The perspective of walking and distance is an interesting thing. I park in a parking deck when I am at work. The deck is one block from my building. As I crossed onto the middle block today I noticed a fire truck down near where I was walking. And as I got closer I was having this on-again/off-again conversation about how the fire truck was positioned.
It was parked. The lights were on.
It is blocking the entrance and exit to the parking deck.
No it isn’t.
Yes it is. No it isn’t. Yes it is. And so on until, finally, I was there and could tell that the truck was blocking the entrance and exit.
There’s only one. It’s a small parking deck. There are three lanes, two are now devoted to entering and one to leaving. And the truck was blocking the one exit and middle entrance, like so.
I was parked on the second level. Near my car was a campus police cruiser. Unoccupied, but running. Not in a spot, but at one of those hasty angles police sometimes use. It was near another car and one of the corner stairwells. Downstairs were two fire fighters walking out. And another guy, who looked young, had a backpack and a low key fire department shirt on, just loitering at the entrance. You can see him silhouetted above.
And we’ll never know what took place in the parking deck today. It’s a mild curiosity, but, on the other hand, this experience could have been a really lousy day for someone. So that walking perspective is important here, too.
Someone could collect a list of stories like this, little tales with no known outcome, and write an anthology series. I wish I’d started this years ago.
But I suppose I was always too preoccupied with my other You’ll Never Know mind game: What’s the closest I’ve ever come to unwittingly walking over buried treasure?
Boats would count, too. When was I closest to accidentally discovering a lost Spanish galleon?
It’ll make you wonder, that game. But a short-story anthology might actually be more rewarding.
We went for a bike ride this evening. The Yankee has all but gotten her TT bike dialed in, as I feared. And, as I have prophesied, I can’t keep up with her in such a highly refined aero position. She’s too powerful. Also, let’s also blame the gearing. But not my lack of fitness. This too, requires perspective.
Tonight’s bike ride was about shifting your attention for half a sec — for a sip of water or to glance around or to breathe — only to see @LaurnSmith jump ahead by 400 meters or so, and then fight back, and then get dropped again, and then attack, and get dropped …
She’s fast. pic.twitter.com/QVoGY8wV14
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) June 10, 2021
That, I also noted on Twitter, is an old gif, and a different bike There was no way in the world I could get my phone out today. I was working too hard to make new art.
So this is how it works now. I have to wait for hills, or rollers, where I know I am sometimes just the tiniest bit better, and really work hard there and close down her advantage incrementally. (It takes many hills.) The rest is guile. Descend those little hills, corner aggressively, win a sprint when she’s just out for her ride and doesn’t know I’m trying to race back ahead of her. Which is how I found myself attacking in a left-hand turn three-miles from the house at 30+ miles per hour.
In her Strava notes, she wrote that it was categorized as an easy ride. It was not easy for me. This is what it takes just to keep up. Perspective.
