First of all, I'm riding the bike most days now. I typically use it for my morning trip to the Red Cup, and then take it back home. If I go out in the evening, I take the van.
The bicycle I'm riding is a Breezer Liberty, which was designed specifically for around-town commuting.I may be getting parts of the backstory wrong, but company founder Joe Breeze, if I understand correctly, more or less invented the mountain bike. Here's his bio on the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. Now, his company's whole line of bikes is geared specfically to basic transportation use.
Security is an issue. Having had a 30-year-old Schwinn LeTour worth maybe $25 stolen out of my garage a few years ago, I know that people will steal – and pawn shops will apparently buy – damn near anything. So the bike stays locked and indoors whenever I'm not using it. Dragging it in and out is something of a disincentive to ride it.
You'd think that someone would have come up with a nearly-bulletproof 'bike garage' that one could install beside a house or something. Like a reinforced steel hut that could hold two or three bikes on racks.
Anyway, the bike now accounts for perhaps 30% of my weekly travel, and when I'm in better shape, the percentage will increase. Some days this is a very easy morning ride, and other days it just wipes me out. Today was easy; yesterday's ride left me recuperating most of the afternoon.
A few words now about my gradually shrinking bubble.
It occurred to me a few days ago that if I could get the Red Cup, three kinds (ie., Italian, Asian, American, etc.) of decent restaurants, a grocery store and a book store all in a space of one square mile, I could live in that square and never leave.
I have no desire to travel and not much incentive to. I would prefer to stay in one little neighborhood for the rest of my life and enjoy the peace and quiet, such as it is.
In an enlightened nation, some Taoist master wrote, the citizens never go abroad because their needs are all met at home and they're content. My needs and desires are few these days.
There is a famous collection of drawings known as the Zen Ox-herding Pictures. Several versions are out there - here's one version.
These have been around since the 12th century CE. What you actually see in these pictures is a guy interacting with an ox, but it's all symbolic. This was apparently a common event in 12th century China, so the average person could identify with the experience as portrayed in the pictures.
You can find a lot of web sites explaining what's happening in these drawings. But I want to talk about what's not happening. The guy is not:
- taking calls on his cell phone.
- jamming along with his iPod.
- text messaging.
- dodging SUV's and Jesus-cab pickup trucks with chrome hand rails.
- repeatedly punching the button for the 'WALK' light with his thumb.
When you were out herding an ox, that's what you did. There was you and there was the ox. There wasn't much in the way of distraction. No wonder Bodhidharma sat at the wall for nine years... there wasn't anything else to do.
I'd like to think that if you blindfolded Hui-Neng or Dogen, drove them to the intersection of NW Expressway and Penn at rush hour, then suddenly pulled off the blindfolds, they would smile serenely and continue to have no concept of either being or not being. But more likely they would be like, "What the fuck, man?! What is this shit??!"
We have a lot more distraction than the ancient ancestors had. We're all about distraction, in fact. We're the nation of being distracted.
Before I encountered the Four Noble Truths, and later Chuang-Tzu, Wen-Tzu, Watts and Seung Sahn, I encountered Henry David Thoreau. Reading Walden in 2000 (along with Douglas Rushkoff's Coercion) set me up for the realizations that were to follow. Together, Walden and Coercion led me to see that I could get along with about one-tenth of the crap I had accumulated, and that most of what I had thought I wanted in my life wasn't really what I wanted, but what a bunch of marketing weasels wanted. And I saw that the stuff made my life worse, not better.
So here I sit in my shrinking bubble, free of desires that weren't mine to begin with.
I'm giving away a bunch of old computer parts. I'm going to box those up this afternoon.
But right now I think it's time for a nap.
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