Most of the miles that I travel while in Albuquerque are by bicycle. I'm someone quick to deride car transportation as alienating and violent and won't hesitate to list the combustion engine in the Top 5 List of Causes of the Impending Apocalypse. When traveling by car, you experience and understand very little of the environment, flora, fauna, people, and neighborhoods that you pass — maybe because that's exactly what you are doing: passing. You are separated from all of the Life. Cars are coffins.
When moving by bicycle, on the other hand, you are exposed to all of the elements, your surroundings. You feel the wind, the weather. You smell trees, you smell exhaust. You hear conversation (albeit in snippets and scraps). You appreciate distance, and closeness, in a more tangible way.
By bicycle, I've discovered that Albuquerque must be falling apart. I can't explain why, but the city seems to be littered with assorted sockets; laying in gutters, camping out in intersections, loitering in bike lanes — where do they come from?
The first three.
The first time I saw one, I squeezed my brakes hard and went back to pick it up. Hah, must've fallen off a truck, I suppose. Then just a couple days later, I saw and picked up another one. Strange coincidence! Then when I found a third in that same week, I understood that something bigger is at work here. I might have picked up the fourth, but left them laying in the street after that. There are plenty of bolts laying about, as well — obviously meant to pair with the sockets: which should keep all the bolts from falling out. The bolts would stay in if people could hold on to their sockets, I reckon.
The spontaneous emergence of sockets on the streets seems to outpace the deposition of snow in Albuquerque. With the lack of snow for projectile making, I fear that I may soon find myself ambushed by giggling friends hurling sockets from behind their socket-fort/igloo. Blood and shards of teeth will be shed. We will secure carrot noses to the socket-man with bolts.
In other news, click this photo for a good time (wait for it to animate):
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Another observation that I've recently made is this, in Aristotelian format: DRIVING : BIKING : : BIKING : WALKING
I just recently remembered what it is to walk. I get so accustomed to jumping on my bike to go anywhere that I rarely end up walking very far around town. I realized that, for me, biking retains a lot of the alienation of driving — I tend to bike fast, with a destination, a time-limit: it's utility. I've chosen to walk more lately, and find myself much closer to the world. As a gift to myself for my birthday, I spent 5 days away from the internet — combined with deliberate walking, I experienced an emotion, a sensation, that I haven't felt since the last time I was living on a farm (rural Wisconsin). I want that back more and more.When I choose to pedal now, I try to give myself more time, not make it a work-out every time. I go slower.
"When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle." - Elizabeth West, Hovel in the Hills
