I want your life

“I wish I had your life.” I get that a lot. “Must be tough!” they say with a smile. And I can’t disagree. I have it incredibly good. Incomprehensibly good. Sometimes I can feel the weight of the billions of lives lived and living that would give anything for a fraction of the ease, privilege, and pleasure my life has. I don’t know how to give adequate thanks.

I can’t complain.

Today was another good day. Of friends, interest, safety and ease. And rain, musical on the windowpanes, while out in it it’s something harder, gusting to feel like stabs, only softening to water to run down inside your clothes.

A friend and I walked around San Francisco tonight, from Market Street up to Grace Cathedral, down for a meandering burble about Chinatown before finding ourselves in Long Beach and going with it, until we stood on Coit Tower’s promontory with the storm blown in off the Pacific. Back through the Financial District to drip on Bart trains, he went south, I came east.

Then a bike ride through streets like faucets open to any nook of me that was merely soggy not soaked, changing that.

For a moment, the unadulterated wind behind me, I was sailing with the vapor snakes that gave form to every vagary of wind. Grey writhing things that slid on the wet black pavement and made me feel like an windborn seaborn waterborne god.

The road curved out of that harmony, wind rocking my frame and tugging my handlebars, sticks invisible in the undertree rubble kicking my wheel out at sudden angles, tire lost in a mush of sodden leaves that my mind registered would make braking impossible under the bobbing red stoplights.

But I made it home, equally soaked and in love with the world. Moved a snail off my doorstep. And felt something unexpected and familiar.

Because I have it good. Really good. I love my life, my freedom, the fact that today I bought two plane tickets touching three continents. I don’t want to give this up. But standing in the stoop under a single yellow bulb

I realized that if I’d done things differently. Lived a little bit otherhow. There would be someone here when I got home. Someone to laugh at my soaked state, help me inside, take care of my clothes and set an old towel under my bicycle while I climb in the shower.

Instead I’ll do it for myself. And it’s fine. Really is. But here in these quiet moments after midnight, when it feels like everyone else is in bed with their paired each-others, I find myself looking over and “I wish I had your life.”

One of those days

And the bicycle goes where, exactly?

Yesterday was just one of those days. Tasks taking longer, lung-based cold draining further, nothing going forward as fast as I needed it to. (And also, of course my health insurance company messed up the automatic billing and cancelled my coverage just in time for my first doctor’s visit in two years. Why wouldn’t they?) Large scale worries and small scale misfires just sort of leached the feeling of effectiveness from my abdomen. Not a terrible day, just the kind that feels like a low slow growl.

But then! Then I was headed over to the city for Korean happy hour appetizers with three dearly beloved friends. The fresh air of bicycle motion was already soothing, though the day’s misalignment continued as every single stoplight turned red at my approach.

You can go, as long as you don't enter.

I’ve ridden from my house to BART (the subway) approximately seven quajillion times, and I well know that one stretch is the most dangerous. An American-style street of two busy lanes on the left and slanted parking spaces on the right, bikes are advised to float ten feet off the ground I guess.

After merely two mazillion passes, I’d developed an automatic habit of scanning for reverse lights to make sure none of those parked cars wanted to put a windshield between me and my destination, but the sheer normalcy of the passage, splattered with deeply-felt frustration, helped me not notice that the first parking spot was empty.

I don’t know if the driver signaled, since I was alongside them, but it doesn’t really matter. I should have been aware of the possibility of that right turn, crossing right in front of me, if not on top of me.

As it was, they pulled right, so I pulled right, and we both entered the space together, factory-shaped automobile metal somehow not impacting DNA-made me meat, with a good five inches to spare. Good five inches.

I looked at the driver, who looked back at me, both waiting to see if the other would rage and threaten. I love neither of those, so just sort of went around and back on my way.

See now the Dutch, the Dutch
know how to run a bike lane.

Air moving again, limbs still intact, I felt two tugs for interpretation. One, I could be overwhelmed with the frustration and fear of the moment and the day and the week, pour it all into a Republican-style rage of blame against another. Or, I could take that startling moment as a gentle but clear reminder from the universe to get my perspective in order. Sitting on hold while I stress at a long To Do List? Not that bad.

So on Super Tuesday, I elected to vote against anger and fear, and helped myself to a serving of gratitude and serenity after nearly going through a car window. Enjoyed time with friends, determined to take my own advice not to be in such a g’dang hurry all the time, and am happy to be blogging about it today. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have hold music to listen to. And that’s just fine.

Sign language

Malaysian freeways are not for bikes. Nor ox carts.

So I’m riding down the street yesterday, right-hand lane like I’m supposed to, directly over the big puffy-paint bicyclist symbol that tells reminds cars that bicycles have a right to exist in three dimensions, and this morbidly obese land-yacht of a Caddy behind me starts honking at me. I know, right? Like I’m supposed to fly, or something. Plus, I’m already going as fast as the car in front of me, just call me Lance Armstrong Greg Lemond, but the peak fuel bugger behind me honks again. I would think it was that old urban legend about the car behind flashing his lights every time the murderer in the back seat rises up, except as fancy as my beautifully battered bicycle is, it ain’t got no backseat. But so I point right down at the symbols as I ride over each one. Bicycle lane, buddy. But no, he keeps tooting at me the whole way home. Toot toot you mother pheasant plucker. Some people.

That's one dangerously rugged floor you got there, Hong Kong

The only thing I can think is that the individual in question had at least one of four afflictions. One: terrible vision, couldn’t see the signs, in which case they shouldn’t be driving a car anyway. Two: couldn’t see the road over that urban Serengeti of a hood, in which case no one should be driving that car. Three: they’re lazy, stupid, and hate cyclists. Four: just don’t see signs anymore.

Signs can be informative. If only I knew which one
was being proscribed, on a train in Myanmar.

That fourth one I can kinda understand. We urbanites, especially in litigious and don’t-expect-people-to-use-their-thinky-parts societies, live in a forest of printed instructions, a melee of designations, a clusterfudge of prohibitions, demarcations, and condemnations. If one were to stop and read every sign, they wouldn’t have the literary bandwidth left to read more than tweets. (I may just have solved a mystery that’s been driving me cynically insane.)

But sometimes, one really should read the signs. For example when threatening the corporal well-being of someone who is doing nothing wrong, nor inconveniencing you in any way whatsoever. Or, when the signs are just plain awesome.

Wait, what don't you want me to do, tuktuk driver in Sri Lanka?
The hoodie mafia flashing....gang signs?...is extra credit.

Riding a theme through Europe, 3 quick photos

If I tell you a story, I’ll want to sit down. If I sit down, I’ll fall asleep. If I fall asleep, I’ll miss the next story.

So instead, I’ll take the easy way out, the modern way out, with a bit of a tap on the nose on my hurried way out, and I’ll show, not tell.

But with so many to choose from, I’ll return to an old friendly theme, whose population grows in a reliable…cycle.

Tour guide training moves to a new city, a new country, a new tour tomorrow. So for now, grazie and ciao from Rome.

Ze Germans, zey are riding zheir bicycles so fast! But not zis vun, zough,
he isht sleeping.

Ah, but mon amis, to ride ze bicycle on a night so soft, so romantique,
it would be a crime tres 'orible! We would 'ave to put you in ze Bastille!

Il Duomo a Firenze, in Italia, e molto bella, of course.
Ma anche una bicicleta puo essere molto bella, if you ask me.