Yesterday I found myself on the Brooklyn Bridge:
In recent years the Brooklyn Bridge has become so crowded with tourists that I avoid it whenever possible–though if I do cross it I’m almost always on a bicycle. Obviously now though the crowds have thinned considerably, and so I took advantage of the situation and did something I haven’t done in as long as I can remember, which is take a walk on the thing. (Hey, gotta find stuff to do with the kids!)
When you’re whizzing by on a bike (or, more accurately, picking your way through the throngs on a bike), you don’t notice all the graffiti on the bridge. However, there’s quite a lot of it, and as I sat down on a bench I noticed this:
Wow, the shit really hit the fan not too long after Anisa and Dena arrived, didn’t it? I can’t help wondering how the rest of their vacation went. Presumably they wrote some pretty dispirited Yelp reviews.
By this morning the cold and the clouds had returned, and I headed out for a short ride, during which I got a firsthand look at the city’s new elevated parking platform program:
Which really complements the new PPE disposal lanes:
At this point the entire city is littered with this stuff, and I have to wonder at what point wearing masks and gloves is completely obviated by turning the streets into a biohazard minefield. Then, as I shifted, I contemplated the bizarro workings of my derailleur:
In turn, I thought about when I’d taken delivery of the bike, and of the derailleur, and how it sort of corresponded with this whole pandemic thing. Finally, I wondered if maybe I’m in some kind of alternate dimension or parallel universe, and somewhere I’m on whatever the opposite of a Rivendell with a low-normal derailleur is (a carbon fiber recumbent with Di2 maybe?) and everything’s totally fine.
Is it wrong that in that scenario I’d kind of rather be in this dimension because of the bike?
Probably.