It's like an Airplane

darkness and bikes

This blog started after I read Maddy's column about losing electricity in her apartment, and because I wanted to write about how I like speeding my bike Renata through Somerville at night (always armed with the appropriate bike safety equipment).

Biking often feels like an opportunity to set yourself apart.  You're more than a non-car, you're a rebel motor.  And you get to swerve and dodge, and make hand signals, all in the name of safety and environmental politics. 

A few weekends ago I went out at night to the fire escape at Ilana's work in ny.  If you climb up several floors, you will come upon a Small Uncharted Land (the "roof").  It's a soft asphalt expanse, and there are curves, rises, and jumps like in a skateboarding park.  And there are bright skyscrapers towering all around. 

The dark is so much better than the daytime.   There are whole worlds out there that are brought into relief by darkness.   Breezing through the wet streets of Somerville at night is so much better than in the vanilla-winter sun.

When it gets to be this season and certain things are offered to you, like falling in love, warm light, showers and baths, sex, you can start getting dependent pretty fast.  And having any of that taken away can be devastating.  It was something you promised yourself you would have.  As Ilana has put it: "I'm leaving work after dark, my whole day is already over. But at least I have this."

Biking has largely saved me from this feeling recently.  It doesn't make me more cynical about love and showers, it just makes me realize I need them less than I thought.  It also leaves me in an eyes-half-shut, wild hair kind of feeling that's a lot better than some recent love and showers that I have had.  I end up thinking less about loss and more about how I'm an explorer, dirt on my face, sweat on my brow, weaving through black wet streets, waving an rebel motor flag as I go.             

Scranton is for Lovers

It's another one of those weeks. It rains. I bike to work, and when I'm not biking I walk on unfamiliar legs and mistime street crossings, imagining I can zoom in front of the oncoming car or swagger in the street corridor like a bike that takes up space.

Last year at this time I was running around fever pitch for MoveOn (and, of course, my country) in Scranton, Pennsylvania for the prez campaign.  By this time, I had set up shop in the attic of this nice house in the hill section, where the college professors and the liberal Scranton gentry live. 
Every night at around 9pm, three Dem volunteers would arrive in my "office" and try to talk shop with me. That was because they were sleeping there. Little did they know that MoveOn organizers operated on the Karl Rove Theory, which, summarized, meant that we were not supposed to tell Anyone about Anything, and if a volunteer was ever disorderly or drunk, they were a spy.  In fact, if my boss had known I was leaving them to sleep in my "office" every night, I would have been sacked definitely.   

I didn't sleep there, though, which was also against the rules.  I slept a few blocks away, in an old
beat up Victorian that someone built when the coal  was still flowing.  The whole neighborhood was like that.  Apparently the area had a lot of deadbeat drug dealers living in those drafty Victorian houses.  I bet you can imagine how cold that house was, despite the layer of cat and dog hair that lined the rooms.   But it was still pretty dreamy.  In Peter's bedroom,  if you lay on the bed with your head on the pillow and looked out the window, you could look down over tipping cupolas into the town. 

The job had terrors.  My boss made me do jumping jacks on my cell phone from my satellite office of one (which gives you a sense of my conscientiousness -- you don't have to do jumping jacks alone when no one's watching, but I did).  There were nightmarish early mornings in Allentown when we would sleep in the rental car outside the office waiting for our delinquent boss to arrive.  There were also, of course, the billion times that people hung the phone up on me or said "I'm voting for my president!" and the times I would canvas and people would literally start foaming at the mouth with their Kerry hatred. 

All of this notwithstanding, the hell of it was part of what I fell in love with, because nothing would have been so good if some parts of it hadn't been so goddamn bad.  Scranton is a shithole, but I loved it.  And I liked knowing every inch of it.  It made me want to get embroiled in county politics, shake up the complacent union members, end the Irish-Catholic cronyism, walk the precincts myself.  Every week we would have NE Pennsylvania volunteer conference calls, with people identifying themselves by precinct, "I'm Betty Sue from Troop Precinct, Lackawanna County," "I'm Miles from Allenton 2-3."  The sense of place was suddenly so much more grand than I had ever really understood before.

In case I jinx myself with this new posting spout before it begins, I'll end now.  Maybe I'll have more to say on the subject before Halloween.