(no subject)
oh man. i'm posting in livejournal, so it must be that time of the year again. fall always fills me with such enthusiasm for everything, it gushes out in whatever outlet it can find. it always happens, right around the time when the air in north east is permeated with the delicious smell of concord grapes. i'm home right now, but i'm gearing up for the big move to philly with my lovely girlfriend april.
today was a chilly, windy day today and i took a spontaneous, entirely improvised bike ride which lasted three hours and took me across somewhere in the vicinity of 20 miles. i can't believe i didn't die. awesomely enough, i learned that i'm in better shape than i would have guessed, 'cause though i got pretty winded, i barely broke a sweat.
i was riding an old bike which hadn't worked for the entirety of my college career (5 years). i had fixed it a week or two ago, and it had since broken on me thrice out of the three times i've ridden it. every one of those times i'd had to walk it home, sometimes with its back wheel refusing to spin at all (a bike without two mobile wheels is an incredibly cumbersome thing to have to walk with).
and the bike once again broke. i had stopped into an abandoned mini-golf course in new york state to try to obtain some pepsi from a cobweb-covered machine which turned out to not even be on, and the chain fell off. simple to fix, but enough to disuade me from penetrating deeper into the uncharted bckwaters of NY. i turned back and wended my way home, surrounded all the time by grapes. miles of grape rows, their parallel lines on a slow decline converging on the lake, which sat huge and upright on the horizon as if it were a flat blue wall.
farmland is just really nice this time of year. i ended up picking some really great fruit on the side of the road. the peaches had already been harvested, but a very nice tree proferred the one peach it had left, and it ended up being one of the greatest peaches of my life. having left without the intention of such a big trip (i left originally to simply go to the post office), i had no water with me so grapes kept me slightly hydrated.
anyway...i felt really invigorated! the wind whipping in my face, snot dripping down my nose, saliva sticky and gross, pedaling along with no goal on bike that will probably break, in a different state than my starting point, stealing small amounts of fruit from honest hardworking farmers -- that's when you know you're alive!
today was a chilly, windy day today and i took a spontaneous, entirely improvised bike ride which lasted three hours and took me across somewhere in the vicinity of 20 miles. i can't believe i didn't die. awesomely enough, i learned that i'm in better shape than i would have guessed, 'cause though i got pretty winded, i barely broke a sweat.
i was riding an old bike which hadn't worked for the entirety of my college career (5 years). i had fixed it a week or two ago, and it had since broken on me thrice out of the three times i've ridden it. every one of those times i'd had to walk it home, sometimes with its back wheel refusing to spin at all (a bike without two mobile wheels is an incredibly cumbersome thing to have to walk with).
and the bike once again broke. i had stopped into an abandoned mini-golf course in new york state to try to obtain some pepsi from a cobweb-covered machine which turned out to not even be on, and the chain fell off. simple to fix, but enough to disuade me from penetrating deeper into the uncharted bckwaters of NY. i turned back and wended my way home, surrounded all the time by grapes. miles of grape rows, their parallel lines on a slow decline converging on the lake, which sat huge and upright on the horizon as if it were a flat blue wall.
farmland is just really nice this time of year. i ended up picking some really great fruit on the side of the road. the peaches had already been harvested, but a very nice tree proferred the one peach it had left, and it ended up being one of the greatest peaches of my life. having left without the intention of such a big trip (i left originally to simply go to the post office), i had no water with me so grapes kept me slightly hydrated.
anyway...i felt really invigorated! the wind whipping in my face, snot dripping down my nose, saliva sticky and gross, pedaling along with no goal on bike that will probably break, in a different state than my starting point, stealing small amounts of fruit from honest hardworking farmers -- that's when you know you're alive!