Friday was a day of diversions. On the way to work, a stop at a coffee shop. On the way home a stop at a bar. There are worse ways to prolong your bike commute. Instead of a coffee shop, you could have to stop to have a bunion removed. And instead of a bar, you might have to stop at small claim's court to ward off of a frivolous lawsuit from an ex-roommate. Or maybe instead of riding between home and work, you wouldn't even bike commute at all and that would be very sad indeed. Or maybe you could still bike commute, but you're a litigious podiatrist and the light of stopping to remove bunions and sue former roommates is your idea of a good time and drinking coffee and beers and stopping at coffee shops and bars would just be the worst thing ever. I don't know. Anyway, that was my Friday: coffee and friends before work, beer and friends after it, with biking on both sides of both of those things and work in the middle. It was a bike commute-y, work-y, beverage-y, friend-y Thanksgiving in a Bucket and that was my Friday and it was a good time.
It was the usual way in, but I rode across town to Columbia Heights. Columbia Road, while possessing a bike lane, isn't great and whatever pretend bike accommodation there is drops away on Harvard (I think?), so there's a gap, which makes it a somewhat suboptimal eastward route. That's before you even factor in how miserable and angry the drivers were. There was much honking and much cursing. While I'm sure, ma'am, that that motherfucker intentionally wanted to block your turn for some unknown reason, alerting him to the fact that he was a motherfucker was surely superfluous, his motherfuckeringness being, I'm sure, something he knows about himself and therefore the reason that he intentionally chose to put his car temporarily in that place where it momentarily caused you to delay your turn. But then, since you promptly reminded him, and all of us bystanders, that he was a motherfucker (and solely because of this and not because the drivers in front of him were able to move forward at the changing of the light from red to green), he was able to move forward and you were able to move as well. Life is hard for motherfuckers and its harder still for those afflicted by them, but not hard enough to cause enough people to sit out the 'dance of the sugerplum motherfuckers' that is the ballet of the car commute that is driving through Columbia Heights.
After taking leave of the going away party for the after-this-week erstwhile editor of your favorite (?) bike advice column (Jonathan Fischer- you are the best and I owe you a world of gratitude. Nothing but the best of things to come!), I took 11th downhill and through downtown to Pennsylvania eventually and followed that until the Capitol and then it was the regular way home and a pretty easy time since the weather was nice and the roads were mostly clear. I almost stopped to take a picture of the scaffolded Capitol dome because is this blog is about anything (which it mostly isn't), it's about scaffolding.
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