The first thing that LittleSister said to me when I met her at my apartment this afternoon, "do you have a first aid kit? I tripped walking up to your front stoop."

Of course, I do, my dear. Of course, I do.

I was strolling in the twilight of a cool spring day towards this pub that I've turned into my substitute reading room, and as I arrived at a signal light, I could look diagonally across the intersection and see a cyclist trackstanding while waiting for the light to change. It was hard to see his face with sunglasses and a cycling cap pulled low over his eyes, but I recognized the beard and the bike posture. As his light went green, I yelled out "T-Bird!" and he looked over smiled and stopped.

T-Bird was from the same forum where I met joeyfresh, and we first met when he posted to the forum about plans to bike tour in Patagonia, and I was all, "kid, let me tell you about Patagonia." We've gone on a couple of rides since then: evening supply runs for Occupy, a Saturday whisky bar hop that ended with me passed out in my apartment with a gifts of Sheep Dip and Bulleit on my kitchen table.

Our conversation was the sort of thing that comes up with friends who haven't seen each other in a while, but still keep in touch over the superficial connections of forum postings and Facebook updates. As we talked I could see T-bird's eyes unfocus, and his head turned as a pedestrian crossed the intersection, walking a blue Schwinn World Tour. Together, we let the conversation lapse, as we both checked out the components.

"old-school Shimano RSX shifters," he said to nobody in particular, "nice."

silentq will confirm for you that if a pretty girl with a sweet bike walks by, I will always be looking at the bike before I notice the girl. In walking around with friends, I've nearly tripped and fallen off curbs because my gaze was turned by a swanky ride chained up to a parking meter. Sometimes, while commuting in and weaving my way through downtown traffic the glimpse of a frame with beautiful welds will bring me to a halt.

When I was involved in raves, it was a common joke how one couldn't pass a derelict warehouse or auto garage or laundromat without wondering what it'd be like to throw a party there. I have climbing friends who've looked at walls and statues and balconies and traced invisble lines along their features. Parkour changes the way one looks at low hanging fire escapes.

So it is with the galaxy of bikes and builds and parts, and all manner of things that can preoccupy two bike nerds standing at a street corner. Lights switch and my gaze drifts over T-Bird's shoulder as another cyclist goes by with a weathered, classic English canvas saddlebag.

"Sweet Carradice," I say.

"Yeah, it's probably got some stories to tell."

We all do, my friend. We all do.

Last night, over dinner with a friend, we were talking about the idea of writing up character sheets for ourselves, and what sort of stats we would give each other.

"I need to give myself some kind of low dexterity or agility score," I said, "I can dance ok and type fast, but I can be embarassingly clumsy sometimes. Maybe that isn't low DEX. Maybe it's a Luck stat."

I was, and still am, accident-prone. There were three occasions where I, as a child, fell down flights of stairs. My brother and I had a phase where we'd spin ourselves around until we were dizzy, except he would collapse on a soft grassy lawn, and I'd happen to tumble into a bush of thorny roses. There was the one time that I was a teenager, and playing tag with a bunch of friends in the middle of a forest under a full moon and clotheslined myself. Then, as an adult, I've been prey to a few bike crashes and skiing accidents.

One consequence of this is that I am used to pain, and injury and dealing with it. I was doing this backroads tour of Vermont last year, and at some point, while descending on a twisty dirt road, I lost control of my bike and crashed. When I got up, I realized that I couldn't see out of my left eye, and while a small part of me was fretting about some bit of debris that had shredded my eye¹ the practical part was running diagnostics. I put a hand to my face and realized my eye was fine. It was just covered in blood. That same practical part, got up, staggered to the side of the road, and, for want of a mirror, took out my phone, took a photo of my face and used that to figure out where the cut was.

This is all to say that Sunday morning, I was cleaning the Raleigh.. While running the chain through a rag that I was holding, a bird had flown by and startled me, causing my left hand to momentarily squeeze the rag and then get dragged backward. And as the teeth of my back gear bit into my thumb, one small part of me was responding to the pain, and the practical part was moving my body to my first aid supplies.

( cut for blood and pain and black comedy in the emergency room )


¹ since that bike crash, btw, I have been really curious to know what it feels like to put one eye out. I don't actually want to know for myself ... I'd be fine with a realistic graphic fictional descrption somewhere. You know, for future diagnostic purposes.

I was at this party over the past weekend. It was a kickoff for the new 2012 randonneuring season, and the cafe was teeming with old hands and new aspirants. I caught up with Jake and Emily, and Mike from last year's 400k. Together and along with various others, our conversation had a sort of back to school feel, but with an extra layer of understated badassery.

"So, what are you planning on doing this year?"

"oh, I don't know. I was considering a 1000k in (the Blue Mountains of) North Carolina."

"I might take it easy, maybe just do this series of 100 mile mountain bike races (in the Rockies. at 9000 ft above sea level)."

you know. the usual.

Our bikes were being put on display in the cafe as part of the party, and I finally got to meet V from Lovely Bicycle for the first time, as she was taking photos of us. We'd been corresponding virtually for a few years now, and I still smile when I remember how she first started out exploring the world of Dutch and city bikes, and then got that Rivendell that prompted her to dreaming about distance stuff. I've liked following her evolution as a cyclist even if through the remove of a blog.

Somebody wound up asking me about my bike and I had to describe how it was a bit like the Ship of Theseus. The front wheel's been replaced, the drivetrain is on its third iteration, and even the paint is new. Some of it has just been a consequence of wear and tear, and the way how given enough time and distance, everything breaks down. But the other reason was that last summer, ( I was hit by a car. )

Still, time heals many things and now, as I was contemplating a new summer of adventures, prior to the party I opted to join a season-opening ride with some old randonneuring friends. With the exception of an occasional long daylight jaunt here or there, it's been a while since I've done anything really challenging and so a part of me was nervous about the passage of time. How much strength had vanished after my lost summer? How was my knee injury doing? What was the bike going to be like?

In the end, the knee was fine, and my fitness wasn't great, but it wasn't as bad as it would've been if I didn't spend the winter swimming. The day was long, marked by a light cold rain, and a persistent chilly headwind. It was also welcome to quiet roads curving between trees, and the continuous sense of being lost in one's backyard, discovering some new secret pocket of the world lurking nearby.

And the bike? The only thing that's persisted through the years has been the rear wheel and the seven tubes of steel that make up the frame. Those will always be its heart. The fork is different, and the front rack is new. The front wheel is fresh, as are the stem and handlebars. Some of that has given it a slightly different character, but this past weekend, as the bike and I dove through fast descents, and glided through tight, twisting turns through the back country of Groton, I could feel a deep, familiar joy. Like running into an old friend on the street, and laughing easily at their jokes like no time has ever passed by.

¹For legend has it that while Theseus was lost in the labyrinth to kill the minotaur, the crew of his ship preserved their vessel while they waited, replacing the rotten wood with new until, by the time Theseus left Crete, every piece of wood had been replaced, but it was still considered the same ship. If you were not a Plato fan, the simpler equivalent was George Washington's axe, which supposedly had its blade replaced three times and its handle replaced twice, but it was still the same axe

Melbourne, Australia is fond of their rooftop bars as they are proud of their weather. A place that is generally pleasant all year-round needs open air spaces that let you sip a glass of wine outside as the aura of the city envelops you. I was sitting at a tapas bar with a coworker, two days into a work gig and the space between us was littered with plates and an empty carafe of sangria. It had been a day heavy with meetings, and we were doing our best not to talk about work. We talked, instead, about vacation, and how, in these moments of having a bit of dinner in a new city with different routines and customs, you could sometimes forget that you were here for a job and could, instead, take a break from it all.

"I always go to Florida," he said, "for the last six years. A buddy of mine lives down near Miami and right around April, after I've been beaten up by winter for four months, I go down there for some sun and sea. I always think that I might want to change it up a bit. See the rest of the world. Went to Amsterdam and Paris once, that was nice, but that trip was (his ex-girlfriend)'s idea; but every time I think about where I want to go, I want it to be familiar."

"I've got the exact opposite problem," I said, "I've gone to places like Buenos Aires and Tokyo and Iceland, and I'm never there long enough to have my fill of it. I always leave with a yearning to come back and do more. But, whenever I consider where to go again, new places are always much more tempting."

"After a while, though, are any of them all that new? Cities are cities."

"You've just spent way too much time on crappy business trips, living out of a suitcase and defining a city as a client's office, a corporate hotel and the cab rides in between."

But I thought about that for a while -- depth versus breadth, spreading out versus focusing. The ready answer is that we all have our individual balance on those preferences. There is no right answer. There's only what makes sense for us; but that point of equilibrium can change with time.

I've only been back in town for two weeks, but I'm already thinking of where I want to go next. I'm also conscious that, for various reasons, this may either be my last year for international travel for a while or my last year for domestic travel in a while, and that's kind of messing with my priorities.

It speaks to, perhaps, a certain sense of jadedness and a very specific sense of disconnection, when one is watching one's friends spin balls of flame or enact some sort of aerial ballet and one realizes that they should be more impressed than they are. Or when one is hanging out with friends and one of them says, "yeah, I'm kind of tired of watching tribal bellydancers."

Like, wow, so many people have these amazing talents and performance abilities, but I've seen it so often that I am now bored by it? I am no longer fazed by silks or six-person juggling or contortionists or drag queens or fire-breathing? It seems like the absolute height of #firstworldproblems.

I mean, and hope to say, that I don't denigrate any of my friends for their talents. I know that I certainly could not match them for what they do on trapeze or choreography, and I respect those performances on an abstract level. Yet, I had gone to a circus show a few weeks back, and while watching yet another aerialist twist themselves into and out of an increasingly complex set of manuevers, I found myself more interested in interpreting the knots and wraps that they had worked around themselves than the actual moves or dance that they were trying to perform, and I realized that it may not have been the intention,

I had thought about a study that posited that, for performances of sufficiently advanced technical skill, there was a threshold where the only people who could fully appreciate the performance were others who had experience in whatever it was that was on display.

I had thought about it with respect to DJ'ing and how, to the layman at a a random turntablist show, it all amounted to a bunch of music flowing into each other with record scratches. Yet, to someone who's actually tried to mix records and knows how hard it is sometimes to find sounds that work with each other, and then mix them in realtime, and then not just sequence songs to follow each other, but actually lift, shift and combine individual fragments of multiple songs into something new -- what sort of skill and versimillitude was on display. That was something impresssive ...

at least to others who tried to do it themselves.

But, to the layman, it still sounds ilke a bunch of music interrupted by record scratches.

And it's an interesting split that emerges, the performances one has for the audience, who are laymen and perhaps easily amused; versus the performances one has for their peers, who grasp the subtle ways that you are challenging yourself and pushing your sense of skill, but are perhaps not cognizant of how this goes over the heads of everyone else in the venue.

Then I wonder what it is about certain performers that transcend that limit, where it doesn't matter if you've ever been a singer or actor or acrobat or DJ before -- you just watch someone and your breath just gets taken away. How does that happen?

"Oh, dude, they have chicharones here. I'm putting in an order of that."

I was with fsfitz amd strange_quark at Chifa, a Peruvian Chinese place in Philly. Peruvian-Chinese might sound odd until one realizes that American Chinese has its own weird and idiosyncratic adaptations. After all, it's not like anyone eats fortune cookies in Shanghai. Whether it's stir-fried frogs legs in Paris or Dim Sim dumpling sandwiches in Melbourne, the question shouldn't be: does a hyphenated Chinese cuisine exist in a certain country? Because that's guaranteed. Rather, what weirdness will emerge as a Cantonese cook tries to adapt to the local produce?

In some ways, the central quandry of Peruvian Chinese struck me as the inversion of Filipino food. If Filipino cuisine is the solution devised by exiled Spanish\Mexican cooks who must adapt menudo or adobo to an Asian kitchen with a shortage of chile and a surplus of soy sauce, then Peruvian-Chinese cuisine is composed of similar hacks from expat Cantonese cooks adapting to a country where potatoes and corn tend to be cheaper than wheat and rice.

Still, it was hard to say if eating at Chifa was wholly representative since to say that it was merely Peruvian was misleading when, in truth, Chifa's pedigree was from that trendy, transnational, postmodern world of panivoracious consumption where the restaurant's flag of origin was just a starting point. Small plates? Check. Pork belly in multiple places on the menu? Check. Asian restaurant that doesn't give you chopsticks* or tea? Double check!

( cutting for kids doing a sous vide cookout on my lawn )

* -- a few years ago, I was eating at a PoMo Vietnamese place called Slanted Door in San Francisco with my family, and we had ordered, amongst other things, a whole catfish and some crab and our waiter returned to ask, "excuse me, you realize that a whole catfish includes a head and bones. That's ok, right?" We looked at him with a mild sense of insult, before quietly nodding. Then he turned around and said, "and the crab is still in the shell. Are you fine with that?"

I've never seen my mom verbally give anyone a "bitch, please", but she has this look that she reserves for times like that.

That place did not have chopsticks either.

When I was still young and living in the Philippines, my father would come back from his occasional trips abroad with videotapes in his suitcase. Sometimes, they were three hours of American Saturday morning cartoons, which we would watch and re-watch until the tapes wore out. Other times, they were bootleg recordings taken from some hotel's HBO channel. One of these was an old, moderately dubbed anime called Galaxy Express 999.

It was a movie about a twelve year old boy in a sci-fi slum town where humans are downtrodden and everyone aspires to immortality in a machine body. He meets a woman who offers to help him on his quest, by giving him a ticket on the Galaxy Express 999, a spacefaring train that travels to the Andromeda Galaxy, where the machine bodies are made. Along the way, they visit planets, watch the galaxy float by and hang out with a cast of loners, vagabonds and space pirates. So, at a young age, the film had imprinted in me a love for taking the train, watching the scenery and keeping company with weirdos.

I'm writing this while taking the train from Boston to Philadelphia and watching the endless city that is the Boston-DC metropolitan corridor unfurl outside my window. It is not quite the BAMA Sprawl of Gibson's vision, but outside my window there are a hundred lights that look like stars and a galaxy of humanity going about their Friday night.

I also have the remains of a sushi donburi tucked undereneath my seat, because one thing that I learned while taking the train through Japan, it's that sushi tastes better while you're gliding across the countryside at 100 mph

I hear him before I see him. The creak of his chain comes up from behind me as we both near the crest of the Longfellow Bridge, and then he passes and I make the match. His face is masked and his eyes are shaded by sunglasses, but I recognize the posture, the bike and the legs -- bare even in the middle of winter, carved like marble and gleaming in the morning light. I probably wouldn't hide legs like those either.

We've ridden together before, in the morning and evening commutes. I don't know his name. He doesn't know mine. But we know that we go about the same speed. He had the drop on me because I wasn't trying to go particularly hard, but as he clears the top of the bridge ahead of me, I find myself speeding up.

I catch him on the far side, as the Charles Street light goes green, and I split the lane between a tour bus and a pickup to pass him and slip between gaps in traffic into Cambridge St and the backside of Beacon Hill. Past Mass Eye and Ear and a gap opens on my inside to let me back into the shoulder, and I check but he's right behind and ready to pass. That's right; he likes to lead.

I wave him up with my gloved hand. He powers past and I slip in behind him. He weaves around a double-parked delivery truck and I follow his line. His right hand point jabs at the truck, a warning, and I cut even further around a car. The delivery driver's door opens into the space that I used to be in.

We carve a space in between the cars as they move and then slide back into the shoulder as they slow up to the next red light. We stop. I don't creep into his space to say anything. We don't do small talk. The light goes green.

And then we're both sprinting down the shoulder, because we both know the timing. Go balls out and you might be able to catch the next three lights at green. Staniford St. Bowdoin. Then halfway to Somerset, he starts outside again and I follow, because we also both know that every lawyer and their client makes right turns to head up to the courthouse. We slip around that pack and into Government Center.

As with every morning, the inside lane is filled with double parkers. We take the outside, riding abreast with him on my left and me matching his speed, taking the space that a car would take; so that another car wouldn't bully us back into the doors of the double parkers. We merge onto Tremont, as traffic backs up and split around cars, flowing like water around rocks. Him on the outside, me down the dashed lines.

We make the left onto School, by the Parker House and stream back into single file, with him leading again. Jaywalkers see us as they step up and I jerk my head to the curb to make them step back. His hand darts down, signalling a stop and we both brake to let a pedestrian use the crosswalk.

We make the S curve from School to Washington to Water, and traffic opens up, so I pull up and pass him as we get to Post Office Square, and I wave as I cross Congress, knowing that behind me, he's making a right to wherever else his commute takes him.

When I was younger, I used to love finding spare change in old pockets and couch cushions. I thought of it as a bonus on my allowance, and would usually spend it on something frivolous but eminently enjoyable. Sometimes, I'd save the change in small jars, but always with the intention of collecting enough for an ice cream or an afternoon at the arcades. That habit changed as I grew older and managed to acquire some disposable income, but the urge still hits me sometimes when I reach into a pocket and find a crumpled up dollar bill that I forgot was there.

I have had this habit, over the years of on-again,off-again DJ'ing, of taking various songs and earmarking them for some future set. Sometimes, it isn't with an upcoming gig in mind; just something to set aside in case the opportunity arises. Then, at various intervals, like the change in the jar, I'll burn a few of them to a CD-R, but because it's so casual, I'll neglect to do things like write down a tracklisting or even label the CD. So, years later, I'll pull these discs out, run through them, and rediscover some old concept or idea. Sometimes, though, I'll have to load up Shazam to remind myself what the song was.

I don't know exactly when or why I burned a copy of "Back To Life", but I'm fairly sure it was related to this request that mishak gave me nine years ago. I don't think that I ever delivered on that; so I figured it was overdue. The rest of the first set more or less coalesced around that seed.



First set
Velvet Acid Christ - Slut
Janelle Monae - Sincerely, Jane
Duran Duran - Come Undone
Soul II Soul - Back To Life (ext version) [*]
Coldcut - Autumn Leaves (French version)
IAMX - Your Joy is My Low [*]
Depeche Mode - Stripped [*]
AWOLNATION - Sail
Freestylers - Cracks (Flux Pavilion Remix) [*]
Emancipator - Rattlesnakes (saQi Remix)

Second set
Dead Can Dance - Rakim
Sigur Ros - Hun Joro (hassbraeour mix)
Thievery Corp - Sound the Alarm
Siouxsie & The Banshees - Kiss Them For Me [*]
Feist - My Moon, My Man (Boys Noize Classic mix)
Gorillaz - Rhinestone Eyes
Broken Bells - The Ghost Inside
Utah Saints - Lost Vagueness
Daft Punk - Solar Sailer (Pretty Lights mix)
Superpitcher - Joanna
The Church - Under the Milky Way
[*] - denotes request