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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #167 - Ride Like a Pirate Day
09.26.12
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).
On the fourth 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.
- Maybe some hills; maybe some distance
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
Ride Like a Pirate Day
"Talk Like a Pirate Day" has always been rather forced as holidays go, but then that's sort of the point. Its
popularity (such as it is) rests upon many factors, but not least among them is the fact that it's a joke holiday that
serves to highlight the arbitrary nature of holidays themselves.
The Pirate is a sort of ceremonial figure without the ceremony. It's a put-on, an affectation, a syntactical-phonetic
costume that wraps our mundane existence in the guise of a character driven entirely by base desires and filled
with an inflated sense of self-regard.
Rather than inspiring terror, the Pirate laments the inadequacy of plastic paper clips and curses traffic conditions,
all while prattling on about booty, wenches and scurvy dogs in an exaggerated West Country accent.
So there's all that, plus of course the fact that pirates are awesome.
The concept does leave some room for improvement, however. So very much of a pirate's life is spent on the
move in search of new treasures and may involve long intervals of not talking much at all. Therefore we declare
Ride Like a Pirate Day, to be celebrated exactly one week after Talk Like a Pirate Day (that would make it today,
for those keeping track). Its premise is pretty much exactly what one would expect, except that there's no
requirement to talk like a pirate. That was last week. Get with the times, people.
The ride is 30-ish flat miles, with some brief unpaved sections. If we are lucky, some bike carrying may be
involved.
Talk, talk, talk...
Check out our new web site!
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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