I have some rules for bike commuting and they're mostly unwritten, but I'll contravene that to share one of them here. I don't pass someone unless it's clear that I'm going to remain well in front of them and that normally means make it through at least the next light. Why? I don't know- to escape awkwardness maybe? the weird awkward feeling of having just pulled round someone only to stop right in front of them a block down the road? Maybe it's that. That sounds plausible. Anyway, as a result of this, I find myself riding behind a lot of people and at a pace I wouldn't normally ride and I could either look at this as frustrating or look at it as a joy and I choose the latter because who wants to be frustrated by a bike commuter. When you ride at a speed you wouldn't normally ride, either too fast or too slow, it's like riding someone else's commute. It's like a vacation. Or something. I recommend it.
Got asked about what bike my bike was at 15th and Penn and I said "it's an Ogre" and the guy said "cool." He might've even said that he liked my bike and I'm sure I said thanks, if he said that. Before this, a few blocks before, I passed a car that had been pushed by a law enforcement officer into the middle of the Pennsylvania Avenue cycletrack. He didn't push it as part of an ill-conceived world's strongest man tryout, but because the car had broken down and everyone knows that what you down with a broken-down car is shove it into a cycletrack because, as everyone knows, the only thing bicyclists like more than the moving cars that imperil them is the stationary cars that impede them.
There's a document somewhere that says the overbuilt part of Pennsylvania Avenue on the west side of the White House will maybe get a road diet and a cycletrack and this is, hopefully, real. I think it is, because I've read about it on the internet and almost everything you read on the internet is real, per this all caps AOL email forward I got once. Wake up sheeple.
Fairly standard ride home. A few "new" bike commuter types (I don't know if they're really new, but they're enthusiastic and the way you can tell a longtime bike commuter from a new one is the utter lack of enthusiasm or superfluous effort) and some of them think it's fun to race other bike commuters, including me, and I was having none of it, mostly because I'm a humorless prig whose whole goal in life is not to be fucked with during his ride home. No, really, that's about it. This is the sum total of my ambition. Anyway, new folks need to get faster if they're going to challenge old folks to commute races. Also, consider having some guile. It helps.
At the grocery store, I made a tpyo on the keypad and I meant to type in 4048 for limes (I bought 4 for a quarter each) and instead entered 4049 for cantaloupes (4 cantaloupes amounted to 13 some odd dollars) and basically my advice is to not make this mistake. I don't know who assigns the produce codes (UN? Illuminati?) and through what means they assign these numbers, but the juxtaposition of the big and little fruits (limes and cantaloupes) do make for a proper justification for being thorough in ensuring correct keypading.
It was Tuesday, but it felt like a Friday. It wasn't a Friday.
They do the same with crash detritus on the I-66 and Key Bridges. It's unsafe on the roads so toss it on the sidewalk where no one will mind. I've seen bumpers, headlights, boxes, things I couldn't figure out what they used to be. I guess someone sometimes comes along and cleans them up, except for this one cardboard box that's been slowly decomposing for the last couple of months. It's like a kind of mud now with tire tracks through it; if I hadn't watched it over time I wouldn't be able to tell it was once a cardboard box. True story.
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