The top three things I have been called lately:
- Post-apocalyptic tobaggan captain
- Cyberpunk (as in "you and your friend Nate look like cyberpunks")
- "Honk Honk!" (car horn) "$#%&*!" (screamed explative) "Move yo ass!" "Honk!"
Yet another day, I arrive at work dripping with sweat. BikeWinter makes these stickers that say "Bike Winter? No sweat!" because theoreticlly you sweat less on a winter bike ride than on a summer one, but the part that they don't mention is that you have to get your layering right. I have become acutly aware of a couple of things:
a) Do not over-dress! Unless you want to be swimming in perspiration after a ten minute ride, wear something that is cold for the first few blocks, and then warms up to a comfortable temperture when you start cranking.
b) Wool is a wonderful thing. Natural fibers have a much more complex structure than synthetic fibers, so wool wicks away moisture, doesn't get stinky (for some miraculous reason), and keeps you war even when it's wet.
c) A face cover makes all the difference. Get a scarf if you want to look mod, a balaclava if you want to look like Subcomandante Marcos, or a bandana if you feel like a cowboy(or cowgirl).
Back to the topic of sweat. I like to peel off my termal layers at work and have a spot of sweat accross my chest like I just finished working out. Especally when everyone eles is comlaining about the cold. However, no one likes to sit next to me I class so I am getting the hint that I must stink. I guess that is the price you pay for being a primal, brutish man.
It's 30 degrees f downtown, with 23 mph wind. The streets are clear and dry and we have nice snow drifts sitting around, which have not turned into grey city-snow yet.
I found this page while looking for pictures of trackstands. It has pictures of a bike messenger competition but unfortunatly the text is in German.
:: Ira
2:18 PM
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Puffy fat snowflakes are coming down everywhere.
"At least it's not raining," says Andrea, who has a farther ride to work than I do this morning.
Balancing my bike in a precarious trackstand at the corner of Wabash and Congress, everything I see is covered with a white insulating blanket. Cars roll cautiously, pigeons huddle under overhead El tracks, and people are bundled. The wide avenues are brilliant with snow; my beard is stiff with frost, and everything looks new and feels great.
:: Ira
10:04 AM
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December appears to be the month for weirdness. The more I think about the scene I witnessed last night, the more I wonder how much was real, how much I missed, and how much I read into it.
I was on the North Avenue bus, heading West around 9 o'clock. CTA buses are great for nights when you have too much shit to carry, or if your load is nearly as large as you are, or if you spent all day traveling across Wisconsin and all you want to do is get home. My traveling pack was on the seat next to me and the wide bus was occupied to only a fraction of it's capacity. The driver picked up a small crowd at the bus stop in front of the Pizza Hut at North and Western. That stop always introduces some beat-looking characters into the mix, replacing rich young white people with tired Puerto Ricans heading home after too many shifts, yellow-eyed drug-crazies with chemical twitches, and half starved adolescent thugs.
Someone paid their $1.50 fare using all nickels, sending the till at the front of the bus into an epileptic fit. I looked up at two little boys under four feet and at most eleven years. They didn’t walk down the isle, they bounced. One only made it halfway down the length of the bus before grabbing the bars on the empty seatbacks and scrambling over them like monkey bars.
“Aw hell, it’s the Bear!” the first kid yelled in a playground voice. He had sighted someone in the back of the bus. I looked at the group of weary adults who where taking seats near the front of the bus, expecting a tired black woman to step forward and shout for her boys to stop fooling or she was gonna pop them one upside the head. As the group of mainly Puerto Rican men sat down, throwing disapproving glances behind them, I realized that these boys were completely on their own.
“It Big Bear, whatup Bear?” The first boy drawled.
“What up dawg, you gonna give us some money?” The second boy was tipping something into his mouth out of a salt shaker, a powder that looked like the sugar-cinnamon that goes on donuts.
Big Bear was sitting in the back corner of the bus, covering the entire right-hand side. He was a voluminous black guy with a leather coat, glasses and large, intelligent features.
One thing I learned in the city is when it is ok to stare at people. It can mean the difference between friendly smiles and threats of an ass-whooping. When there are little kids are involved, you are usually afforded an extra amount of time, so I watched the boys climb over the mountainous man’s body as he pulled out his wallet and slipped them bills. I tried hard to make sense of the relationship between the unsupervised boys and this man. I looked at the Puerto Ricans for a clue, but they just shot more frowns over their shoulders.
“You wanna buy a rock?” said one of the pre-pubescent voices over the rattle of talk coming from the oddly matched group. I turned around and noticed and element of the group that had not caught my eye, there were two white women with washed-out faces and bleach-blonde hair sitting next to Bear. They were talking in sing-song childlike voices that I associate with mind-control cults. I couldn’t believe that these little kids were trying to sell crack to the women, who I was betting were prostitutes, but the kids seemed too young and earnest for it to be a joke.
“She’s my friend, we live together,” I heard one girl explain to the boys in a voice that sounded filtered through cotton candy. I lost track of the conversation as it bounced between the swaggering little boys and overgrown little girls. At one point Big Bear’s sub-woofer voice began saying some rhymes; a taunting ghetto-wisdom parable for his young audience. This scene continued for a while. As I got off the bus, hunching under the weight of my traveling pack, I heard the pale womens' mocking voices singing part of an unidentifiable R’n’B song, fading into a cloud of hydrocarbon exhaust as the CTA bus trudged off into the night.
What were those 11 year old kids doing on the bus by themselves at 9 pm? In a perfect world, Big Bear was a family member or some nice-guy Santa Claus from the neighborhood who was looking out for them, not a pimp with whom they were conspiring, and Bear's friends were just two friendly ladies. I don't know. Stepping alone into unfamiliar circumstances can often be enough to destroy one's self credibility. Send me a better explaination and I'll give you a prize.
:: Ira
3:22 PM
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