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January 12, 2006
I should probably knit more
and think less.
Proceed with caution, as I am the bringer of doom today. Or at least a little bit melancholy. And gosh, I'd hate to bring anybody down on this tyranically gorgeous spring day we've got. I've also got a cold, so maybe stay back from your monitors, dudes.
Anyway, recently there has been some discussion amongst the online Chicago Critical Massers about~
ghost bikes. Go look at the photos, its really haunting. Plus, I've been long-distance cyber-haunted by bike ghosts, the Ghosts of Bicycles Past, it seems, have found their way to that most haunted of haunted places, New Orleans. It started with a group email received from Ben, a Rat Patrol acquintance, on his return from helping build bikes alongside Plan B. Community Bike Project. Some Rats went down and sent back detailed and sometimes grimly lovely accounts of what they saw. One offhand comment Ben made about Schwinn bikes (shipped to New Orleans from Working Bikes) caught me somewhat off-guard, he said," over and over I got a little thrill during the off hours seeing an old Schwinn ten speed with a decal from some long-dead bike shop in Winnetka parked in front of the grocery store or the local watering hole." For some reason it spooked me in an oddly profound way, because it referenced the place I grew up, and got me all in an existential tizzy contemplating the mysterious afterlives of bicycles, and other things, animate and inanimate. How many Schwinn 10-speeds were there in Winnetka? Oh, like 5 jillion, one most likely owned by the young woman next door who babysat me and my brother. Who recently passed away. See? Its a little spooky. Ok, maybe only to me.(Could it be I am only hoping, in some childish way, that parts of the past spontaneously resurrect, just as surely as they disappear?) Then I dreamt I was telling my brother that someone had seen his old bike in New Orleans. And then I thought about it all day in that way that dreams can pop into your head where you aren't really sure if you dreamt it or if it happened.
And once again I am off and running, because time is breathing in its way, collapsing and expanding again, pretty much audibly. And I am wondering if the spirit of the rider really does inhabit some part of the vehicle. In the case of bicycles, they are definitely generators of a unique joy and energy, more and more when you are intimate with the places you pass, and you come to know more faces of neighbors, and see your surroundings with fresh eyes from all sorts of previously unknown vantage points. It can be a little bit like flying. Ah, yes, waxing poetic at the Knit-A-log.
I gotta go out and ride my bike around and get some air for gosh sakes, and knit some striped socks, not at the same time, of course (gratuitous beautiful mouth-watering sock yarn I been eyeballing) because I haven't found a way to do that yet.
Oh, I need dawg photos, don't I.
Don't answer it!!!
I stop now.
Posted by at January 12, 2006 02:07 PM
Comments
I didn't think this was doom-ful. It's pretty.
Cycling *is* a bit like flying, especially when you've been out long enough to get some endorphins flowing and your muscles are warmed up and you pretty much feel like you could just keep pedaling forever.
I hope to get that same feeling while running someday.
Posted by: Thomas at January 12, 2006 10:35 PM
I often feel the ghosts of myself - forward and backword - within the flash of the moment. Sometimes with someone coming and going too. At this simple bridge, sharing the not speaking.
Posted by: johnr at January 18, 2006 03:16 PM