A bike ride into the maw of hell
Canto I.
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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