Ride Home 6/30: Ionic Bond

Goodbye, June. You weren't the worst.

It was one of those rides where things kept going right. I kept getting green lights and I kept finding the bike lanes free of obstruction and there wasn't even much of a line at the grocery store. There were a few hassles throughout the trip (a dedicated bus lane on I Street through downtown would most likely greatly reduce the incidence of a bus blocking the intersection at I and 15th, for example), but nothing so much to distract from the overall feeling of "fineness" that hung over the ride, like the summer haze itself. When things go right, it's best not to question why they're going overly right and just enjoy the unexpected swing of the pendulum before it swings back and you have one of those bike commutes where not only everything goes wrong, but it goes wrong in such over-the-top and comical wheels that cause you to question whether it's even possible for them to have ever not gone so horribly wrong. I don't know if it's the era we live in or just a particular cultural moment that specifically impacts the social cohort of which I'm a member, but I feel like statistics, averages, regression and the like permeate the air, like the smell of honeysuckle and pollen, and it's become difficult to conceptualize life experience without thinking "do I have a large enough sample size to draw a conclusion about this?" And so it's kind of weird when you're thinking about (and writing about) and trying to draw conclusions about the novel happenings of your daily, idiosyncratic bike commute while also firmly ensconced in the belief that no matter how fluky the ride, it's just one more addition to a larger data set, any analysis of which will reveal that, on average, rides aren't exactly like the fluky one you just had and they're not exactly just as fluky in the opposite direction, but somewhere exactly in the middle, because that's, by definition, how averages work. And I suppose what makes the ride average is what makes the ride interesting. At least in a global, more  comparative sense.

But, I'm not a statistician. Also, yo no soy marinero. Soy capitan. Like a Chicano Abraham Lincoln. (This blog has hard some weird Lincoln digressions lately.) Where was I going with this? I'm not totally sure. I think what I'm trying to say is that while averages are interesting, anomalies are even more interesting. So, yesterday, the anomalous ride where things went overly well, the ride about which I have had nothing substantive or otherwise interesting to write, was more interesting than an average ride, about which I normally have something to say.

Here's a picture of the Supreme Court:

Those guys.