using only this
carrying my [new to me] camera and cell phone and keys and and... but realized that it's really just for holding one or two essentials and would severely impact any sort of super duper time that I might be needing to make cruising about town, and so I opted to also take this,
which I love, but which is a little floppy when I don't have enough things to fill it. It's probably for the best that I had to tote it around though; it offers some reflectiveness, as my new beloved bicycle is light-less until at least tomorrow, as the postal service hasn't yet been privatized and can't get a fucking shipment four states over in a week's time.
I set off later in the day (about dusk) on my bicycle, as I thought
might keep me indoors and away from the exhilarating feeling of rushing along past vehicles 2000+lbs heavier than myself just feet away, but alack, no rain fell (that I noticed, being holed up in my apartment), and the cloud to cloud lightning was just pretty decorations for the tenants playing volleyball and shouting in drunken Spanish on the litterbox volleyball court in the middle of the apartment complex.
So I hopped on my bike and rode to CAMPUS (from the Latin, campus referring to the Campus Martius, a field near the Tiber used for military exercises (WAR) and later sports, sacrifices, godly worships,etc etc, now used almost exclusively to mean a place where over privileged adult-babies listen to over privileged old white men yammer on about things they'll forget within the hour-- excitingly enough, occasionally about the Campus Martius itself.) where I wouldn't have to worry about things like *traffic* and *darkness*. The 1.6mi to campus from my apartment is a pretty nice ride. There isn't a lot of traffic, there is a bike lane most of the way, people are particularly kind to cyclists, daisies grow along side the road, and there's a crew of city workers specifically being paid to hand out popsicles to anyone they see on a bike, 24-7.
JUST KIDDING.
The Terrible Fate that is the Bike Lane in this God Forsaken Town or: How I Learned to Check Behind Myself While Riding Because Veering into Traffic is Absolutely Necessary.
This town has a bike lane. It runs about from where my apartment complex is (Little Tijuana, if you're wondering) to right where traffic becomes dangerous and people stop paying attention to cyclists and worry about whether or note their McJumbo Meal came with extra Ranch-Honey bacons. Oh! No worries, this dangerous intersection of fried greased cardboard (ironically next to the bike shop touting its own eco-friendly agenda) is conveniently one block away from two things cyclists (read no one worth communicating with anything other than a fist) love! A hippie co-op grocery store and a bike path! A bike path you say? How convenient! It must be paved and wind over operational railroad tracks that lead to a gravel pit, intersect the ghetto, and be extremely dangerous at night! The city is encouraging (read: trying to do as little as possible to appease) cyclists? That's wonderful! This should keep them from having to ride through particularly dangerous intersections and deposit them from a cycle-friendly part of town to peaceful, scenic CAMPUS! Right.
Said bike path's entrance. This is conveniently where hobos pilrimage to pay homage to the crack-den god's mattresses on the ground. Somehow broken 40s don't accumulate on the pavement.
Said bike path's instructional sign. Because cyclists and pedestrians must have their own independent lanes, in which they always remain and always yield for the other. Oh wait.
Had it been daylight (or had I been heavily armed and riding a tank), the bike path scenic-ly would have deposited me here, at the operational train tracks that lead not to a gravel pit, but to this menacing building in the last corner of ignored campus property. This is supposedly a real live coal-powered power plant, where steam is heated and pushed underground through tunnels to heat all the buildings on campus; where drunken faux bohemians wander to ponder the man and just how much of their tuition is paying for him to keep on keepin' on (whatever the hell that means). Supposedly it is a coal power plant. Look closer. Huge glass windows, smoke stacks with no smoke, constant construction, huge electrical hum? This is no common power plant. It's a coverup. Of what, I'm not sure. Probably something terrible that involves the government pouring money a university research of something to peel the flesh of freedom hating infants so they'll be learned good about why they should put the Levis factory back in America (and why they should buy their American flags American made, despite being lesser quality and more expensive than their Taiwanese produced counterparts).
In front of this buzzing, humming disaster waiting to happen restarts the bike lane (which, remember: would in theory be a few feet away from a perfectly good greenway rape lane). Herein lies my beef with CAMPUS. CAMPUS pays for this road to be paved. I know, because everytime I can't drive on it because they're doing work, the workers have cute little footprint stickers on the back of their work trucks, and I can hear the tuition gods making the cartoon cash register noise in my head. The road is wide, and there is plenty of room for cyclists, pedestrians (who have their very own sidewalk, separated from the road with trees and parked cars), and motorists, and even those jerkoffs on motorized scooters.
Problemo uno. Cars think the bike lane is the perfect place to park. Example:
Fed-ex guy: I'll just leave my truck parked right here, out of traffic, so I can run this package up to the front door and make this old lady smile!
Motorist: Oh, look, a Fed-Ex truck, probably doing his job very well. I wish Fed-Ex owned the USPS, I would get my checks on time! HARHAR!
Cyclist: Shit, there's a truck in my lane. Shit there's a car who doesn't see me. Shit shit he's not moving over. Shit, I'm gonna be squeezed!
(cue cyclist having to slam on brakes before hitting parked truck, motorist oversteering when he stops singing Pat Benetar and sees cyclist in his mirror for the first time, and Fed Ex guy generally being a prick in those little shorts.)
Problemo Two-o: The bike lane is not paved like a lane at all. When construction needs to be done, workers are instructed to chop the hell out of it, not to finish paving it, not to worry about evening it, to score it for inserting cables, to patch holes unevenly, etc etc. Residents on the VERY SAME ROAD are told by some magical bike lane logic fairy that it is where they should put their garbage cans and empty their takeout boxes and forget that cement driveways cut down into the pavement may leave GIANT HEIGHT DIFFERENCES.
Problem Three: The bike lane is not regarded as any form of lane. Sure, it's got it's own line. A white line. A regulatory line. Which does not, in any way mean to motorists "STAY THE FUCK OUT NOT FOR YOU". Case in point, I was nearly run off the road tonight by a scooter. A fucking motor scooter, with two drunk kids yelling WOOWOO at me. Why did you need to share your WOOWOO in my ear with your lawnmower engine two feet away from my bicycle, when you have fifty feet-- two whole lanes, another bikelane and parking for cars-- that aren't occupied by my (barely) two feet?
Eventually, I made it to campus to ride over delightfully unoccupied cobblestone to scope out deliciously spooky looking empty buildings.
No worries about campus being spooky enough for "bad men" like *rapists* or *muggers* to hang out, though, as RAPE PREVENTION LIGHTS (tm) have been installed every 16 feet, probably in honor of St. Eve.
I did cut through the cemetary (after being drawn to the road that comes up behind the back of the graduate library, because the library looks like an aeroplane hangar at night, and cicadas chirping in trees (real trees, that weren't landscaped in, I mean) near the old dorms were happily reminding me of sleepless nights as a child (because it was too hot and the bugs were too loud).
Who gets to have a bench when they die? Apparently someone named Patton. I didn't stick around long enough to get a less shakey picture, as I really hate being in the cemetary alone, and that bench looked too damn makey-outey to be there without the boyfriend.
CAMPUS is quiet during the summer, because the only people on it are high schoolers in different basket/volley/foot/fut ball camps. I caught a few minutes of a bizarro inspirational speech by one of those important World Cup women that apparently came from my university. There were ~200 highschool girls in gym clothes sitting outside on the basketball court outside another LIT FOR PROTECTION dorm, being told how "important" soccer was to their lives. Right.
Even ye old symbol of the university is lit up like the window of a one legged hooker in Amsterdam. I've never taken a picture of it, and... I still think even in this first one, the shadow of me and the bicycle are more interesting.
Construction abounds, and I think it inspires things that are a little counter intuitive. Like...
a tree protection area. Yes. Save the trees. Yes, please, construction workers making ~$20/hour, please do not harm out e'er so precious nature as we pay you shit loads of money to continuously tear up and rebuild with your eco-friendly carbon concious bulldozers in some sort of Sisyphian tragedy. Please do not harm these three specific trees we have roped off--- but that tree over there, that one that is [also] supposedly a symbol of ye old university, that one gets no net. It could be that whoever decides where to put the tree protection nets put them around trees that are most likely to be harmed during renovations of the oldest building on campus that receives renovations every three years because it wasn't built to last this damn long. Or it could be because the idea of tree protection nets is the most rigoddamneddiculous thing there could possibly be. We need *you* Mr. lowclass Trade Engineer to stay on *your* side of the CAMPUS. The... underconstruction side. We don't need you dirtying up this place for saps to send their precious snowflakes! Hey, a CAMPUS tour!
I went to the university rose garden next, which is conveniently located in a parking lot in the blazing sun, in front of the world famous planetarium, so it's basically impossibly to get there during the day. There is a curiously placed sundial in the middle of the garden (and by garden I mean a single row of roses all the way around this huge thing), and there can only be one use for it. Bike rest! You know, for photo ops to show so much light pollution that ambient light makes for not so bad pictures. No flashes were harmed in the making of this entry.
I made my way into traffic, and ended up at an indoor alley that houses the single best restaurant, the one unmatched when it comes to curing hunger, boredom, awkward first dates with your boss, cravings for health food, cravings for junk food, too much hope in humanity... pretty much everything.
And I ordered $3.30 of delicious protein, dairy, grain, fruit, and music that always makes me think about how the biggest taco hats are on the heads of white guys from Oklahoma.
Hello vegetarian burrito.
And goodbye faith in a polite, civilized, quiet dinner, listening to taco music and the kitchen staff talk about each others' tiny huevos. For, you see, these burritos need sauce. Not like Cher needed Sonny (which was exactly enough to blow out some of the cobwebs of her most respectable mourning wig while she was dabbing away fake tears about her ex-husband's most unfortunate late dendrophilia.) Not like a flower needs a butterfly. These burritos need sauce like Wallace needs Gromit. Like donuts need to be Hot & Now. Like Whitney needs some Degree at the Regan family Christmas dinner. That is to say, it is pointless, meaningless, and no good without it. So I stroll up (read take 4 steps across the dining room) to the kind of guy that's covered in burrito and hotsauce eating by himself at 1000 on a Tuesday night in a hole in the wall college burrito joint, too cheap to buy himself a Negro Modelo (or even a Corona!), and say politely, "Hey can I use this?" This interchange is neccessary, because Burritoplace owners know that if they put out more than two bottles of Valentina's hot sauce (Mexico's gift from god) at a time, they know that people will go into shock, trying to drink it (or liberate it) or otherwise being uncouth asshats. This is not a question someone can say no to. In the rules of eating burritos, you are not allowed to be a hotsauce hog. You know the burritos suck without this hot sauce (my boyfriend would disagree, and say that they suck without Tabasco, but he's got a particular affection for the stuff...). You know that I NEED this hot sauce to enjoy my burrito in quite the same way that you needed it to cover your stout fingers connected to your stubby little arms, dripping with that and burrito ends (a shred of tortilla, bean juice, salsa). YOU have two bites left, sir. The response I received:
Man, flustered, mouth full of food: Actually, I uh (begins to grab for bottle with his burrito covered hand)...
Me: THANKS! (Cheerfully, out of disdain and utter disgust, I grab the bottle and shake some into a little plastic ramekin, before slamming the bottle back on the table)
Man, feeling like a dick: Oh. Oh, you just wanted to fill a. Oh.
All in all, a nice ride this evening, a car yielded for me on my way home, I ate a tasty burrito, and got to wander around a quiet (and uneventful) university CAMPUS to kill a few hours, fucking around with my new [to me] camera. Less shakey pictures in the future. Also, more fun things to do with two wobbly spindly things.
