NYC

After almost two weeks of riding from the deep south through the mid-Atlantic, to NYC, the thing I'm most struck by here in NYC is that people are so damn aggressive.

I've spent a fair amount of time in New York, so it's not like this is new to me. But I am struck by how unnecessarily and arbitrarily aggressive people are. For stupid reasons. For no reason.

It's sad, really.

Cops lie, google doesn't.

Okay, as we know, google most certainly does lie. But today, google told the truth, and a Galloway Township, NJ cop lied. Or at least her partner/friend/boyfriend figure did, and she didn't contradict him. He told me it was perfectly legal to ride across US-9 just north of Port Townsend, where it joins the Garden State Parkway.

It's not.

And it's a really treacherous two miles, on an interstate, with construction blocking most of the shoulder.

But I did it anyway, since at that point, to turn around would have meant adding 15 or so miles to my already 71 mile day.

Oh, and the day started from Atlantic City in fog so thick it was like light rain, and with me bruising my calf badly while muscling my bike in the bushes alongside a bridge. Then the last 15 or so miles were in some of the most miserable suburban traffic ever, at least since I left Atlanta.

But I hustled to avoid the thunderstorms, have tofu broccoli and brown rice in me, and am ready to ride and ferry to Manhattan tomorrow.

Hard to complain, since life really does remain fantastic.

Meet Virginia

To get across the Chesapeake Bay bridge and tunnel, you have to arrange a shuttle through the bridge police, then wait around until they send a maintenance employee with a pickup to shuttle you across. (For which you have to pay the standard $12 car toll, which I find a little silly, but whatever.)

I was being driven across the immense bridge when a truck with a camper shell with Virginia plates passed us in the fast lane. It was plastered with bigoted bumper stickers, literally flying a full sized confederate flag, and the license plate was WHITEP. Yeah, the confederate flag is just about history and heritage.

I was literally speechless for a couple beats, then said to the driver, "Okay, I have to say something. What kind of fucking jackass flies a confederate flag and gets plates that say WHITEP?" The driver, who was African-American, was quiet for a couple beats, then said, "Yeah... we've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go." So, so, true.

And what the fuck is wrong with Virginia DMV, issuing those plates?

The ride continues to be great. In Onley, VA now, and expect to be in Ocean City, MD tonight. Ocean City both puts me back on the water for a while, and might sound familiar to some of you: it's the eastern terminus of US highway 50.

Virginia, except for the ignorant racist cracker in the truck, has been nice to ride in, though I am looking forward to getting back to the northern states.

Day, uhhh, 7?

Left North Carolina yesterday, will be in Virginia for 2-3 days. I'm only averaging 50-60 miles a day, but am on "schedule" and not physically tired, and it's nice to be able to explore a little rather than just fall asleep exhausted.

Loving every day of riding. Even the rain and dumpy run down rural motels.

Massachusetts here I come!

Day 5!

Rode around 50 miles, took a ferry from Ocracoke Island to Hatteras Island, climbed the tallest brick lighthouse in the world, did laundry, and am about to go swim in the ocean. Returning to mainland North Carolina today.

Life is really, really good.

Bicycling directions (beta): use caution.

Caution, indeed! Today's 46.8 miles (so far) were some of the most difficult I've ever ridden. Google's bicycling directions sent me down a rough dirt road (okay, I admit, I had to go past some barricades to get on it. Permanent barricades. But hey: I ALWAYS do what google maps tells me to: I think you get shot with a laser from space if you don't.)

The road then ended abruptly, and I had to climb down and out of a steep drainage culvert. Then it really started to suck: about 15 miles of soft dirt roads through an enormous series of industrial corn fields.

Waiting for the ferry to Cape Hatteras now, so tomorrow should be better.

Day 2: Wilmington to Surf City

A short 28.1 miles, but most of it was in moderate to driving rain, and stopping in Surf City, NC was too tempting to pass up. The ocean is about 100 yards from the front door of my room, and it's pleasantly quiet on a Monday afternoon in what looks to be a packed tourist town on weekends in season.

Odometer: 1827.8
Maximum speed: 22.5
Riding time: 2:01:03 (seriously?)
Average mph: 13.9

Now: beer and dinner.

Day 2!

Sitting in a Subway in Hampstead, NC, as much to get out of the rain as to eat. Yesterday was 67 miles from North Myrtle Beach to Wilmington. Today is up in the air: either 35 or 45-50. Either way I'm hoping to stay close enough to the ocean that I can go for a swim. Sitba is performing beautifully, though I'd love to cut some weight.

More boring updates to come!

A big bike tour! And food porn!

C'mon, what more do you need?

Planning for a big bike tour now. Roughly: Myrtle Beach, SC to Amherst, MA, then train to Rochester, NY, then bike to Detroit. Unknown from Detroit. Big times. Hopefully I'll figure out how to post photos when doing mobile blogging.

But just in case, so my loyal readership isn't starved for food porn for a month or more, here's last night's dinner I made. J2 came over and we played trivial pursuit. We were going to go out to bar trivia, but only one non-smoking place in the area had trivia, and it was in East Decatur.

Ridiculously, dinner didn't include any onions. Bummer. It was a basic stir-fry, with brown rice:

Frying tofu.

Fried tofu.

Broccoli!

Giving the broccoli stem a little extra frying time before adding the crowns.

Stem and crown: reunited, and it feels so good!

Zucchini!

Zucchini, cooking!

Poblano peppers!

Poblano peppers! Frying! (Garlic was added later.)

And like I usually do when we have guests over, I kept most of the components separate so the guest(s) can add whatever they want, and skip what they don't. Except onions. Onions are mandatory.

Cork fell out and you stink!

Well, okay, nobody stinks. But I did just replace the ink in my crappy little $80 printer. The quality of the printing isn't so bad: average inkjet. But the little black starter ink cartridge was empty after about three months of fairly light use. (Check out the complaints on the amazon page for the HP901 ink cartridge.

So while the manufacturer's game is presumably to get you to spend $40-$60 on replacement ink cartridges, I instead took the cheap, messy route, and paid $11.50 on ebay for a refill kit. And it worked great. I probably wasted a little ink in doing three full cartridge cleaning processes, as the refill manufacturer recommends doing one to three, but it's still a way better deal than replacing the cartridges.

Today: meeting with the commander of the local private security force regarding my complaint about one of his officers (an off-duty police officer) who threatened to charge me for criminal damage for having my bike locked up to a utility pole on the sidewalk, and then a committee meeting tonight to work on recycling and bicycle storage issues in our building. In between, planning for the bike tour, which is looming near!

Randomorama

Looks like I'm on one of those blogging binges again. Here is a random balcony panorama from yesterday:


I got the free tickets (wristbands) for Georgia Shakespeare doing A Midsummer Night's Dream tonight in the super cutely named Shake at the Lake, and we're excited about the play. I've never seen it, and how can you not be excited about free Shakespeare? Well, I suppose you could be unexcited if it sucks. But hopefully it won't.

A report absolutely may or may not follow.

Free shit update

It's now 9:30am, and there are a couple hundred people in line for the free Shakespeare tonight. Since they give out 4 tickets (wristbands, actually) per person, there is no way all these people are going to get them.  People keep showing up at the front of the line (I'm about six people back) thinking it's the back, and the people at the front inform them that they have been here since 6:15am. And I thought I was ridiculous for showing up at 7:30!

Free shit

It's 8:14 in the morning, and there are already 17 of us in line for free tickets for tonight's performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Piedmont Park. Yesterday I was about 20 people back from getting tickets after waiting for an hour; today I came 2.5 hours early. Amazing what people will do for free shit. Okay, what I will do for free shit.

In our stars, or in ourselves?

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
-Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii

Today I got a smartphone. It's only the second I've ever owned, and the first, a Motorola Droid, I owned for less than 30 days, and went back to my coffin phone, a Nokia 3*** series that has served me incredibly well. With the upcoming bike tour, though, I really wanted on the go GPS and google maps, and the HTC Incredible came out at just the right time. So far, I'm extremely happy with it, excepting the mediocre battery life.

Yeah, yeah: what the hell does this have to do with Shakespeare?

Well, I don't know if the fault is in our smartphones (our stars), or the human condition (ourselves) but I wonder if smartphones are the death of human civility. Sure, for a while there it was people screaming into their phones on the bus, on the subway, on sidewalks, in meetings. Slowly, though, people are realizing that just isn't socially acceptable.

What hasn't seeped in yet is that clicking away nonstop on your blackberryiphonedroidwhatever in a public setting just isn't acceptable. Especially if you're a board member. In a board meeting.

Last night I went to the NPU-E meeting, and a member of the board literally sat there the entire meeting when he wasn't talking and looked down at his blackberryiphonedroidwhatever. Now, I'm not talking about furtively checking it when it vibrates, and putting it back in your pocket. or even excusing yourself and stepping away to take a call. No, this person literally played with his device the entire 2.5+ hour meeting, except when he was talking about (the apparently one) issue he cared about. The other guy in the picture was actually listening to the public official talking, to his right.

To be real, NPU meetings aren't exactly barnburners. It's mostly consideration of special event permits, zoning variances, and liquor licenses. Judging from the few I've attended, it's mostly rubber stamping of the neighborhood association decisions, and said rubber stamp is then forwarded on to the appropriate city department.

But really? You want to serve on the board, and have us sit and look at you conference panel style for two to three hours, and all you can do is sit there and play with your blackberryiphonedroidwhatever? Really?

Privilege, and responsibility

I was writing an e-mail to a friend, and decided to make it a blog post instead. She mentioned how much she appreciates that I've dedicated myself to following my passions, and found a way to make it work. I was struck, as I often am, by how extraordinarily, amazingly privileged and lucky I am to be able to live my life the way I do.

Sure: J and I live relatively simply and inexpensively (outside of travel) and very consciously live within the bounds of one income. Even though we both love food, we don't eat out all that often. Well, J eats out a lot while traveling for work, and loves it, since she can justify it money-wise: she gets a per diem. Even when I'm traveling, I tend to shop at the market whenever possible, and try to get hotel rooms with fridges and microwaves, and even better, with kitchens.

We're amazingly lucky that most of my income, be it from lawyering, bartending, selling homebrew supplies, etc., can go to savings, travel, retirement, and fun stuff like bikes. On which note, our transportation choices also save us a lot of money: our car regularly sits in our parking space for weeks at a time. It's a 2007, and has ~16k miles on it. I clip coupons, comparison shop, and buy in bulk, and we cook almost all of our meals at home (as you've seen from this blog!) I stand in the store and do the math to figure out what the best price is for recycled toilet paper (and then pay more, if necessary, for the TP with the most post-consumer recycled content.) I do the same thing for soap and shampoo, and then pay more to get products that aren't tested on animals. I bring home napkins from airplanes and restaurants, though this is definitely as much an environmental decision as a money saving decision. Same for obsessively printing on recycled, re-sourced, and salvaged paper, and printing double sided whenever I run out of recycled/re-sourced/salvaged. While yes, our condo is in a high rise, with floor to ceiling windows, it's a 865 square foot, one bedroom, one bath. We don't need more, and so we don't get more. We still entertain. People we love still come to visit. (I even occasionally clean it when people visit! Come visit! We're fun! And sometimes not this preachy!)

I'm extraordinarily privileged that I can do so much volunteer and pro bono work, and very mindful of my obligation to give back to my communities, social justice causes, and people and the earth generally. I'm aware that every single thing I do matters. It's a little like the Butterfly effect: every thing I do, choose to not do, or fail to do, effects something. Not necessarily in a Newtonian way, in that it won't always be equal and opposite, but it does matter if I choose to decline a bag at the store, or put my litter in my pocket rather than drop it on the street, or ride my bike instead of driving my car, or stop to help someone on the street. It matters when I dumpster dive into the trash cans outside of Whole Paycheck for recyclables, or pull the junk mail out of the trash can in the mail room in our building and recycle it. (Though of course, for myself, I prefer to reduce, then reuse, then recycle.)

As I explained to a friend recently (hi A2! and p.s., it'd be easier to blog if I didn't have so many people whose names start with A and J: would you all consider changing your names? Or maybe going by your middle names?) I don't believe in the cockroach karma: i.e., if I stomp on a cockroach, I don't think I'll be reincarnated as a cockroach. (Though I don't kill cockroaches, or ants, or mosquitos: I don't need to, and they're just filling their econiche. And in the case of cockroaches, doing it incredibly well.) But I do believe in a more general kind of karma: I believe that if I generally do good in the world, good things will generally happen for me, and vise versa: if I generally do bad in the world, bad things will generally happen for me.

A good friend in law school (A3, are you still reading my blog? Want to consider changing your name?) was the first person I heard this quote from: "Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth." (attributed to both Shirley Chisholm and Marian Wright Edelman. I absolutely believe this to be true, and have tried hard to live most of my adult life this way.

I absolutley believe that I have an obligation to give back, and a responsibility to mitigate the immense privilege I have, much of which I was born with: skin privilege, gender privilege, language privilege, health privilege, being born into a developed nation privilege. Some of it I've acquired along the way: I'm graduated educated, have no more student loans, own a home, have extraordinarily good health care. If we want, and continue to live simply and mindfully, J and I can retire in our early 50s. Imagine that! We have a society where people work two and three jobs, where people work full time into their 70s even when they'd prefer not to, and we could quit working in less than twenty years.

When I talk about mitigating privelege, what I mean is that I must be mindful every day of my privilege, and to consciously and carefully work every day to be sure I'm not using it (them) unfairly, exploitatively, or abusively. To be privileged, and not give back, would be some or all of those three.

Okay, at a certain length, this probably gets preachy, and I don't want to lose what precious little readership I have. So I'm going to go do some volunteer work. Yes: really. And then tonight, go meet with a group I did (volunteer) legal observing with for a post-event wrap-up, and then have drinks with a friend who I'm working with on a recycling and non-profit fundraising project.

Massacares, and government power

Tomorrow, as most people know, is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre. At the risk of boring you, on May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen fired 67 rounds over 13 seconds at unarmed anti-war protesters who were between 75 and 400 feet away, murdering four, and wounding another nine, including paralyzing one from the chest down for life.

It is slight comfort that the Kent State Massacre was a pivotal moment in our war in Vietnam, and one of the events that started turning mainstream public opionion against the war, leading to our ultimate withdrawal. It is of somewhat cold comfort that Kent State helped lead to the development of so-called "less lethal" munitions, like rubber bullet guns and beanbag guns.

A point worth making is that this is not the last time that US government personnel, under the color of law, have murdered and tortured US citizens. Almost every day, someone is gunned down in a major American city by police. Absolutely every day, indeed, right this minute, someone is being tazed or pepper sprayed or beaten by a cop somewhere. Maybe it's "necessary" for the administration of "justice." Like the broken broomstick was "necessary" for NYPD officers to anally rape Abner Louima. Like all 41 rounds were "necessary" when NYPD officers murdered Amadou Diallo while he was reaching for his wallet. Like it was "necessary" for the LAPD to beat Rodney King. Like it was "necessary" for a NYPD officer to gun down unarmed Ousmane Zongo, including shooting him twice in the back, as part of protecting the world against the horror of pirated CDs.

Now, don't get me totally wrong here: as many of you know, I'm a big fan of big government, the welfare state, and am a staunch tax and spend leftist. But maybe -- just maybe -- giving government employees guns and nearly unfettered discretion to discharge them against unarmed citizens is a poor idea. Can we learn something from our history? Or shall we only think about for a few days each year, and be condemned to repeat it?