"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

On the Run

First of all, a big shout out to my man LGD in Alemania: Crackademic, bitches. He doesn't smoke crack, but he does need money.

I've been on the run lately. Worked through the weekend with more office improvements and have been down in Palo Alto the past two days working on speccing out one of our next big (cross-fingers) clients. Too busy to really worry about much, and happy to note that my urban biking skills are returning with a vengeance.

It is getting to the point with everything being all work all the time that I miss the old homestead. Called back and talked to Mark to try and work out plans for next week, and it made me kind of want to bail on the city. I'm having serious dog-envy, at least.

Tying a few threads together from recent life, I'm feeling an acute lack of community. Coupled with a (arguably snobby) disinterest in making new friends or social connections, I've created a little catch-22 for myself. It's the Westhaven mental disease; on the phone the other night I literally said, "but, man, I don't want to go out and like meet people or do things." I can try and dress it up with paeans to my existing roster of friends and comrades and bemoan my over-booked schedule, but the truth is that's a strongly anti-social statement. Which is not really something I like.

These things are connected: community, identity, sociability, self-esteem and some bedrock notion of what the hell I'm doing here. I don't have any problems with professional networking, and indeed I'm pretty good at it when I'm in the mood, but outside of my worklife things are tattered and lone.

Biking around this weekend in SF, I had to cut around a blocked-off street because it was Gay Pride and there was some kind of march. It hit me what a great thing this is, and how much I miss it, this idea of pride, not in some kind of individualistic seven-deadly-sins kind of way, but in terms of who you are and the people you run with.

As I said before, the new cultural movement is furtive and clandestine, sputtering even, whithering in darkened isolation. It needs to be revived again.

Responses

Hey Josh,
Good to hear you're getting back your urban bike skills. San Fran is a tough town to bike through what with the hills, the trolly tracks and the long, wide stretches of road that let cars get up to 45 mph on a straightaway. I found New York to be a lot more manageble. Over here in the Lou the drivers are big teddy bears, and it's by and large pretty flat.

I agree on SF vs. NYC in terms of bikability. People think I'm crazy because NY traffic appears to be so much more gnarly and tight, but this is actually a big asset to us bikers. Cars rarely top 25 mph, meaning you can move in the same speed-range when things are rolling, and with the exception of people jumping out of cabs, slow/stopped traffic is easy to navigate.

Interesting that STL is easy though; I would have thought the suburban layout would make drivers lazy and dangerous.

It's failry suburban, but at the same time, most of the neighborhoods are contiguous and close together (the five mile rule applies to St. Louis quite a bit). St. Louis also has or rather had a good highway system so that the cars on the street are just doing local runs. The other thing is that unlike a lot of bike commuters, I have no expectation of being seen or treated fairly, so it's always a pleasant surprise, especially among midwesterners.

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