Ride 7/22: circle of circuses

I took the Ogre. On one hand, it felt slow. On the other hand, it wasn't any slower than usual. Perception is much more real than reality sometimes, though it's possible that my time to work on the heavier bike remained consistent due to an increased effort to compensate. Newton never proposed a Law of Conversation of Bike Commute Time and this falls squarely on his shoulders for also not inventing the bicycle a couple hundred years early. Sure, we got calculus and that's fine I guess, but just think how much different the the War of Jenkins' Ear would have gone if the troops had bicycles! Just think! This is the counterfactual historical fiction that I want to read. My tastes, perhaps, are peculiar in this regard.

There's construction along the Rock Creek Parkway between the Lincoln Memorial and the Kennedy Center. It's road resurfacing season. It's not parking meter installation season, though once upon a time, NPS promised that parking meters would be installed in various locales around the Mall, but I don't think I've heard anything about this for months and months, so who knows. You probably wait until winter to install parking meters anyway. One more summer season of free parking says Uncle Sam. But, please let them be in before Cherry Blossoms. It'll help add some semblance of order to the whole affair. Between parking meters and the new Mall circulator, it's almost as if the attitude towards cars is changing. Almost.

 My bike makes a period clicking sound when I pedal. Also, the chain keeps falling off. I wonder if these two things are related. I'll let you know when I write about the calamity that eventually befalls in, I don't know, a few days? A week? Tales from the Sharrows: your go-to source for avoidable bike problems that weren't avoided.

On the ride home, I saw this guy on L who rode a Bikeshare bike alongside another bike with a flat tire. It was an impressive feat.

2 Bikes 2 Furious

Like, really impressive. And what make it more so wasn't just that he ghosted this flat tire bike while riding another one, but that he was able to zig and zag through the mixing zones in between cars blocking his way while guiding both bikes through pretty narrow spaces. I can barely do this with one bike! I even saw him pass another bicyclist! This is some next level stuff. There are amazing people in this world and some of them ride bicycles.