Grant Peterson is some dude who owns a company dedicated to making fun, rideable bikes, on the idea that racing bikes are stupid and not for everybody. Pretty neat stuff, especially considering the fetishization of technology that exists in a lot of bike stuff.

Anyhoo, he's got a nice little piece called Tips for Happy Riding, which I shamelessly plucked off the blog of somebody who i've never met but seems really cool and thoughtful.

Inspired by Peterson's sensibility, I put an easy gear ratio on my bike, flipped my flat handlebars way high up in the air, and passed up the third in a five-part race series (in which I'm doing well) to go to the beach with friends on Saturday.

It was a very good decision.

On Monday night's prospect park race, I had fun racing again - I had the feeling I wouldn't, so I was pleasantly surprised. I stole wheels and blocked some wheel-steals, then hopped on the wheel of a breakaway and had a deadly fast first lap. Wound up coming in 4th and scoring some points - not bad!

My sister has moved to town, and this is a nice thing. We had dinner on Monday night.

You know, in Boggle, when you shake up the cube filled with letter-cubes and you have to keep on giving them little shakes until they settle? But there are always a couple that are lying at odds on their corners?

Shake shake shake.

My band, Maxwell's Demon, is playing a show on Saturday. We have been intensively practicing and writing music and are planning work on a new album - we've got a great start and I am just getting more and more excited to see this develop.

I wish I could take a couple months off work to see this through... I still feel the strongest urge to play hookey, to go somewhere new each day, to wonder where I'll eat my next meal, to explore the corners, to sing songs loudly, to see Manhattan from new angles and heights. But sighing, I return to work every morning.

As it happens, I am back at my desk at work. The morning was humid and damp, and, unfortunately, the flowers on my desk - this beautiful surprise waiting for me when I got back from vacation - are wilting. So it goes.

I'm restless and antsy. My pedal unscrewed itself from the crank on the way in this morning - why? I don't know - that's not supposed to happen.

I'm discombobulated!

I got back from vacation in Salt Lake City and feel somewhat defeated, deflated to return to a routine that is bracketed by time spent at work. Not unhappy or depressed, but rather, aware of the importance of experiencing new things and the extent to which a 9 to 5 job fetters that, binding the will, energy, and ability in manacles.

I have a sudden claustrophobia, I'm realizing - I need time and space. I need a long afternoon to myself, I need to clean up my shit in my house. I need to listen to REM on repeat. I need a day that doesn't end. I need time for liesurely bike rides - not commuting, not racing, but fun and exploration. I need, again and again, to go places I've never been. I need the clarity of a mountain top, the exciting heartbeat of thin air.

In the past - in more punk rock days - I would dogmatically spew lines about how selling one's labor is the death of the soul, that life it too short to do so, that sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul, that product is the excrement of action, that lived experience must be elevated to the status of art... slogan after slogan... and yet here I am. Quagmires - student loans, health insurance are what keep me at the desk.

I'm thinking of foregoing a race this weekend in favor of a ride to the beach. I was just thinking about how I haven't been in an ocean in a log time. Might be good for me. Shake some of the cobwebs out of my brain.

Excuse me, but do you know about New York City in the summer?

Do yo know about the exuberance? The motivation to spend hours in a park? Do you know about how the buildings tower over pockets of green, peering down, jealous?

Have you breathed in the air shared with nine million people, all wearing very little clothing? Bumping elbows on sidewalks, sharing sweat and furtive glances around the corner; dirty, odd-numbered side streets where burly men throw parcels on to trucks lead to wide open, heat-seared avenues of migrating men in suits, of blaring taxi horns.

The whole city sweats - the smell of that stagnant water in the gutter, or of the sudden moist greenery of Central Park where you go to lie in the grass, to get impossibly grass-stained dirty in a fit of cuddling and wrestling with a friend.

Don't you want to yell and laugh? Grab a stranger's hand and spin around? This is what will happen: the crowd (and yes, there will be a crowd, for where are people but outside on the sidewalks?) will push back to create a circle for you and they will watch, some with glowing eyes, some warily, but when they skulk off they will remember your movement, your effortless and graceless abandon, and they will dance someday too.

New York City in the summer! I let slip to a boss the phrase "slacker summer" not once, but twice. I didn't hide the look on my face when I was asked about my five-day weekend, but let flow facial expressions, grins like laughter at the feelings from letting myself ride, enjoy the sun, enjoy a date or three in new york city, unencumbered, in the summer.

Why hide it? I challenge the liars. You don't want to be indoors anymore than you want to excise a piece of your heart. You don't want to be working, and if you say you do, then I challenge you to run around the block and then head to Madison Square Park; sit on the grass for thirty minutes and then I'll show up with a blended fruit smoothie or some sort, or a beer in a paper bag. Tell me now where you'd like to be!

I was at Coney Island for the Mermaid Parade and, dehydrated, undercaffeinated, and slightly boggled by the hour-long bike ride there, and the sudden infusion of piercing, bleached sunlight, lost my place as I found myself listening to a voice in my head narrating thoughts I didn't know I had; it did take me a moment to realize that the voices came from a loudspeaker, cabled to the announcers speaking the afternoon from their vantage point on the grandstand, but it felt like they were holding my hand through the oddest of dreams.

Later that afternoon, I hopped on my bike and rode somewhere else.

I do, I love it, I feel better than I have in a while. Chalk it up to several things if you want to - and that's okay - but I'm just going to say that I am thrilled by this love affair with New York City. It may take me longer to fall in love with the sighs and resignation of autumn (The Tartar Steppe) or the dream clarity of winter (Winter's Tale), but maybe I need to try harder. Maybe I even will.

I get a big stupid smile in my heart when I'm moving through places that amaze me. This one moment last night, coming back from the velodrome out in Queens, biking past Shea Stadium and through a huge cloud of smoke from a car fire.

And then this morning, after a pre-work ride to Piermont, coming back across the Hudson River, seeing Manhattan in all of its glory.

I bought a cute little cycling hat. This is one of the best things about cycling.

If I glance at myself in the mirror, I can see a dark smudge on my forehead, about two inches long and three quarters of an inch wide, next to my hairline. I figured that it was from biking all day in the sun on Saturday - I got tanned in accordance with the vent holes on my helmet. No more!, I declared, and bought a cute little cycling hate, so as to avoid silly through-helmet tan patterns.

Also because it's a funny little cycyling hat. It says "Columbus" on it, which is the kind of steel that one of my bikes is made of.

This morning, several people asked me how my ride was, so I told them that I did a longer ride before coming in to work. They asked how long, and I told them forty five miles, which is the truth. "Wow, you must be in really great shape," is a frequent comment I get, but I'm not too interested in it.

I prefer to talk about how I'm just really proud of myself for having abandoned some unhealthy habits in favor of this far more healthy habit. I'm pretty proud of what I can do with my body - it's an achievement for me, and it's changed my lfie significantly.

I'm wary of sounding as though what is important to me is the Biker Points that I rack up - the mileage, the rides, the placings in races - because at the heart of it is the fun I have, the mobility I've aquired, and the pleasure that I take from it.

I take some inspiration from Jeanette Winterson's Product is the excrement of action (which, by the way, mimics some of the stuff we talked about a few years ago about elevating Lived Experience to the status of Art; oh, and, apologies for linking to crimethinc...): "After all, it's so complicated to have to worry about whether you are really enjoying yourself, how you are feeling in the moment. It is easier to focus on the results, the hard evidence of your life; these things seem easier to understand, and easier to control." When I'm in the saddle, I'm feeling my legs, my hands, my ass, my pace, the wind in my face. I'm looking at the view, I'm moving through it, I'm feeling the pavement through my tires, I'm feeling my feet through the rotation of the pedals. These moments come frequently and they're moments when I am truly enjoying what I am doing, and I can honestly say that I am present to my body, to my self.

I learn lessons from riding.

Racin' some bikes!

I took my chances in another alleycat race this past weekend, and rode to a respectable 10th place in New Haven, Connecticut. There's nothing quite like doing well despite a couple of mix-ups and getting lost to make you vow to do a whole lot better next time, especially when it's combined with repeatedly catching up to (and passing) a fast local, only to have them pick a better route from behind you, and emerge in front of you yet again.

On my commute to work this morning I thought a little bit about why I ride in alleycat races. I'm aware of the tendency for bikeishness to lean toward snobbishness and general jockery, and don't want to be a part of it. Bikes are for fun, not status symbols. So it was a funny moment to realize, hey, wait, alleycat races are surprisingly non-competetive. I mean, people aim to do well, but I haven't seen any idiotic cock-measuring of "I'm gonna kick your ass today!" People ride hard, cooperate frequently (I rode the whole race alternating between drafting off of and pulling another NYC rider, and was joined by several CT folks at many points of the race), and are generally out to have fun with the mentality that anything can happen in an alleycat race. It's not about speed, nor is it about geographical knowledge. It's about both, with a healthy bit of luck thrown in - are you going to get a good sequence of lights down that avenue? Flat right after the first checkpoint? Pick a direct route only to run into a devastating headwind? Kiss the hood of a taxi?

I think that a lot of riders know that when they ride, there's a lot that is within their control, and a whole lot that is out of it. The sobering threat of an inattentive driver damaging your frame or your body adds to the mix the knowledge that whatever happens happens, and it's preferable to some of the worse-case scenarios.

Bike races are fun. Before I started doing them, I was pretty convinced (based on slim evidence, mind you) that racers were a hardcore, exclusive bunch. I've since been proven wrong. When you're on the outside of something, it's really easy to be scared of stepping in. When you're inside something, though, it can slip one's mind to reach outside. That's why I like having fun at races, being friendly to bikers who haven't raced, encouraging them to race - to test their limits, improve themselves.

After all, I'm at a point where one of my notions of fun is to sprint my bike around for 20+ miles through traffic, and I can do it well enough, too. It's a physical feat that I never really thought I could accomplish until I realized it was within my grasp.

That was the point at which I thought, I wonder what else I can do - on bikes, and off.

On Friday night, vagabondery brought me to the infamy that is the intersection of Broadway and 7 Avenue at 42nd Street: Times Square. A truly bizarre place, all sailors in white uniforms, and tourists from the midwest vying for room on the sidewalks underneath the big-screen billboards bravely battling the night with absurdly bright advertisements, while cabs screetch to a stop in front of competing hailers, narrowly missing another six-person "party bike." And all around, enormous signs screaming at you to buy things, watch things, demanding your loyalty and obedience. Larger than life, really, and you can't imagine how big they really are until you are there, staring up at them wide-eyed, realizing their enormity, and the extent of their trickery - it is entirely possible to absorb their idiocy without even knowing it.

I was drunk, and relieved to be in the company of "an old college friend."

It's not as if college was so far ago, but the fact that the world around me won't ever be organized as it was in college makes it seem far away, though it's not. It's just a few years away. The distance comes from the fact that it is all undeniably over and changed. So, being able to describe somebody as "an old college friend" is of some comfort, adding a sense of familiarity and, more importantly, continuity in a world where I meet people who have never met me, and I must start drawing my personality out to them in everything I say and do, from the beginning. But "an old college" friend has a foundation for understanding - a dictionary for my vocabulary.

The following night, I found myself engaged in vagabondery again. After a day of biking around, interspersed with a generous dose of the giddy feeling of illegal tresspassing that comes with urban exploration, I headed to a party for Purim. Purim is a Jewish holiday when one is mandated to drink until you can't tell the difference between good and evil, and, like a good honorary Jew (I've earned it, and besides, I was late because I was hanging out with my grandmother), I would observe it.

I walked in to a scene that was more like a college party than anything I had experienced outside of school - a comforting mix of friends, aquaintences, strangers, and people who you haven't met but for some reason, don't feel so terribly foreign.

It was an episode of odd connections. I quickly found a different person, "an old college friend," with whom I could hold hands while getting my bearings. Coming from seeing a play in a dark theater, to a room filled with dance beats and people far drunker than you are, makes for a difficult adjustment.

I was experiencing an odd set of continuities. There, holding me and yelling at me to dance, was a dear frien a few years older than I am who, several years ago, held my hand and helped me grow up. Also there was the person who trained me as a medical activist (prior to accidentally bumping in to her two months ago, I hadn't seen her or heard from her in years), who could be part of the reason that I met this dear friend. A friend who I medic-trained years ago, who I see so infrequently but who always manages to communicate a wonderful familiarity, a sense that we have shared experiences or something else that's hard to articulate. The old college friend from a seperate college world was there, comfortingly. And a newer friend from a more recent set of aquaintances, whose presence in these radical and queer circles always strikes me as discombulating and disjointed. And, my roommate, who makes me want to smile, who evokes a sense of current, comfortable at-homeness. All these emissaries from different times in my life, at one party, getting hammered. And I wound up with a good-night kissing from a recent friend of a friend, who lives in a social scene in far out in Brooklyn that, these past several months in New York City, I have been in and out of.

Surprisingly, I felt more adrift than grounded. It was a confusing way for familiarity to come together in a drunken vortex in a city that offers familiarity as a disguise for layers and layers of strangeness, of strangerness.

I bikes home alone in the cold. Tired, satisfied, confused. Feeling that feeling that something has happened, something meaningful but mysterious and confusing, that renders me thoroughly inarticulate.

Yesterday evening, as I was curled up on the couch with a book, my bike gave me one of those reproaching looks. It's been a while. Yeah, I know that. You know you want to. Yeah, I know that too. Is there a problem? Naw, it's just... it's cold outside. That's never stopped you before. I know, but... Is it me? No, darling, it's not you. There's no other Italian Steel between my legs - just you.

I've spent a lot of time on the subway. It's not too cold to ride, just a little too cold to be motivated to ride. It's just cold enough to make me use a hackneyed conversation-with-an-inanimate-object device.

Anyway, I've been riding a lot of subway, which lets me either curl up with a book for a half hour in the mornings (love it), or press my face against the glass and look at the graffiti as the train tumbles down the tunnel at 32 miles per hour (love it).

I'm getting more tuned in to street art. Not all of it thrills me - far from it - but I've been seeing it, noticing it more often, and it's been making me think about it. How did somebody get up to that billboard? On to that rooftop? Were they speaking in hushed voices when they trotted down the subway track, looking over their shoulder, carrying a backpack full of cans.

Not that all of it is good. I have a hard time imagining the point of venturing on to the subway tracks (though maybe the barrier is a level of risk that's only in my head) just to toss up a scrawled tag; but then again, some of the stuff that Revs and Cost did also elicits some head-scratching, like the billboard-sized roller tags they left all over the city (so odd to see one of those and have my breath taken away from it while driving in a livery cab, too well dressed for my comfort, with coworkers on a work trip...).

I like graffiti because of its low signal-to-noise ratio. Is it art? Yes no and I don't care. Is it vandalism? Yes no and I don't care. Does it require skill? Yes no and I don't care. Is it rebellious? Yes no and I don't care. Is it anti-capitalism? A baffling reversal of advertising? Self advertising? Yes no and I don't care. Graffiti artists, dissatisfied perhaps with the blandness of their surroundings, transform their surroundings. And yet graf has become an easily expected part of the urban landscape - ubiquitous, omnipresent, unsurprising. A tag, a mural, in unsurprising spots. Much of it being absolutly and utterly formulaic, noteworthy only in its mediocrity.

And then, every now and then, something grabs my attention. Sometimes a mural's freshness. Sometimes the curve of a tag. Sometimes something undescribable that makes something stand out. Sometimes, just the color, or the surprising legibility of a word or the vagueness of a phrase or tag. If graf artists are transforming their surroundings, they are recreating a domineering blandness with occasional moments of incredible beauty. How appropriate.

I'm keeping my eyes open a little bit more these days than I have been in some of the recent past, and I suppose it's paying off. Maybe I'll carry a camera more often, and preserve little bits of things that are making me think or gasp.

Image found at ofb.net/~epstein.

There's something about Interstate 95 in New Jersey that's magnified by a wet, humid Saturday morning in January - the whole state seemed moody and hungover, the worse for wear. On the way back, the Delaware Bridge was obscured by fog; crossing the George Washington Bridge after sunset we saw the lights climbing the suspension cables before disappearing into the dark fog. Even Manhattan was barely visible.

Several times on the drive I pulled out my camera, but put it away for lack of space on the memory card, and for another reason too. Photographs are just photographs - they can beautifully augment an experience, capture a moment, or the process of doing that can leave you stuck behind a viewfinder.

So, attempts to write the song that perfectly archives this or that Life Experience - with humor, hindsight, regret, nostaligia - can occasionally be detrimental to one's ability to learn from a situation. Archiving life by writing about it is a good idea, but sometimes those songs and stories must remain unfinished, so that I can remember what I carry with me - past, pain, joy, love. Keeping yourself firmly rooted in the past is part of staying in the present.

And, with that said, I'll close with a joke about how coming to visit somebody From The Future is way more of an exciting and terrifying prospect than saying to somebody, "I Am Coming To You From The Paaaaaaaaast!" Because really, that should not come as a surprise to anybody...

In an ongoing conversation with myself about how to deal with life and time, I realized that last year, in quiet little Bridgeport, I felt that the days were far too long; now, in the big and busy new york city, they're far too short. my need for private space, i realize, is manifested in how i view the world around me - see the last entry as my moment of finding time, space, and quiet in a city that hides that all very well. In fact, it does more than hide it; sometimes it convinces me that it's not there.

In a state of perpetual vagabondery I seek to create routines; routines become overwhelming and I seek to break them. I feel as though I'm filling up my days, which perhaps should come as no surprise as the days shorten into December. I can chose between being bored and being tired, but boredom is tiresome and fatigue is wearying anyway.

And so the need for vacation, or spring, or both all at once, presents itself again.

On Monday morning, I hit snooze on my cell phone alarm clock a few times before seriously lifting my head. I muttered to myself and kicked at the sheets, grabbed the string for the venetians that dangled by the head of my bed and tugged the blinds open - not much brighter.

Yeah, it's getting toward December all right.

It's still mild out but I took a look at the bike, and at the clock steadily creeping past 8 AM, and decided I'd take the subway in. It's not really a decision based on how much time I have, because riding the bike is quicker especially when I factor in the walk from MSG to my office, but the later it gets, the harder it is to get going, and something just made me not want to get on my bike that morning.

Maybe there was an accident waiting to happen.

On the subway I got the opportunity to watch people disengage with their surroundings. iPods everywhere, tinkering with cell phones, or just staring straight ahead, numbed out. What a world we live in, where we take every opportunity to shut ourselves out from it. It makes me grateful I don't have an iPod and it makes me grateful that I don't take the subway to work - with fatigue and resign, I too would just look for ways to disengage.

I've spent a lot of time in various parts of my life doing things that have been disengaging rather than engaging. I like to think that biking is a way to engage with the world - I get outside more often, go places I wouldn't otherwise, meet people I wouldn't otherwise, interact with strangers more, perhaps, than I would if I were on foot - but it's a bit more complicated and more dynamic than that, because I'm sure that some people around me may have noticed my occasional tendency to sink into a space where I only think about riding. It's happened. It will happen again. I try to be careful with myself when patterns and priorities emerge in my life. There was a few months last year when I spent almost no money at all, except on alcohol. It's good to track those sort of things, to be clear about how it's choice and not happenstance.

This started with me thinking about how I'm glad I don't have an iPod. But I also have to realize that I've barely discovered new music in the past two years. I can count on one hand the number of artists who have broken in to my steady rotation. So what I really need to do is give friends 5 blank CDs and tell them to get to work on my "New Year, New Music" gift.

I gotta get on that.