With a swollen elbow the last few weeks, I was unable to clutch my handlebar, so I was forced to commute by car. Accustomed to commuting by bicycle as I am, this was truly hell. My eyeballs still wanted to look at everything everywhere, but I didn’t want to kill anyone on the road, so I had no choice but to reign them in—and deprive them of their daily bread (joy).
It’s easy to stop your bicycle in the middle of the sidewalk. It’s hard to stop your car in the middle of the road in the middle of traffic.
I felt like I was inside a pot and couldn’t get out.
I kept remembering that passage on traveling by train in Walden.
One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country.” But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
When traffic’s heavy, my commute to school is about 20% faster on average on bicycle.
If you like a breeze in your face (people seem to go to the beach for that, don’t they), well, it’s better not to have a windshield. How much more easily the air is pulled down deep into your lungs.
And it’s so easy, on a bicycle, to stop and look.
To look as closely as you like.
What colors and patterns are everywhere, just waiting to be discovered!
Whenever I get a good, close look at the Harujion—known to some as, and I hesitate even to type this, a “weed” . . .
. . . I always remember that jazzy tune by that completely unknown beatnik-poet Shizuoka folk duo. If you’re interested in hearing it—and why not become one of the handful who have heard it—you might contact the folks at Persimmon Dreams Recording Studios, who I’ve heard have plans to record and release it . . . yes, yes, I know how unreliable those guys can be sometimes.
I once knew a girl named Harujion
I loved her pink color, loved that skin tone
Her heart and smile like a brilliant sun
Her shiny silk hair in the breeze such fun.
But then she broke my heart when she said
That soon at the latest all her friends would be dead
Some pulled up and stuffed in the trash
Some coldheartedly smothered with gas
Some shipped into space to fill black holes
Some blown away in a swirling dust bowl.
She said I know I’m as sweet as any flower
Got the bees and the June bugs in my power.
I’m a daisy, I lied, just my hair a bit thinner—
But that man didn’t mind if I thought him a sinner
He said by tomorrow I’d be burnt to a cinder.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. How wonderful it is to be back out in the blue again!
And back out in the blue, there’s no telling what I might see coming through the blue.
