Ride Home 1/3: Molecular Gastroenterology

Is there anything left I have left to tell you about this route home? The state of my feet: cold. The state of my bike: dirty. The state of the union: strong, with chance of showers. The state of play: a movie starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams that I somehow haven't seen. States of matter? Solid, liquid, gas and a chance of showers. The state under Louis Quatorze: him. That's pretty much how things stand. I was cold, my bike was dirty and absolute monarchy prospered in 17th century France. Telling you anything else is just gilding the fleur-de-lis.

And yet gild I will, like I'm in some kind of gild guild. This is not to be confused with the Society of Gilders, of which I am not a member, Gilda Radner, whom I believe to have no association with gilding, or a gild of geldings, which I can only assume is a kind of anti-competitive business association of castrated horses.

Sometimes I worry about falling down when riding downhill. Most times I don't worry about this and I've only ever fallen once and this was as result of my haphazardly and mistakenly rolling over a concrete slab, which is not something I normally do. Downhill riding, which is by far my favorite riding vis-a-vis hills, is also the time I feel the most anxious. Maybe this is because I don't go skiing. I might take up skiing to establish a better relationship with hills and gravity.

There's a right way to ride on the sidewalk- slow, deferential, unfunly, and then there's the way when you weave around pedestrians and poles (Poles who are pedestrians if you're in Krakow) and other street objects and even if you're going just as slowly as you would when riding deferentially, this is somehow worse and gets you a much worse reaction from pedestrian types. No one wants to be a slalom pole or a slalom Pole if you're in Krakow. I highly encourage you to visit Krakow if you've never been. Some of my favorite medieval queens are buried there.

I biked a perfect on L Street, which was great, but even greater is my unlocking the mystery of car traffic backups on L Street and I can tell you that it has nothing to do with cyclists on the cycle track. Of course, I'm a bike apologist, so you can take this with a grain of salt (Krakow has salt mines!), but the real problem that creates the car traffic backups on L Street is the pedestrians crossing the street, especially on the number streets. This prevents drivers from turning left and/or right because they have to wait for the intersection to clear. Seriously. Almost all of the "traffic" is caused by people in cars waiting for people on foot. Bikes have little/nothing to do with it. I have some potential solutions:

• Ban people from crossing the street. 
• Ban cars from turning
• Give all drivers and all pedestrians bikes

I didn't say they were good solutions. 

11th to Penn and up the hill, this time on the Senate side. The Capitol looked lovely and I took a blurry picture:

We may have the building, but the jackasses inside are the rest of America's. Stop blaming DC. The rest of you are the ones sending them here. 

I dropped my glove on East Capitol and this was pointed out to me by a nice guy who saw the glove fall from my pocket. Thanks, nice guy. 

I stopped at the store and bought eggs noodles and beer. It was "boil egg noodles in beer" night our house for dinner tonight. Healthy and delicious. Just kidding. It's not that healthy. I advocate for bikes, but more so, I advocate for daily grocery shopping by bike. I find it much nicer than stocking up and actually having things in the house and not having to scramble to pick up some random assemblage of things in order to fend off starvation.