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Rolling on the streets of Austin

“One of the few aspects of living in Austin that’s become less of a hassle over the last 15 years is riding a bicycle,” writes Kevin Curtin in his recent essay, “The Joy of Bicycling in Austin.”

Meanwhile, Aaron Chamberlain biked the I-35 “Hell Route” from Austin to San Antonio for Texas Monthly. (He previously rode every street in Austin and circumnavigated the entire state of Texas.) He writes:

Everyone wants to ride the best routes. The beautiful routes. The fewer cars the better. Sure, I do too. But what about these poor routes? Who will ride them? I almost feel a responsibility to ride them.

This ethos reminded me a bit of the skateboarders I’ve read about, who take the ugly or invisible parts of the city and turn them into a playground.

Aaron recently tipped me to this skate video, victims of boredom, by Igna, a local Austin skater and filmmaker who is still in high school. I found myself mesmerized by it, for at least two reasons: one, it just delights me that there are teenagers out there cutting it up like this and making trouble (I find the title ironic, as these kids seem like conquerers of boredom), and two, one of my favorite things about biking in Austin is that it gives me glimpses of a city I’ve never really seen. This video does the same.

One year of biking

Golden hour on the way to the Austin FC game

Last March I fell in love with riding a bicycle, and since then, I’ve blogged about my adventures here and there.

A batch of thoughts and things I’ve learned off the top of my head, many inspired by Grant Petersen’s Just Ride and Bicycle Sentences, which have a kind of punk, unfussy ethos that meshes with my own:

1. If you’re new to biking, just go to the bike shop and try out some bikes and buy whatever’s in your budget. Don’t fuss over it too much. After six months of riding you’ll know what you really need and want.

2. Better to ride up a hill than to ride into the wind. You’ll overtake the hill eventually, but you can’t overtake the wind. Also: Everywhere seems flat until you try to bike it. There is no flat. (Kevin Kelly said this to me.)

3. Get a basket or a pannier. I always ride with one of my bags now. You never know what you’ll want to pick up when you’re out riding. Biking is this perfect pace between walking and driving — you take in more than you would walking, but it’s still easy to spot things and stop and investigate.

4. Start a bike gang. It will make you happy. Easiest way to do this is start riding regularly — taking off at the same time and place — with one other person. Pretty soon you’ll have a gang. Give your bike gang a stupid name. My bike gang is called The Turtles, because our sensei, Hank, aka Master Splinter, who is 75, always says, “Off like a herd of turtles!”

5. A two-hour ride is plenty long. Anything longer than that is vanity and wankery and needs to be broken up with lunch or beers. Better for a ride to be too short than too long.

6. If your friend asks you if you want to ride, drop everything, if you can, and go out. Always worth it. Some of the best rides I’ve had were with my pal Marty in the middle of the afternoon when we probably should’ve been working.

7. I don’t know what it is about men, but two men can ride and have an intimate conversation with each other, but 3 quickly becomes a locker room, somehow, unless somebody’s being left out. (I like to ride in the back when we have 3, it’s like having ambient chatter and camaraderie, but I can withdraw into my thoughts a bit.) Even numbers, like 4 riders, means you can pair up and have conversations.

8. Keep a bike that you can hop on without much fuss so you can go out for short rides whenever you want. It’s nice to have a simple, fun, extra toy-like bike for errands and joy rides.

9. Look out for dogs, children, and Lexuses. All wildly unpredictable.

10. Riding a bicycle is a beautiful paradox — it requires you to become one with the machine while also making you feel more human.

I probably have more that I’ll remember the minute I hit “publish” on this post, but that feels like enough for now.

Nobody said it better than Mark Twain: “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”

Happy riding.

A good assistant to your future self

This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journal that illustrator Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (I’m a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)

He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep it on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, and what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: “What seems bland when you write it down… will seem epic in thirty years.”

I have a new studio routine where when I’m unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each year on today’s date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but I’ve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. That’s where a lot of gems are buried.)

Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)

Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreau’s diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.

(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirth… When babies are new, they babble and make noise without language… do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)

Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.

This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:

Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work,  all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.

I’ve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self who’ll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.

Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working – those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your “assistant self” in motion, the self that will be there for your “future-self.” Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.

Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. You’ll thank yourself during & afterwards.

I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.

Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.” This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.

Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.

Where you look is where you go

a hawk I saw last month on the Walnut Creek greenbelt

When you’re biking you have to look out for a thing called “target fixation”:

Target fixation is an attentional phenomenon observed in humans in which an individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object. It is associated with scenarios in which the operator is in control of a high-speed vehicle or other mode of transportation, such as fighter pilots, race-car drivers, paragliders, and motorcyclists. In such cases, the observer may fixate so intently on the target that they steer in the direction of their gaze, which is often the ultimate cause of a collision.

As with biking, so with life. Thoreau said that we find the world we look for, but if he rode a bicycle, he might’ve said, “ where you look is where you go.”

Machines that make you feel more human

That we would train machines to be like us is not surprising.

The real scandal is how much we’ve trained ourselves to be like machines.

We’ve trained ourselves to be so machine-like that the machines don’t have to make that much of a leap to emulate us.

Resistance is celebrating and cultivating what is not machine-like in you.

Resistance is also using machines that help you feel more human.

By pedaling a bicycle, for example, you become one with the machine, but you’re also using all of your senses including the kinesthetic and vestibular. On your bike you come into contact with people and places you normally might not. The bicycle expands you rather than diminishes you.

(This, by the way, is nothing original that people haven’t been saying for hundreds of years. As my wife who studied STS in graduate school put it: “Same shit, different machines.”)

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