Ride Home 10/2: I freed my mind, but the rest didn't follow.

Here's what I looked like before the ride home:

who needs a helmet? my hair will protect me

This was after being delayed leaving work due to my compulsory attendance at an event that prominently featured candied and caramel apples. This event was not in any way associated with Halloween. It was weird.

I elected not to change back into my wet clothes and rode home in the work ensemble and that proved a bit silly because it was inordinately gross outside and soon I was sweaty. Seriously, I don't know how the normal people clothes bike commuters can do it. Sure, I look like a regular person on a bike and maybe that's "good" for "bicycle culture" (whatever that is), but after just a little bit of riding, I look like a regular person who is both gross and uncomfortable. And I'm sweating! [rimshot]. Wear what you'd like, but normal people clothes just aren't for me. Sorry.

Perspiration aside, the ride was great. I don't know how contentious your bike rides are, but mine are pretty much never that way. I suspect I'm lucky. Sure, sometimes people are jerks and they do careless things that casually and flagrantly endanger me, but they'd probably be doing those same things if I were in a car. And definitely if I were in a bobsled because people would all be like "it's not winter!" and "get on the bobsled track, you lycra bodysuit-clad Herschel Walker wannabe." DC just isn't ready for luge lanes.

Mass through Dupont Circle and down 19th. There's a fun tiny hill from L (El) Street to I (Eye) Street, before you go back down to Pennsylvania and it's each time I ride up that hill I think about pre-modern urban topography and that's admittedly strange, but lots of cities were built before sewers and proper drainage and I occasionally what extent the contours of the land played in those places early development and settlement and this is why I'll soon be writing a book on "That Hill That Shaped the World: Those 3 blocks on 19th Street and one bike commuters over-exaggeration of their importance"

Left on Penn and I followed a guy on a CaBi for a couple of blocks and then headed down 15th where another guy on a CaBi passed me on the right as I slowed to wait to turn left onto Penn. We didn't crash, but I wasn't super happy. Don't pass on the right. Unless you're in the UK or somewhere where that's exactly what you're supposed to do, maybe while hoping God Saves a Queen and/or already watching season three of Downton Abbey.

The trite things I hear of the one-sides of cell phone conversations as I pass people on my bike are just so unmemorable. I try everyday. I just can't.