Nine Years, Nine Lives--With Max

It's hard to believe that I was once nine years old.

It's also hard to believe that, not so long ago, really, nine years seemed like a geologic age.

Now it goes by in the blink of an eye.  Periods of five and ten years start to blend with each other.  I realized as much when I made an offhand remark that something looked "Soo '80's."  

The person to whom I made the remark corrected me:  "More like early '90's".  After thinking for a moment, he said, "The '80's, the '90's--at our age, the decades run together."

That I can think of nine years as, in essence, a decade, says something about my perception of time.  I think I've also reached a point where any amount of time more than fifteen years becomes twenty.

Anyway...today, the 9th marks nine years of a relationship--with someone who, proverbially, has nine lives.

I am talking about none other than Max.  

Whenever I come home from a bike ride, he circles my wheels and my feet.  I feed him and, as soon as he's sated, he climbs onto my lap, whether I'm drinking, eating, reading or just spacing out.  

It still amazes me that such a wonderful cat came my way--and I didn't pay, or really do, anything to get him. In an earlier post, I told the story of how he came into my life. Whatever I've spent on him--which, really, isn't much--has been a pittance.  After all, when he climbs and walks on me, I feel as relaxed as I do after a good massage.  And when I'm tired or feeling blue, I talk to him and feel as if I've had a nice therapy sessions.

In  brief, he's a stress-reliever.  Of course, I don't tell him that:  I don't want to reduce him to mere usefulness.  I simply love having him around, and I hope he's around for some more years.  He's fifteen now, according to the vet who examined him just before I took him in.  In the scheme of things, that might just be the blink of an eye.  But it is a relationship, it is a love--which is to say, it is a life.

More Proof There's Nothing New

One theme to which I often return in this blog is "there is nothing new under the sun".  Just about every "innovation"--whether or not it actually changes the way we ride, or simply look at, bikes--has been done before.  I include bicycle frames made from aluminum (1890s), titanium (also 1890s) and carbon fiber (1970s, possibly even earlier).  I also include most newfangled componentry. Also, everything we associate with modern bike componentry--including "freehubs" and dual-pivot sidepull brakes--had been done before Shimano introduced them in the late 1970's and early 1990's, respectively.

Turns out, the "new" genres of bicycles aren't so new, either.  Although they weren't called "mountain" or "off-road", there were surely bikes that were, or at least seem like, prototypes of what we see on trails and in the woods today.  Ditto for folding bikes:  As I've mentioned in an earlier post, some were made for the French Army during the 1890s. 

And, as it turns out, "fat tire" bikes were rolling, bouncing and thumping along New York City streets (some of them cobblestoned) more than eight decades ago.  At least, that is what this Safety Day Parade photo from 1930 could lead us to believe:

 

 

 

But that bike had nothing on this "fatty", which beat it by sixteen years--and was aquatic, to boot:

That bike was entered in a waterbike competition on Lac Enghien, just north of Paris, in 1914.

Speaking of Paris:  When I saw this, I thought it was an entrance to a Metro station:

If it flew, I'd love to know how far.  Can you imagine having a waterbike and an aerobike?  You'd be ready for any disaster!

It's About Time They Took Control Of Those People!

There was The Look.

It was knowing and hateful--with a healthy dose of fear mixed in.  The giver wanted to instill fear in the receiver. But the receiver had already done the same:  Something in his walk or demeanor said, "Don't F- with me."

I know it well because I was the intended recipient of The Look.  And I was getting it because I had wrapped myself in psychological barbed wire.  The person who gave me The Look wanted to sell me drugs or his or her body.  Or lure me into a "theatre"--or an alley. Or try to suck or force me into some other scheme or scam to part me with my money and leave me part of the sidewalk or pavement, at least for a moment.

What I have described was an experience of walking 42nd Street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to Times Square about thirty years ago.  That stretch of "The Deuce"--the street's nickname--was, of all New York City thoroughfares, the one in which a person had the best chance of being the victim of a crime.

Today Times Square has been turned into a cross between Disney World without the rides and a shopping mall.  Fresh-faced families flock to the same sorts of chain restaurants and stores they could find in their home counties--with higher prices.  And, instead of pimps, prostitutes and hoodlums, costumed street perfomers and "painted ladies" accost tourists and ply them for cash.  Some of those performers are even more aggressive than those old denizens of the demimonde I remember from my youth. 

At least, they seem more aggressive. Or, perhaps, they are because they can be to those fresh-faced families, who have no experience in walking by people they have never seen, and never will see again.  They do not have the ability to wrap themselves in psychological barbed wire and be unaffected by The Look.

Now the City Council is scheduled to vote on a measure to regulate those ersatz Batmans and Wonder Women, and all of the other costumed characters who terrorize Times Square.

I used to fancy myself a libertarian. Sometimes I still do.  But I know when regulation is necessary, or at least beneficial.  This is one of those times. I mean, do we want people running around the fashion capital of America looking like this?: