For the past couple of weeks, the only people I've seen on bicycles were making deliveries for the local restaurants and diner. Whenever I see a delivery man (Yes, they're all men.), he likely to be the only cyclist on the road at that moment.
I think now of my days as a messenger. There were days when I was not only the only cyclist on the streets (at least for a few blocks around), I was sometimes the only person to be seen on the streets. It didn't matter whether I was on or around Wall Street, or in one of the industrial areas that still existed, though as shadows of their former selves, in Manhattan.
In those days, I was watching quite a few post-apocalypse movies, most of which I've forgotten. (Frankly, I watched most of them high or drunk.) That may have been the reason why the landscape seemed almost lunar, and I felt like some sort of pioneer or homesteader.
Somehow the snow and ice made me, and the few other people who were outside, seem even more solitary, as if the scene were a photograph negative of a chiaroscuro portrait.
This photo was taken in Kalamazoo, Michigan yesterday. But it could have been shot in just about any community of any size in the Northeast or Midwest during the past couple of weeks. It feels as if these storms are making every cyclist seem solitary.
In a sense, we are.
I think now of my days as a messenger. There were days when I was not only the only cyclist on the streets (at least for a few blocks around), I was sometimes the only person to be seen on the streets. It didn't matter whether I was on or around Wall Street, or in one of the industrial areas that still existed, though as shadows of their former selves, in Manhattan.
In those days, I was watching quite a few post-apocalypse movies, most of which I've forgotten. (Frankly, I watched most of them high or drunk.) That may have been the reason why the landscape seemed almost lunar, and I felt like some sort of pioneer or homesteader.
Somehow the snow and ice made me, and the few other people who were outside, seem even more solitary, as if the scene were a photograph negative of a chiaroscuro portrait.
This photo was taken in Kalamazoo, Michigan yesterday. But it could have been shot in just about any community of any size in the Northeast or Midwest during the past couple of weeks. It feels as if these storms are making every cyclist seem solitary.
In a sense, we are.
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