You’re a school of clowns? Well, dang, you need yourself a minivan.

Can’t fit your TV set that you replace every seven years into your car? You need an SUV.

Hey, attractive lady who would never talk to me in a bar, it’s taking a long time to fill up your tank in that SUV. You should get something smaller and not wear so much denim. I prescribe for…A PRIUS!

I just want to kick him in the throat. That’s violent! I know, I should be grateful that Toyota has us all covered like that. Thanks, T!

Photo Friday: Comfort.

First, rules of the trail dictate that bikes yield to everyone. Everyone. Including and especially hikers. The rules also state that you announce your wish to pass via a bell or horn. Not and jerk-toned, “On your left!” I swear I wanted to clothesline a few of them sumbitches and then shake them and beg them to do two things that very few of the people I saw Saturday knew how to do:

1) Properly adjust one’s seat-post for the benefit of one’s knees and because people riding with their seats too low look, well, needlessly fat. I know. I made that mistake two years ago and got sore knees and unwelcome reflections of myself looking fat and squatted over in the glass of the carwash I drove past on the way to school.

2) Grease one’s dang chain. I muttered to one such wanker’s, “On your left!” with, “I know. I can hear your squeaky @#$%ing chain!” Seriously. When your chain is the color of fire, you’re in trouble.

There were some cyclists who paid attention to the rules and greeted myself and my ped-trekking pals with friendly “Hellos” and “Howyadoins.” There was also a crazy lady who passed us and almost ran into another cyclist that she should have seen, making the other lady stop. The not-at-fault had the manners to only calming say to the old lady, “You shouldn’t do that.” Someone, I’m not saying who, called the dumb and reckless one stupid. Not me.

However, if you cut off two guys on bikes on University Parkway last Friday and got an earful of some powerful words, that was me. Next time, I’m gonna let you graze me and pay my student loans off for me. That was also me giving METAL to the little guys at Gilman practicing I don’t know what.

You don’t know what METAL is? Well, you’ll have to find a North Baltimore Bike Brigade ride to join in on and experience it for yourself. There is one tonight, after dark. However, you know, the club is only two guys right now. But damn, we can do the METAL. It’s like fifteen guys. Honestly. With dogs and horns and guns and junk. Really. Wait till we get our T-shirts made. The first of the series will have the slogan: NO JERSEYS! Sorry if you wear them. But it’s funny.

This is a bench that is usually not underwater.

The water was very high, and there were parts of the beach I’ve never seen underwater before. There was a lot of rain in the days before our visit. The sky cleared as the commuter rail train got near Concord.

For Photo Friday: The Beach.

But I was in a band. And we were pretty good. We got an offer from a local indy label to do some recording after our guitar player showed them our demo, of a song called “Testikles” (pronounced like an old Greek name) that was mostly stacked-fifth chords, a la The Police. We were becoming good friends, enjoyed each other’s company. So when Paulie wanted us to play at the birthday party of his ex-girlfriend, we said we’d do it. I admit that I was not entirely on board. My school was showing The Rock outside, projected onto the library that night. I really needed to get to know more people at school, and there were not going to be very many people at the party to make it worth dragging our gear, setting up, practicing, etc.

But Paulie is just one of the nicest people I knew (and know still, like his brother), so we did it. I had some vintage clothes on. We video-taped it. Paul sang while he played drums because we didn’t have a singer.

There were exactly four people there beside us. A strange girl and the pompous guy she brought. The birthday girl (who would later date our guitar player and become our singer). And a tiny little dark girl in a red shirt with one of those poison/suicide rings, to whom I was asked to deliver a caffeine-free Diet Coke in a golden can on my way back from my last cigarette before we played. I look sullen in the video, even through the songs I really liked. I sat on the floor when I switched to my purple, sparkly five-string bass for a while.

But everything changed afterward. We all chatted. We watched Aladdin for the part when he says, “Take off your clothes.” We talked about how the girls at the party knew my brother because he was dating a girl who went to the same Catholic school that they did. And the petite, dark girl asked if she could braid my hair. I was never one to decline a girl playing with my hair, let alone one so attractive. So I sat on the floor, with her behind me, pressing her bony pelvis into my scrawny back. I was floored.

The rest of the evening is a blur. I don’t remember her leaving, but she left her poison ring, which I learned was returned to her later. We packed up and left. On the way down I-83, Paulie and our guitar player were in boisterously good moods while I drove my dad’s Blazer with our gear in the back. I was trying to be fun, but I was sad because — like most other times in my life — I didn’t ask the girl who braided my hair for her number or anything. I wussed out, and I was both sad and mad at myself about it.

Come Monday night, my brother comes to my room and says, “I heard you were picking up chicks at that party the other night!” “What the hell are you talking about?” He told me that a girl from the party asked his girlfriend for my number, that she dug me. That she corrected my huge mistake by getting a hold of me. That his girlfriend said she was pretty nice. A few nights later, my brother and his girlfriend were at the ring dance, and they saw my lovely. Gave her my senior picture from high school with my phone number in it without telling me, which she made her date hold (A friend of a friend who I don’t like to this day because he was with her as a friend that night — because I can be a freaking cowboy sometimes, too. I have it on good authority that I am a much better bassist than him, too, but he’s never been anything but nice to me, so I should not take so much pleasure in that).

A week later, on the next Saturday, we spoke on the phone. Her parents had their number blocked, and my parents block the numbers of people who do that. So she was on the phone with the operator, trying the code. When she finally got through, I was out, so I called her around 11:00 p.m. My brother’s girlfriend wrote her number down for me, a PA number. I still have that paper.

We talked for three hours, long distance, which was expensive in 1997, remember. We talked about the female singer we auditioned for our band that day, how we tried to freak her out, how I smoked a Camel Red with my own blood on it and felt sick afterward. How she wanted to go to Harvard, major in history, be the President, how she thought the sound of me smoking over the phone was attractive. We made plans to talk later that week.

I was beside myself.

And surprised by the truth of that old adage about finding true love “when you never expect it.” I found it at a tiny party I almost didn’t go to. And today, ten years later, she’s ten feet away, drinking coffee and smiling at me.

This is the view from my kitchen window the other night. Monday was a crazy day, as I had a difficult application for a job somewhere I would love to work. So I snuggled up with a good book, and I did the same thing last night.

I’m reading The Namesake (which was a film this spring, but I missed it). It’s fantastic. It keeps having me run to the kitchen for tea between chapters. Even made chai latte’s last night. The author talks about tea a lot. When a certain person in the book died while I was reading last night, and I had to finish the chapter and stop reading. It was very sad.

It’s going to warm up for a week starting tomorrow, but that’s Okay. Late September 82 is not the same as July 82. It’s much cooler than where I used to live right now (and save your anonymous comments — it’s a fact; I checked). I am hiking to Pennsylvania Saturday (not from the city, though) to practice for a larger and longer hiking weekend next month, in the mountains of Western Maryland. It’s supposed to be 87 Saturday, but I don’t care. Eighties for the first day of fall on Sunday would have pissed me off in the past, and not just in Illinois. My first fall in Massachusetts was disappointing, too.

I had a nice bike ride with my bike buddy yesterday to and through Druid Hill. We are seriously thinking of founding a modest bike club. I think I’ll buy a wheel truing stand to make it official. If you live in North Baltimore and want to be a part of our sissy gang, email me.

[Also for Photo Friday: The City.]

It was an Okay phone. Despite being more polite than the cleavage-lady, the guy who sold us our phones didn’t know his products enough to know that this one did not have the web, which I was pretty used to having. Not having a computer in my office during my first years of graduate school, I liked being able to check my email anywhere. And to have something to do while my wife tried on clothes and took a long time in the bathroom at a restaurant.

I didn’t want an mp3 phone with accessories to buy and take care of, but I did want a camera and the web. The camera because I always see things on my bike that I can’t photograph because I don’t take my camera with me on two wheels without a bag. And even with a bag, I can’t get it in traffic. The web because I missed it.

So the big V owns me for two more years. But I got a cool little black phone that has the ringtone from The Life Aquatic on it. Put there by my brother who is nice and awesome. I’d promise not to subject you to camera phone pics on here, but the city just put a new bike lane on my street. And it’s calling me.

I get, plainly, spoiled on my birthday by my wife.

This year, I got to drool over my gifts while we had crème brûlée and café au lait. The soundtrack to Amelie was playing. I got to watch all the trailers like I enjoy doing. And, I’ll say it: that’s a nice film for cuddlin.

My gifts from my wife were a star-shaped necklace made of recycled sea glass and the [then unavailable elsewhere] Library of America volume of Jack Kerouac. Awesome and delicious, like the treats we had the night before. And then I got to have a bratty birthday on the 30th…

Larger images at Flickr.

[Also for Photo Friday: Fantasy.]

So, at my local Giant, there is usually one express lane with a cashier and one normal lane. The rest are self-check-out lanes. I like them because I am good at the machines, and the Mrs. and I usually go together, so one of us fills the tote bags while the other “bip-bips.” Usually, the folks with cart-loads go to the cashiers, and people at that store are usually pretty good about being patient and not being jerks. The Mrs. has helped old ladies with the machines when they want to give them a try, etc. At another local market, a guy threatened an employee once over self-check-out, etc., but that’s another story.

So we’re behind this guy today. I’m nosy, so I look at some of the stuff he’s buying. Organic this, fresh that, not put into those stupid little plastic bags Same stuff as me, down to my loose tomatoes. He even has some cotton tote bags sporting “Trader Joes” on the side, and they looked dirty and well-used.

But the similarities ended there. Not only was he slow and seemed like he could not read, he was a jackass. Some soup from the deli was not scanning. So when he finished everything else, he just paid. I thought to myself, he’s take the soup — free soup! But no. He left it there. Right in everyone’s way. Which is as good as stealing it. It’s not like they can sell it now. So the soup and the plasticized paper container are wasted. What a wanker. And what a wanker I was for not telling him, throwing it at him or otherwise not letting him do that.

We checked out and filled our totes before he could bag, and he didn’t buy much more than we did. After we left, the Mrs. said, “I guess he just shops at Trader Joes because it’s fashionable.” I said, “What a wasteful d!ck.”

I don’t mean to sound preachy. But yeah. I didn’t stick around to see how big his SUV was. Yeah. But I’ll bet my bike it was big. I know, organic stuff being fashionable has really helped it become more widespread. Same with farmers’ markets. But last time I was at the Waverly Farmers’ market, a lady in a $300 bike helmet butted in front of the Mrs. at the bakers. The same day, some yuppie douch in head-to-toe Eddie Bower didn’t just butt in front of me; he stepped on my feet — both of them. I called him a choice name, but I don’t think he heard me.

I like Whole Foods a lot, and there is one in Mt. Washington — only two or three miles from me, which does not take me long on a bike. But I can’t stand to shop there. They have one bike rack which some jerk always locks a bike to parallel to the rack so that no other bikes fit it, so I have to find a sign that will take a U-lock. If I don’t almost get run over by a Yukon or a Benz on the way in, I can barely get in the door because of the look-at-me’s standing around pretending to read labels like they know what the hell they mean. I know Whole Foods would not be growing without such money-laden tools shopping there along with people who know what they are buying and why they are there. But still.

I don’t want to get into a “who’s greener?” pissing contest with anyone. Or who’s more wasteful after the harassing comments from someone in my department last summer when I all but came out and said that I did not like living in Carbondale (as if that’s such a bad thing). But sometimes the whole “I love the planet, but I need my SUV” thing makes me think and feel how I could just kill a man. But. You know, I’d never actually hurt anybody. I’m just sayin.

Dan, rocking light sabers this spring. Mix them, and you get purple, for Photo Friday: Purple.

Man, I had a busy weekend, which started Thursday. I’ll write about it Tuesday. I’m tired. And full.