:Cyclostat

The first two legs (read: circles) were going to be bad, but we knew that. But we thought that there would be a bike path for the first leg. When we got to the “bike path”, we thought it looked strange, but by then it was too late:

Admiral Ackbar was right, of course. Google bike maps is a motherfucking trap. We, the three travelers, naively thought that this bike path would be worth it. It was not worth it. It was a sidewalk. See diagram below for illustration of the first and second legs.

After the sidewalk of the first leg ended…..we were trapped. There was nowhere to go but a 3 lane highway; so we went.

It sucked. Biking on a highway sucks. The view was actually quite beautiful, because we could see East Boston and old New England homes rising on a hilltop like a Montmartre with more trees. I feel like saying that there was nowhere to pull over, but the fact was there were some places where we could have. None of us wanted to stop to take photos because all of us were driven by the single thought: “make this end.”

As the cars flew past us, some of them honked, some of them cut in too close, and some of them yelled at us. The second leg didn’t end soon enough, but we were only half way through.

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Canto I.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

That’s right, I’m going to be quoting [paraphrasing] Dante in this blog post and there is nothing you can do about it. I’ve been mulling over this bike ride for a week, and that’s where I’m at. I have no idea how to phrase what happened in this trip. The road was fucking brutal, and thinking about it makes me want to say classist things about the bleak hellscape north of the mystic and south of Gloucester.

Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say.

What was this [road] savage, rough and stern?

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

I don’t use the term hellscape lightly. Some people call New Jersey a hellscape, but that’s more of a har-har hellscape of capitalism and chain restaurants. New Jersey fills you with ennui and a desire to leave. The road to Nahant fills you with a loathing for humanity, a fear of the lower class, a distrust for the police, and the desire to take your own life so that you never have to remember that terrible place.

I traveled with two women, whose names are redacted and not given.

It starts, much like the divine comedy: with some confusion about exactly how we are supposed to get to hell. The main difference here is that we three weren’t looking for yucks circumnavigating Satan’s semi-conscious chewing of the great betrayers (read the book, you illiterates). We just wanted to go to the beach.

And google biking directions was the shittiest Virgil out there. I’ll follow this up with more posts.

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Yeah, the lolcat was funny while it lasted, but this is the kind of invisible bike that I would want to ride. Jimmy Kuehnle is an artist (in San Antonio) who is best known for his inflatable suit performances, and who somehow built this bike. Kudos, good sir.

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