.

Like the other day, I’m rolling down Jackson Street and this Ford Bronco zips around me just in time to cut right immediately into a parking lot. I’m all like “what the fuck?” but manage to panic stop before I crash into him. But instead of completing the turn, the guy stops and gives me the “oops” look through his passenger side window. I grimace back at him and then have to swing wide around him, dangerously into the other lane’s traffic to continue on my way.

“No kindness ever goes unpunished” said Oscar Wilde; corollary for these drivers: “Your kindness is ever not punishing.”

Football

2011-11-24T13:44:00.001-08:00

This being Thanksgiving, I’m doing my patriotic duty as an American male by watching me some football on the big-screen TV in high-definition.

As silly as the sport it, it’s nevertheless relatively relaxing—primarily because the Steelers aren’t playing—to watch large men in tights run around and into each other for the enjoyment of fans in the stands and catching the game on the tube.

I do have to say, though, that there are a couple of things about the sport I just find terribly annoying, namely above all, fucking pass interference and holding penalties. It seems to me that the refs could call either of them on just about every single play, and so it’s relatively arbitrary when they do.

To my way of thinking, they ought to let defensive backs do whatever they want to receivers when the ball is in the air; tackle the guy, poke him in the eye, punch his nuts—that would make catching a pass something meaningful rather than the sissified nonsense it is right now.

Similarly, the league should allow linemen to use whatever means they want—tripping, punching, nut-punching—to keep defensive backs away from their quarterback, and it would likely even out whatever advantage would accrue to the defense for being allowed to smash receivers.

As a general rule, officials have way too much effect on the game; I say let the players play, even if it means—well, especially if it means—that there is increased mayhem and violence on the field.

Naturally, I don’t really want to see players getting hurt—except, of course, Tom Brady—but isn’t the game suppose to be all about which team is more physical?

Back in the days of the Steel Curtain in Pittsburgh, they used to let linebackers wear casts on their forearms to crack the heads of their opponents; that’s the kind of play that I miss; how about going back to leather helmets for everyone?

Droplets

2011-11-22T19:23:00.001-08:00

Even the steadiest downpour has some nuance.

On my ride today from Bothell to the U-District, which easily qualifies as my wettest ride of the season, the rain never stopped, but it did seem to let up from time to time.

But that could have been just during the climbs, when I hit fewer raindrops by going slower. Come to think of it, all of the times when it seemed the rain was falling hardest were times I was heading downhill.

So, I dunno

What I am sure of though, is that it really wasn’t so bad, at least when I was all geared up with plastic pants and shoe covers.

In fact, I got more soaked, after I’d taken my gear off to enjoy a cup of coffee in my old graduate school favorite, Parnassus coffee shop, riding from the Art Building (in whose basement Parnassus resides) to Savery Hall (where my afternoon class takes place)—a distance of maybe 200 yards—than I did in the 14 or so miles from Cascadia to the UW.

My only real complaint is that it wasn’t 10 degrees colder so all this would be snow; we’d probably have three feet on the ground now and the Thanksgiving break would already have started.

I guess I could also lodge my standard objection to wet gloves, too; although I planned ahead for a change and brought an extra pair, so I didn’t have to don the soaking ones after my UW class for the ride home.

So, all in all, a reasonably comfortable pedal through what some wags are calling the “Rainpocalypse.” Of course, I’ll be sick of the wet soon enough if it keeps up; at this point, though, I’m still finding it sort of amusing given our fairly dry November so far.

In my mind, December’s when it gets really shitty; sideways rain, days that get dark by 3:30; and worst of all, gloves that smell of cheese.

Missed

2011-11-18T10:14:00.001-08:00

One of the standard “problems” in philosophy is the so-called “problem of personal identity.” Essentially, it’s the “what makes me ‘me?’” question, and is particularly puzzling when we wonder about identity over time.

The nub of the issue is that because we change so much from year to year, it’s hard to see how one can conclude we remain the same person all of our lives. After all, I’m nothing like the infant I was more than half a century ago, so why should I claim that that baby with his bottle and me with mine are identical. After all, from the standpoint of our physical, mental, or even biological properties we’re not.

There are, of course, “solutions” to the problem. We can talk about bodily continuity, or a kind of connected chain of memories, or, if we want to go all dualist, we might propose that it’s the singularity of soul that defines me consistently.

Frankly, I’m most sympathetic to the so-called “illusion theory,” which says that the “self” doesn’t really exist. All we are is an ongoing collection of mental states and physical attributes; just like Oakland, California without its “there” there, here I am without any “me” here.

But then that means that all “I” am is what I think and do at any moment. The strange implication of this, if I understand it, is that if I don’t do the things I do then I’m no longer who I am anymore.

If I skip a day of my yoga practice, as I more than halfway did yesterday then apparently, I’m no longer a student of Ashtanga.

If I stop writing 327 word essays and posting them to the internetz, then I can’t say that I’m still a “blogger” (not that I’d have any interest in so defining myself.)

On the other hand, if I miss the weekly Point83 ride, I’m still a cycling miscreant: it was just once and not because of weather.

Blink

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

I had explained to Joeball why I was seriously entertaining the notion that inanimate objects occasionally pop out of existence and then back in again: right before Westlake, I stopped at the ATM to withdraw beer money, but my wallet was nowhere to be found.

I dug through my bags at least three times and had just resigned myself to the fact that I must have dropped the fucking thing back at the coffeeshop in Eastlake.

So, I’m reaching for my phone to try and call them, when I’ll be damned if the billfold doesn’t present itself under my fingers right where I’d searched repeatedly with a fine-toothed comb only moments before.

No surprise, then, that it was he who pointed out that the phenomenon reoccurred later in the evening: when Submariner Matthew managed to achieve what Lee Williams rightly describes as an “escheresque chain suck” while navigating the roller coaster paths through Discovery Park’s woods behind the Angry Hippy’s fearless lead.

Clearly, there was no way that loop-de-loop around crank arm and chainring could have happened had some part of his drive train not exited this temporal realm and then reappeared back on the bike with its atoms inverted slightly.

And while I still think that had we flipped his rig and taken a longer look at the contorted metal we might have figured out how to untangle it, you had to love the opportunity to stand around outside in the woods on a full moon night and kibbitz Fancy Fred while he performed open heart surgery with all-in-one tools to get our nautical comrade seaworthy again.

Insert seaman joke here!

It’s probably crazy, of course, to think reality isn’t continuous, and that wallets and chains perform these feats of inter-dimensional travel, but I don’t know.

Consider the macro version of the same phenomenon: teleportation of several dozen bike riders to a lunar-lit paradise and back in under two hours.

How else you gonna explain it?

Native

2011-11-04T11:06:00.001-07:00

Charlie don’t surf.

Papa don’t preach.

And Joeball don’t do no out-and-backs.

Instead, he pulls from his seemingly bottomless quiver of tricks yet another never-seen option and escorts you through the riparian forest wormhole where mountains are scaled with no climbing at all.

Just another night on two wheels tracing ancient land routes that would have taken old Chief Sealth a week of vision-questing to complete but which, simply by following blinkies, balancing atop marshes, and ignoring every rule on the sign except the one about Jeeps, you can navigate in just a few starry hours on an evening so ideally suited to the task it sows laughter even without any vegan whipcream.

It’s always confused me how a perfect lunar half-circle is called the quarter moon but it nevertheless made all the sense in the world to be bathed in its milky glow as the flames circled closer and charmed for a moment while sparks rose and all those indigenous shamans from way back when chilled alongside.

Ponder alternate realities just inches away. You can slide over to visit then pull the scrim back on return but what’s most amazing of all is the mundane: human-powered adventures fueled by open flame, familiar voices curling like smoke on night air, and trails that interface between land and river; man, if that don’t tickle the grease monkey within, it’s time to pedal harder.

Getting lost is most fun when you can also lose yourself, and that only happens when it's all relax and rely; and though I admit I couldn’t picture the hill-free loop beforehand, I wasn’t really all that surprised as it unspooled.

After all, we’ve been down this road before—a totally different one, of course, but another which no way doubles-back upon itself neither.

It’s like an inhale, then exhale, and there you are, back in a bar eating peanuts almost like the amazing is ordinary which, amazingly, it is—all the way 'round.

Missing

2011-11-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

I have a Burke-Gilman Trail-shaped hole in my heart.

It’s not the whole thing; just the part from 25th and Blakely through Lake Forest Park, the part I nowadays skip by riding up from Montlake through Lake City and down the 522 to 175th and Bothell Way.

It’s not so bad on the ride out to school from home; time-wise, it doesn’t really take me any longer than staying on the trail did. Pedaling past all the car dealerships in Lake City isn’t as pleasant as cruising by Lake Washington to be sure, but I don’t mind it too much since it’s generally still light out when I’m doing so.

It’s the coming home that sort of sucks, especially the grind up Lake City Way from the Lake Forest Park Shopping Center. That’s where I all too often yield to the temptation to wait for the bus downtown, even on nights when it’s not raining and an extra ten or twelve miles of riding would be a good way to pass an hour or so.

It’s been this way since summer, when construction crews began work on the trail; the signs say they’re going to be done December 15; from the looks of things, it may be sooner than that.

Paving is completed from Log Boom Park in Kenmore at least as far as 175th. You get to ride on new asphalt for about 20 feet before the detour begins. This has only served to whet my appetite for the rest of the newly-restored route.

I’ve often thought, over the past nine years of riding the trail four or five days a week, that were it not for its existence, I probably wouldn’t be so consistent of a bike commuter from Seattle to Bothell. These past five months of detour have done nothing to dissuade me; I think I can hold out, though, for another month or so, and my cycling heart to be whole once more.

Shimmer

2011-10-28T09:59:00.001-07:00

Winnie the Pooh observed at Westlake that every time there’s a chance to wear a costume, I show up in a dress.

True enough, but you can’t really expect a person to pass on the opportunity to sport of glittery frock and pedal round town especially when it includes a stint standing in a bar, pretending to be the Princess of a Seven Game World Series while raising a glass and cheering for what turned out to be one the greatest games ever in the history of the Fall Classic.

And speaking of fall classics, it was good to see dear old Ronald McFondle turn up for his annual Halloween shenanigans, which this year, in addition to the requisite bottle rockets and other small ordnance, also featured an abortive attempt to raise an outdoor conflagration ex nihilo from a scavenged wire spool and some broken apart palettes.

Downtown Seattle shimmered across the water like its namesake Emerald City as we sparkled in reflection on the Gasworks Park slab before a short spin to what turned out to be the final three innings of that marvelous game.

As long as baseball’s being played, summer’s not over and only a crusty old toad like Nolan Ryan himself could possibly bemoan those two, count ‘em two, down-to-their-last-strike comebacks by the Redbirds of St. Louie in the bottoms of the ninth and tenth.

Beer, baseball, bikes: even in a tutu, I’m still a guy, so it was the total sportsgasm experience, topped by a bomb through the woods to a bar I thought we’d drunk at before, but may not be back to for a while after the chilly send-off I got from the cook who vowed to remember my face should I ever return wanting food, not that I imagine he’d recognize me without the long blonde locks and twinkly hoop skirt.

But who knows? It’s only a year until next Halloween’s ride and I already know what I’m wearing.

Tools

2011-10-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

Here’s another thing I like about riding my bike everywhere: free stuff for my shop!

Yesterday, I picked up a perfectly good pair of Vice-Grips that were just lying in the street, nowhere near the pickup truck they probably fell out of. Not only are they a useful addition to the stock of tools in my workbench, they also go really well with the screwdriver I scored last week as I pedaled home from school.

This isn’t all that an uncommon phenomenon, either. I’ll bet that I find some sort of useful (or broken) something or other at least every other week. It ranges from a simple box wrench one day to, on another occasion, a cordless electric drill, complete in a box with the charger and everything. (Admittedly, it turned out to be busted—I think from being run over by a passing car—but still, a pretty good find; someone at Goodwill, where I eventually took it, surely made out well with it.)

Of course, I haven’t bought a bungee cord in years; I rarely go more than a week or two without finding one abandoned by the side of the road. Now, you might think that those that have sprung themselves from whatever they were holding onto might not be so desirable, but none of those I’ve garnered have given me any trouble; they certainly work just fine on my bike trailer.

I suppose I might do a better job of trying to return the loot that I come across to its rightful owners and, in my defense, I have, from time to time, placed whatever item has presented itself to me on the hood the nearest automobile, although admittedly, when it comes to box-cutters (of which I’ve found three or four) that strikes me as courting danger, at least indirectly.

It’s safer for me to take these things home, just like the dime of devil's lettuce I found near the park last week.

Russian

2011-10-20T19:18:00.001-07:00

Today was one of those overscheduled days, where I had to be watching the clock from the very first breath of my first yoga pose of the morning, all the way through my early class, a meeting with my college president, the bus ride between Cascadia and the UW, my second stint teaching of the afternoon, and even the bike ride home.

No sir, I don’t like.

Back when I was a callow youth, sometime in the 20th century, I used to feed on this sort of thing. I recall one day, for instance, must have been 1985; I was living in Los Angeles, eking out a meager sustenance with at least three jobs—syndicated radio production, temporary office worker, and aspiring comedy writer—and my schedule required me to race back and forth across the city, getting from West Hollywood to Downtown and then up to Burbank with negative numbers of minutes between my destinations.

I actually had to go backwards through time to get where I needed to go when I needed to get there.

The heart-pounding thrill of it all was thrilling to me; snaking through traffic like a madman was my idea of fun. Having no time to think, much less to eat or excrete made me feel like my life really mattered and that I was destined for great things, some of which I was already doing.

Nowadays, by contrast, I despise being in a hurry. I’d rather get out of bed three hours before I have to be somewhere only an hour away just so I don’t have feel that sensation that I’m almost running behind. I’m one of those old people who shows up at the airport for their flight two and half hours ahead of its schedule departure; I even typically give myself 90 minutes of preparation in advance of heading off to teach a class.

Truth be told, I even allocated nearly 10 whole minutes to write this.

Regular

2011-10-14T10:14:00.001-07:00

I’m interested in the difference, if there is one, between reliable and predictable, or, let’s say, between dependable and boring.

In both cases, the former term is an admirable quality, the latter, a trait we generally try to eschew. I’m perfectly happy being a reliable husband, father, and teacher; I get a little nervous when my wife, daughter, or students can predict beforehand what I’m going to do around the house or in the classroom.

Similarly, it’s comforting to know that there are certain qualities and experiences one can generally depend upon come a cool and dry Thursday evening in October, but at the same time be able to rest assured that those familiar shenanigans will—in spite of their familiarity (and perhaps, even to some extent, because of it)—rarely, if ever, be in the least bit boring.

Besides, I’d never seen a moon quite like the one that hovered over our hobo peleton as we wound around a newly-paved trail on top of Beacon Hill: the mist had softened and shaded the lunar satellite’s edges such that the normally two-dimensional disk in the sky looked instead like a silver sphere nestled in the downy heavens.

Nor do I recall the bomb from up there to our provision stop being so hilariously extended; two or three times I thought it had ended only to have the road dive deeper down into the welcoming woods.

And of course, fire is fire, but being fire, always burns anew, especially when fueled by palettes carried three miles by single arms on two-wheelers.

Joeball and I had pondered a bar in the middle of things to which we’d never been or at least, not in a while, but rolling out from the park, an inexorable gravity drew us all back to a familiar ID haunt and yet, even that was full of surprise: I, for one, had never before caroused in circles to an Angry Hippy version of Piano Man.

Surprise

2011-10-09T16:09:00.005-07:00

I did the unthinkable today.

Even though the Steelers were the early game, I went to Sunday morning yoga class, thereby missing not only the kickoff, but as it turned out, all but the last 42 seconds of the first half.

Amazingly, though, it worked out, as the Black n’ Gold, even without my assistance, dominated the Tennessee Titans, for a 38 to 17 victory (that wasn’t even really that close) at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh.

Woo-hoo.

Does this mean my superstitious ways will now be put on hold, and I’ll no longer have to worry about wearing my lucky shirt, eating the propitious sandwiches, and laying out my late Mom and Dad’s wedding rings on the table to ensure a Steelers’ victory?

Probably not; probably I’ll just make it a new practice to go to Sarah Plummer’s led Ashtanga class on gamedays like today; so far, it’s an infallible technique for securing that my team prevails.

Of course, this might not be so strange as it sounds; there is a precedent. Back in the day, when I was a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan, I discovered a correlation between how many laps I swam in the swimming pool and whether the Boys in Blue won that night. It turned out that if I completed at least 40 lengths of the pool, doing the Australian Crawl, I could pretty much count on the Dodgers winning. I ever wrote to the team management to let them know about this curious, but entirely predictable phenomenon. Oddly enough, they never got back to me.

During the last Superbowl, in which the Steelers succumbed to the Green Bay Packers, I was sitting on my couch in India, listening to the game on internet radio at 5:30 in the morning, waiting to head off to the yoga shala by 8:00. The Steelers lost, of course, and now I know why: instead of waiting to practice, I should’ve already been on my mat.

Blip

2011-10-07T11:42:00.001-07:00

When, upon calling tehSchkott for coordinates some two hours or so after the ride had begun and he told me where it had landed, I reckoned how long it would take me to get there and asked where the assembled would likely be in an hour, he said: “Right here. It’s one of those kind of nights.”

And indeed it still was when I pedaled up sixty or so minutes later, greeted with the most heartwarming wet-eyed and slurry salutations a fellow could be welcomed with.

And though I had a lot of catching up to do, having missed the grain alcohol cocktails tehJobies had treated folks to unrelated to Chief Science Officer Forsetti’s birthday, I immediately felt the heady contact high that inevitably flows into one’s consciousness when engulfed by familiar characters in familiar states of intoxication, revelry, and bicycle-induced endorphin release.

In this life, you’ve got to have a crew, otherwise you’re sunk, and even when quotidian responsibilities mean you’re only able to show up briefly, it’s worth it, just for the visuals and audio: songs were sung; solos became duets; trios morphed into choirs; and dance parties flared up like Zippo sprayed on the campfire.

Huge messy bike piles outside a public house remain one of my favorite things in all the world. Sometimes when I’m out pedaling around on another night of the week, I’ll see an array of two-wheelers locked near a bar and my heart will all but skip a beat, trained as I am to see such a sight as evidence that, at last, I’ve arrived.

As I was locking my rig last night to a jumbled heap of others I recognized from following their tail lights on many a night past, an apparently very well-lubricated (euw, no, I mean “drunken”) Daryl went into a sweet rant about how Professor Dave always locates the gang no matter where it is.

But it’s easy: you just ride around until you’re found.

Veracity

2011-10-04T19:31:00.001-07:00

I was teaching a philosophy class as a graduate student when I heard that O.J. Simpson had been acquitted. The students and I spent the entire session—when we were “supposed” to be going over readings on the mind-body problem—talking epistemology: How could anyone know what had happened the night of the killings? Was there really any good reason to conclude that he was innocent? Was it true that, “If the glove don’t, fit you must acquit?”

Most of the class concluded that the evidence in support of his guilt was overwhelming, that the standard of “reasonable doubt” hadn’t been attained. (Oddly, most of them also had a notoriously relativistic conception of truth, something to effect of “what’s true for me is true for me; what’s true for you is true for you,” but that seemed to go out the window when people’s lives were at stake.)

Yesterday, when the news of Amanda Knox’s acquittal came over the internetz, I was at my desk, preparing to teach my own Intro to Philosophy class, but in contrast to the O.J. verdict, I wasn’t immediately compelled to throw out my planned lesson in favor of discussing this ruling.

Does this suggest that it’s somehow more intriguing from the point of view of epistemology when apparently guilty people are found to be innocent than when allegedly guilty individuals are ruled innocent? Is the former somehow stranger to our sense of truth than the latter?

Maybe there’s one of those sociobiological explanations in play here: our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for instance, would have been more interested in bad guys getting way with shit than good guys being unfairly punished. Creatures who failed at the latter would have less of a likelihood of passing on their genes than those who failed at the former. So, maybe we’re hard-wired in this way.

I usually resist such explanations, but I dunno. One thing I’m sure of, though: the whole sorry story is a tragedy.

Mindless

2011-10-01T18:39:00.003-07:00

After all these years, and probably, if truth be told, somewhere near the end of the useful life of the phenomenon, we finally broke down and bought the huge 250-channel television package, and then, a couple weeks later, the giant 42” flat-screen HD TV.

Welcome to the 21st century, I guess.

So now I can sit here on the couch, remote in hand, and watch at least three live sporting events simultaneously, thereby pretty much completely turning off my mind and living the good life as defined by American males everywhere coast-to-coast.

Woo-hoo.

Additionally, I can follow along on the radio so as to listen to the local announcers for the Washington Huskies game, and tomorrow, of course, I’ll screen the Steelers contest while catching the audio from Pittsburgh on the internet.

So much for getting anything productive done on the weekend, huh?

I’ve gotten so used to the incredible resolution on the HD big screen that I no longer marvel at being able to see the blemishes and razor burn on the faces of big leaguers. But I’m still not prepared for how food commercials look; I must say there’s nothing particularly appetizing about Taco Bell tacos or Jack-in-the-Box hamburgers glistening in glorious 1080p.

Currently, I’m switching between the American League baseball playoffs, college football, and major league soccer. I hardly give a damn about the outcome of any of these events, but I nevertheless am enjoying the spectacle. I haven’t, admittedly, fallen into the habit of plopping myself down with a bowl of cereal to watch cartoons all day long, but who knows? Bugs Bunny is pretty amazing at this degree of clarity.

We didn’t buy the super-duper special package that includes HBO, Showtime, and all the premium channels; that’s probably just as well; I’ve got to get some grading done one of these days.

Right now, though, I’m gonna just keep chillin’; all I need to complete things is my beer and a taco.

Lit

2011-09-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

Oddly enough, the first autumn visit to the very same park this year was way more summery than the last time we went, right by the season’s solstice.

But that’s weather in the Pacific Northwest, where the only thing you can count on is not being able to count on it, which is why you take every opportunity possible to squeeze the very last juice from a surprisingly mild September evening and pedal to the favored seaside location as fast as your little legs can carry you.

World-record time was made to the traditional provision stop, a destination that typically doesn’t show up until at least an hour later in the course of events. Still, at this point in the year, it was already dark by our arrival around the fire pit where even non-stop kibitzing from the peanut gallery wasn’t enough to put a damper on Joeball’s flame-coaxing skills, although before the cheery blaze sprung to life some wags were calling for the cashiering of his Single-Match Club merit badge.

It was one of those nights where that question frequently asked by folks on the street as our hobo peleton rolls by—“What’s this for?”—was simply self-evident: bike-riding, beer-drinking, standing around an outdoor conflagration bullshitting and then screaming at the top of your lungs when a train roars by and the usual suspect launches a beer bottle to doink or crash atop the freight cars.

Isn’t that all the answer anyone needs?

Themes, of course, are delightful and surely on the horizon as the costume and holiday seasons beckon, but there’s also much to be said for simply kickin’ the old skool essentials, including dark paths through the woods and that most elemental of shared human experiences around a common hearth.

It never gets old (in contrast to yours truly) but then why should it? This worked just fine for our hunter-gatherer ancestors ten thousand years ago, no surprise the it's still warming human hearts today.

On

2011-09-28T13:44:00.001-07:00

As of today, and after almost ten months—six and change of sabbatical and three-plus of vacation—I am back in the classroom teaching college students.

Should be a busy quarter; I’ve got a couple of classes at Cascadia, and then, this is one of those times when “Professor Dave” is officially a professor: I’m teaching at the University of Washington, too.

Naturally, I have a bit of trepidation about jumping back into the fray. I always wonder if I remember how to do this thing when fall rolls around and that feeling is only amped up by my experience over the year so far.

Still, I’m confident that there’s something of the “riding a bike” aspect to it. Once I’m there, working with students, I imagine it will all (or at least most) come back to me. I’ve been doing this long enough that certainly there’s some “muscle memory” at work. Or, so I hope.

I’m eager to infuse my teaching with some of what I imbibed during my time as a student in India. Above all, I hope I can bring to my students here some of the seriousness with which students at the yoga shala approached our studies there.

To that end, I’ve made one small change to all my syllabi that, I’ve been joking, indicates that I’m truly an old fogey.

Up until this year, I’d always resisted having a cell phone policy in my classes. I’d hoped that the fascinating things being done in class would discourage students from checking their text messages, emails, and Facebook statuses during our time together. In recent years, though, this has proven overly optimistic; more and more many students have found it impossible to go the entire two hours (with a break) without a hit or more of their devices.

So now, I’m stating on my syllabi that if students want to check their phones, they have to leave the room.

See how serious I’ve become?

Do-Gooder

2011-09-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

It was a Haulin’ Colin trailer extravaganza at the 350.org Moving Planet event yesterday at South Lake Union Park.

Besides my rig, four more of the venerable cargo-hauling beasts showed up, towed by various friends, colleagues, and customers who have also come to appreciate that awesomeness and planet-saving qualities of the world’s best-loved bicycle trailers.

I carried two coolers of ice, beer, and other necessities, along with a bike trainer stand to run the bicycle blender and make smoothies for passersby. Fancy Fred towed his Wal-Mart Sidehack BMX bike; Knox Gardner showed up with a cooler stocked with free sodas for kids; Colin himself dragged one of his creations; Ashok from BikeSoGood in Georgetown had his attached to an XtraCycle, and Art from FoodPedalers.com came by with the one I’ve loaned to them for their growing business.

What was cool, I thought, was how the trailers themselves sort of disappeared into the background, but, in doing so, formed the foundation for pretty much everything that was going on.

In my case, for instance, people were really intrigued with the bike blender; many thought I was representing it. (I probably could have sold a couple of them.)

Likewise, everyone wanted to ride Fancy Fred’s Sidehack.

So, even though I passed out a bunch of business cards, I’m not sure it made for an incredible marketing event; the trailers, I think, sell themselves, but only to folks who want to buy them.

The Moving Planet event itself was reasonably impressive: there were probably 500 or so people there and Mayor showed up, too. I’m not sure all the do-gooders there are really making a dent against human-induced global climate change, but at least a lot of people rode bikes to get there.

I hardly moved from the spot I initially encamped in. Mostly, I tended to smoothie-making, which entailed getting people on my bike to pedal away until ice was crushed.

Probably not planet-saving, but pretty amusing after all.

Equinox

2011-09-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

Most of us, I’ll warrant, spend a good deal of our lives engineering out the ambiguity and uncertainty, so it’s comforting, in a way, to give it over occasionally, and just—as they say—STFU and ride.

One is able, then, to take a certain delight in the unraveling of the mystery as it spools beneath two wheels: “Aha! Tonight we go south.” And then, “East! It’s been a while.” Until, “I’ll be damned. Up and up north.”

But finally, it doesn’t matter, and trees fly by as you simply follow blinkies over the serpentine ribbon burrowing through our fair city’s arboreal core.

Autumn officially arrived last night, although, as Lee Williams pointed out to me, this is a celestial, not meteorological marker, indeed attested to by the warm coverlet of humidity that lay softly upon riders all along the lake and up through the woods.

And while that wet blanket, as he put it, did seem to impart a certain mellowness to the evening’s proceedings, it wasn’t as if it really reduced the level of joviality and shenanigans, especially after Specialist Sean made it rain pitchers of beer and shots of whiskey at the watering hole.

But then again, such manna from heaven was the theme as lo and behold, upon a word, did trays of hackin’ Heather’s victuals appear at the lake: spaghetti, chicken, and bread pudding that made the eyes of shirtless men roll back in their heads as they daintily shoved softball-sized portions into open mouths on tiny plastic forks with pinkies upraised.

Beers were launched towards torsos in the water, of course, as surely as random bottle rockets set skyward in Wizard Staff Park were earlier.

Surprisingly, the authorities steered clear (at least on my watch), perhaps they too, subject to the mollifying effects of the evening’s atmosphere.

Really, I have no idea, which is just how I like it come fall.

Sometimes, all one need know is how not knowing nourishes.

Old

2011-09-18T11:05:00.001-07:00

One of my students last year said that her utopia would be a place without cell phones, computers, or the ongoing threat of global terrorism.

Seemed legit to me, albeit a bit surprising coming from a kid who regularly updated her Facebook page in class (yeah, I notice this stuff even if I don’t do anything about it), but what occurred to me at the time (and I mentioned it in passing) was that she pretty much described what my life was like what I was her age.

And what has occurred to me subsequently is that this is pretty much my utopia, too, at least in terms of sorts of activities I enjoy most of the time.

Except for sitting with my laptop on my knees and writing electronic text that I then post to cyberspace, everything I really like to do I could have done (and did!) when I was a wee lad of 14, way back in anno domini 1971.

Consider: bike riding on a steel bicycle with friction shifters and a leather seat. Reading books published in the early part of the 20th century, or even earlier. Yoga. Watching the Pittsburgh Steelers on TV. (Okay, HD is nice, but not critical, and I’m almost just as happy to listen on the radio.)

I’m perfectly satisfied eschewing the contemporary high-tech world in these pursuits; I don’t need the latest and greatest, newest and shiniest whatchamacallit to enjoy myself.

But then, again, I’m old.

Not ancient, mind you, but it’s going to be a long time before I’ve lived even half my life in the current century, so I suppose it’s no surprise that I’m used to doing things that were available to people way back when.

Had I been born a caveman, I’d enjoy nothing more than hunting and gathering, and painting pictures on the walls of caves.

Come to think of it, old is also probably why I prefer beer in a can.

Trails

2011-09-16T10:22:00.001-07:00

There’s a delicate balance between tradition and novelty, but when it’s achieved, something remarkable occurs: a kind of timelessness ensues, in which past and future have no meaning and the present stretches out endlessly, an eternal now where all that ever was and will be merge as one.

Or maybe that’s just the space cookies talking.

In any case, last evening’s version of our annual memorial to the tragic events of 9/11/2001, “The Point 83 Never Forget How Fat You Really Are (I Forgot for a Little While) But Then I Remembered! Freedom Fry Eating Contest,” really did find that sweet spot between history and tomorrow with the perfect combination of old skool nonsense preceded by trails so new they have yet to be opened.

And the result was yet another occasion on which the very shamefulness of the event makes one proud to be an American.

Or at least kinda sick to your stomach.

But, of course, not nearly so ill as the “winner,” Shaddup Joe (who paid 8-1 on the nose) must be feeling this morning after downing 12, count ‘em 12, 16-ounce cups of deep-fried spuds, making “history,” I guess, in the process.

Because you see, forgetting is actually a kind of remembering, for in doing so, one recalls a time before the memory was formed—in our case, perhaps, an era of innocence before the terrorists attacked.

Thus, some healing takes place, incrementally, in passing.

All the balm I really needed, though, was to pedal en mass over a freshly-paved path along a former jungle with our fair city spreading out in all its industrial glory below and then relax a bit along the waterfront where locals jigged (jug?) squids from the dock.

These are the moments that connect us to what was and impel us towards what will be.

Or to paraphrase the timeless words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “We beat on, bikes against the current, born on ceaselessly into the past.”

Wake

2011-09-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

At least 12 cyclists have died on the roads this summer in Washington, and the only thing sadder than that is reading the “Comments” section in online articles about their deaths.

My somewhat shaky faith in humanity crumbles when I peruse the hateful postings of people who use the opportunity of someone’s untimely demise to grind their axe about bicycle riders (or, for that matter, car drivers). Anyone who writes anything should imagine the dead person’s mother reading their words; maybe then they’d temper their vituperative with a bit of compassion.

As a longtime bicycle commuter, the deaths give me pause.

I’m not inclined to give up riding my bike in traffic, but I am made more aware of the dangers of doing so. I think I’ve been riding slightly more cautiously these last few days, which I think is a good thing, and I hope, an appropriate tribute to those fallen riders.

It’s also made me consider how I’d like to be remembered should a similar fate befall me.

Above all, if I die doing something dumb on my bike, I’d appreciate if my stupidity not be used as a justification for enacting stricter regulations on cycling—especially, for instance, not changing our beloved RCW 46.61.790.

Beyond that, a ghost bike would be nice, but I’d rather that whatever old clunker might be used were fixed up and donated to BikeWorks.

Love to have a big fucking memorial ride, if possible. Encourage the usual nonsense and shenanigans and if it could end with a bunch of inebriants and their two-wheelers standing around a fire late at night, that would be great.

Just get home safe, okay?

Of course, I don’t foresee any of this actually taking place, but then neither did those dozen we mourn this year, Robert “Storm” Townsend the most recent among them.

And one last thing: should I die while biking, please keep the “Comments” section on the online article about it closed.

Body

2011-09-12T15:56:00.001-07:00

I never quite understand it when people say “Your body is a temple;” to me, it’s always seemed more like a spaceship.

After all, it’s not like you get down on your hands and knees and pray to your spleen or whatever; you do, on the other hand, continually use your physical form to carry you wherever you’re going, whether that’s down the block for a drink at the local bar or into outer space to commune with aliens among the heavenly spheres.

No matter how spiritual any one of us is, it’s still the case that everything we do, as long as it’s us doing it, is done through out bodies. Even if I’m lying on my back, staring at the inside of my eyelids, spacing out on a Pink Floyd record, I’m still doing it corporeally. My mind may travel to other places, but only metaphorically.

I suppose it’s possible that this might change after I die, but as long as I’m alive, it’s impossible for me to have an experience that doesn’t depend on the workings of my physical form.

I’m not necessarily taking a so-called hard-core “physicalist” position here, whereby I’m maintaining that all of my mind states are identical with brain states, but I am proposing that nothing that goes on for me goes on without something parallel going on in my body.

Which is why it seems so strange to me that so many people treat their bodies with such disdain. (I’m not exempting myself, either; I run mine hard and put it away wet all the time.)

But it was funny at the car wash yesterday, where Mimi and I took the Ford for its annual clean-up, so see these guys lovingly polishing their automobiles while smoking cigarettes with their fat guts hanging out all over the place.

Maybe they’ll get 100,000 miles out of their vehicles; what’s the chance of getting a full three-score and ten from their hearts?

Remember

2011-09-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

On this, the 10th anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we are all being admonished to “never forget” that fateful day on which, as they say, the world changed forever.

Of course, with all the media coverage, you’d have to have some kind of advanced case of Alzheimer’s to be unable to recall what happened, although, I do have to admit, I’m not always entirely sure what we’re supposed to be remembering.

Is it the lives of the people who died? While this is indeed the most poignant aspect of the day, I daresay that those of us who weren’t personally friends or relations with any of the deceased can’t really remember someone we never knew, so all we’re doing is keeping in mind the idea of those folks, and frankly, not so much their lives as their tragic deaths, which frankly, strikes me as an odd thing to focus on.

Is it the terrorist attack itself? I can see the point of wanting to hold on to that as a reminder of actions we despise and despair of, but it also strikes me as perhaps empowering the wrong thing; shouldn’t we be more concerned about preventing something like that from ever happening again?

Is it what we were doing and where we were when the events transpired? This is what we’re hearing from most quarters, but really, who cares? It’s all the same story for everyone who wasn’t there: we glued ourselves to the TV and stared in mute horror the entire day.

What I certainly don’t want to fix in my head is that image of George W. Bush reading The Pet Goat in the direct aftermath of the attack. If I could erase that from my memory, I would.

One thing I would like to hold onto is the sense of connection, community, and compassion that followed (at least for a while), after the attacks. That, I hope, I’ll never forget.

Heaven

2011-09-09T09:44:00.001-07:00

There’s got to be some religious sect somewhere that believes that this right here is the afterlife.

But if there isn’t, I’m starting one, because I don’t know how else to explain an evening like last night, which certainly seemed to embody many, if not most of the qualities I’d be looking for in a place to settle down for all eternity.

I mean who wouldn’t want to go through that tunnel of white light and end up on a bicycle, enveloped in a contingent of your fellow two-wheelers as you pedaled to the nicest beach in town, where you could then lie on your back in the water and gaze up at the celestial sphere with a nearly-full moon rising behind the evergreens?

That would be enough of a paradise for me, but then when you add to that an hilarious and probably unnecessary climb straight up some of the steepest of the steep to find yourself atop an Olympus you then get to bomb right down, well, what else can one conclude other than that this is some kind of divine reward for whatever has gone before or some such thing?

Besides, when we arrived at the trail we were seeking, there was a moment when we almost didn’t take it, so I’m thinking it just had to be supernatural guidance that convinced us to ride the twisty route after all—and it certainly looked like something out of God’s own home movies the way the blinkies ascended the tortuous path to the summit.

And then, the bar was filled with angels!

Of course, maybe in Elysium the car wash won’t stop even if the cyclists don’t align their wheels on the rollers just so, but then, not getting totally soaked is probably a sign from above, as well.

Not that the fire wasn’t a gift from the gods, too.

And I’ll be damned if we didn’t make last call at the final stop.

Heavenly.

Conjecture

2011-09-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

You know how people say that the reason the terrorists attacked on 9/11 is because they hate our freedoms?

I’ve come to believe that this is the same reason some car drivers get so incensed about bike riders, as well.

Read the comments section in any online article remotely related to bicycles, and you’ll come across lots of postings that rail against cyclists flaunting the law: running red lights, zooming through stop signs, being intoxicated at the helm of a moving vehicle. The general sense I get from these complaints from car drivers is something like: “Hey! We can’t do that, so neither can you!”

It drives them mad to see people getting away with something they’re prevented from doing. What car driver wouldn’t enjoy cutting onto the sidewalk to avoid sitting in traffic? Show me someone behind the wheel of an automobile who woudn’t love running red lights. And man, wouldn’t driving be more fun if you could occasionally get away with doing it while buzzed?

But you can’t!

So no wonder drivers gnash their teeth and rend their hair when they see cyclists getting away with this shit.

They hate our freedoms, see?

A couple years ago, early on a Sunday morning, I was pedaling to my local coffee shop and came upon a red light at a six-way intersection on Capitol Hill. Caddy-corner from me was a car, who also had a red. I slowed, looked both ways, saw that no one was coming from either of the directions that had the green and rode on through.

The guy in the car started honking at me and yelled out his window: “Hey! That’s a red light! You’re supposed to wait! What if I ran the light?”

I looked at him and smiled: “Get a bike and you can.”

This probably didn’t make him view bicyclists more favorably, but if he didn’t hate my freedom as I pedaled away, at least, I hope, he envied it.

Cargo

2011-09-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

Biggest cargo bike ride ever!

I’ll bet there were a hundred people, including around a dozen or so children, hauled on various contraptions like the two on the Xtracycle with the sticker on it that said “One less minivan.”

No surprise, though, on the turnout, given the perfect weather and more importantly, that the ride functioned as an informal memorial for the beloved Val Kleitz, whose recent passing leaves a huge hole in the heart of the Seattle bicycle community, but whose own heart, I’ll bet, would have been warmed by the sight of so many folks out on two wheels carrying all they needed for a festive picnic in his honor at a lovely outdoor park on a beautiful late summer day.

It was deeply moving to see all the folks whose lives were touched by Val’s; for one thing, it was like the Hall of Fame of local bicycle mechanic royalty. I almost wished I had some sort of catastrophic failure of my bike just to see the assembled spring into action and fix it with zip-ties and bent spokes or something. As it was, however, my cargo bike performed beautifully, even when the ride took us through wooded pathways and gravel trails.

Momentarily, when we strayed from a more direct route to our destination, I was miffed, but then it occurred to me (no doubt inspired by Val’s spirit) that efficiency is not the only value. What about beauty, camaraderie, nature, physical endeavor, and fun? Why was it bothering me that I had to ride my bike a little farther than I had expected? Wasn’t pedaling around with people the whole point?

After that, I was delighted to go wherever the route took us as it wound around some of the prettiest spots Montlake and Ravenna have to offer, until eventually we arrived at the picnic, ready to drink beer and eat potato salad with a cone wrench, as Val himself was famous for.

Retrospect

2011-09-02T12:02:00.001-07:00

At the bar, after a lovely hour or so cavorting in a park perched high atop West Seattle’s south end, and following that thrilling downhill during which, for me, at least, all the green lights were made, the Angry Hippy and I were talking about Aristotle, specifically, the part in the Nichomachean Ethics where he wonders whether a person can be made unhappy after he is dead.

Consider a scenario in which a man dies having provided well for his family and leaving a fine reputation as a scholar and citizen; in short, having lived what we would judge to be a happy life. Then, however, through a series of misfortunes and happenstance, his legacy is completely lost; his heirs suffer deeply and his once-proud reputation is utterly tarnished; he comes to be seen as a charlatan and a fraud; in other words, the life that earlier seemed happy turns out to be something completely false and empty.

The question is: would we still say the man lived a happy life?

Aristotle’s conjecture is that we wouldn’t.

Happiness, for him, is a state that needs to persevere over time; his famous quote in that regard is: “One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

It is with confidence, therefore, that I can assert how happy indeed is the Thursday night bike ride; half a decade of delightful adventures have rolled for me under its ever-turning two wheels.

Last night, I got to appear, a bit late, at yet another location in our fair city to which I’d never been, and come upon several dozen cyclist-shaped bodies back-lit against the Seattle skyline. Shades of E.T. being pedaled before the harvest moon.

Such events, each one unique, add up. No brief time of happiness; rather, a multitude.

How can this not, then, be a happy life?

Indeed, one to die for.

Ahead

2011-09-01T11:29:00.001-07:00

My friend, Julie, rightfully warns me that I have a “rude awakening” ahead of me in the next couple weeks. No doubt.

After almost nine months of pretty much only doing what I want to do, I’ll be back at school, adding to the mix of my daily activities a lot of what I have to do whether I want to or not.

I’m a little nervous about it, but remain reasonably confident that I’ll adapt; in no more than a month, I’m sure, it will be like I never left and I’ll automatically rise when my alarm goes off, shovel breakfast into my mouth, and make my way out into the big wide world of higher education to help prepare young minds for the challenges of being competitive in the global marketplace of the 21st century.

Right now, though, I want to savor my last few weeks of “freedom;” the only constraints on me, really, are those emanating from my mind, which—as is its longtime wont—is consistently trying to kill me.

The Hindus say that the observation that you can observe your mind is evidence for there being a Universal Self that transcends the individual self. It’s something like the idealism of Bishop Berkeley in the West; “to be is to be perceived,” and all that.

See? I’m already doing philosophy and I’m not even on the clock yet.

It’s been a good ride, this sabbatical morphing into vacation thing; I can’t imagine I’ll ever have an opportunity like this again, at least until I retire—although what that’s going to look like in the upcoming era of no Social Security ought to be interesting to say the least.

In Hinduism, the stage of life after work is when you renounce worldly possessions, go into the woods and live in a hut to study the sacred text; I’m thinking maybe I can just pack a touring bike and do something similar on two wheels.

Rebound

2011-08-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

On a not-very-busy four-lane street near Recycled Cycles, I’m cutting left to the center lane just before a stop sign to make a turn in that direction. Suddenly, this van, probably a good fifteen yards behind me, starts honking. I give the International Sign Language shrug and outstretched palm gesture for “What the fuck?” and continue on my merry way.

Half a block down, the van pulls up next to me, and the guy driving it leans across the passenger seat and shouts, “What about a signal? And stop at the stop sign?”

Okay, sure, I didn’t do either, but seriously, my path left was totally obvious (why else would I be cutting across the lane?) and as for stopping at the stop sign, you’ve got to be kidding: I slowed, looked both directions and proceeded on safely, even though I didn’t put my foot down.

Of course, I had the usual l’esprit de l’escalier moment after the van drove off: I should have said to him, “What about your seat belt?” (He wasn’t wearing one) and “How about that speed limit?” (He sped away far faster than the posted 25mph.)

People in glass houses, they say, shouldn’t throw stones. (Nor should they parade about in their skivvies—unless they happen to be Heidi Klum.) Point being: I don’t see why so many car drivers get so incensed about the roadway violations of bicycle riders when they, too, are continually playing fast and loose with the rules of the road themselves.

So-called “Rule Utilitarianism” is the ethical theory that says that acts are right insofar as they are endorsed by a system of rules that when followed maximizes utility. This means that everyone will be happier if everyone stops at the Stop sign rather than deciding for himself whether running it will maximize utility.

Still, blind adherence to some rules is just silly: I didn’t follow the rule to give a honking car the finger, did I?

Unordinary

2011-08-28T16:47:00.001-07:00

I’m a guy who doesn’t mind things a certain way: the same yoga practice every day, the identical breakfast seven days a week, a bike ride to familiar spots as often as possible.

Consequently, I’m a bit out-of-sorts from the last week of unfamiliar paths: the family and I spent four nights in Las Vegas from Sunday to Thursday, and then I attended the annual Philosophy Camp at Smoke Farm over the weekend.

Both events had their charms (although the one’s at Smoke Farm were infinitely more charming), but I’m glad to be back home in my usual spot preparing for a week ahead that promises to be just as typical as I tend to like it.

That said, Sin City was reasonably enjoyable: I came home a winner at the craps tables and even, for the most part, at the few slot machines I put five bucks or so in a couple times. My high point as a gambler was making three passes and throwing a bunch of numbers while shooting at the Hard Rock Casino and Mimi, Jen, her dad, and I were suitably awestruck by the Cirque du Soleil production of “O,” which featured dozens of contortionists falling from great heights into an ever-changing pool of water.

Philosophy Camp, by contrast, had only a minimal water element—an afternoon swim on Friday in the Stillaguamish River, but the dialogue was way better. We read a bunch of Continental philosophy and beat our heads together over what the authors were supposedly saying and while this year, for the first time, there wasn’t any yoga, I did get to experience my yearly struggle with sitting meditation, a practice I admire deeply but not enough, at this point, to take it up myself.

So, this week, I’m hoping to sleep in my own bed every night and enjoy my usual breakfast of yogurt and nuts, although I may go wild and add cashews to the almost mix.

Metaphysics

2011-08-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

At some point in my travels, I found myself pondering the metaphysical question: “What constitutes the ride?” Is it the people? The meet-up spot? The attitude one has while pedaling? And how do you know if you’re really on the ride or not?

Suppose it breaks into two more or less evenly-sized groups: which is the authentic original, and which is just another gang of drunken cyclists out on a Thursday night?

No matter, really, since for much of the evening, the issue didn’t arise; it was obvious what made things what they were: a warm August night, several dozen human beings riding two-wheelers much to the chagrin of neckless fellows in BMWs rushing to get nowhere fast, and an outdoor destination where beer was set on picnic tables and steadily consumed.

In my ongoing effort to never pass up an opportunity to swim outdoors (because really, you just never know when—or if—you might have another chance), I paddled around a bit in the yucky shallows feeling as if the abundant ferns might tangle themselves around my legs and draw me down, but even that was lovely as, at water level, myriad moths circled around my head like stardust and birdies from a cartoon bell-ringing.

And then it was off to the long-coveted white whale for which, in my enthusiasm to finally land Moby Dick, I may have pushed too hard, thereby severing the golden cord connecting us all, although it seems to me that since the birthday boy came north, the necessary condition, at least, for identity was met by the half which followed.

And while the reality fell far short of the dream, the back deck was surprisingly charming, and karaoke Kansas rocked, if I do say so myself.

Express lane aspirations aspired to were not—sadly, but sensibly-ever met, but my solitary surface spin home was nevertheless a sparkling delight and still, I believe, authentically part of the ongoing ride.

Simple

2011-08-17T19:02:00.001-07:00

No doubt we are all meant for greater things. Each of us should be glorfied by angels; we ought to stand on mountaintops and proclaim our greatness to the gods.

At the very least, it would be cool to win the lottery, or just do things that occasionally get written up on the local neighborhood blog.

And yet, when it comes down to it, the most mundane of behaviors take up most of our time, and thankfully, for me, anyway, it’s those little things that provide me with whatever modicum of satisfaction I find with existence.

Take today, for instance. (Please!)

Here are some of the little tasks I accomplished that, in spite of myself, have made me feel like I have some right to take up space and breath air on the planet:

• Doing almost two hours of yoga first thing this morning, including a second short practice with Jen.

• Editing a couple dozen pages of my forthcoming book, Plato Was Wrong! Classroom Exercises for Philosophizing with Young People.

• Cleaning the glass in our glassed-in shower.

• Fixing a loose screw in the faucet of that same shower, a task I put off for almost two years before today.

• Making a grilled cheese sandwich for my daughter’s brunch.

• Doing a load of wash, and replacing the clean duvet cover on the kid’s comforter.

• Repairing a flat tire on one of my bikes, even though it was only a very slow leak.

• Taking a bicycle ride around town on the single-speed, including climbing all the way from the downtown to the top of Capitol Hill.

• Re-shellacking the handlebar tape on four of my bikes.

• Riding to the Columbia City Farmer’s Market and back to buy salad fixings for dinner.

• Sort of fixing the annoying latch on the back gate.

• Making croutons, cleaning and drying romaine lettuce.

• Cooking a cheeseburger for my daughter’s dinner.

• Reading three chapters of Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

• Writing this 327-word essay.

Weather

2011-08-15T17:09:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when everyone talks about the weather in Seattle, unlike those other times of the year when, in Seattle, everyone talks about the weather.

The chit-chat now is all about how nice it is, even though, all it takes is a cloudy morning for folks to get all like, “Oh man, what a crummy summer we’re having,” even though we did early on, despite the fact that it’s been pretty lovely for days on end just like it usually is from now until about the middle of September.

What worries me more than the inevitable onset of the drizzle is the dying of light. Already, the sun isn’t rising until after six and this evening, it’s setting before 8:30 or so. Oddly, you hear many fewer people going on about this than you do about raindrops. (Can you actually hear fewer people? I guess, technically, you don’t hear them.)

I don’t mind talking about the weather, but I feel sort of embarrassed when I do so. I can’t help noticing that I’m being one of those people who talks about the weather and I think I ought to be holding forth on far more lofty considerations. On the other hand, there’s probably no subject of greater natural interest to human beings; surely, our hunter-gatherer ancestors spoke (or grunted) to each other of little else.

The good news is, should I become too self-conscious about weather-talk, I can take a step back, and like a well-trained 21st university-trained philosophy teacher, talk about talking about the weather. Meta-level conversation affords me the ability to hold forth on the mundane, but do so in brackets, thus allowing me to persuade myself that I’m actually discussing something of great interest, even though it’s the very same subject I dismissed as boring just moments before.

Of course, I have no idea what I’m really talking about here, anyway; chalk it up to being slightly under the weather.

Aquatic

2011-08-12T11:22:00.001-07:00

After fifty-four and a quarter years on this planet, the last five and change riding bikes with the drinking club with a cycling problem, opportunities still present themselves for experiences I’ve never in my life had before.

Sad but true: in the five-plus decades since my birth, I’d never, before last night, swum in two different lakes on the same day.

Sure, I’ve been in two different bodies of water: the ocean and the hotel pool, the hot tub and the cool plunge, and I’ve cavorted in the Seattle Center fountain a few hours before taking a hot bath, but this was the very first time I’d ever ridden my bike to one outdoor body of water—South Lake Union—donned my trunks, jumped in and paddled around, then, after fortifying with silver tequila from the impractical shot glasses dubbed by Henry, “the horn of infidelity” ridden en masse to another large pond—Greenlake’s Greenlake—once again put on my (now cold and clammy) swimsuit, and, for a second time in less than ninety minutes, floated around in smooth and silky H20.

The all-but full moon was a gleaming dime on the glassy-smooth surface of the water, which was warmer than the air, but once more, upon exiting from the wet, I was fortified by distilled cactus juice and thus eager to pedal to the next stop on this themeless, old-skool tour, a pleasant spin, marred only by a scary-sounding, but ultimately uneventful crash of a fellow rider, who might have been, like me, imbibing freely, but who hadn’t, unlike yours truly, availed herself of the sobering powers of summertime lake water.

At this point, rather than staying indoors to sing, I rode off, intent upon trying for lake number three; I didn’t achieve my goal of Lake Washington, but I did manage to drag my fingers through the Cal Anderson reservoir on my ride home.

Not quite three lakes in three hours, but certainly a first.

Downhill

2011-08-06T16:11:00.001-07:00

The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest had that lovely tradition known as the potlatch, in which clans would hold big parties and give away gifts to attendees. Fortunate to live in a part of the world abundant in natural resources, tribespeople understood a host’s willingness and ability to share food, drink, and material goods as a sign of his wealth and power.

It’s nice to see that this tradition is being carried on today, at least by the indigenous Dead Baby Bike club, who last night, hosted their annual gift to the local cycling community, the Dead Baby Downhill and Messenger Challenge which, as usual, lived up to its reputation as the Greatest Party Known to Humankind, although if truth be told, I split fairly early in the evening, preferring to head home about the time that it seemed that more of the burgeoning crowd had driven there than arrived on two wheels.

The race itself was a gas; I hauled a Haulin’ Colin trailer with a cooler full of dry-ice cold beer and, in keeping with the generous spirit of the event, pulled over about a mile from the finish and passed out frosty cans to thirsty riders. While most, it turned out, were older guys on department store bikes, I also got to give some refreshment to a guy who snapped his crank on the West Seattle Bridge approach and was finishing the race in velocipede mode and luckily, I saved the last beer for longtime .83 rider, Meg-Ha, who was a bit farther up the road, fixing a flat that she, like many others, got on the train tracks leading to Georgetown.

I didn’t see as many freak or tallbikes as in years past, although that could have due, in part, to the relaxed attitude I took to the race start; it was great to be towards the rear setting out with a view of several hundred bikes before me.

What a gift.

Everything

2011-08-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

The way I reckon it, all that was missing from the full tasting menu was roller-skating, but since he didn’t actually create that, but only took us there, I think it’s safe to say that all the popular faves of tehJobies were on display last evening: the bicycle-mounted mobile disco (even louder this time around) the waffles (though pre-packaged, surprisingly sweet and tasty), the stiff drinks stirred with unusual mixers (short on ice but long on liquor), the Slip N’ Slide (wider and faster than ever), the Christmas tree burning (just one, but packed with explosives), the glowsticks (to excess, but that’s the point), and, ultimately, the general merriment and shenanigans on a lovely summer evening in Seattle at its best, all dolled up for SeaFair and still basking in the contrail glow of Blue Angel dust from the afternoon’s air show.

Let those images of back-lit bodies, smiles like headlights, skittering off blow-up rafts into jumbled collections of arms and legs—and all this nonsense carried there on two wheels—settle in to your memory banks so you can retrieve them as you sit on the porch of the retirement home in your dotage; the pictures will put a secret smile on your old wrinkled face, and those whippersnapper grandkids of yours won’t believe a word of it: “It’s just too good to be true,” they’ll say, “You’re remembering a beer commercial or something; nothing like that ever really happened.”

But you’ll know; you were there and witnessed it with your own bloodshot eyes, which just goes to show that while planning may indeed be over-rated, there’s much to be said for preparation; if one sources and assembles the proper accoutrements and lays them before a willing and grateful public, joyfulness will ensue.

We’ve seen it happen time and again.

The best-selling record album of all time is the Eagles: Their Greatest Hits, 1971-1975; good for them; as for me, I’m groovin’ to tehJobies compilation, 2008-2011.

Conversation

2011-08-04T14:03:00.000-07:00

I’ll bet a case could be made (and I’ll wager someone’s already made it) that the rise of the internet—especially being able to post comments online and hold forth, as I am doing, on one’s own personal forum—has correlated with, if not actually contributed to, the decline of civil discourse in politics and society at-large.

On the interwebs, nobody talks to one another; we do a pretty good job of talking at each other, but I’m not sure it’s co-mmunication; maybe all we do is “municate.”

The machinations over the recent effort to raise the country’s debt ceiling seemed to characterize what I’m talking (not communicating!) about. We saw a lot of politicians holding forth with their views but not really listening to what anyone else had to say. In the end, I guess there was some exchange of perspective, but that was more about horse-trading than human interaction.

Of course, conversation is a lost art; it’s difficult to really engage in dialogue with another person when the whole time they’re speaking, you’re trying to come up with a witty rejoinder or find some fault in their argument that you can exploit. Most of us never actually converse; at best, just take part in parallel versing, like some sort of weird competitive poetry slam.

And duh, it’s totally oxymoronic for me to be writing about this; I’m doing the very thing I’m complaining about—but, you see, I’m doing it intentionally, “in quotes,” so I get a free pass.

Anytime you’re feeling too good about yourself and your fellow human beings, all you have to do is go to your favorite newspaper site and read a few pages of readers’ comments on an article about an issue that’s even the least bit contentious. Whenever I really want to get myself all worked up, I read what folks have to say in response to a story about bicycling; like Ring Lardner said, “Shut up,” I explained.

Out

2011-07-31T10:31:00.001-07:00

Vacations used to include a daily or nearly-daily posting; apparently, not any more.

We’ve been on a family road trip for about a week, driving south to Lake Shasta, California, where we hung out in a house on a lake for three days with the San Francisco cousins, then after a night in Medford, Oregon, which included a fascinating bout of food poisoning for yours truly, we’ve arrived in Portland, Oregon, where the only available room we could find has been a suite at the fancy Governor Hotel, so we’ve been livin’ large for the past twelve hours, as evidenced not only by the quality of the digs in which we find ourselves, but also by the kid’s dinner last evening, which featured a six ounce filet mignon priced for the Robber Barons who this place was apparently built for.

But hell, we’re on vacation, so why not?

August arrives tomorrow, and with it, increased nervousness about the future—just a month to go until school starts and so on, but for now, it’s still all fun and games. One wonders whether what’s in store will be manageable given the last six months of relative calm, but one thing is certain: life will go on in its own inevitable ways and whatever happens will have happened when it’s all over and done with.

In other words, we’re on vacation, so why not?

It’s odd how much time a person can spend fretting over tomorrow while simultaneously regretting yesterday; neither of those times actually exist, (they’re both in our heads), and yet they can cause terrors that seem as real as those induced by the 18-wheelers that roared alongside me in the dark as we careened down Interstate 5 earlier this week.

Having driven way more miles in the last five days than I have in the previous 12 months, I’ve had my share of frightening moments behind the wheel, but hell, we’re on vacation, so why not?

Watertowers

2011-07-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

When I was checking in for this year’s Tour de Watertower, I bragged to event organizer, Hardcore Greg, that having ridden in last week’s Polka Dot Rocker, I wasn’t daunted by the prospect of pedaling up seven of Seattle’s highest hills; it seemed like the climbing prospects afforded by that earlier competition dwarfed those required by the one ahead. After all, in the PDR, I was on my bike for almost four hours non-stop; no way the TdW would take that long.

Hah!

My final time yesterday was 3:44:46, and because the Tour’s route was clearer than the Rocker’s, I definitely rode harder and suffered more in the former than the latter; TdW FTW.

It was a stunningly beautiful day and the route took us through some of the loveliest neighborhoods in town, including the creepy Stepford Wives tidiness of Magnolia and upper Queen Anne.

I was pretty pleased with my route, having finally, after two previous attempts, figured out some reasonably efficient ways to reach each of the destinations.

My better decisions were to take the Magnolia Bridge and approach that neighborhood’s tower from the south and also, in a moment of inspiration, go across the Aurora Bridge on my way from Queen Anne to Woodland Park.

On the other hand, leaving my bike at the top of the Counterbalance and walking to the nearby tower was kind of a mistake. Note to self: you may save time strolling up, but coming back down on two feet is sloooow.

And, for the third year running, I took that dead-end street leaving Magnolia and had to ride back up a hill to get out of there.

Still, I only cramped up once, climbing Fremont Boulevard, but by that time, I was pretty sure was going to survive, no matter what.

The winner, Rob. K., finished more than an hour and a half faster than me; I got to spend more time riding on a perfect day, though.

Olden

2011-07-21T12:56:00.003-07:00

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.

Polka

2011-07-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

I didn’t walk up a single hill, not once.

I rode all the way to the top of Dravus Avenue, including that last block that’s so steep the sidewalk has ridges in it to keep pedestrians from sliding backwards.

I even took the challenge of slamming 12 ounces of Snoop Dogg-endorsed Blast malt liquor beverage and then riding down and up one of the gnarliest blocks in all of Seattle.

And to top it off, I actually made the podium, coming in third (with 100 points!) in the “Joker” Division of this year’s revived “Polka Dot Rocker,” checkpoint-style underground bike race famous for its “whiskey, hillclimbing, and suffering.”

It was four years ago when the race was last run, and that time, I mainly bailed, hitting a few checkpoints, and then, after lounging at home, heading off to the after-party. This time, though, I stuck out the whole four hours, and, sort of by accident, ended up taking a route that earned me a higher score than I had any reason beforehand to expect.

It was my one good idea to power up Genessee Street in West Seattle twice to earn a quick thirty, and then head back to town rather than spending a lot of time on that side of the water for not so many more points.

I then headed to Magnolia, mostly because I wanted to check out the Discovery Park lighthouse, a place I’ve never visited. As it was, though, I got completely lost in the park and never even found the place. I did, however, gather up another thirty with my jaunt up Dravus and a visit to Perkins Lane, way down below Magnolia Boulevard.

At this point, I had just enough time to get home for polka dot clothing and a quick stop on Yesler at 32nd right near my house, before the Blast checkpoint on Interlachen, and then off to the Summit to savor my completely unexpected third place finish.

Memorable

2011-07-15T10:59:00.000-07:00

tehJobies younger and handsomer doppleganger brother and I were talking about what makes a ride memorable and I think we concluded that there aren’t any set criteria.

Sure, a theme can help, even one cobbled together more or less on the spot in response to the postponement of another, and seeing a bunch of familiar faces mixed in with a healthy contingent of fucking noobs usually contributes, as does going to a place we’ve never been, especially one with a stunning view of downtown Seattle cradled among its vast industrial wastelands, but it’s not as if there’s an algorithm or recipe for what makes a Thursday night out on two wheels difficult to forget.

Which isn’t to say that the concept is merely tautological; that is, just because the experience sticks in your head isn’t enough to make it memorable and indeed, being unable to recall details is often a component of unforgettable times.

Nor do I believe that it’s purely subjective; there are well-established markers for the memorable—outdoor drinking, long-lingering summer evenings, a full moon eventually so bright it casts shadows—and I think a person could be mistaken about what’s memorable, especially if he or she were overly impressionable or, more likely, had less of an appetite for the sorts of imbibing that makes it hard for me, at least, to remember the particulars of what went down.

That said, it’s certain that the First, and Perhaps Only, Pointe Quatre-Vingt Trois Occasionally Annual Bastille Day Ride is one for the memory annals; I’m sure I will never forget (no matter how hard I try) the baguettes and bicycles, the panoramic belle vue of our fair city, and finally, back on mon velo for a spin to the semi-authentic French bistro and a couple more bottles of wine to cap the night.

Bogart and Bacall as Rick and Elsa in Casablanca will always have Paris, sure; this bike gang, I guess, Ella Baily.

Etoile

2011-07-12T18:28:00.001-07:00

I still enjoy major league baseball’s All-Star game, even though this year’s bloated rosters feature a load of players not fit to carry Sandy Koufax’s jockstrap (a job I’d happily take on, by the way.)

I liked it better back in the old days, though, when the National League won like a hundred times in a row before these days, when, until last year, I think, the American League prevailed for about a century.

But this business of having the winning team garner home field advantage in the World Series for its league’s representative is lame. That’s like giving a head start in a track meet to a runner just because he comes from a town voted “Most Livable in the U.S.” by Rand-McNally. Or something like that.

I think my favorite All-Star game memory is in 1986 when Fernando Valenzuela struck out five batters in a row, although I also have a soft spot in my heart for Bo Jackson’s 1989 game home run, a contest I watched with my friend’s son, feeling, for the first time ever, that it might be interesting to have a kid of my own, a sentiment I didn’t act on for almost two decades afterwards.

I seem to recall listening to the 1966 game in which Koufax pitched; apparently, he wild-pitched in the one run he gave up. I would have been nine years old, prime baseball fandom time. It seems to me that I was at the swim club our family went to. I vaguely recall hovering near a radio in the covered dining area. I could be completely making that up, though; for all I know, I was glued to the TV set in my parents’ bedroom—although that seems pretty unlikely; I can’t ever really picture doing that other than to watch an Allan Sherman special that aired around that time.

My kid, of course, will have no such recollections: she’s watching Master Chef on the internet.

Forecast

2011-07-10T17:38:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, after a vigorous yoga practice using the primary series Guruji-led Ashtanga yoga DVD, I did some gardening, then rode the tandem with Mimi to a doubleheader softball game; afterwards, we pedaled a couple miles to our sponsoring bar for celebratory libations, then cycled home. In the evening, after dinner, I took a random bike ride around Capitol Hill, looking at people and things before coming home and going to bed.

This morning, I rode my bike up the hill to shop, then came home, changed clothes and bikes, and pedaled to the Vedanta Society meeting, where Swami Bhaskarananda talked, among other things, about how all the pleasures we experience are experienced through the body, which is why they’re temporary and ephemeral and why real bliss can only be found by recognizing the essential One-ness of everything.

Afterwards, I rode home and then, after moving the lawn, took another random bike ride, this time up and down Queen Anne hill twice, doing some recon for an upcoming bike race.

And the whole time, all I could think of was what’s going to happen to me when I can no longer do the things that I do. I’ve probably got only twenty or so years left (at best) when I can pedal about so much and bend myself into the various positions I’m apt to bend myself into most mornings and, with any luck, I ought to live something more like forty or even fifty years more. So, those last two decades, what am I going to do with myself? Sit on the couch and read? (Or more likely nap?) Eat? Take a few more walks?

I wonder how most of us would respond if given a choice of living an extra few years in a state of compromised health or dying quickly while we’re still feeling good. I hope I never have to decide; but I do think if I can’t ride a bike, just shoot me.

Sedate

2011-07-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

I (dimly) remember my first .83 rides, now close to half a decade ago. Such adventure! So many new places in town to visit on a bike! What a stunning display of alcohol-fueled hijinks!

These days, though, (at least if last night was any indication) things sometimes tend to be a bit calmer: sure, there are strange and wonderful routes taken to secret bike-accessible locations; of course there is quaffing of alcoholic beverages outside; and naturally, one even gets to experience an unexpected visit from a police officer, although her opening gambit question, “Have any of you heard anyone yelling?” cast no aspersions on our august assembly.

But the overall mood (again, arguably committing the fallacy of hasty generalization by basing this assessment primarily on last evening) seems to be slightly less manic and fraught with danger; heck, you might even be moved to bring your mom on the ride! And not have her die!

Of course, it could just be that after all this time, my tolerance level for the experience of bicycle shenanigans is higher and that, at this point, I need to mainline the nonsense to feel the same rush.

After all, we did cruise crazily through Myrtle Edwards Park as a dreamy sun began to set over an Eliot Bay packed with an unprecedented number of sailboats; and there was bridge-crossing in crosswinds after many a libation al fresco; and we eventually wended our way northwards to a long-favored bar that I’m usually arriving at just as the ride is being eighty-sixed, so one can hardly argue that nothing exciting at all went down.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic for the days when bottle-rockets were launched from buttcracks, or bikes were carried miles upwards through the woods, or when grown men sported children-sized skeleton costumes and cavorted wildly in the playgrounds of public schools; no doubt, though, such inspired stupidity still lies ahead; surely it’s to be found just the next bike ride away.

Frailty

2011-07-07T15:05:00.001-07:00

I’ve visited two friends in the Emergency Ward at Harborview Hospital in the past week or so: one was a spandex-wearing type cyclist who crashed on a training run, broke three ribs, and punctured a lung; the other was an urban knickers and t-shirt wearing type of rider who fell through a roof while watching fireworks on the Fourth of July and broke her leg pretty spectacularly.

Both are on the mend, though, no thanks, in the first place, to modern Western medicine, which even in the 21st century can’t do much for those injuries other than stand by and wait for the body to recuperate, but with much gratitude in the second case to contemporary emergency medical procedures which, apparently, can pretty much go all Bionic Woman on fractured knees and femurs, insert some pins and titanium, and have the patient back as good as new in far less time than it takes your average auto body shop to repair a smashed-up fender on your car.

I’m not all that great at the hospital visit, other than adhering to the “no longer than 15 minutes” rule. Despite (or perhaps as a result of) having spent many hours as a lad trailing behind my physician father as we navigated the halls of his hospital on weekends while he got in some work before or after sporting events or swimming pool visits, I get all nervous and uncomfortable around the injured and/or ill.

Mainly, I think, I recoil at being confronted so starkly with the frailty of human beings. I don’t like to think about how soft and vulnerable we are and how hard and unforgiving are the structures that we’re apt to impact by accident: tarmac, concrete, crushed gravel, owch.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had it better: when they crashed on the Wooly Mammoth raid or whatever, they were more apt to land on dirt, or grass, or furry moss. We could all do for such softer landings.

Combination

2011-07-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

I did the Cargo Bike Jamboree White Trash Sprints Ride yesterday, combining two bicycle events into one and, in the process, learning an important fact: while it’s cool to participate in a parade of bikes with massive carrying capacity, it’s sort of more fun to be the one person at the scene who has the ability to handle a larger-than-average load. Not only do you feel like you’re performing a valuable public service, you also get props from folks who ride bikes fast and might otherwise find it difficult to restrain a sneer at the rate of speed at which you pedal.

Also, it was interesting to see the two different, but slightly overlapping bicycle communities: the former was populated by older, more sedate folks whose bikes mostly had gears and baskets; the latter by younger, hipper kids whose rigs didn’t even have brakes!

But the cool thing was a good time was had by all, although it would be interesting to see how badly sunburned some of the shirtless dudes hanging out on the Bridge to Nowhere were by the end of the afternoon.

I myself mostly crouched in the one small piece of shade afforded by an ambitious eucalyptus tree creeping over the ruined freeway; it was pleasant to sip a beer and watch pairs of cyclists race up the road; there was a moment of unwanted excitement when one girl flipped herself off her seat and landed hard on her backside, but she seemed to be all right, albeit a bit bruised.

I left long before things probably got really interesting in the competition; I’m sure there were some thrilling races later in the day, but by that time, I was napping in my backyard and trying to keep my dog from freaking out over all the Fourth of July explosions going off in the neighborhood.

I never made it back to the Cargo Ride as planned; still, plenty of fun combined all around.

Goodwill

2011-07-03T13:50:00.001-07:00

Few things are more satisfying than clearing out half a dozen bags of old clothes, abandoned books, and assorted bric-a-bracs from one’s basement and closets, and carrying all that shit to Goodwill or St. Vincent DePaul or wherever, where worthy individuals will sort it, repair as necessary, and resell it, thereby earning much-needed funds for their respective organizations and the communities they serve.

And when you can make the delivery on your bicycle, carrying the goods in your very own Haulin’ Colin trailer, it’s a virtually unalloyed joy: not only do you get to the enjoy the intrinsic pleasure of divestiture, you also get to feel all holier-than-thou for doing so on two wheels, plus you earn your day’s exercise by lugging the load behind you while pedaling up hills that become that much steeper with every extra coffee-table book or pair of shoes you’ve included in the stash.

I made two trips today and cleared out something on the order of 30 square feet of floor space in the basement, an area now freed up for bike components and other junk that I’m unable to part with. This just goes to show that one man’s junk is another man’s imagined project; it’s not that one doesn’t hold on to crap that will never get used; it’s not as if I don’t have loads more stuff that ought also to be donated to a worthy cause; it’s just that it turns out to be a lot easier to give up on a polyester shirt that hasn’t been worn since 1996 than it is to forsake a broken derailleur from a scavenged bike of the same vintage.

I’m pleased to say that the workers at Goodwill were suitably impressed with my decision to bring my donations to them via two wheel; they let me cut to the front of the line and everything. And they were even more impressed when I came back the second time; trailers rule!

Rollercoaster

2011-07-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

If you sit in the front car on the “Cyclone” rollercoaster at Coney Island, you’ll feel as if you’re going to be pitched out over the front of the thing and then be crushed by the train as it hurtles down the first big dip and the rises into a teeth-jarring turn to the right.

But it’s a sensation not to be missed, although perhaps you should really heed the sage advice of a guy sitting behind you and hold your glasses in your hands rather than leave them on your face, where they’re not apt to stay unless you get lucky and/or have fast hands to catch them before they’re off onto the tracks below.

The whole ride lasts less than a minute, but, frankly, I was pretty ready for it to be done, even though it was a screaming riot the whole time. The thing is like 90 years old and still packs a wallop, even more than the modern conveyance, something called the “Soarin’ Eagle” that we rode later, a contraption that has you lying down face first over the tracks upon which you’re riding and also features several 360 degree spins along the way.

Coney Island was charming in its tawdriness; I especially liked that you could get a beer (or a Pina Colada) right there on the boardwalk and that, in the civilized state which is New York, a parent can sit with his child in a bar, just so long as the youngster is drinking something non-alcoholic (although even that might have been permitted in the dive we found ourselves in.)

It’s surprising to me that in all the times my family came to New York City when we were kids, we never (at least as far as I can recall) never visited the place; although I’m not sure I’ll ever go back, I’m pleased to note that my kid, at least, will have enjoyed its ragged charms in her youth.

NYC

2011-06-30T04:38:00.001-07:00

The family and I have been in the world’s greatest city for the last few days while I attend a philosophy for children conference and they wander about visiting art galleries; now, I’m done and we’ll play together for the next 48 hours or so.

As always when I visit Manhattan, I feel like the proverbial country mouse, awed by the big buildings, vast underground rail system, and sheer crush of humanity everywhere you go.

We’re on the Upper West Side, where I’ve never spent much time, and the conference was at Columbia, where I’d never been before at all. It feels like a Woody Allen movie in these parts, with lots of skinny old women and red-faced bald guys who always seem to be arguing over something that could easily be rectified by looking at a subway schedule or consulting a map or something like that.

I’ve been doing yoga at this studio, Pure Yoga, right down the street, that’s more like a high-end health club than a temple, like I’m used to, but the amazing facilities sort of outweigh the weirdness of having mats that are color-coded with the rooms and norms that include just leaving your sweat-soaked towels on the ground for people (of color, naturally) to pick up after you.

The philosophy for kids conference was pretty great: lots of talks from people involved in this practice that, after a decade and a half of involvement on my part, it turns out I’m sort of almost a figure in. Oddly enough, even though the practice itself is highly-interactive, I was one of only a couple folks who really engaged the audience in some sort of activity.

But, I only fell asleep and drooled on myself once, and that was during the last talk on the last day, so not bad.

Now, though, it’s two days of wide awake as I get to wander about, too, starting today with a visit to Coney Island.

Fixed

2011-06-26T14:33:00.001-07:00

I “raced” in the initial event of this weekend’s “Rebel Without a Cog” series of fixed-gear cycling events on Friday night, and while I didn’t win anything, I was competitive, at least in the challenge I undertook, and most importantly, managed to pedal around town for a couple hours without coasting while managing to not forget I had no freewheel, thus succeeding in refraining from launching myself over the handlebars of the Quickbeam, even as I hurried to complete the tasks outlined on the race manifest.

Local cycling hero, Rob Kittleson, whom I’ve had the pleasure to run into at a variety of events, including the North American Bike Polo Championships a few years ago, organized Friday night’s alleycat to have an ideal “race within the race” option for slackers like me who were unlikely to complete all ten or so checkpoints in the full race. Participants could compete for the green sprinter’s jersey by returning to the meet-up spot at Cool Guy Park as soon as possible after the start with three different bottles of beer from three different Seattle-based breweries.

While other racers who were considering this option debated which three brewpubs they could ride to the fastest, I headed straight fro the nearest QFC, which fortunately had pint bottles from the Elysian, Hales, and the Fremont Brewing Company.

Racing back to the start with the trio of beers in hand, I kept thinking of one of my dad’s favorite mottos: “Old age and treachery will beat youth and enthusiasm every time.”

Unfortunately, there must have been someone—probably not older, but apparently more treacherous than me, because when I arrived, confident that I’d won, Rob pointed out to me on the starter’s table, three beers already standing.

Still, second place in the sprinter’s competition ain’t bad, especially when you’re not that used to riding fixed. And given that I didn’t go endo once all night, I consider the event a rousing success all around.

Dual

2011-06-24T10:10:00.001-07:00

Not duel. Dual.

There was so much luminosity on the night of the almost longest day of the year that we needed two fires to contain it.

And each had its own undeniable charms: you could choose the indoor club with its closeness and café society or the out-of-doors, with all its windswept “Wuthering Heights” wildness.

But you had to accept the downside of your choice, too: claustrophobia and smoke inhalation under shelter or spitting rain just steady enough to make you feel like a Russian peasant standing out in it.

I found myself going back and forth and often splitting the difference, seeking Aristotle’s golden mean between the two, beneath the trees, where I could view both cheery conflagrations in relative comfort under the branches while still enjoying fresh air and the feeling of freedom that comes from standing by a huge body of water near the edge of a continent.

You could see how societies develop their own mythologies and how positions become ossified simply out of habit, so while I admired those who were loyal to their own flames all evening, I also acted the emissary, inviting the easterners to visit the west and vice-versa, with some success.

It was an evening on which accidental traditions were considered, but rejected in favor of old favorites and what I found most remarkable early on was how remarkable a stream of several dozen bicycles on the road appeared to so many people. Tourists leapt from pastry shops to snap cellphone pictures of what one loudmouth termed “The Bikealists!” At least three different not-quite-right folks shook their fists at us, including a toothless hag who shouted, “I hate you motherfuckers!” And a pitbull lathered itself into a frenzy barking as we pedaled by.

And wonder of wonders: no broken collarbones (as far as I know) leaving the park, although admittedly, I wasn’t the last to depart, and both fires were still slightly aglow when I headed out.

Return

2011-06-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Since my summer class has been cancelled due to lack of interest (I’m shocked there weren’t at least 25 students at Cascadia Community College dying to take a course in “global” philosophy, which would have included yoga and vedic chanting; alas), I’m now officially on vacation.

My sabbatical is over, and now I can get back to what I do best: puttering about my house, making plans for books I’ll never write, running errands on my bike(s), and “reading” on the couch until my eyelids get heavy and the book falls from my grasp.

I’ll also probably start back up with the more regularly-scheduled 327-word essay. It’s doubtful that I’ll reprise my epic (and yet oddly-ignored by major media outlets) accomplishment of 327 days in a row of a 327-word essay, but I think I’ll probably average at least 3.27 of them a week.

There’s just something about the practice that helps me feel whole and which—given my impossibly low standards—has me feeling that I’ve accomplished enough for the day after I’ve written and posted a piece.

Besides, there’s no end of material upon which I can riff.

Case in point: the recent news story indicating that Bill Gates will only bequeath a “minuscule portion” of his fortune—something on the order of $10 million dollars each—to his children because he wants them to make it on their own.

Now, I’m not a Bill Gates hater; I realize he’s probably a way better person than me. But if he thinks that somebody with a $10 million dollar trust fund is someone who has to make it on their own, then I strongly encourage him to give me that same amount so I can pull myself up by my own bootstraps and self-make myself as quickly as possible.

At the very least, having $10 million on hand would enable me to keep puttering, planning, riding, and “reading” whether I have a summer job or not.

Pajamas

2011-06-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

Team Pajamas was also Team Overslept as, for some unknown reason, my alarm didn’t go off for when I set it at 4:11.

I woke up and turned over to look at my clock: 4:47!

Shit.

Figuring immediately that the organizers of this year’s “Nine 2 Five All Night Bicycle Scavenger Hunt,” Greg HXC and JSMG couldn’t possibly be completely inflexible about the 5:11am meet-up, especially since I’d be arriving with a bottle of vodka for 5 points on my manifest, I flung myself into some clothes and grabbed my most forgiving bike for the barely pre-dawn ride over to Gasworks.

And it all worked out, since points of the winning team—repeating their success of last year—were still being tallied and there even remained zucchini bread and coffee to go with Bloody Maries and Screwdrivers while we waited in the quicksilver morn for the inevitable results to be announced.

Besides, it would have been particularly unfortunate to have disqualified since this time around, I actually managed more of the course than in 2010, when I pretty much went straight to bed.

I hit two of the “dive” spots, anyway, before pedaling home where—instead of retiring immediately—I enlisted Jen in the effort and we rode the tandem over to the Twilight Exit where the bartender, Kylie, who, of course, like everyone, knows Hardcore Greg, gave me my race quota of Rainier puzzle bottlecaps, fished from her opener waste.

We also got a photobooth picture, adding 7 points to my total.

I was proudest of two of my scavenged items: first, for the 2-point “medals or trophies no lower than 3rd place,” I dug out my UW Excellence in Teaching Award” (first place grad student!) for 1999 and second, for the “Any Go Means Go or Bike Bloc event spoke card” I was able to pull together six different events from previous races, for 18 points, plus, reflexively, this year’s, for a total of 21.

Innertube

2011-06-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

If you’re ironic about your irony, does that make you sincere?

That’s what I kept wondering as the parade of cyclists wended its way along the Lake Union waterfront to the face-meltingly loud beat of tehJobies bicycle-mounted sound system, especially at the intentionally unintentionally hilarious moment when Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” poured forth from the speakers making me, at least, unable not to put the experience in quotes but also unable not to put that in quotes, too, so that somehow they cancelled each other out, leaving only authenticity, sincerity, and quite frankly, schmaltz.

And I came to the conclusion that there are some times that you just can’t help being delighted in spite of yourself, with no filter whatsoever, like when the birthday boy squeezes into an innertube and dons a snorkel for what seemed certain to be a hypothermia-inducing dip in the lake, but which instead turned out to merely be sobering enough swim that the odds-on favorite in my book to be passed out in a wife-taxi before dark was actually the responsible adult when it came to getting his date home on two wheels.

But I guess that’s the wisdom which comes with age, even though from my perspective, celebrating one’s 33rd birthday puts you only about halfway through adolescence, a sentiment I would have to say that the Roman candle and bottle-rocketing brandishing Mr. Ito seems to share in deed, if not word.

Our somewhat chilly summer still abides, but that was more than made up for by the softness of the sky and the magic lantern show afforded by the rising nearly-full moon, which, masked by clouds during its ascent, revealed community-theater special effect rectangles of yellow light on the horizon, much to the delight of all who turned their heads to look.

Eventually, there was spooky pedaling along the trail and a regroup at the local Viking-themed dive bar; I headed home, sated with fun, no quotation marks required.

Stages

2011-06-10T11:59:00.001-07:00

If you take it in stages and don’t let on much about it beforehand, you can get people to ride their bikes pretty far for a drink at a bar on a Thursday evening, at least that’s how it worked last night, when we arrived in Renton via Beacon Hill to Rainier Beach almost before it got dark and certainly prior to many people realizing what they were in for in terms of distance and adventure.

In fact, the only real drama on the way there was the last block, winding around the one-way streets in the strange Twilight Zone time-warp 1950s stage set that is Seattle’s southern neighbor, when all of a sudden, on the previously deserted three-lane roadway, there were cars coming right at us, a phenomenon so unexpected that it took longer than it should have to convince riders that it was we, not they, who were going the wrong way down a one-way street.

Fortunately, however, the pub pulled up just in the nick of time and a pleasant hour or so was spent quaffing from a surprisingly large selection of beers while fielding amazed questions from a whole slew of patrons way more impressed with the facts of our two-wheeled journey than they should have been, an (over)reaction that no one, especially those few who wife-taxied it home, felt inclined to disabuse them of.

For the bulk of the pack who stuck it out, though, Joeball’s promised flat-ride back to Seattle was well worth the price of admission, including, among other things, a portage over the railroad tracks, many bridges to cross, and a long and fragrant spin along that elemental magic at our fair city’s heart, the Duwamish.

I was only good for a couple sips of beer at the final stop in South Park, before taking the western route home with a handful of riders pointed in a similar direction, still many miles to go, but in stages, no problem.

Familiar

2011-05-27T12:27:00.001-07:00

The ride didn’t go anywhere I’ve never been last night, nor was it “moderately all right, maybe average at best” in any significant way, but even so, there’s always something unprecedented when one is out on two wheels with one’s familiars on a Thursday night, this one being the last such evening in May, although you couldn’t obviously tell it from the weather.

For instance, although we’ve often stopped at the Hop In grocery for beer and skittles, I can’t remember ever getting there with a bomb down 24th Avenue, especially one fast enough for even pokey old me to break the speed limit by a good six miles an hour as duly noted by the radar sign halfway down the hill.

And I’m sure we’ve never been greeted, as we made the left into the grocery store parking lot, by some crazy homeless person shouting “Fuck You Niggers! You Fucking Faggots! Learn to Drive!” at the top of his leather lungs like a dog wildly barking at passing cars.

Moreover, even though there have been four or five times I’ve stood around drinking beer with fellow cyclists, keeping an eye out for nutria in the UW Nature Preserve on Lake Washington behind Husky stadium, I’ve never before enjoyed witnessing there a brief, but spirited, game of “Chicken on the Log” one that surprisingly, didn’t even result in the Angry Hippy rupturing himself as he lifted his rider up on his shoulders.

And, sure, we’ve ridden through the woods up the ravine to Cowen Park, but this is the first time it was still light enough to see where I was going, although I was still surprised by how magically the park appears at the top of the corkscrew.

Finally, who hasn’t before finished off and evening with a quick spin to the surrealistic playground that is the Baronoff bar? But I, for one, have never seen so many jello shots consumed and which such sheer abandon.

Cheater

2011-05-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

I missed former Gold-medal-winning cyclist Tyler Hamilton’s tell-all on CBS’ Sixty Minutes last week (had to wash my hair) in which he ratted out his former United States Postal Service cycling team teammate, Lance Armstrong, for using performance-enhancing drugs in order to win at least a couple of the seven Tour de France titles he garnered.

Although it’s certain that Hamilton was lying about some things (How can I tell? His lips were moving!) it’s certain that Armstrong availed himself of one or more of the available doping strategies in pursuit of his Tour victories.

But did he cheat? That’s what I’m not so sure of.

By all reports, professional bike racers in the 1990s and early part of the 21st century took nearly as many drugs as Keith Richards and Lindsay Lohan combined. Everybody says “everybody was doing it,” and no doubt, they were.

So, if Lance took human growth hormone or engaged in autologous blood-doping, or even if he shot up speed, it’s hard for me to see how this would have given him an unfair advantage; rather, had he not, he’d have had an unfair disadvantage.

Not that I’m advocating drug use here (I save that for Thursday nights with my friends, and limit it to substances grown organically), but the point is, if Lance had artificial help when he crushed his competitors time after time, they did, too, so even if the overall results were synthetically enhanced, the relative results were spot on.

So what if everyone’s best was better than it should have been; Lance was still the best among them. Just because everyone’s riding with tailwind, doesn’t mean the winner cheated, does it?

And I’m not even a fan of Armstrong; I actually liked Hamilton best of all. But that was before I bought into his “Believe Tyler” campaign.

In the immortal words of George Bush, “Fool me once, shame on you, if you fool me, you can’t get fooled again.”

Rapture

2011-05-20T11:51:00.001-07:00

If Family Radio President Harold Camping is right and doomsday comes this weekend, at least I’ll have had the longest and prettiest bike ride of the year before the shit hits the fan.

Last night, I pedaled from the north end of Lake Washington in Bothell to near its southern tip below Seward Park then west across town to Magnolia before heading back east to my home, a loop that, if you include my ride out to school in the afternoon almost certainly managed to be as many miles as years I’ve lived, a feat that grows more impressive and less likely with each passing day.

But it was so lovely that I hardly wanted to stop and didn’t really get to given that by the time I’d found the never-before-visited beach, thanks, in no small part to Andre’s light show, the ride was already gathering up discarded cans and departing.

So, I tagged along up the hill to a spot in the road where we waited so long for the Angry Hippy that, for a while, I thought people were asking “Where’s Ben?” metaphorically.

But then, it was a comforting train of cyclists all the way north on the Rainier, making the often harrowing ride into the reasonable bike route it oughta be.

tehJobies was persistent enough to convince a portion of the assembled that Magnolia was just around the corner from Chinatown and although it involved surviving a flock of seagulls so large and loud it almost seemed a sign of the impending apocalypse, I was glad since it meant that not only would I get to keep riding but I’d also have the long way home to look forward to.

The waning almost-full moon was a menacing god head as I came over the hill after midnight; if the end is nigh, so be it; I’m sure I won’t be raptured on Saturday, but so what?

A night like this I’m already in heaven.

Completeness

2011-05-13T10:29:00.001-07:00

I was trying to articulate one of the conceptions of happiness that the philosopher Robert Nozick describes, “those particular moments you thought and felt, blissfully, that there was nothing else you wanted, your life was good,” when Christine marched in, gazing at the setting sun off Alki (which moments before had treated viewers to the never-before-seen sight of two identical flattened disks of burning magenta, one on the horizon and one, just below, on the water) and with arms upraised, announced “This is fantastic!” thereby nailing Nozick’s point way better than I could ever have.

And even though she stepped in some dogshit as she did so, nothing, really, could undermine such complete two-wheeled joy last night, not even the crazy lady in a minivan who accused Lee of assault for brushing her car when she angrily tried to drive through us while we gently—and legally—took up the whole goddamn rode for an entire quarter mile to get through the construction zone before crossing—in the bike lane—the low-level West Seattle Bridge.

Not even the dude in the pickup who got all bent out of shape because he apparently had to take his foot of the gas for two seconds to let a bike pass in front of him, but who clearly wasn’t mad enough to cross the street to take on three dozen cyclists, one of whom claimed to have a family that would kill him should he get tough.

Not even the cop who pulled up and seemed all ready to get serious with us for being slow to extinguish our little beach fire and because, apparently, he’d gotten a report that a gang of bikers was on the high-level bridge, riding through traffic and beating on cars.

But I think he must have been feeling it, too, though, that sense of completeness, because all it took was one respectful question, and whatever desire he had to make a fuss disappeared completely.

Stunning

2011-05-06T14:59:00.001-07:00

It’s a reliable indicator that a party has achieved escape velocity when girls start dancing on the table, so on that score, last night’s ride qualifies as an unqualified success in the festivities department.

But I thought it was already spectacular much earlier—even as we poured forth from Westlake Center under a blue-smudged sky to the throbbing beat of tehJobies bicycle-mounted discotheque, playing at least one of the songs that’s emerged as a group anthem, Lil Wayne’s poignant apostrophe to his friends and acquaintances, “Get Low,” which inspired numerous wobbles and wiggles in time to the beat as riders cruised down Second Avenue.

And Seattle itself was so stunning in its juxtaposition of natural beauty and industrial wasteland that a person couldn’t stop smiling down strangely deserted major thoroughfares to a secluded park by your favorite Superfund site river, a spot which I wouldn’t be surprised to learn was once a meeting place for indigenous peoples in the area when they were looking for a location to hold an evening’s revelries.

Revelry was evident to no small degree as dozens of south-of-the-border-themed mixed drinks were mixed and consumed in near assembly-line fashion to commemorate the holiday that doesn’t actually celebrate Mexican Independence, a detail no one, least of all those responsible for the music seemed to mind a bit. The upshot of which, in addition to the aforementioned table-dancing, was also a good deal of wrasslin’ around on the ground, gooseshit be damned, which apparently resulted in, if not a broken nose, at least one which could only be staunched with a tampon, an application that surprisingly, Proctor and Gamble’s corporate marketing department has yet to expand into.

Eventually, the two-wheeled party rolled farther south to a well-loved bar near a much-missed bridge; at this point, I headed home, but not before one last adventure accidentally crossing the alternate span on the metal car deck, like the night itself, a little scary, but above all stunning.

Certificate

2011-04-28T11:30:00.000-07:00

I know that some people find it so hard to believe that no matter what evidence I put forward, they’ll continue to doubt, but the truth is, I was born on planet earth and therefore do qualify as eligible to be King of the World.

And while I refuse to dignify questions about my origins by responding to the haters who refer to me as a “space-case” or “alien,” I have decided to post my birth certificate just in case an appeal to evidence might have any bearing whatsoever on the beliefs of certain people.

Not that reasoned discourse happens to be the preferred mode of public debate these days; rather, it seems like all you have to do is spout whatever ideas come into your head as loudly as possible over and over again until somebody with a microphone and/or camera begins to listen and take you somewhat seriously.

(Of course, that’s been my strategy on this weblog for the past five years, without much popular success, but I digress.)

Besides, the “earth-born” requirement for Planetary Regent strikes me as outdated, anyway. After all, these days, somebody constructed in a test tube, or put together out of silicon chips is allowed to be Earth’s king, just so long as those operations took place on this third rock from the sun. Conversely, a child born to two carbon-based homo sapiens, using the time-honored (albeit rather messy) method of sexual intercourse, is disqualified just because his or her parents happened to be visiting Titan or some other extraterrestrial vacation spot in the solar system when the joyous occasion of birth occurred.

As a consequence, some of our greatest statespeople, including the current half-human, half-Venusian prime minister can’t accede to the top spot on the planet, while the vast majority of the current prison population could.

As for me, I trust the evidence I present here puts this issue to bed; I know I’m ready for a nap, anyway.

Nothing

2011-04-27T16:24:00.001-07:00

Obviously, some things are more worthwhile to do than others: volunteering at an orphanage or writing great works of literature has to be a better use of one’s time than sitting on a couch reading fiction, but it’s all the stuff in the middle that’s hard to quantify.

Like, for instance, which is superior? Going to the dentist to get one’s teeth cleaned? Or picking up the dog poop in your backyard? Riding your bike to the dry cleaners to retrieve the laundry? Or hanging out in the bike shop talking about punk music with the head mechanic?

And does any of it really matter given that the human race will inevitably go extinct sooner or later (if not sooner), and that every single thing any of us have ever done, from Shakespeare and his plays to Steve Jobs and his iPod will be nothing more than dust at best.

I know I ought to be doing more with my days, but I’m not entirely sure what “more” means. As long as I’m not actively making the world a better place—writing Shakespeare plays, for example—then does it really matter whether I’m doing yoga or taking a walk? I could be practicing flute, I guess, but why that instead of prepping for my summer philosophy class?

I realize, of course, that this is one of those “problems” that is really a privilege. If I were an impoverished auto-rickshaw driver in India and had no choice but to hang around the coffee stand all day in hopes of drumming up a couple fares before nightfall, these questions would never emerge. And even last year at this time, when I was teaching 3 classes, I never had the luxury of wondering about whether it was a worthwhile use of my time to spend six hours of my life grading.

So, I guess I’ll just live with it; at least I’m not wasting my time (right now) watching Youtube.

Engagement

2011-04-24T18:40:00.001-07:00

I hop off my bike at the bus stop the other day and while I’m removing my gloves and arranging myself, this middle-aged gentleman in a suit comes over and gets in my face and says, “That was a red light, you know.”

I’m not exactly sure what he’s talking about, so my reply might not have been exceptionally articulate: “Huh?” I say.

“That light. It was red. You ran right through it.”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t; I tried to explain that I had the light across the intersection and then was simply cutting left across the crosswalk to enter the lane in front of the bus stop, but he wasn’t hearing it.

“I saw you run that light,” he maintains. “Just like all you bicycle riders; if you want to be taken seriously on the road, you have to obey the laws,” he insists.

Whatever. I shrug and let him just walk away.

But after a moment, I decide to engage,

“Listen,” I say, “I don’t think I ran that light, but even if I had, I’m not sure I agree with you about unquestionably obeying the laws.”

“So, you take traffic lights as simply advisory?” he asks.

“I think that’s right,” I respond. “I mean, it’s 7:00 in the morning; the streets are empty; I hardly think I need to sit in the rain at a deserted intersection.”

This sets him off completely. He sputters that he sees cyclists running lights constantly, that he was almost hit by a bike in a crosswalk, and that cars don’t break laws, so bikes shouldn’t either.

To the first claim, I mention that he may be experiencing confirmation bias; to the second, I point out he wasn’t actually hit; and to the third, I encourage him to notice how many drivers do speed and run lights, too.

I didn’t change his mind, but he admitted he might have been mistaken about my running the light.

Lonely

2011-04-19T20:31:00.001-07:00

I feel sorry for human beings; we’re such pathetic creatures.

Everyone is so lonely; the fundamental human condition is one of profound solitude. We’re all trying to connect with something else, but, by definition, the effort to do so is doomed.

Tonight, I walked around a bit and saw people’s minor aspirations foiled; imagine how dashed their deepest dreams must be.

My waiter was taken aback that I only ordered a salad; just think of how real disappointments must hurt.

I’m not even sure I believe this; perhaps I’m just responding to a day during which I sat way too much; few things are worse for one’s psyche than being stuck in a chair. Unfortunately, as an attendee of a philosophy conference, that’s pretty much what I’ve got to look forward to for the next three days.

One thing is obvious: nearly everyone believes that sensual pleasure equals happiness. Notice the proliferation of restaurants, fast cars, and luxury appointments. But it’s just as clear that none of these things will really bring happiness—not that it’s easy at all to see what will.

I read in the paper today about a 16 year-old girl who survived a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, something only about 2 in 100 people do. Were that the case for you, would you try again? Or would you take it as a sign of something and devote your life to living?

And if you did, what would that mean? I can’t imagine you’d ever want to sit at a podium on the street in San Diego and try to convince passersby to come have dinner at the restaurant that employs you. But would you sign up to be a monk instead?

That’s my point (assuming I have one); no matter what we do, it’s all just pointless. I don’t know what this means; perhaps it’s just further evidence that all one can really do is rise early and begin Surya Namaskara.

Filmed

2011-04-17T08:58:00.001-07:00

I always think of bike-riding in Portland as a mellow experience; the town’s so bike-friendly, groovy, and flat that going out on two wheels is remarkably easy and pleasant.

However, if it’s after midnight, you’re all alone in some part of town that looks entirely unfamiliar, the evening’s entertainment has sort of caught up with you, and the general direction you think you ought to be heading back towards your hotel seems to be across what appears to be in interstate bridge without a shoulder, then things can get a little weird and scary.

So, you decide to take a break at the brightly lit bar that suddenly appears to your left; once inside, you realize that it’s the kind of place that gives you your change all in one dollar bills, which reassures you that if there are other bike riders in the vicinity, they might be expected to appear before too long.

And if that isn’t exactly what happens: you finish your drink, head out, feeling generally restored, and no sooner do you go another mile or so, than a vast contingent of cyclists comes heading right towards you and then, in what has to qualify as a “Groundhog Day” (the movie) moment, you follow them and, in moments, find yourself back at the very watering hole you’d left not ten minutes earlier.

This time, though, the place doesn’t seem nearly as exotic and foreboding as it did before, and by carrying on an outdoor conversation with an acquaintance whose bearings are better than your own, you’re able to envision your route home.

It takes you across the aforementioned bridge, which turns out to be nothing particularly frightening at all, merely an under-construction roadway which leads you almost right back to where you need to get to after all.

And so, the freaky redneck river town turns back into to the charming little village again, where well-marked bike lanes lead you gently home once more.

Organ

2011-04-09T15:57:00.000-07:00

As a matter of fact, one might actually aspire to being miles from home, well after midnight, deep in one’s cups, with only a bicycle for transportation. And while it took the entire night to get there, eventually the goal was met and I achieved my hoped-for post-last call two-wheeled ramble home on what turned out to be an exceptionally clear and cool early spring evening in the Pacific Northwest.

I caught up with the a ride a couple hours into it as it rolled up 19th Avenue from the Bridge to Nowhere (which, according to Andre is now, once again, somewhere, albeit a glass-strewn one) and thanks to a family sushi dinner pre-funk that included two giant orders of sake, was more or less in the same place psychologically as the riders who had started their evening’s booze n’ cruise earlier than me.

We headed to the inevitable ride-suck that is Capitol Hill to spend a couple of amusing (although essentially bike-free) hours at Organ Karaoke, an event made almost palatable by Fancy Fred and Lee’s rendition of the “it” song of he moment and by the generous shots poured by the tragically hip bartender.

Still, I was glad to be out of there at last and on the way to outdoor imbibing, even though a detour for nightcaps at some drinking establishment whose details escape me now meant that I ~~at least, never did arrive at~~ have no recollection whatsoever of Gasworks Park—~~nor, if truth be told did anyone else, if I recall correctly (not that there’s any reason whatsoever to suppose that in fact, I do.)~~
although, apparently, it must have happened because, as is required, there ARE pics.

Nevertheless, in the end, I got to enjoy most of what one looks for on a Thursday night ride: conviviality, shenanigans, and eventually, a sufficient number of miles out riding one’s bike—despite the fact some of the last ones are sort of lost in the kind of mist one occasionally is apt to experience internally even on such a cloudless night.

Wow

2011-04-01T12:15:00.001-07:00

It’s a good thing I’ve given up all recreational stimulants so that my head is clear enough to accurately recall everything that went down on last night’s maybe moderately all right, average at best ride last night.

I mean it would have been enough that not only one, but two (young and old) Wreyfords showed up, back to Seattle for good with new jobs as a certified public accountant and a police officer respectively, and that neither was whisked unconscious off to Harborview before the night was out, but what was really mind-blowing was to see Aaron Goss, who arrived on his new carbon fiber Cervelo and tehJobies (wearing a brown tweed vest!) cuddling in the park shelter after a couple drinks and proclaiming loudly to anyone who’d listen that they were now BFs 4 ever, no matter what.

Of course, this was after Andre led us on a well-marked bike trail to an indoor shopping mall where we stood around and admired the fake fire displays in a hardware store before riding quietly away. And subsequent to when Lee talked us all out of cycling on the freeway express lanes so we could stop instead at that quaint teahouse for steaming cups of chamomile blend.

The Angry Hippy was in rare form, too, especially after that second flat tire, when he started crying and had to have that girl change the tube for him. It was so sweet to see how thankful he was!

But, of course, not nearly as thankful as Derrick, who expressed his deep gratitude to all of us for putting up with his drunken shenanigans and promising never to do anything that might embarrass anyone ever again.

tehSchkott was so taken with the display that he stopped talking about his new bike!

And Henry and Jeff, bless their Summer Babes hearts, sang an impromptu bicycle-powered set of Barry Manilow tunes!

Right then was when I swore off cannabis and bike-riding for good.

Dreary

2011-03-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

I’m generally not one to complain about the weather. What good will it do, right?

And besides, you’ve got to keep things in perspective: here in Seattle, we’re not having earthquakes or tornadoes, and as I’ve long thought after moving from Minneapolis, the local climate might make you want to kill yourself, but, unlike in my old home town, you’re not going to actually die out there from the cold.

But, still.

It is fucking dreary here.

I’m home from India two weeks now and there hasn’t been a single day on which it hasn’t rained at least a little and for the last five mornings in a row, extending pretty much through the afternoon and evening, it’s been drizzly and cold, the sort of chilly weather that makes you feel like you’re living in London in the late 1940s when the world was still in black and white and no one ever got warm.

It’s usually better when you get out in it and so I’ve been doing my best to make sure I take a couple bike rides every day, and while it does tend to be my experience that the rain looks worse from inside your house than it is when you’re pedaling around in it, the whole business of getting geared up and then, even worse, peeling off the wet things when you arrive at your destination, is really tedious. I’m sick of gloves that smell like cheese and am fed up with my sodden toes never quite drying out.

Of course, I know that all this precipitation is good for us; Washington state snowpack levels are up, but still tend to be below average; wet socks are a small price to pay for irrigated crops and clean drinking water come summer.

I realize, as well, how tiresome is a guy sitting inside his dry home ranting about wet weather; if the sun would just come out, though, I’m sure I’d feel better.

Report

2011-03-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

Let the record show that I hated disco when it was actually happening.

Like all right-minded folks, I maintained “disco sucks,” and listened exclusively to new wave and punk music: bands like Devo, the Talking Heads, and the Clash.

More than three decades later, though, I’m a fan, at least when it comes to choosing a theme for a bike race, as well as an outfit to wear when putting it on.

The 327 Words Studio 54 Disco Time Trial went off in fine fashion, with 33 riders setting forth, and all but six finishing. The weather was suitably crummy, with rain showers pelting the southern part of the route, but no one got killed, even though the Angry Hippy was attacked by a crazy hobo downtown, for no apparent reason, and with fortunately, no lasting damage other than to his bicycle’s rear wheel.

Tall Jace, riding a single-speed and subsisting only on bananas and water, was the winner, finishing almost two minutes ahead of second-place rider, the surprisingly fast Kevin Septor, who credited his success to knowing where to go, especially Haulin’ Colin’s shop on 5th Avenue South, not 6th Avenue, as the race manifest mistakenly indicated.

My favorite story was of the group of stoned riders who ascended the south steps of the Volunteer Park water tower and, upon descending the north ones, looked around and were convinced, at least momentarily, that their bikes had all been stolen.

I also loved thinking that third-place finisher Small Fred won’t be celebrating his 54th birthday until the year 2044, at which time, no doubt, races like this will finally be run using jet packs and anti-gravity belts.

My heartfelt thanks to all the folks who performed checkpoint duty and my deepest gratitude to all the sponsors, notably New Belgium Brewery who provided a keg of beer (that for the first time ever, we didn’t finish) and to Vapolution Vaporizers, whose grand prize Ben failed again to win.

Floating

2011-03-25T12:08:00.001-07:00

Andre advised us to be prepared to drink in an outdoor place at which we’d never drank before, to ride on roads never ridden before, and to drink in a bar never previously sat at; I’m pretty sure all three of those were accomplished in one form or another, even without taking into account Heraclitus’ famous reminder that the same river can never be stepped in twice, given that all is flow and flux, so that even if, technically, I had had a drink in that same park shelter on Alki before, it’s still not the same drink nor, really, the same shelter either, even though, thankfully, the bike gang itself remains consistent, at least in its success in taking you to fresh locations via new routes for imbibing and carousing well into the night.

We ended up, midway, at what I was expecting to be a bar on a boat, but which turned out instead to be a boat in a bar, and which, thanks to the reasonably confused state into which I’d gotten myself as a result of various quaffables and eatibles, really did seem like an indoor home upon the water. The light through the rear windows of our “ship” was perfect, like moonlight dancing upon the Caribbean as we floated gently at anchor drinking rum and playing dice made from the bones of our enemies before our morning raid on the English armada.

It was all I could do to simply stay abreast of the proceedings as I sat near the “prow” as conversations swirled around. Soon enough, though, there was talk of completing a “boat to boat” run that would put us crosstown at another nautically themed establishment.

Eventually, we went fast downhill (if not necessarily downhill fast) and crossed a bridge or two before splintering into friendly factions; I had an hour or so to myself on the final leg, floating over the spring night to my home port once more.

Guru

2011-03-23T19:01:00.001-07:00

As anyone who’s even ever seen a Karate Kid movie knows, the Eastern tradition of learning is based in the student’s relationship to a guru. “When the pupil is ready, the guru appears,” and all that; you apprentice yourself to the master and do whatever he says for years and years until finally, you discover, with surprise, that you have internalized the lessons he’s been teaching you all along and now you can kick the bullies’ asses, or fly, or lift your Jedi spacecraft out of the swamp just by using your mind.

In the Ashtanga yoga tradition, the guru is important, too. Although some people have managed to pick up the series from videos or books, traditionally, one is taught by a skilled teacher who, in turn, was taught by a master, and so on an so on, leading right back, directly or indirectly to Pattabhi Jois and even Krishnamacharya himself, though the lineage of instruction.

I’ve been fortunate to have a number of gurus, beginning initially with Catherine (Satya) and David Garrigues, who ran Seattle’s Ashtanga Yoga School for almost a decade and from whom I got infected with the Asthanga yoga bug; I was also blessed to have participated in two week-long led classes with Guruji himself, and then, most recently, in Mysore, I got to be taught by his daughter, Saraswathi, for two months; all this in addition to workshops here and there with Ashtanga masters like Manju Jois, Richard Freeman, David Williams, and Tim Miller.

But today, as I practiced alone, I was struck by how the real guru is the practice itself.

Most everything that I’ve learned from Ashtanga has been a result of going through the poses, doing the breathing, trying to be present as I bend and sweat during my time on the mat. It’s from the series that I’m learning about myself, the world, the unseen, the Atman that is Brahman.

I bow to my guru, the practice.

Open Sesame

2011-03-21T13:32:00.001-07:00

Even someone who likes to hear himself talk as much as I do gets tired of listening to himself occasionally.

But, of course, the chatter in the mind goes on; thoughts keep percolating up, all of them attached to words, and for some reason connected to my sense of self and what I consider necessary to understand the world, I’m compelled to put some of that mind-stuff down in text.

Does it make any difference to the world? Certainly not. And ought my time not better be spent by making contributions to Japan earthquake relief or to writing impassioned screeds about the latest war my country has gotten itself into? Naturally.

But here I am, puzzling publicly about my puzzlement; wondering aloud about the my wonderment, making excuses on behalf of my sorry excuse for an externalized internal monologue.

I once went 327 days in a row writing and publishing a 327-word essay, half-imagining that doing so would somehow catapult me into internet stardom. But all that happened is that I got sort of addicted to the habit such that I don’t entirely feel like myself—whoever that is—unless I do so.

In the literature of Vedanta I’ve been reading, there’s lots of talk about how the mind falls into grooves and how yoga, meditation, and other such practices are means to assist us in climbing out of those grooves.

The problem, typically, is that the grooves feel so groovy; it’s nice to snuggle down into the familiar; quite frankly, I’m disinclined to change when change is difficult and the status quo so nice and easy.

Thus, here I am again, returning to the 327 word form, writing and posting an essay that’s little more than naval gazing turned inside-out.

Does this mean that 327 Words is back?

Well, sorta. In April, when spring quarter starts, I’m back at Sabblogtical, with a focus on doing Philosophy for Children.

For right now, though, this is groovy enough.

Hiatus

2011-01-03T14:40:00.001-08:00

My sabbatical officially starts on Thursday, I guess; that’s when my contract at school resumes, but I’m heading out this afternoon for some yoga study in Olympia to prepare for my yoga study in India (yeah, I know…) so, I’m thinking that the content of my time away from school really starts with this workshop, which begins tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM (yeah, I know…).

Consequently, I’m hereby designating this 327-word posting as my last entry on 327 Words until at least I return from Mysore in March.

(Keep track of my sabbatical, though, in sometimes more, sometimes fewer than 327 words at sabblogtical.blogspot.com.)

I’ve been churning out a 327-word essay with fanatical regularity for over five years now, and think it’s time, in keeping with the sabbatical theme, to try something a little different. This isn’t to say that I won’t keep applying myself to the writing form of which I am no doubt the world’s exalted master, it’s simply that I’m interested in seeing what happens if I spend the time I’ve typically devoted to this practice (usually between twenty minutes and an hour a day) to something else.

I surmise that the world will keep spinning on its axis, but I want to find out for sure.

It’s been a good run, and I’ve usually enjoyed the writing (no doubt more than those doing the reading), but it’s probably time to branch out—maybe even to 328 or 330 word essays.

Blogger tells me that 327 Words has 1305 posts (this will make 1306). That means I’ve spent something on the order of 900 hours writing these essays. That’s like twenty-two weeks of a full-time, 40 hour-a-week job.

Although at such job, you’d never write steadily for those 40 hours, so figuring about halftime working, halftime chatting with co-workers, etc., it’s almost like I’ve spent an entire year of employment at this task.

Even at my relatively paltry salary as a community college teacher, somebody owes me bank; I look forward to the checks in my mailbox when I return.

Lazy

2011-01-01T18:49:00.001-08:00

If there’s any truth to the old chestnut which has it that whatever you do the first day of the year defines what you’ll be doing the other 364, then this is going to the laziest twelve months I’ve ever lived.

Jen and I succeeded mightily in our New Year’s Eve celebrations and didn’t get home from seeing the band X, then closing down a bar where some friends were reveling, then walking across town in the cold for omelets and toast at our chums’ apartment until 5:00 in the morning, so we both managed to lie abed until almost noon, (something I’m pretty sure I didn’t do once in all of 2010), and even after we did rise, my activities have amounted to little more than puttering about the house, doing a bit of shopping, and reading the big fat book I’ve been working through for the last couple weeks, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which, although it bills itself as literary fiction, is hardly much more than Harry Potter for grownups.

But I’m going to cut myself some slack, this being a holiday and all; while I may not have done much to make the world a better place, I didn’t at least, do anything that made it significantly worse, which is more than can be said for the actors in the Budweiser commercial that’s airing as I half-heartedly watch hockey, of all things, on the television, as I type.

It will be interesting to see what 2011 has in store for us; of course, the feature event for me will be my trip to India in a little over two weeks. My only fear, at this point, is that it won’t be exotic enough; Mysore, where I’m going will be overrun with Westerners, and promises to be somewhat less like India than other parts of the country. Still, it will certainly be a stark contrast to today, even if I don’t rise till noon.

Freeze

2010-12-31T11:13:00.000-08:00

On the ride from my house to the pre-funk, my fingers froze, but after the appropriate ingestion of various anti-freezes, I wasn’t cold at all even though this last Thursday night of 2010 was as clear and frigid an evening as Seattle has seen all year.

Still, it seemed like a good idea to head for a place with an outdoor firepit as we pedaled away from Westlake Center and, although progress tended to be a bit less aggressive than when someone’s pre-planned a theme or in cases where Angry Hippies or Drunken Derricks are leading the way, the assembled were eventually treated to a ride on the road across the Aurora Bridge where a Subaru station wagon zoomed passed us, honking steadily and inspiring a great deal of conjecture as to whether it was a friendly horn-blowing or, in what would seem contrary to the stereotype of such cars’ drivers, one sounded in anger.

And it was both body and heart warming to still be able, after all these years, to cross a pedestrian bridge I’ve never been over and then, with great alacrity, already be atop Phinney Ridge and alternately standing around the bar’s outdoor flames and sitting inside the joint to admire the sights within.

Pretty soon the call to head west to Ballard and see Goddamn Bob Hall at Snoose Junction arose and so then, there we were consuming pizza and drinking beer as, on TV, the UW Huskies unexpectedly prevailed in their Holiday Bowl matchup against Nebraska much to the boredom and/or delight of those still in attendance.

It seemed like only a handful of the hardiest souls were left to then cycle eastward along the ship canal to the most time-honored of outdoor warm-up spots; I, however, was intent on one more indoor fire and so departed for the venerable CIP where I warmed my gloves on the flames and drank a nightcap before setting off home, warm as toast.

2010

2010-12-30T17:47:00.000-08:00

Everyone should find something no one else does; then like I am with the 327-word essay, you can become the undisputed global master of the form.

It’s odd in a way to be world champ, but perhaps odder still when there’s no competition whatsoever. Nevertheless, there’s something vaguely satisfying about being number one at anything, even if it’s entirely trivial.

At the very least, your opinions on the matter get to stand as THE opinions. Thus, my top ten (well, top twelve, actually) list of this year’s postings really means something. It’s like having Ella Fitzgerald in her prime pick the top twelve Ella songs. Or George W. choose the dozen worst moments in his presidency.

So, without further ado:

January gets “Backwards,” my .83 ride account nod to the film “Memento.”

For February, I’ve got to go with “Lived to Tell,” but perhaps some of my affection for it is that tehSchkott didn’t die. Carry on.

March’s winner is “Easy,” a simple tale of how to have a great 53rd birthday.

For April, I present “Hungry,” a surrealistic menu fantasy.

May, I admit, seems a bit sparse; nevertheless, “Trailer Love,” including the picture by Steve Hanson deserves my nod.

I like “Perfect” best in June, but again, it could just be the memory of the occasion that I’m responding to.

July’s best piece is “Agnosognosia,” about a condition which any of us might have although, by definition, none of us would know it.

In August, it’s “Mystery,” who knows why?

Best of September is “Unbelievable;” it may not be the best writing, but it wins for the most amazing story of the year, maybe of all time. I’m not even sure I believe it.

“Gravity” is the winning entry for October; I still even think it’s funny.

November? “Democracy.” And because I rule here, I can say so.

I don’t really know what to say about December; it’s too close; I guess I’ll go with “Grrr.”

Sailing

2010-12-27T14:20:00.001-08:00

I’ve never really understood the allure of owning a boat; the most salient feature of my experience on board a water-going vessel has always been a feeling of being trapped: once you’re on deck, there’s nowhere to go and you’re stuck with whomever you’re stuck with until you get back to port.

I imagine, though, folks who are into that sort of thing probably consider being on a boat the ultimate expression of freedom: you can go wherever you want as long as the water’s deep enough, and if you’re sailing, it’s even better since you don’t have to use any power other than the wind.

For me, that experience is best attained on the seat of a bicycle; when you’re out and about on two wheels, you’re absolutely free; as Kent Peterson is wont to say, “Any distance is biking distance,” and it is, as long as you’ve got the time.

Yesterday, I enjoyed the feeling of sailing around Seattle as I took a break from football-watching (if you can call Seahawks broadcast “football”) at Bill’s Off-Broadway to ride from Capitol Hill around and down to Eastlake, South Lake Union, and then back up the hill for one final round; I timed my pedaling perfectly for the blustery day: just as I headed out it was starting to rain and right at the moment I returned, it was finally stopping, but it was a lovely jaunt nonetheless.

As long as I kept heading in a generally northwest direction, the wind and rain were at my back and only made me feel stronger. And then, when it was time to return in a basically southeasterly route, I got to enjoy a sunbreak to my right—which, while not powerful enough keep me dry, nonetheless was so scintillatingly beautiful that I didn’t mind the drizzle at all.

I really did feel like a sailor; tacking into the breeze as I maneuvered home, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

Retro

2010-12-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

The kid made out pretty well this holiday season; she got everything she wanted on her list other than the “more money” item (in addition to the “money” item) and even though, at this point, we’re all just pretending about Santa, she was still willing to write a note to the Big Fat Man in the Red Suit and put out cookies and bourbon for him before turning in, so all in all, a successful holiday, for everyone, kids and parents alike, Merry Christmas.

What I found particularly charming about her gift requests this time around is that, basically, it turns out she’s essentially recreating my adolescent bedroom, circa 1972 or so.

Here’s what she wanted and got:

• A record-player turntable with built-in speakers, kind of like a fancy Close N’ Play. Then Jen went to the Salvation Army and bought a bunch of old LPs, including a couple I had, including the first Elton John album, Deep Purple’s Machine Head, and the Grateful Dead triple album, Europe 72.

• A film camera, one of those plastic Holga jobs, although I supposed a more authentic choice would have been a Polaroid Swinger.

• A Zippo lighter, complete with a can of fluid and some extra flints.

All she needed to add was a black light and some posters and a rotary dial phone and she’d have had the complete package.

I’m sure none of this was intentional, but it’s charming, and probably not unique. One of my students, for instance, in an exercise we were doing in the Philosophy of Religion class where they were to conceptualize what heaven might be like, described it pretty much like the world of my adolescence: a place of no cellphones or computers, where you could stay up late and didn’t have to check in with your parents every couple of hours; seriously, throw in a couple of seedy joints rolled in American flag papers, and basically, that was life.

Real

2010-12-24T21:38:00.000-08:00

I like to think I’m serious about my yoga practice; traditionally, one does the Ashtanga series six days a week and I’m pretty good about doing something at least every day of the week but Sunday, but there’s no doubt that I’m lazier than I could be.

During the school year, I usually manage a kind of modified version of half of the Primary Series; I do all the poses through Navasana, but I usually only do the vinyasa between poses rather than between sides as I was originally taught. I’ve believed this has kept me from completely becoming a slug, and it’s certainly better than nothing, but how much better is the question.

Lately, as I begin to prepare for studying in India, I’ve gotten back into doing the full Primary Series, completely with vinyasa between both sides. And what’s become apparent to me is that I’ve sort of been wasting my time all year long; or, at least, what I’ve taken to be a serious practice, isn’t really very serious at all.

There is a magic to submitting to the entire series that you just don’t get when you do less; maybe what I’ve been doing has kept me slightly more limber than I would have been otherwise, but insofar as yoga is about liberation, I don’t think it’s been doing me much good.

When I used to do Tai Chi in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park back in 1976, my teacher, Bing Leong, used to say that if you miss one day of practice, you fall back two days; I think something similar happens with yoga, although progress isn’t so obvious.

It will be interesting to see whether I re-acquire some of poses I’ve lost over the last few years when I’m in Mysore; Marichysana D is beyond me, as is Garbha Pindasana; I used to be able to do both of them; maybe when I’m really there, they’ll come back to me.

Almost

2010-12-22T13:07:00.001-08:00

In comments to the article about the clusterfuck that was last week’s Thursday night Point83 ride, lots of people said something like, “I almost got hit by a bike rider x number of times, and so now, forevermore, I don’t trust those fuckers; they should all be run over just like I almost was.”

The operative adverb, of course, is “almost.”

What these commenters don’t seem to grasp is that almost getting hit by a bike is still NOT getting hit.

You can come pretty close to somebody and not clip them; you can weave in and out of pedestrian and/or vehicle traffic without coming nearly as close as it looks to hitting someone or something. Just because you almost crashed doesn’t actually mean that you were in real danger of crashing.

Now, I’m not advocating being stupid (most people I know who ride bikes do so perfectly well without any admonition on my part); but at the same time, most people I know who ride bikes aren’t quite as stupid as they look. Believe it or not, very few of them actually want to get into accidents and most will make every effort to avoid them; that said, “almost” crashing is usually good enough; as long as it’s still “almost,” you still haven’t.

Today, for instance, I probably rode a bit too close to a lady walking on the trail as I rode out to school; I guess you could say I “almost” hit her as I wove around two side-by-side walkers and cut inside her left shoulder as she approached me. Had she not been paying attention, and had I not made eye contact, I’m sure she could have been jolted out of a reverie with the realization that she “almost” got taken out by a cyclist. But there wasn’t really any chance I might have actually hit her.

“Almost only counts in horseshoes and dynamite,” haters take note: cycling's not even almost either one.

Socialism

2010-12-20T16:31:00.001-08:00

It cracks me up when right-wing politicians and their followers accuse Obama of being a socialist, as if (a) the economic policies of the President aren’t the same brand of government-supported corporate capitalism we’ve seen in America for that last six generations or so, (b) our country isn’t pretty socialistic already, and (c) there were anything wrong with being accused of socialism, as if simply calling someone a socialist is to denigrate them.

Socialism, as I understand it, is simply a governmental system whereby people allocate part of their income to the common good; having a police and fire department paid for, at least in part, by payroll, property, or income taxes; I don’t see what’s so bad about that, nor is it clear to me why anyone would be vehemently opposed to such a system.

I guess if you take if further, you’re going to get into advocating some sort of common ownership of the means of production and perhaps a re-allocation of wealth to make sure that nobody starves to death even if it means the richest of the rich don’t get to hold on to every penny they would otherwise. Again, it’s hard for me to see what’s so awful about this.

Sometimes, when I let my own political leanings come out in classroom discussions—usually when we’re talking about Peter Singer’s essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which he essentially argues that people in wealthy nations have a moral obligation to donate money to organizations working to prevent people in poorer countries from starving to death in absolute poverty—some wag will accuse me of being a socialist; my standard response is to deny that and claim, rather that I’m a Communist and while it’s not like I’m a fan of Stalinism or repressive dictatorships in general, I don’t think it would be so bad if more was given to people according to their needs and drawn from others according to their abilities.

Agalloch

2010-12-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pestering my friend Evil Mike for a couple years now to take me to a concert of metal music; I finally managed to make a show last night, catching the band Agalloch, which features Evil’s friend, Don Anderson on guitar; I don’t know about the genre in general, but I’m totally a fan now of this group in particular.

They were so good they make me want to be a better person.

I’m not sure how you’re supposed to characterize their music; Wikipedia says, “Agalloch performs a progressive and avant-garde style of folk metal that encompasses an eclectic range of tendencies including neofolk, post-rockm black metal and doom metal;” that seems about right. They reminded me of King Crimson more than anything, and I mean that both descriptively and normatively: I’ve rarely seen a band whose musicianship is so excellent and who seem so genuinely committed to exploring what music can really be.

Amazing melodies, sometime buried in a cacophonous sludge; Anderson’s Fripp-like guitar pyrotechnics intertwining with the rhythmic strummings of pint-sized guitarist John Haughm, who reminded me of some kind of half-human half-wolverine elf creature; sometimes there was some Pink Floyd about it, and then, at other times, the whole thing sounded almost like straightforward powerpop; I swear to God I heard a little bit of Fountains of Wayne in there at at least one point.

The crowd warmed my heart, too; haven’t seen so much long hair on dudes since I wore it that way myself; I stood up in the balcony at Neumo’s watching the entire audience banging their heads in unison; it was a little Orwellian, but not in an overly evil way, although I did get a sense that were one wanting to recruit an army of techno-orcs, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

I totally got into it, though; closed my eyes and just let myself be transported to medieval realms and cosmic starscapes; short-hair head-banged, too.

Grrr

2010-12-17T11:19:00.001-08:00

I blame the bus.

Every time I’ve lost something in the last few weeks—and it’s getting ridiculous now: a helmet, one and a half pairs of arm warmers, my wallet (although happily it was returned intact), a hat, every other page of the readings for philosophy camp, my dignity (no great loss), etc., etc.—there’s been a ride on public transportation involved.

I could chalk it up to hurrying to get on board, or that when I take the bus, I don’t wear all my gear, whereas when I ride, I put it all on my person or immediately realize that I’ve left it behind or dropped something, but I think it’s more than that. I think the Sound Transit and Metro vehicles are out to drive me crazy, by randomly snatching away things I own and dropping them into some bottomless vortex far beyond the reach of their Lost and Found Department.

Why this is so, I’m not sure. Perhaps the busses are jealous of my bike-riding; or maybe the seats are hungry for wool fibers; or it could be that the drivers are running an underground black market in pre-worn clothing and accessories; I’m not sure what’s at the root of the scheme, but I’m convinced it’s a conspiracy nonetheless.

No doubt skeptics will claim that I’m just over-reacting, but like that old chestnut reminds us, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

I’ve had my suspicions about this for some time now. Just this week, for instance, a Sound Transit driver deliberately ran me off the road just because I’d passed him on the right a bit earlier. And when I e-mailed a complaint letter, the person who wrote back was named “Renolda,” obviously an anagram for “Learn Do,” which proves the driver thought he was trying to teach me a lesson.

Plus, the scheduled arrival at the stop he nearly hit me: 3:27PM! Coincidence? I think not.

Shot

2010-12-16T21:19:00.001-08:00

I’m sure I could never be an intravenous drug user; I’m just not that into syringes and such. And after today, I’m also certain I couldn’t even be an intramuscular drug addict (if such a thing even exists); having had the experience this morning of getting stuck five different times in two different arms by hypodermic needles, I have no doubt I’d never want to do it recreationally, or even in the name of entheogenic research.

In preparation for my trip to India, I visited the travel medicine clinic at the University of Washington and got all sorts of information about the various diseases I could conceivably contract in that part of the world and was provided with a suite of inoculations against said maladies, getting vaccinated against Hepatitis A and B, tetanus, typhoid, and polio, if I remember correctly. I could have also gone for rabies, but at something like nine hundred bucks for the full series, I decided to just opt for not getting bit by dogs or monkeys.

I guess I had no idea what a dangerous and scary place it is out there in the world; the clinic provided me with eleven pages of precautions I should consider, from not eating any food that isn’t steaming hot or dry as sand to making sure I have insurance to pay for having to be medivacced out of country following a catastrophic automobile accident.

Maybe I’ll just stay in my room for the sabbatical and simply read about India.

On the other hand, I’ve got my inoculations, and I suppose it would be a waste to waste them, so why not head east after all?

I wonder how all those British in the 19th century managed; my sense is that they got by with just fizzy gin; I guess the malaria-carrying mosquitoes are all immune to quinine these days, so that won’t work; however, maybe if I just leave out the tonic, I won’t care.