"The philosopher's gaze is turned from the sky by the pretty girl walking by."
Thus is theory grounded in the social world.
I've got a pretty good gig going with this bike parking thing. We're providing it at all the home games of the minor league baseball team, the Vancouver Canadians, and so I've been spending a few of the last bunch of evenings hanging out playing cards, drinking a beer or two, and reading a little Benjamin. I'm working with Marysia, a young vegan quasi-hippie chick... we share half a joint over the evening and are fairly evenly matched at 'Speed' (the card game). It's a good life if you don't weaken, as the Tragically Hip song goes...
There are some beautiful sunsets by the stadium, it's on a fairly level section of Vancouver (Main St., down around 30th), looking back west towards the mountains, and I feel like I'm on the plains or grassland, somewhere in Africa or even just somewhere further south like Arizona or New Mexico. It's good to have a summer job that has me outdoors - that had been the case for most of my life (since I've had jobs, in fact - from about 16 or 17 until up until I took the library job at the Ledge). I reconnect with those past summers, where I was usually at my most healthy and happy...
There were some awesome fireworks after the game, rising up out of the stadium - we had a pretty good view from where we were, out in the parking lot behind the backstop. I biked west afterwards, down to the beaches in Kitsilano and sat looking out over the water towards the north shore, and then when I had my fill of that, I biked over the Burrard Bridge to Sunset beach on the other side. It's great having my good bike back - it makes me want to bike more, use my legs and really get into it, because it is such a solid, well-built bike - it just soaks up all the bumps in the pavement and you can just take corners and weird bumps a little harder and faster. I spent six weeks on the thing five summers ago, going from here to Toronto, so maybe it's no surprise that my body adapts and remembers how to work the thing over hills and around the city. Having a decent, well-made bike sure makes biking a lot more fun... take it from me.
I'm flying off to Toronto for a few days on Wednesday, to see my family for the first time in six months. It's my dad's 70th b-day celebration next Saturday (the 7th). I'm actually looking forward a bit to spending a bit of time in Toronto this time around... I've been feeling the tug of family and the memories of formative moments, which I'm perhaps better able to reabsorb at this stage/point of my life. I feel like I just get stronger and more focused or balanced as I get older... I just gotta figure out where I'm gonna settle down and put down some roots, build up the strong, compelling and expansive life I can sometimes envision. Being a sojourner makes it different to build up resources and thus make concrete your dreams...