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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #225: The Not-So-Great Divide
11.20.13
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 fifth 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 distance;maybe some hills
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
The Not-So-Great Divide
When describing the course of events, we speak sometimes of "watershed moments," which alter the path of
things to come in much the way that passing over a ridge (and thus from one drainage basin into another) would
alter the path that a droplet of water takes to the sea.
But while such transformational moments make for convenient explanations after the fact (not to mention
lucrative pop-sciencey book subjects), events rarely proceed with the hydrological inevitability that a "watershed"
would imply. More often, there is a period of sustained uncertainty, where no one may even know where that
metaphorical water droplet is, let alone what forces are acting upon it.
And so it is this week, as we visit a divide that sits between social classes and world-views just as much as
between drainage basins. We cannot be certain of much, but we can be certain that we will cross it, flowing up
like money, down like water.
25 miles this week, with a healthy dose of dirt and hills. Though the forecast calls for rain, it has been calling for
rain all day with nary a drop to be seen, so we will just hope that the dirt does not turn to mud.
Talk, talk, talk...
Check out our web site!
(and our tumblr!)
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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Ridazz Roulette!
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