Bikes: July 2008 Archives

Hello bay-bees. My week of not thinking too hard about anything has been oddly productive.

Enough that I begin to wonder if I should do more of this kind of thing. Making decisions by not making them. Choosing to just ride my bike endlessly and sleep very very late, and then wake up one day knowing kinda what I want to do.

Sorta neat, really.

I begin to think perhaps my best bits are the intuitive ones, the ones that don't fret too much, that just let something sit and reflect the water off the leaves. I dunno.

But I will remember this the next time I have some momentous decision facing me. That sometimes the best course of action is no action - or actually lots of action. Lots of physical activity and less mental gymnastics.

Anyway, I don't think I am quite ready to go into details, since they are still being worked out (with very little brow furrowing), but it's good.

In other news, I have picked up an old on-the-needles project and have been whittling away, oh so very slowly and lackadaisically, at it. Row by tiny row. There's a metaphor in there, somewhere, but I am not going to go chasing it. It's my new park zen. Just ride. The rest will come.

Once upon a time, when I lived with the artist formerly known as Boywich, he went off to the music store, to pick up a little thing called a capo, which, for you non-musicians, is a small tool that holds down guitar strings and puts the guitar into a higher octave. It's a neat little object, and not expensive.

Anyway. He was gone for hours and hours, nearly the whole day, and I remember thinking, "Wow, what's taking him so long? It's just a capo."

When he came back, he was carrying a guitar case. I said, "That's not a capo."

He looked abashed and said, "No. No, it's not." And pulled out a beauteous Martin, which is a very fine acoustic guitar.

He then played it for me, which took much of the sting out of the fact that he'd just spent a month's mortgage money (his half of it, anyway) on an impulse purchase.

I tell you this story because I just went into the bike shop for a headlight to replace the one I lost yesterday ($14), and came out with a vintage Italian track bike frame. Ahem.

Then I called Boywich and said, "Hey! I just went in for a headlight and came out with a Cinelli." He said, "That's it. You're gone. Toast."

Yes indeed, my friend. Excuse me now while I go order a rare vintage French crankset.

"And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house.' And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife!'" - Talking Heads

No, these are not my peaches. I am peachsitting for a friend. Yes, they do taste just like they look like they would. Peachsitting comes at a price.

It's good to have some lovely things to look at, even if only temporarily, because I am, at the moment, and for the last several weeks, quite sad.

I realized it after taking a few self-portraits the other day, and being aghast at them.

And today I had one of those night-rides where my eyes got all half-weepy as I pedaled slowly, and then faster, to get over it, home. Yuck.

I mean, it was a nice cool ride. The rain never came, only the fresh air that comes after it, and the traffic was much lighter than it'd been at rush-hour, when I'd had one of those near misses that used to make my fingers prickle, but this time only made me very angry.

I was going out to photograph a bicycling event, but I'd left late (had to pick up those peaches), and couldn't find it. Either it was over by the time I got there, or it was in a different location than redhead #1 had thought. And anyway, I was feeling sort of like a dork wannabee for even showing up. So I sadly turned the bike around and headed back home through the chic throngs of Billyburg pedestrians. Enh.

"So what. Big Deal." - Black Lectroid from Planet Ten.

Several big important things have come to my attention lately, and I am trying to figure out what to do about them in the larger scheme, and what to start with in the smaller scheme, and it's a whole lotta figurin', and I really just want to lay low, or lie on a beach, or somethin' of that nature, and let my brain sort it all out in its sleep.

Sometimes you need to think about things with your conscious mind, and sometimes you need to let your mind drift into those altered states where it can see its way clear through the strange Milky Way-like debris of truth. At least, that's how I picture it. Very much like a full, full night sky.

Ahhhh. I hardly know where to begin. I had a great day today, but it was not without its bizarre moments. To begin with, I spent the entire day on the bike, or as close as is possible for a girl with cranky knees. I got up and ate and showered and rode out to the bike shop to meet my two cycling companions (beautiful boys, one very young and one a bit older than me). We then proceeded to ride out to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the eldest of our posse dropping me easily on the bridge (the young one very nicely hung back to keep me company).

There, we met up with two other cyclists and rode some laps around the park, which was leafy and gorgeous, and generally hung around being lazy the rest of the time. Just so you have the full picture, it's now me and four men (two of them being the glorious redheads).

Here's where it starts to get weird. My phone would not stop ringing the whole time I was there. Everyone I know or ever speak to seemed to be trying to get hold of me today. First I had a client call. Then I heard back from the boy whom Special J has dubbed bird-boy (because of his resemblance to an ibis). I'd called him over the weekend and asked him to just call me and tell me yea or nay, because I happen to prefer to be turned down clearly rather than having them simply drift away, as many boys are wont to do.

Anyway, this was the call back, and it was a perfectly fine conversation. I wasn't surprised to hear that he just wants to be friends, and if in fact he wants to do that and isn't just making polite noises, I think I might be able to swing it. I mean, one can never have too many cycling buddies. In any case, I am relieved to have a clear answer.

But. It was funny as hell to be having that conversation while I was out cycling with several hot (hotter than bird-boy, if we are being honest) boys. And the one who overheard the conversation pointed out that I really ought to have told the guy I was out with three hot boys (we hadn't met up with the fourth yet). And he was right. I should have.

So there was that. Anyway, I had a great time and cycled my legs into jelly, and one of the boys showed me the way home, and it turned out to be super-easy and quick, and I got home and ate and ate and ate and showered again, and so on and took this (I think) very cute pic of the feline sacked out between two fans. Hey, if I had fur, I'd be there too.

But what I wanted to talk to you about is beauty, and the fact that there's a certain amount of relativity involved in it.

As I was looking through some old pics (Mermaid Parade again - yes, I am going to take the camera out more; I just didn't want to carry it today), I was struck by how a photo of someone - a person I'd normally think of as odd-looking, quirky, or maybe even homely (I love that word, and the fact that it has both positive and negative meanings) - can make me see that they have their own beauty.

This woman in the flowered dress struck me that way. It's something about the strong character in her face, and the fact that she seems so unabashedly herself. I like that in people - usually in people I know, because I have come to love them for who they are, and every time I look at their faces I see who they are written there. No, I am not talking about boys here. I am thinking of friends. My beautiful, unique friends. Love you guys, and boy are you beautiful.

Heh. When the going gets tough, the tough put on their sexiest $15 Target sundress, hop on the cycle, have a 40-minute ferocious yelling brawl with a vicious bastard of a headwind, arrive five minutes early for brunch all lathered up and invigorated, and buy a very large new dildo (on sale!).

Then they (or I) go flirt shamelessly for hours with the very prettiest redhead they can find (looking at him for that long made me high), pet the cute doggie, and ride home laughing maniacally. Bwahahaha.

But now I have to work.

Beautiful sunset on the way home tonight (unfortunately I had no camera), but it didn't make much of a dent in the sense that this has been what Boywich would call a craptacular week. Lowlights include being shaken awake every morning by Richter-scale vibrations from the pile-drivers operating a mere 10 ft. or so below my windows. Not to mention having yet another tube blow its bitty little cork just as I was pumping the last tire preparatory to leaving on a ride.

So my ride ended up being to the bike shop, to buy more tubes (and complain about them having weak-ass valve stem connections). And to top that off, my favorite redheads were not even there, nor was the nice girl I usually talk to, nor was her cute puppy. Drat.

Ugh. I am exhausted, sick at heart, sleep-deprived (construction starts early, and I keep having to work all night because I can't focus all day with that horrible, horrible noise and the whole building shuddering to bits around my ears), and generally demoralized.

I couldn't even get it up to think that the friend of a friend's invitation to go for a bike ride (he just bought a new bike) might have an ulterior motive in it, even though I had at one time found him to be very cute. It all seemed very likely that a bike ride is just a bike ride, and even if it's not, he's probably not a good person to date, being, by all accounts, something of a solitary reclusive type. Interesting, but maybe best appreciated from a safe distance.

Which I am beginning to think is true of all men.

Hello me lovelies. Here are your bridge pictures! I must apologize for their workmanlike quality; I had only the pocketcam in my bike bag, because it's what fits easily and lightly into the bike bag. (I need a bigger bike bag.)

I took the on-the-bridge pics yesterday, and the of-the-bridge-from-far-away pics today. I had this grandiose plan of getting right on the bike in the morning to travel to an appointment I had uptown. I got all dressed and geared up, and had my bike shoes on and everything, and decided to pump that extra 10 lbs. of air into the tires so they'd be all perky and smooth-rolling, and then as I pulled the pump nose off the rear tire valve, shhhhhhwshhhhhhhhhhh!!!! God damn it.

I tried pumping it up again, hoping against hope that I'd somehow unscrewed the presta valve without noticing or something. Nope. Another valve bites the dust.

Which means I have to change the tire before I can leave. Which means I have to take the goddamned subway. Again. Which I have (mostly) sworn off. And increasingly hate doing. The more time I spend getting myself from place to place under my own steam (and that of my beloved, wonderful bicycle), the lower my tolerance for the cramped, claustrophobic, smelly indignity of mass transit. Not that I'm not grateful to have that to fall back on, but really, there are far better ways to spend my $4.

Lately I am spending it all on tubes, of course.

And coffees for the adorable, simply adorable bike mechanics. I'd much rather buy them coffee, and me Clif Bars and hummus and other assorted fuels than support the MTA, and if that makes me a bad New Yorker, well, so be it. Y'all can suck my you-know-what.

Okay, wait a minute, I'm getting rude, and it's really just an avoidance tactic because I don't want to have to tell you that that boy I liked, you know, the one I really liked? Has disappeared. Ceased communication. No phone, no email, no text, nada. No explanation, no polite, "hey, you're a nice person and all but I'm kinda not interested anymore." Nothing. No manners, apparently.

So there's that. All I can say is I have been feeling thankful for the following:

a) friends
b) bowling
c) brunch
d) bike boys (the better to flirt with and talk bike parts, which always sounds like one is talking about sex. mmmmmm, bottom brackets.....)

And most of all, I am thankful for my bicycle himself, without which I would not be here today spilling beans and posting photos and all that jazz.

Really, he's sanity on two skinny tires, and I love him more than I can adequately express. We went and hung out at the waterfront together tonight just before sundown, the two of us lying on the grass, my head on his saddle, his cranks sprawled on the ground.

I looked up at the sky and out at the skyline and over at that little girl's giraffe hat, and thought luscious thoughts about what it might be like to have two beautiful young boys in my arms at once, and sighed a sad little sigh and thought how stupid that one boy must be, and then thought some more about redheads. It was nice.

PS. The bridge in question is the Willie B (aka. Williamsburg Bridge), which connects the hipsters of the LES with their even-hipper cousins in Williamsburg. Despite that, it is a swell bridge for cycling, with a nice two-lane bike path and a great view.

I was going to take bridge pictures for you today, my darlings, but I just. didn't. want. to. stop.

Yeah, I remembered the camera. It wasn't raining (for once). I was heading for home and could have. But I couldn't.

There's this thing that happens with a fixed-gear bicycle, you see. What happens is that you never want to stop pedaling. It just feels too good. And with the new bottom bracket, well, if I may quote one of the redheads (the really young, really cute one), "Every pedal stroke is like making sweet, sweet love."

He ain't wrong. Not that I would know, at the moment, what the latter is like, but I can dimly remember. Suffice it to say that every time I reach my front door, I am always, but always, reluctant to get off the bike. No matter how long and hard I've already ridden that day (and it was a long, fast, hard day in crazy Manhattan traffic this afternoon), I just wish I could keep pedaling.

So you see, there is a certain difficulty in taking bridge pictures for you. Have no fear, though, I will continue to carry the pocket cam in the bike bag until I have managed to pull over (kicking and screaming) and take some pics for you. Because, well, it is a neat view - Manhattan spread out below you, the Empire State poking like a fist into the sky, the water surprisingly blue, and the East River factories below, smokestacks and that Save Domino Sugar sign looming up on the left as you slide down the bridge in a blur - bump, bump, swoop, and the rattling chain against your left thigh.

"It's good to be the King," says Mel Brooks on TV just now. And he ain't wrong.