Ride Home 8/16: Chareth Cutestory

"Dance with the devil and you're gonna get stung" is a malaprop cliche that combines the elements of a few of my favorite different cliches and maybe incorporates the devil for reasons that I don't fully comprehend. It combines elements of "Dance with the one that brung ya"  and lie "Lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas", but replaces with the dogs with bees and replaces the fleas with beestings and I suppose the "devil" is, so to speak, in the details and the details of this malaprop cliche (The Malaprop Cliche was the name of the French fighter plane used, unsuccessfully, by the Lafayette Escadrille) are that I had been trying to prolong the life of a tire tube that didn't want its life prolonged and my repeated efforts and reinflating this tube instead of replacing it hastened its eventual demise. Whether the leak was from bee sting, Red Baron, devil horns, or worn thin dancin' shoes is neither here nor there. What happened was that when I went to reinflate for what I hoped to be the last ride, it turned out that the last ride had already happened. The last ride was from work down into Glover Park, where a former coworker and I met for drinks. I walked the bike back to my coworker's apartment, about 6 blocks away, locked it to a fence and took Bikeshare home.

I rode Calvert Street to 37th, down through Georgetown across R and down through East Georgetown, intending maybe to divert to the Foggy Bottom metro at some point, but I continued past that when I realized that I'd rather just stay biking than waiting for a train. I live on the Blue-Orange Line and there are a number of stops along my bike route home where it would make sense for me to ditch the Bikeshare bike, especially if I want to avoid riding it up the hill. I think the last one that theoretically makes sense, or would have on this ride home, would have been Metro Center at 12th and G or thereabouts, but it would have maybe even made more sense to dock the bike near Farragut West or McPherson Square, which I didn't do. Actually, I did dock momentarily by McPherson, but only to re-up my 30 minutes. Every time I re-dock, I think of Kid Chameleon on those clock bonuses. I once stayed up nearly 24 hours trying to beat Kid Chameleon but this didn't happen. Last weekend sure was crazy. In reality, this occurred when I was in middle school  and my friend Jeff and I both thought that achieving this aim would be an accomplishment and furthermore than this accomplishment would be somehow fraught with meaning. With some perspective, I can assure you that this wouldn't be the case, though I'm the one harping about our failure to beat the game all these laters later so make of that what you will.

I rode through Dupont Circle, down Mass and then down 15th to H, over a block on H and down 15th again (yeah, 15th Street is weird) and then down to Pennsylvania, where my phone fell out of my pocket. I heard the phone drop and I quickly divined that it was my phone and I rode back to pick it up. At this point, I realized that my wallet was not in my pocket. Please be in my bag, please be in my bag. It was in my bag. Then I put my phone in my bag. Then I put my keys in my bag. Then I continued to ride home.

Riding up the hill isn't nearly as bad as I made it out to be and then it was a quick jaunt down East Capitol to the Bikeshare dock nearest my house. I got home to find that the new tire I had ordered wasn't delivered by UPS. I walked and fed EtP, then we drove back to pick up my bike. You shouldn't bring your toy poodle with you when you go to pick up your bike. There was one minor poodle escape when we got there and there was one minor "I'm just gonna throw this dog in the trunk while I'll try to hoist my bike in there and hope that the guy in the Mercedes will be surprisingly cool with my blocking the street (which he was)" and then I drove home and now the bike is in its place and I'll figure out how I'll get to work/Friday Coffee Club tomorrow.