Bikes: August 2008 Archives
Okay, it's pop quiz time. What is wrong with this picture?
a) The hot boy in the foreground is not offering Lizbon candy.
b) The fracking road is in the sky.
c) Lizbon is not at the front of the line (for either boy-candy or road returning to earth).
d) All of the above.
Yes, it's time for everyone's favorite annoying/amusing game - waiting for the drawbridge to come down at rush hour. As usual when I am waiting for a drawbridge (which is admittedly not often), I was torn between being frustrated at having to wait so long and tickled by the fact that my bicycle journey was being delayed by the need for the road to come back down from the sky.
I watched the little tug push the big flat barge through, and thought about how I forget that NY is a working harbor.
Then I rode on my merry way, slightly too oblivious to traffic craziness for my taste (I had a mild migraine and was not at my best). Later, I dined with several young boys, as is my wont, met Miz Fury and her beau for a couple of Campari and tonics, and spent the rest of the evening trading increasingly flirtatious and X-rated texts with the boy formerly known as the blonde.
'Cause that's how I roll, baby.
A new set of handlebars, choosing rims, having my pedal threads retapped.
Flirting outrageously (redhead, natch). A couple of new dates in the works (non-redheads - well, one of them is in fact redheaded, but is not one of my fair redheaded friends).
A ride in a monsoon. A lovely cool ride the next day.
A thought about what I'd do if I were given another 40 years of life (just now), a thought about what death is, a thought that it's really best not to think such thoughts.
A list written to a boy I'll likely never meet. The world exists so much in the unwritten category these days - letters on a screen but never on a page.
I watched a documentary on the retrieval of a famous pirate ship wreck, and the objects they pulled up - the coins that used to be cut into eight pieces (yep, "pieces of eight"), a boy's shoe with a piece of his legbone still caught in it after 300 years. The cannon. More than 60 of them: English, French, and Spanish. The captain, a legendary dandy. The crew, run as a democracy, with even a primitive form of health insurance - they got paid for missing limbs.
My friends, pirates themselves, in one way or another, braving many, many dangers to flit in and out of traffic, delivering other people's packages for pittances - more money for faster riding. Bold, ignoring the laws of physics and the push of fear. Beautiful, strong, dirty, admirable, trash-talking, fiercely loyal, strangely kind.
That bit of knitting is a new hat, to go under my winter helmet. Yarn: Bought at Rhinebeck last fall, hand-dyed by a woman whom I met. The most glorious irislike colours. Colours is prettier with a "u," if you ask me.
Again I tried to take pictures from the bike for you, and again I saw beautiful images - a graffiti-covered plaque on the bridge, all blues and blacks; the Domino Sugar factory on the Brooklyn side, bathed in golden light - and yet I didn't want to stop. I told myself I'd take some, walking, on my way to the bar with the friend I was going to meet, but then she wasn't feeling up to going out (she's recovering from surgery), so I didn't take any.
The light would've been gone by then anyway, and I knew that, and I still couldn't stop.
I'm a little heartbroken today, and maybe for the last few days, and I'm not sure how much of it is for me, and how much of it is for the various people in my life who are going through rough times. When I say rough times, I am talking more serious than breakups or job losses. I am talking cancer.
I won't go into detail here, because these stories are not mine to tell, but suffice it to say that several of my friends - two of them very close friends and one a more recent friend whom I'm nevertheless very worried about - are having to deal with some heavy shit. And I as their friend am having to deal with being afraid for them, and knowing how much they mean to me, and how intolerable it would be to lose them.
And then I check my email and see yet another message from yet another guy I'd emailed who is telling me that he is not interested because I am older than his chosen age range (in this case only a couple of years older). If he'd just said that and not included a bunch of chatty banter as well, I wouldn't have minded. But the combination was, somehow, like a slap in the face.
I don't know why that particular email mattered - it's not that I was super-interested in the guy; it just hurt, even coming from a stranger. I suspect it is to do with something larger, something that I can't examine just now, because I can't even examine the things that I'm aware are going on. 
It's a big tangle - like that giant ball of string that's either an actual or apocryphal tourist attraction in the midwest.
Another friend of mine mentioned to me, just offhand, that he's hung up on somebody, "hung up bad," and I was dumbfounded for a minute trying to figure out how I'd describe my own state. I was going to say that I'm not hung up on anybody, and that that is unusual for me, and somewhat uncomfortable in its own right. Which seems weird - why should I prefer to be suffering unrequited passion, instead of just feeling nothing very much? I guess because it isn't that the alternative is to feel nothing very much. The alternative is to feel much blanker and more empty than one does when suffering the unrequited.
How are these things related? "Even the wisest cannot tell." (Galadriel)
PS. Obviously, these pictures were taken on a different bike ride, on a different day - but at much the same time of day, for there is that slanting evening light. Pocketcam, auto exposure, flash off.
