#339

Been on my bike a lot lately. Haven't owned a bike in years and years, and it is crazy what the body and brain will remember with the wheels spinning beneath. Think I wrote a whole post on an old blog I used to write about why I don't wear a helmet (I still don't). Sometimes I wear a safety vest, or a nice eye-catching shirt or pair of shorts. So far this summer I've exclusively worn sandals to ride. For me, a great deal of the pleasure in riding a bicycle is the sense of lightness, of being unencumbered. Helmets, and to a much lesser extent, shoes, and consequently, several layers of safety and protection, hamper my optimal biking experience. In valuing optimized experiences and the feeling of riding the edge of risk if it means the kind of living dangerously I value just as much, riding as I please, how I please, to accomplish what I please achieves the kind of massive endorphin multiplier I rarely bother to deny myself. A measure of heedlessness in every life; it is that too-humanness of ours that makes us just human enough, still, despite everything that seeks to deprive us of such happy dignities, such simple fuck yous at death and the people who would ruin life out of fear of death. 

Bike thinking is often tied to ideas and traumas about freedom and safety, in my experience; in the public sphere, it extends to rights and duties and obligations. Judging by the level of discourse that kicks off when people talk about bicycles whether on internet or meatspace, the space it operates is a powerful emotional and intellectual flashpoint, a hub that can take you down all matter of discursive side arguments and caveats. The conceptual load is wide and tall and by no means neatly packaged. Hard to feel unencumbered with so much baggage, eh, boys?

Anyway, I have a bike again because my mom, purely out of the industry she enjoys engaging in and the great kindness and elevated generosity of spirit she expresses in deed and craft, fixed up my dad's old destroyed one (and my brother's old destroyed one in tandem) like new. It has been a massive pleasure to ride it as much as possible, what with the wildfire pollution and other conditions of our home ellipsoid's agitated systems keeping me at bay. Locally, it has been a very beautiful summer, despite all, and I have ridden a huge amount. 

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Speaking of baggage, been spending lots of time over at the parent's abode, hanging out and helping with the maintenance of canines. It's been a very good time, though not without it's "hey ok it's time for me to go ok love you bye" moments. 

Family. So wonderful, so essential to the core sense of selfhood, of belonging, of coming from a discrete collective bound by its shared identity. How perfectly designed to drive people a special kind of crazy, and make each other crazy also. I love each member of my family completely and unreservedly, and furthermore, I emphatically respect each one in their own way. The emotional vulnerabilities this creates can be sizable, and lead to a lot of pain and misunderstanding. So it goes.  

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Another thing I been thinking about is how bad I am at taking care of stuff, like land "property" and housing, largely becaue I love seeing things break and warp and degrade and generally take on a radically altered aspect over time. It's a real effort to rob myself of the pleasure of watching, say, leaves decompose, or the boards of a deck peel up one by one, in different places, each just a little at the tip. The way rust blooms and spreads on once-lustrous metal. A splintered handle, a crooked structure, ivy o'ergrown over all. I love the aesthetic of a broken thing, ancient wood moldering, mosses and lichens, insects calmly moving across surfaces they own in a much more concrete and tangible way than people ever did. 

Love a broken fence. Love a derelict building. Love the mushrooms and the wet, livesome aura 'round a wet, decomposing log. And damn, a vacant lot that's been a vacant lot for a long time, asphalt practically bleached, huge green furrows of weeds like completely insane caterpillars all scribbled across the old cracks, chain-link rusting and balooning like a slow-motion cloth rotting in a ponderous, ominous wind. 

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Feeling very inspired lately. A great work, a great frenzy of creation and study lies close by my horizon. Gotta save this juice for the work. Oh! Finished David McCullough's John Adams, which I loved and paired very well with the U.S. history classes I took this summer. Nearing the end of Ingrid D. Rowland's Giordano Bruno, which has been a steadily deepening note of bliss. Also I rewatched The Young Pope and watched The New Pope and they comprise a work of art that seemed tailor-made to suit me just fine. I have a lot of ideas about popes and paping about with the lads. This tickled a lot of my pope spots.

Godspeed, dear reader. I shall andeavor to soothe you with a post here and there, but what will be, will be what has to suffice. 

--JL