What are cars doing here

Its time for another post, most appropriately begun with a
random thought or analogy. 

 

What are the wind velocities influencing a tree about to
blown off a cliff in southwestern France?  And why?

 

In this most recent iteration of the journal of crazy
thoughts and sampled foods we’ll investigate the traffic design of automobiles in
their unending quest to firmly tramp down people’s creative personifications.  Just when are corporations going to introduce
creative facility into mass production? 
Certainly its been improving, but with the degree of automation taking
place in the transportation of goods, and the number of specializations which
have to be taken into account during the production of even the simplest
manufactured goods, why is personalization not a larger portion of the process.  Certainly you can change certain aspects,
size, color, heated seats, blah blah blah… Yet it seems if we standardize the
connection points (ex.  Weld points and
structural reinforcement joints), you can put just about any topping on the ice
cream as long as everything fits in the bowl. 
That may be a fairly obscure analogy to relate but it works… So why not
a civic front with a flat bed in the back, why can’t I have the dodge viper
combined with a Durango,
straight from the production line.  Why
go custom when it should be a fairly simple process of designing cars so they
can be made from a single blueprint, with an outer coat that fits just about
anyone’s wildest imaginations.  Naturally
you’d need the websites to confer personalization upon the consumer, yet that
doesn’t seem so difficult. 

 

I think I’m going to stop ranting and start yawning.  Maybe after the lunch run I’ll have something
more constructive to add to the poor souls of the world.

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Riding with the dead

Sometimes on hard pushes I'm finally able to dissociate from the world and focus.  Whether triggered by a happy moment or a long silence, a smooth road or beautiful vista, these moments are what I live for.  Today, on a 12 mile lunch hour circuit I've really enjoyed the past two times I've done it, I relaxed and entered "the mood."



I wouldn't call it a zone because it wasn't perfect and I knew that, I had other thoughts bouncing around the sides, but it was as close to the zone as I've been in a long long time and traveling through "the mood" lifted me higher and higher.  Perhaps its simply the endorphins picking their way through my central nervous system, activating long-lost cousins of good feelings and enjoyment...



It happened as I swung past my second cemetery of the ride, the smaller one on the nicer street, just a little past the town line for Brookline.  Enormous antiquated houses overshadowed the little road, pushing against the constraints of the concrete as if trying to swallow the link between modern society and their storied pasts.  Fortunately for me, while their efforts may not have been entirely  in vain, the laws of gravity and characteristics of dead wood kept me from their vengeful clasps.  Following this narrow road I entered "the mood" and began speculating on the true role of cemeteries.  My thoughts followed the contour of the land, rising and falling with the elevation gained and lost by my madly pedaling feet, but as with my physical being, they too pushed forward, driven by their own mad motors and levers of abstraction and creativity.  What is a cemetary?  A resting place? For those who no longer need to rest?  A internment for those who lack the ability to put forth effort and therefore do not require the recovery of the weary?  As I rode, my mind flew farther and farther from these first vagaries and drew closer to another definition, perhaps the cemetery is a symbol, one which we use to counterpose life against, for who does not think of their own lives as they visit those monuments to passage? 



Then I forced myself to concentrate.  The road was getting a little hairy with enormous potholes providing a vangaurd for the street canyons and sand traps on the outsides of most corners.  Luckily I flew through this area far too fast to do anything but smile grimly in retrospect at the various amounts of danger one can ignore while strenuously exercising on two square inches of rubber moving at 28mph.



My thoughts moved, as they usually do while riding, to issues of national importance; are my feet "scraping the bottom" of the rotation? How long can I hold this pace?  What's that sharp pain?  Who's looking at me?  Drop the butt?  Oh the burn...



82 days

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