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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #144: Cutting 'Em Off at the Pass
04.11.12
One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations,
their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.
It's a bike ride.
Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.
It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
We'll endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight).
See how we move.
On the third year of this bike ride, you might expect:
- more inconvenient passageways
- more full moon picnics
- perhaps more "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- certainly more amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- dance parties
- karaoke
- imaginary histories
- scavenging for fun and sustenance
- more geocaching
- more oblique strategies
- more Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
Furthermore:
- A medium pace (maybe not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- We're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light.
- Short-ish, but hilly
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
Cutting 'Em Off at the Pass
Topography often prevents idealists from bringing order to the world. Routes and timetables that seem to
possess an undeniable elegance when seen from above may seem hopelessly flawed when viewed from
below. The Donner Party, for instance, had a brilliant plan to get to California, but in retrospect, they might have
been better off toning down their optimism a bit. Theirs was a route that didn't exist, at least not in the way they
thought it did. But no trail exists until it has been blazed, and there are so very many lines that one can draw on
a map. How are we to know whether our route over the mountain will work until we try?
Our city is full of notional boulevards, most of them invisible to the world, products only of someone's
imagination, but there are others that have made their way into various forms of being - streets that never
existed except on paper (or the digital equivalent thereof), streets that still exist but only for some, streets that
have been erased by the politics of property values, and streets that may yet be.
Come out tonight for a ride on these streets that may or may not exist, a study in illusion; perhaps also allusion;
certainly some elusion and elision; but (at least this week) nothing Elysian.
Talk, talk, talk...
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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