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January 31, 2006

Marcel's Winter Blahs

Probably just about now you are asking yourself, "Hey, what's up with Marcel?"

Well, you could say he has a little bit of the blahs.

A dawg can get a little down-in-the-dumps this time of year!

You know. He's a little bit uninspired.

But he'll be ok.

Really.

Posted by pippypippy at 05:56 PM | Comments (4)

January 21, 2006

snow ride!

Last night it kind of looked like winter around here! There was snow and everything. It started out as rain in the afternoon, when we ventured out, and slowly turned to snail! Yes! And was officially declared to be snail by the originator of the term, a Travesty, who knows about these things, and lots of other things too. Believe it! In any event, we experienced snail, a light-weight, bouncy hybrid of snowish hail, which gently taps on one's helmet and pingles on one's nose! We ate brunch and watched the snail from the window of the cozy Flying Saucer. The way home was a wee bit complicated! Was it food coma? Was it slush? Yes! It sure was! I know, because I saw it up close! My knee hit the ground, how was it that I failed to keep the rubber-side down!? Slush is an ugly business, and is unsightly on one's hand-knitted hand-warmers, truly. Anyway, I gotta bruised knee and some muck on my gloves, but other than that, am pretty unscathed. So there it is, my dorky bike confession! Well, there was at least one witness. I can't deny it! The rubber side was sideways, momentarily. Ahem.
And this was before the snow ride!
There were about 2 inches on the ground when we decided to go to the Handlebar and also do some errands, one for urgent girl stuff, oh yeah, is that TMI?? Well these things happen! It couldn't be avoided, thus, we trundled out into the sno-globe, the pretty, glittering sno-globe. So few words for it in English, that stuff the Eskimos know has so many more varieties! This was the big fluffy dense kind, swirling in streetlights, piling up in little mountains on one's hands and shoulders, melting in big watery blobs on one's face, in lakes and lakes of crystal tears. It was poetic! Even if words fail! Believe it! Tree branches coated with diamond ice, glittering and whatnot. It was a postcard of a night.
And plus, in wet, unplowed snow you point your tires straight and pedal and then somehow they have minds of their own, and skitter and skate like nervous ponies! Tire ruts can be your friend, or not. Just one of many things I observed! Blinky-lights look pretty through the snow, another thing I learned because we weren't the only ones out!
This winter biking is a crazy business! (And I've only seen the tip of the iceberg.) There's more I could tell but here's the main thing~ this morning I went out and once again it was spring.
More later!

Posted by pippypippy at 09:14 PM | Comments (5)

January 14, 2006

Unparalleled and fuzzy! Memoirs of a smallish dawg

It started this morning when I was adding some links to the Knit-A-Log, and I ran across this
at 3 Quarks Daily. Where there are any number of eggheads posting all sorts of enlightening, edifying, trenchant and always stimulating stuff! The collective brane power of New York intellectuals, well, its staggering. See for yourself! (And if you don't know who Matthew Barney is, that's really ok.) So then I surfed over to McSweeney's and it was all straight downhill from there, because I found Fondling Your Muse and felt compelled to share. Maybe I'm easily amused but it made me laugh. Mostly because I spent some time playing with the Blurb-O-Matic, and thus, the title of this blog entry. And probably the very words Michiko Kakutani will write upon reviewing Marcel's memoir. A fuzzy record of love, hope, and despair that will leave you dumbstruck! Believe it!

Posted by pippypippy at 10:12 AM | Comments (2)

January 12, 2006

I should probably knit more

and think less.
Proceed with caution, as I am the bringer of doom today. Or at least a little bit melancholy. And gosh, I'd hate to bring anybody down on this tyranically gorgeous spring day we've got. I've also got a cold, so maybe stay back from your monitors, dudes.
Anyway, recently there has been some discussion amongst the online Chicago Critical Massers about~
ghost bikes. Go look at the photos, its really haunting. Plus, I've been long-distance cyber-haunted by bike ghosts, the Ghosts of Bicycles Past, it seems, have found their way to that most haunted of haunted places, New Orleans. It started with a group email received from Ben, a Rat Patrol acquintance, on his return from helping build bikes alongside Plan B. Community Bike Project. Some Rats went down and sent back detailed and sometimes grimly lovely accounts of what they saw. One offhand comment Ben made about Schwinn bikes (shipped to New Orleans from Working Bikes) caught me somewhat off-guard, he said," over and over I got a little thrill during the off hours seeing an old Schwinn ten speed with a decal from some long-dead bike shop in Winnetka parked in front of the grocery store or the local watering hole." For some reason it spooked me in an oddly profound way, because it referenced the place I grew up, and got me all in an existential tizzy contemplating the mysterious afterlives of bicycles, and other things, animate and inanimate. How many Schwinn 10-speeds were there in Winnetka? Oh, like 5 jillion, one most likely owned by the young woman next door who babysat me and my brother. Who recently passed away. See? Its a little spooky. Ok, maybe only to me.(Could it be I am only hoping, in some childish way, that parts of the past spontaneously resurrect, just as surely as they disappear?) Then I dreamt I was telling my brother that someone had seen his old bike in New Orleans. And then I thought about it all day in that way that dreams can pop into your head where you aren't really sure if you dreamt it or if it happened.
And once again I am off and running, because time is breathing in its way, collapsing and expanding again, pretty much audibly. And I am wondering if the spirit of the rider really does inhabit some part of the vehicle. In the case of bicycles, they are definitely generators of a unique joy and energy, more and more when you are intimate with the places you pass, and you come to know more faces of neighbors, and see your surroundings with fresh eyes from all sorts of previously unknown vantage points. It can be a little bit like flying. Ah, yes, waxing poetic at the Knit-A-log.

I gotta go out and ride my bike around and get some air for gosh sakes, and knit some striped socks, not at the same time, of course (gratuitous beautiful mouth-watering sock yarn I been eyeballing) because I haven't found a way to do that yet.

Oh, I need dawg photos, don't I.
Don't answer it!!!
I stop now.

Posted by pippypippy at 02:07 PM | Comments (2)

January 09, 2006

the mysterious nature of endings.

Life is strange, unpredictable, and cruelly short sometimes.
Its hard to know even how to talk about these things with sufficient reverence because one questions the absolute unknown, uncontrollable and inevitable, which might have beauty at its heart. And yet the fact is the world has shifted, someone has passed from us. I'm always left wondering if they've gone somewhere better, and if there was small thing that could have happened differently so they would still be here. Or if there is some reason that we don't understand and in the end it will all be explained.
Maybe it sounds obvious, I don't know because I'm in it, I'm thinking about it. Like how one can't cling to everything forever, and yet so wants to. I don't want people to be left, and I don't want to think of my own leaving. Sigh.

This morning I learned of the death of a woman who had been a family friend, our next-door neighbor where I grew up. She was a favorite babysitter to my brother and me, and also other neighborhood kids. When I was little I thought she was the most beautiful woman on earth. She had long, dark, wavy hair, to the middle of her back, pale delicate skin, pink cheeks and huge dark eyes, she was a living Snow White who gave us airplane rides on the grass in the summertime. She was in high school and we looked up to her and watched as she studied, once she even spent time explaining algebra to my brother, who was enthralled by numbers. She went to Yale, which adults spoke of approvingly, and I thought to myself someday I wanted to be just like her, smart and beautiful.
Rightly she was named Grace, and at the age of 46, she is gone from a long illness with breast cancer.
She was dearly loved and will be missed.

*****

Also, a member of the biking community was killed in an accident with a car last week. I didn't know him but he was an active part of the larger biking scene, and well liked by many who were acquainted with him. He was 50 years old, a friend of many, a father, a husband, a Freak Biker For Life. He rode a chopper covered in blinky lights and equipped with a siren.
The details of what happened are unclear, but the story is that he was not riding but standing on the sidewalk at the time. Then a van hit a cab, which ran up onto the sidewalk and hit him as he stood next to his bicycle. This was on Western Ave, near Augusta, in front of a laundromat, where a smallish shrine has been erected.
Anyway, Saturday evening there was a memorial ride, called by a close friend of Isai, the man who was killed. A group of riders gathered on North Ave, and rode to the site of the accident to pay our respects.
I think a lot of us are still left with a feeling like we need to do something.

This is the gathering of riders at the beginning of the ride.
There were lots of freakbikes, including Travesty on the drumbike.

This is the drumbike by itself, before the ride.

And plus here I am in my orange scarf, getting started on the ride.

Big thanks to Don S. for permission to use his photos.

Posted by pippypippy at 12:56 PM | Comments (6)

January 06, 2006

Bark-lava?? Balaclava!!

Marcel was hoping for a sticky Greek pastry but instead he is all set for winter biking. Or holding up a 7-11, but he's too short to see over the counter. Marcel would never do that!!!
Anyone who knows me would have been very surprised last night to see a Pippy on a bike on North Ave. in January. But its amazing what I can be persuaded to do when there are pancakes involved. Also, the thing I've found is that biking in winter is better than walking because you get there faster and you sweat. Sometimes. But for dawgs sakes wear enough protection on your digits!
In any event, the thing is there is cold and there is f****** COLD. Lately its just been cold. And cold isn't so bad. Plus then you have an excuse to drink more coffee.

Posted by pippypippy at 12:22 PM | Comments (3)