Dear J-
Every morning, just like that scene in Edward Scissorhands, garages open and spill people onto small streets, merging onto larger arterials until they meet the freeway and we all wait obediently for the light to change. Green means go. We pick our departure times based on when we want to get there, based on how long it took us before; if it’s a new place it’s not unreasonable to allow a few extra moments for orientation, unless it’s the journey we’re after.
On my bike, when it’s not majestically attempting to ingest its own chain and spill me forward, I watch it all unfold with an unmatched sense of superiority and trepidation; there is nothing so arrogant and vulnerable as the thirty-odd pounds of metal and rubber supporting a human, ego and all, in America. It turns out a third of my daily three-hour commute is spent experiencing San Diego by bike, and much of it on the nigh-highways of Balboa or Genesee, where you may rage at the vehicles which would brush you aside as easily and carelessly as an insect, despite your gentle protestations that you’re doing your part to combat global warming.
There’s a marked contrast in the mornings, no one quite yet weaned off the coffee drip and treading lightly amongst each others enormous buffer zones, and the afternoons, where we’re all pushing each other in our haste to get there, wherever there may be. On this Thanksgiving eve we cut out of work a little early to beat traffic and we pushed it all the way home, trickling back down the veins and freeways to the smallest capillaries, waiting to be absorbed back into our families, back into life.
Mike
Tags: bicycle, commute, driving, home, thanksgiving
Dear J- 
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