Shorthand for Nothing

The Dead Baby Downhill Race (14th annual!) was more of a parade than a race, at least for most people I saw there. The pack of cyclists was huge, and most of them were content to ride slow. It was probably the most fun I’ve had on a bicycle since I started biking again. The downhill was fairly gentle (and was actually a bit of an incline at the very end), so I was never going the speeds I get going down 10th on my daily ride. No, mostly the fun was from being in a huge mass of people having fun and blocking traffic.

Bikers are a fairly weird group (and I say this in the best possible way), and if there’s one thing I like it’s large groups of weird people. If there’s another thing I like, it’s pissing off impatient drivers. (A bike mechanic asked me on Monday, “Are you sure you’ve never been a messenger?”) The sheer mass of bikes basically makes the road into one giant bike trail. A bike trail occupied with people who are doing nothing but enjoying the fact that they are on a bike.

Despite having biked 20 or so miles before, I was still passing people on the uphill at the end, convincing my tired legs to do things I was pretty sure they couldn’t.

On arriving at our destination, we got our water bottles of beer, talked to some fun people, and watched some of the events. Amongst Hammercising and dances by the Sprockettes, there was the Save the Baby/Kill the Baby race. Basically, this is a head-to-head sprint on BMX bikes to try to grab the (horribly beat up) baby doll that’s resting on top of a traffic cone.

Gregory’s attempt resulted in a low-speed wreck in which he fucked up his hand, and perplexed the medics by salting the wound instead of accepting some slightly more high-tech medical attention. (”You guys need a vest that says ‘Healing hurts,’ and has a salt-shaker on it.” Personally, I think it would make a better sticker.)

And then it was home, with a nice gentle incline most of the way. It was a nice end to a day where I decided to bike to Shoreline just to prove I could.

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Dear girls who hated me when I first started college,

This was about 2005-2006, I guess. You may remember! I was always hanging out on the couches, along with some of my friends. I think there were two or three of you. I only remember one of your names, and that one of you was blonde. Apparently one time you complained about me to the guy who works in the cafeteria, who knew me. “Do you know Robert Mason?” you asked. And when he said he did, you just said how much you hated me.

I have no idea what I had done to earn your ire. I suppose it was probably just a case of being completely different people who happened to share proximity all the time. Apparently your hate for me was pretty intense. I’m sorry if I caused you to lose sleep or something. I mean, I’m sure you aren’t terrible people. Maybe you are very nice, and I just rubbed you the wrong way? So, I’m sorry. I hope that you don’t think back of how much you hated me from time to time, unless it’s just to laugh about the follies of youth. We should all laugh about the follies of youth.

Yours,

Rob Mason

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Like many of my writing, this one has something of a history:

You were an ancient clock,
beautifully crafted,
carefully honed,
Roman numerals on the facing,
wound daily,
maintained carefully,
and none could deny your beauty,
your effectiveness.
I could never bring myself
to replace a part, however,
and even with loving maintenance,
painstaking repairs,
eventually your endless tick
stopped.

Only I could see it coming:
to the last you gave no sign,
no indication,
neither through arrhythmic ticking
or inaccurate timekeeping.
You kept your secrets,
and even I could scarcely tell–
I swore there would be more time.
When at length you would tell time
no more,
I felt almost cheated:
no climactic moment,
no epic time–
just one last tick, and then
silence.

I wrote an earlier poem called Like Clockwork, which was sort of about an old broken clock I had but was mostly about August of 2005, when it was written. The clock was very beautiful and that poem is one of the ones that I’ve always remembered writing. I know everything about it. It is reproduced at the end of this post. I have cleaned it up slightly; at the time of writing I did not think capital letters looked very nice.

So “Like Clockwork, Revisited” is about another relationship, and you can see how differently I viewed it. I can also perfectly see all of the problems that perspective came with, but that is another story altogether.

The original piece is here:

You were the gears,
I was the pendulum.
The clock was wound–
together, at first,
we kept perfect time.
But winding won’t last
forever.

You turned more slowly,
and I could not keep
swinging on forever–
not without you helping.
The harmony that made us tick,
so beautiful, so perfect,
slowly faded away.

Our chimes were once a symphony
sounding by the quarter hour,
announcing to the world
our perfect time.
But it’s only haunting now:
the keys are wrong,
the sound is broken.

You would not turn
and I would not tick.
We sat on the shelf for a time.
The hands did not move,
the chimes did not play.
Our music was silenced.
Wind it up–

The time was not perfect,
the chimes were not right,
and nothing was quite the same.
Your spokes were rusted,
I became arrhythmic,
never could keep going without you.
The clock stopped.

“Wind it up” is lifted directly from Radiohead.

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This installment is about the bout of insomnia that made my insomnia legendary, among certain circles. (more…)

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Summer always reminds me that I prefer the winter. Of course, I prefer the springtime and the autumn even more, each for its own reasons, but I never feel as if I get used to the heat so much as I feel that it just goes away eventually. The humidity over here does not make things easier.

That said, this summer continues the long tradition of Seattle being afflicted with freakish weather while I am away. Heatocalypse ‘09! Who knew? You see, I bear a good weather curse. Everywhere I go the weather is tamer than usual, nicer than usual, not as bad as expected. Meanwhile, wherever I used to be is plagued with storms and death from the skies. I am being spared the possibility of a freakish death in the weather, no doubt for some other grim fate.

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The absolute worst part about walking to the subway for a mile and a half is you have twenty minutes of your mind going into overdrive and imagining things that, it turns out, are just in your imagination. It’s weird, the scenarios that play out in your head when your mind is left to wander. Most of them have little to do with reality, and only slightly more to do with your thoughts at the time. The weirdest part, though, is how, as you run these scenarios through your head, you come to expect them, however implausible or unrealistic. The whole night ends up being judged based on these weird expectations, however implausible or undesirable they may be. You come home with the weird feeling that, despite having a great time, you didn’t live up to some impossible, bizarre measure you had set for yourself.

Is that so weird? Is it just because I’m a writer, or a romantic, or something? I come up with these involved scenarios in my head, good and bad, and then everything is based on those. They are never accurate predictions. Is that getting in the way? Or am I just paving the way for one of the times all this weird imaginative preparation pays off?

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Today at Davis Square, there was a girl with a Pocky handbag. This sort of thing is legitimately awesome, and there ought to be more of it. Without, you know, it becoming all the same thing all of everywhere. It, and the Awesome Foundation mixer this evening, have had me contemplating what the function of awesome is. Specifically, for some reason, when it comes to fashion.

I’ve got a collection of t-shirts that I happen to think are pretty great. People occasionally comment on them and it makes for good conversation; I’ve also had at least one random street person approach me and actually buy me a cup of coffee because of one of them. It’s easy to say I wear them because I like them, but there’s always a little something there. I want people to see these shirts and appreciate that they are awesome, and in many ways it has nothing to do with me. I just picked it out. It means I’ve got an eye for awesome.

Pocky handbags, for instance. I bet there’s a fair amount of them out there. (Maybe she designed it, I don’t know. In which case, awesome?) Nevertheless, there’s something awesome about that. It’s the sort of thing you want to acknowledge. “You have an awesome handbag. Can I give you a high five?” Maybe that’s weird. But I think that’s the point. We want to share what we think is awesome with other people, and it’s always nice when we get someone else who thinks it’s great, too. It’s a cryptocompliment! You are vicariously saying “oh man, you have good taste.” Positivity!

(Once, I walked up to someone and told him he had an excellent shirt. He was not awesome about it. I think he does not deserve to wear excellent clothing if he cannot be awesome about it.)

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Am I alone in this?

I enjoy reading bad reviews of my favorite restaurants online. Places like Yelp, Citysearch, and now, apparently, Facebook, are ripe with them. They are usually pretty hilarious! When a star rating is available it’s almost invariably one star (though occasionally they give it two stars), with the frequent rider that they would give it zero if they could. (We get it, you want to give it the lowest rating possible. Get over yourself.) They tell angry stories about how horrible the service was, often mentioning how everyone else in the restaurant got better service, which really doesn’t help their case in the least.

The story is generally pretty incomplete-sounding. That is, they never detail the exchanges; they just broadly state that they requested something and got an unfavorable reaction. Given the types of people who leave these reviews, this is pretty significant! Politely asking “excuse me, could we move to another table?” is rather different from snapping, “My friends are freezing at this table. Seat us somewhere else.” Both would be summarized “when I asked the hostess if she would re-seat us . . . .”

Anyway, I just read one of these on Facebook of the Friendly Toast. I am going to go through it, for laughs, after the jump. All errors of spelling and punctuation are hers; I may unconsciously correct some. I may see if I can find some other bad restaurant reviews in the future, so stay tuned, unless you think this sucks in which case tell me to stop! (more…)

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Man, I love stormy weather. It is the sort of weather in which you are supposed to be miserable and afraid to go out, and it definitely has its down points, but there is nothing nicer than sitting in a quiet living room with the rain pouring down around you and the occasional flashes of thunder and etc. It is one of the fastest ways to remind yourself that even in the city there’s still wilderness out there and until we create giant space lasers to control the weather (so in like five years) there’s still a lot that’s beyond man’s control.

I have always been slightly crazy and enjoyed going out on the porch or equivalent in inclement weather and just sit/stand there until the novelty wears off. It’s the little moments like this that make being human so exciting. Every time there’s a severe weather alert I’m secretly hoping for it to be the big one: a snowpocalypse or windstorm or ice storm or something that takes out the power or otherwise cripples the city.

I’d worry that I’m being weird, but that’s really the least of my concerns.

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It’s a sure sign the year has gotten away from you when it’s may and you’ve only barely registered that it’s spring–which happens to me every May, so, you know, I guess I’m just bad at seasons? Spring is so fleeting–there’s something so arbitrary about the seasonal designations. By the time it’s clearly spring and not winter anymore, it’s almost summer. It hardly seems fair, really. Spring and autumn are the nice seasons, yet they only last a few fleeting weeks and are gone before you notice. Summer and winter last far too long and tend to have too much time where it’s unbearable and you just can’t wait for spring or autumn to come around.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s springtime, and that’s kind of exciting.

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