I can't get over the misty, rainy sight to the trees, hills, bay and gray and white and dark and green in the morning. It almost makes me forget the part about biking home Sunday for like 6 hours in the pouring rain. I don't know why we were so slow. It was only 45ish miles.
The weather report didn't lie to us (as it has so often lately). These days, more often than not, it says rain and then doesn't. This simply infuriates me when I take an hour to get across town on the bus when I could be _flying_ on my bike (30 minutes). I guess that's what we figured when we launched the bike trip anyway. You can imagine our surprise when it actually did pour rain Sunday early morning on, without stopping.
Yeah, the ride there was great.... I was trying out my new clipless peddles (purchased the previous weekend at a swap meet in Dublin, which we also biked to). This meant that we had to stop several times to adjust this or that (seat or peddles or rack or whatever). Come to think of it, I always imagined myself as a very low-maintenance person... high-emotion, but low-maintenance.... It's hard for me to accept being cared for… tended to… anyway.
I don't want to make this a whole psycho-chyck self-help blog. So, I'll try to control myself. But in the process of doing this whole art thing I have going on, most of the people I spend time with are interested in their own (and their loved-ones') emotional health rather than politics or the meaning of life or whatever. I am easily steered.
Hmm... That leads me loosely to something that I used to talk about with Grayson all the time. Are we formed by the people around us, or, by choosing them, do we form ourselves? I try to be a positive, forgiving person (some of my friends call me "the public defender" bc I can defend almost anyone for doing almost anything when dirt is being dished), but I like some people A LOT more than others. I want to say that it's like matching colors, but I really don't know what that means. I like some people more than others, and they, in turn, make me who I am. I guess, hopefully, that person is someone I want to be.
On Tuesday and Thursdays, I make art all day long. We've formed this little lunch group with a few core members and some who sometimes show up. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my little lunch group. (Actually, I LOVE LOVE LOVE my life right now. It rocks. But that's another story that I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to parse out for you.) Anyway, we share all sorts of inappropriate things with each other (from sexual preferences to substances abuse issues to family dramas, you name it, we discuss it in detail). And I guess that's influenced the things I've been thinking about lately. Not sure how I feel about that, but anyway....
OK, back to the bike trip... We woke up early (likely -- though we did not look at a clock) but since it was raining, it seemed to make sense to stay in the tent until it stopped. Yeah, that was funny... since it didn't stop! The good part was that neither of us had slept well in the night (the air too cold, the bag too hot...) but in the morning we could actually get some rest. We packed up camp in the rain, washed at a cold-water facet sticking up from the ground, and hit the road... in the rain.
It was fine, mostly, until we got back to the Marin bike path, stopped for the toilets, and got cold. I think it started to rain harder too. I mean, Jared may have started hating it before then, but that's when I got upset. (Incidentally, we bumped into a friend of Jared's, also biking in the rain, on that Corte Madera hill -- strange!) I got a lot more upset when, back in SF and after it had gotten dark, when my brakes stopped working! You can imagine what a hit that was with me. Ugh. OK, worst part: Jared was fearlessly crossing Market Street to turn left onto Valencia, dark, bike loaded, and he slipped on the light rail tracks and went down hard. Yeah, he got roughed up a little, but the worst part for me was the car that zoomed up behind him... and... nearly killed him. Yeah, I'm not over it at all. (When I told my mother about it earlier this week: "He could have been killed," she said to me. "And you would have left society and lived in a little cottage by the ocean tending to houseplants for the rest of your life." …She's so cute.) But, since Jared WASN'T killed, I don't regret the trip. I think we're both up for a low-key weekend now, however.
Have I had too much to drink? I still have more to say.... To make a short story… as short as possible coming from me, I’ll go right to the punchline on this one. The most important things in life are:
1) Treating everyone with dignity and respect... and not hurting people's feelings if at all possible, and
2) Having adventures/good stories to tell/being interesting to yourself and others.
I think that's enough "wisdom" to leave you with today... but the gates have been unleashed... I keep thinking of more things I want to say....
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