Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Have a Holly Jolly Christmas



I hate to sound like a snob, but sometimes I can't help it.

Black Friday was a work day for me, but I read online about mobs, pepper-sprayings, bloody noses and other mayhem.  I also happened upon a music video about "Walmart People."   It celebrates  tolerance, acceptance and individuality, but some of the candid photos were of people whose behavior and appearance was so bizarre and unattractive that I imagine they only go out in public at night, to shop at Walmart.

Downtown Ferndale at rush hour
Monday I crept out to the mall myself, and found a bargain DVD, Bad Santa starring Billy Bob Thornton.  Now I am utterly cured of any lingering sentimentality about the holiday season.

I feel surprisingly cheerful.  I'm going to avoid shopping and dippy holiday soundtrack music, feast moderately, and appreciate the colorful lights that are beginning to brighten my ride home from work.


Monday, November 21, 2011

Thoughts on Mark Twain

Bicycling certainly keeps me keenly in touch with the rising and setting of the sun, the length of days, and the weather, but regular reports on the weather days after the fact aren't much use unless they're from a writer as clever as Mark Twain.  I happened upon the previous quote from Twain while looking for a good read to curl up with after coming home from work on a stormy evening.  The passage gave me an excuse to skip the weather report, and also brought back some strange but fond memories.

For Christmas one year my parents gave me copies of the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.  I was a little young for them, only about seven years old, not long past the school primer adventures of Dick, Jane and Sally, and accustomed to simple, direct, declarative sentences.  For the first few pages of Huck Finn I struggled with the ungrammatical dialect, reading where I'd dropped on my knees and elbows on a pile of clothes, toys and gift wrappings on my bedroom floor.  It was the first time I'd read a first-person, present-tense story written in the character's own voice, and I was amazed.  I must have been reading out loud, because I remember looking up at my parents peeking in my bedroom door.  "But this is REAL.  This is a REAL BOY talking to me in my head RIGHT NOW," I gabbled.  Then I had to get right back to reading the book, because that boy and his whole world disappeared from my head when I stopped reading.

After that I loved reading, and started saying I was going to be a writer when I grew up. Inevitably, I grew up to be an English major, but I've always been more of a reader than a writer.  All through school no one ever told me I was really a very clumsy and dull writer.  I had lots of ideas, but struggled to organize them into words and sentences; I would get impatient with the mechanics of getting words in order, and forget what I was trying to say.

Mark Twain was a writer who could handle his words.  Of the two candidates for Great American Novelist from my school English classes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the verbal writer, while Ernest Hemingway was the visual one.  This is something that occurred to me after I'd been blogging for a little while:  when I want to show the odd and lovely places my bicycle takes me, my first impulse is to just paste in a big, colorful, digital Polaroid shot.  Turns out I'm a visual thinker, not a verbal one, and writing doesn't come naturally to me, no matter how strongly reading grabs my imagination.  Maybe I need to re-learn to write like Hemingway did.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

See and Be Seen

Students can get discounts on bike lights and free clothing reflectors Wednesday the 16th from 10am to 1pm in Red Square as part of WWU's "See and Be Seen" safety campaign, and I urge all who can to take advantage.  This is prompted by my bus ride home this evening.  I rode the #27 about 5-6pm, and at several stops along Northwest Drive, people getting on or off the bus commented on their own poor visibility - including me.  We were all wearing black jackets and jeans, and were barely visible on the unlighted roadside.  I'll be getting out my geeky reflective jogger-vest tonight.

Earlier in the day on the way in to town, I saw a young man, possibly on the way to the community college, riding against traffic in the bike lane on West Bakerview Way, which is illegal.  I've seen a lot of this lately; maybe new students, or newcomers to Bellingham, are still making the transition from riding for play to commuting in traffic.

Most smaller communities in Washington base their bicycle laws on the state's.  You can look it up under Revised Code of Washington 46.61.750-790.  Basically, bicyclists are required to ride as far as safely possible on the right side of the road; if there is a separate bike lane or path they must use that instead of the sidewalk, and they must yield to pedestrians.  It is legal to ride on a sidewalk, pedestrian path or crosswalk if there is no designated bike lane, except in Bellingham where a city ordinance bans cyclists from sidewalks in the downtown business core (there are "no bikes" symbols painted on the street corners).

Many parts of the state's bicycle law seem ambiguous and conditional to me, but I think that's meant to allow cyclists to use their judgment about their abilities and what is safe under particular circumstances, for instance whether to make left turns from the car lane, or use pedestrian crossings.  Also, the street system and lane markings are inconsistent and still evolving, some intersections are asymmetrical, and bike lanes, pavement markings, and even pavement sometimes disappear abruptly, making it impossible to write a law for every circumstance.

Over the summer the senate passed SB-5362, the "Vulnerable User Bill" which increased penalties for car drivers found at fault in seriously injuring or killing a pedestrian or bicyclist.  Not much comfort to the victim, but it might have some preventive power.  The state also has RCW 46.61.667-668, banning hand-held cell phones and texting while driving.


Saturday, November 12, 2011

It's not that bad

THE WEATHER IN THIS BOOK
     No weather will be found in this book.  This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather.  It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.
     Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather.  Nothing breaks up an author's progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather.  Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.
     Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience.  That is conceded.  But it ought to be put where it will not be in the way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative.  And it ought to be the ablest weather that can be had, not ignorant, poor-quality, amateur weather.  Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article of it.  The present author can do only a few trifling ordinary kinds of weather, and he cannot do those very good.  So it has seemed wisest to borrow such weather as is necessary for the book from qualified and recognized experts - giving credit, of course.
-Mark Twain, introduction to
The Unabridged Mark Twain

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Adventure Commuting

Usually I work the second shift, beginning around eleven, noon or one o'clock, until six or seven in the evening.  Last Saturday I was scheduled for 8am-5pm, and was surprised to find it was still daylight when I left work.  Dusk was just beginning when I got home to Ferndale.  That will be the last time I see light skies after work for several months - Saturday night was the end of Daylight Savings Time.

On Wednesday morning a cyclist was hit by a car pulling out of a driveway on Northwest Ave.  Apparently he wasn't badly hurt, though he did go to the hospital, and the driver has been found and charged.  The cyclist did have legal lights and reflectors on his bike, but I often see (barely) cyclists in dark clothing with no lights.  Once I almost rear-ended someone walking in the bike lane wearing jeans and a dark hoodie, and one night a young deer crossed the road close in front of me, but I only saw its silhouette in the headlights of a car coming the other direction.

I'm always careful to wear light-colored clothing and put head- and tail-lights on my bike, and wear a helmet of course.  I think reflective wheel rims, reflectors on spokes, and light-colored, reflective clothes are especially important because they are recognizable as a person on a bike.  In dark, rainy weather small bike lights can easily get lost among all the other little spots of light along the road or look like stray reflections in rain spots on a car windshield.

I also try to vary my route and the time I leave work or home.  This is an old habit left over from being a single woman in the city.  A street bad-guy who spots a commuter walking, riding a bike or catching a bus at the same place and time every day sees someone with a regular paycheck, and could become a stalker to get a piece of it.

I was always glad to get to work in the morning at my old job.  I'd arrive early to get out of my layers of rain-gear, change clothes in the bathroom, clean the grit and rain-spots off my glasses and my face, put on warm, dry socks and shoes, then fix a nice, hot Ovaltine mocha in the breakroom.  The day could go straight to hell after the first twenty minutes, but I always walked in the front door smiling.