The Cycles of Black Friday

No, I didn't go to any of the "Black Friday" sales today.  To me, they're like New Year's Eve in Times Square:  something to be done once, to say that you've done it.   Yes, I've done both.  No, I don't intend to do either again.


The simple explanation is that I don't like being among the BF or NYETS crowds.  Actually, I don't like being among crowds generally.  So what am I doing living in New York, you ask.  Well, I live in the Big Apple precisely because I don't like great masses of people, just as I became a writer and teacher because I was, and in some ways still am, shy.  No, I'm not being cute, contrarian or Zen.  Actually, I never have been any of those things, and Zen is the only one of them I have even the remotest chance of becoming.  But I digress.


It goes something like this:  the more I like people--well, some individual people, anyway--the more I dislike being among masses of them.   And the more I live with and by my shyness, the more I find to say and the more I have the need to say it.  Likewise, the more I enjoy shopping, the less I like to be part of the throngs who are hunting bargains.


All of this has to do with what led me to a lifelong passion for cycling.  When I first started to take long rides and realized that I would benefit from a bike with gears, pedaling while astride two wheels when you were old enough to step on a gas pedal and accelerate four wheels was still something of an act of rebellion, at least in the US.  Also, counterculturism and consumerism were still seen as antithetical to each other:  Birkenstocks weren't yet a brand, or at least a consumer tag.  I still believe that good consumer choices might save you money, but they're not going to save the planet.  I also realize what a position of privilege it is to be able to make choices according to a company's "carbon footprint" or to be a locivore.  Maybe that's the reason I never was a liberal and never will be a hipster.


Anyway, I have my own bragging rights.  I once moved myself from one apartment to another entirely on my bicycle.   Black Friday shoppers, including the one in the photo, had nothing on me(!):

Giving Thanks on a Quick Morning Ride

I heard it was going to rain today.  So I tried to sneak in an early ride:  just a few miles on Tosca.  It felt about ten degrees colder than it was when I pedaled home last night after teaching in the technical institute.  And yesterday was at least that much colder than the day before.  At least, it seemed that way, for the wind blew hard enough to strip nearly all of the remaining leaves from wizening branches. 


One of the things that amazes me about cycling is that, even after all of these years, I can ride down some street I've pedaled dozens of times before and a moment, an image, will imprint itself in my mind.  Just south of LaGuardia Airport, in East Elmhurst, an elderly black woman stepped, with dignity if not grace, from behind a door on which dark green paint bubbled and the wood splintered and cracked into ashen hues like the ones on her coat, which she expects, or at least hopes, wil get her through another winter.


She is probably thankful for even that.  You might say that I am, too, for being able to ride by and see that, and to be able to ride home, then to Millie's house for Thanksgiving dinner.


I hope yours was at least as good as mine.

Riding Into The Sunrise...All Right, It's My Morning Commute!

OK.  So yesterday I embellished things just a bit when I said I rode off into the sunset.


Well, this morning, my commute took me into the sunrise.

I always thought it was kind of strange that when the guy got the girl, he rode off into the sunset with her.  I mean, if they're starting a relationship, wouldn't a sunrise be more appropriate?


And what about when the girl gets the guy?  Or when the girl gets the girl?


For any of those scenarios:  Should the guy-who-gets-girl, girl-who-gets-guy or whomever-gets-whomever ride tandems?  Or should they ride solo bikes abreast of each other?  Or single file--and who should lead?


If these questions are academic, well, I guess that's appropriate.  After all, I am riding off to teach in a college.


Into the sunrise.  In Queens, yet!

Old Bikes Never Die, They Just...

Sometimes I'll see the same bikes parked in the same place for what seem to be aeons.  

These golden oldies have been parked on Broadway at 11th Street (by the post office) for as long as I can remember.   The nearest one is a Ross "compact" bike from, I think, the 1970's.  But those other two bikes are much older. 

I've been known to "rescue" books from unsavory surroundings.  As an example, during a ride I used to take regularly when I was a Rutgers student, I stopped at a truck stop in the foothills of the Watchungs.  On my way out, I saw, from the corner of my eye, a little paperback volume of "Silver" poets.  Even if I hadn't been interested in some of the poems that were in it, I would have felt sorry for that book, stuck among the 57 varieties of porn on the racks.

I brought it to the man at the counter, who looked as if he could have been one of the truck drivers who patronized the place.  He squinted.  "Give me 75 cents for it." 

I rolled it up, tucked it into the rails of my saddle and pedalled off into the sunset.  Well, maybe I'm exaggerating, er, taking poetic license, about the sunset.

Sometimes I have a similar impulse when I see old bikes, unless they're absolutely awful.  The problem is that it takes a lot more space and money to rescue old bikes than old books, or even cats.  I know about the latter:  Charlie and Max were both rescued from the street and the pleasure they give me makes what I spend on them one of the great bargains of my life.

Anyway, I often wonder how Charlie and Max ended up on the street.  Or how a volume of Silver Poets ends up in a rack full of porn at a New Jersey truck stop.  Or how bikes end up locked forlornly to various sign posts, parking meters and other immovable objects for geological ages.

Did those bikes' owners suddenly have to leave town?  At least books can be left with the Strand Bookstore, which is only a block from where I saw the bikes in the photos.  And cats, dogs and other animals can be left with the ASPCA, though I will do my damndest never to leave Charlie, Max or any other animal I may adopt (or, more accurately, who adopts me) to such a fate.  But where is there a Strand Bookstore or ASPCA for bikes?  I know, you can leave them with the thrift stores--when they have the room.  Otherwise, those bikes end up on the same streets as those benighted animals.

When A Favorite Ride Changes

I, of all people, should not be fazed by change.

But how do you react when one of your favorite bike rides is about to be altered, possibly beyond recognition?:

I guess I shouldn't be so worried about what's going to happen to Rockaway Beach.  This guy looks like he might not survive the changes.


Just for  the heck of it, I decided to see how close I could ride to him.  How close I got to him surprised me.  What disturbed me was the reason why I could:

Not only is his wing broken; he was even more sickly than he looked from a hundred feet away.  


I may not be much of a naturalist, much less an orinthologist.  But I think it's a pretty safe to say he won't be there come next spring's cycling season.  I wonder who else won't--and will--be.


Much of the boardwalk--like many of its counterparts up and down the East Coast--hasn't borne the brunt of this year's storms very well.  So it's being rebuilt:

I always wondered what a boardwalk would look like if it were built in the Brutalist style.  Well, all right, I never did.  But now I know.  


My dislike of this boardwalk is not only from an aesthetic point of view.  The lines between the slabs are even sharper than the ones between the weathered wooden boards of the old boardwalk.  Those slabs are not always perfectly level with each other, and even if they were, the edge of a tire could skid against the edge of one of those slabs and cause a nasty spill.


As much as I dislike them, I can understand why they're being built that way. For one thing, it probably fits in with the row houses that are being built on the streets leading to it.  But more important--at least to the builders--it's probably cheaper than rebuilding with wooden boards.  It also won't weather and splinter the way wooden boards do, though concrete doesn't always age well in damp places, either.  


The latter, by the way, is the reason why builders have gotten away from the Brutalist style.  That, and the fact that raw concrete slabs can be unbelievably depressing, especially under the gray skies that one sees about 250 days a year in much of Northern Europe and northeastern North America, where so many of those buidings went up.


My question is:  If it's made of concrete, can it still be called a boardwalk?


Anyway, I have to wonder what next spring's--or even this winter's--rides will look like.  I hope that some of the old bungalows will remain:

Well, whatever happens, I guess I should be happy if the concrete replacement for the boardwalk remains open to cyclists.  I can tolerate almost anything that's by the ocean, so I guess whatever they're building will work, in some way or another, for me.


Still, I can't say I am happy about the prospect of a ride I've done for about 25 years being changed irrevocably.  All  I can hope is that at least something about it will be for the better for us.