God the accountant

God the accountant:


Who else would be so obsessed with balancing the books that they would have everyone eat everyone else?

Gardening and me

It has turned out to be impossible for a man with my brownish-gray-green thumb to grow a proper garden in my yard. The skies of summer are soon heavily sketched over with a sprawling foliage of an oddly unbalanced oak tree and a towering pine tree that has waxed fat off of our sewage line. Every couple of years we have a sewer man come grind out our sewer pipe, driving a massive whirring blade through gluttonous pine tree roots. The pine tree is unphased by this, and it is now over 400 feet tall. At this point, gardening-wise, I mostly grow fruiting things that thrive yet bear no fruit (no raspberries, no grapes, and no apples). Most of our hostas do well and our creeping charlie is blossoming in purple even as I write this.

But a few blocks over from the house of my wife and I is the second oldest victory garden in the nation. We learned this fact at our orientation, an orientation we attended because we have obtained a plot there. The oldest Victory Garden in the nation is somewhere on the east coast. Our orientation host cast aspersions on this garden in the east, though I can't remember what those aspersions were. The upshot was that while our Victory/Community Garden isn't technically the oldest in the nation, by any of the really important standards it pretty much is.

We have already put a good deal of preparatory work into our sunny patch of land in this historic garden. And as composts and weedings and early seeds make their way into our plot I am finding much of my characteristic emotional relationship to the world expressed in my feelings of hope, anticipation, and despair surrounding the prospects of this garden.

I am fully convinced that our garden plot is going to provide so many glorious, sweet, and strangely wonderful heirloom tomatoes, peas, herbs, melons, onions, raspberries, and greens of all kinds that I will hardly know what to do with them all.

And I am equally sure that no seed will sprout, nothing will grow, and everything that does grow will wither and blacken on the eve of bearing fruit.

All my prodigious life experience tells me that something in between these two will happen.

But what is that to my feelings, which, while utterly blind as prophets, are nevertheless free of all time and faultless.

Inherent contradiction be damned, you will watch those feelings all come true, right here, should you dare to stay for the summer.

The first book

Here I am reading the first book.

Don't we all have a first book? The first book, made of meat and bone, we ever read?

I have not read this book in a long time.

When I was 15 my mother brought home from the library some books by Steinbeck. "You might like this." She said. This makes my mother sound like a good mother. She wasn't. But there, in that moment, in that act, she was. If only we could have multiplied that. 

Alas that one times one is one.

I had read books before Tortilla Flat. A couple years earlier I had read The Lord of the Rings. But to my 13 year old mind that wasn't reading. It was a wonder unto itself. Some things are like that. Some things are so great they are the entirety of their own category. Later, perhaps, one can understand them with some perspective, but really, they don't have much to do with anything else. Maple syrup, the paintings of Caravaggio, Blood on the Tracks, Lionel Messi.

Tortilla Flat, briefly, is about young men and the love of cheap wine and a few other things. It is almost a fable. In case you've forgotten. Or never been there. Because the book is a place.

Tortilla Flat is not on its own in greatness like maple syrup, the paintings of Caravaggio, Blood on the Tracks, and Lionel Messi, despite its wonders, but it was the beginning of literature for me. I read through something close to all of Steinbeck's books shortly thereafter. I have not read any of his books for decades except that maybe I reread Grapes of Wrath somewhere in there, and I live Of Mice and Men. What can I tell you about Tortilla Flat? My mind is furiously more full of things than it was 35 years ago. But it is a pleasure to see it invaded again, suffused and hypnotized by a whole and other place.

How about a quote from the book. Maybe it can be about the mother who brought me the book, or about libraries, or about Tortilla Flat itself, your choice:

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous.


And here is the thing: I don't care whether I agree or not. I have visited another world.

No blood on my hands

Early this evening, exhausted, I lay on the couch, my head on my wife's arm, lap, leg. I am dozing. I am remembering a long ago time with her. I am remembering being 17, having left a work/study program with few funds, sleeping rough on the hard floor of a temple in Jerusalem. A ragged night, one of cold, discomfort, kindness, and fear.

I have toyed too much with regret. I have too often suggested in myself the rewriting of the past. But slipping in and out of some evening nap, remembering, I was made whole. I was freed of all regret by the fullness of a recognition:


To change the past we must be the murderer of everything that came after.

Dear literary agent

Dear Literary Agent,


As a literary agent you have been waiting your whole career for me to write you. You did not think it would happen, and yet here it is.

No, you don't know me.

No, you have never heard of me.

Perhaps it would be expedient for you at this point to pause in your reading of this letter to consult the enclosed examples of my work. I'll wait here...


I know, right? It's like turning over a rock and finding William Shakespeare, only not writing plays and not dead and using a contemporary vernacular. It's like finding someone is writing the Tao Te Ching before your eyes, only nothing at all like Tao Te Ching in any way, and far better.

At this point one question is undoubtedly foremost in your mind: "Why are you not terribly famous?"

I feel the answer to that should be very clear from this letter. I am terrible at marketing. Why, look at how badly I am marketing to you right now!

That's where you, a literary agent, come in.

As you know a great literary agent can sell two things: Great works that no one in their right mind wants to read until they've been properly marketed to (think, for instance, Finnegans Wake), and worthless formulaic writing that no one in their right mind wants to read until they've carefully been marketed to, like unto pushers hooking innocents like it's an addictive drug (think, for instance, the work of Lee Child).

This is why literary agents, marketers, and publishers are so essential. You alone create the link between writer and reader. You alone create all fundamental interest in any new works of literature anywhere.

It is a terrible burden!

I am here to help you.

Once, when you were younger, you perhaps had exalted dreams for the work of a Literary Agent. But alas how the mundanity of it all challenged those dreams! The addictive drug writers, such as James Patterson, were many, and the money from their representation was some succor, but it was not ennobling. It did not touch on your mighty, secret dreams. The James Joyces of the world were very few, and doubt rose in you and you hid away your dreams. You dampened your mighty, essential skills because your heart did not sing with the full pride it was entitled to.

I am as great a writer as James Joyce. I rival William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Oh, sure, not in my use of language, or storytelling, or subtlety of expression, or power of poetry. But what is that? I am a visionary, the word of God, the sword of justice. I am just the sort of person who needs a mighty Literary Agent.

You can be that person.

I am not popular. I will always criticize the wrong things. I am not on the side of man and I do not get along with the gods who spur me on and shower me with gifts I spurn and resent. In two years of hard work writing and blogging I have attracted roughly 30 regular readers. This number would dwindle every day, but is too small to do so, so has to dwindle on a monthly basis. It draws near to the point where it must dwindle on a yearly basis.

I am a terrible challenge that no sane Literary Agent would embrace. But calculations of sanity must sometimes be set aside to prevent the soul from withering.

Your destiny has come. Let us ride out to a glorious defeat!

Inflate your take home percentage if you must, I am no businessman, but say yes. There is a mighty work to be done.


Yours,

Feldenstein Calypso
www.clerkmanifesto.com
Writer

Amazing true life library story

So there I am at the front desk of the library. A woman comes up to the desk with 11 or 12 DVDs she pulls messily from a bag. She wants to check them out. Or, more accurately, in a world full of self check out machines, she wants me to check them out. I don't mind. I start checking them out. It's very easy. At around DVD number eight I come, surprisingly, to a duplicate. This woman has two copies of a movie called Last Vegas. That's okay. At my library you can check out as many of the same copy of something as we have on the shelf. For instance, people sometimes do this with books for book clubs. We even have "book clubs in a bag" that include ten of the same book.

But people don't usually do this with movies, so I figure I'll just check.

"Do you want both of these?" I ask, holding up the identical DVDs.

A look that I would describe as "faint surprise" fleetingly crosses her face. "No." She says flatly. "I don't want either of them."

To get to the other side

I think there's going to be a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.

I have been biking again. It is part of an elaborate patchwork of activities I am engaged in these days. When I bike I skirt along all the outside edges of what is safe, customary, and legal. I like to think I am a safe biker (my slow speed surely helps!), but, if what everyone likes to think were true, this world would be dazzlingly more bizarre, impossible, and wonderful than it ever will be.

Or so I like to think.

But here is what keeps happening to me: I navigate one of my odd, stealthy, crafty street crossings, all based on cars just continuing to drive as they're legally supposed to and are inclined to do, and yet, they don't. I am timing everything, my brakes, my slow gathering of new speed, to slip through a certain gap in the traffic, just so, and the car stops. The car stops to be nice. The car stops to let me go in front of it. The car stops to help me. But first I must brake out of caution and reorientation. My gears are now wrong, and so is my momentum. They are waiting now as well, so I have to make some serious getting started effort, usually standing in the pedals to drive their heaviness forward. Plus I have to wave to acknowledge the driver and thank them for their misguided and inconveniencing kindness to me.

Actually, I'm still not sure what the moral of this story is, but it does perhaps say something about my preference for walking, especially on paths, far from roads.

They find me

My river walks are so good now, deep in the lost world of sewers and geese and walking trees and mad and generous graffiti, that it could take many small essays here to tell you about them.

I have been reading a book (Father Goose) much involved in the affairs of migratory geese. This has made me acutely aware of the many geese I have been encountering down on the river. I stop stock still to watch a pair bank down to the river. I have been reading longer, far more knowledgeable accounts of their suitable anatomy and their mastery of flying than I would dare attempt to articulate here, but it makes me alert to the guiding spear of their long necks and the hundreds of tiny adjustments of their wings and bodies as they ease to the water.

Their great honking is more unmistakable.

When I get to the University my head is full of geese. I climb a long flight of stairs to the river road. I cross the road to a mighty staircase leading up to the heart of the campus. On the grassy hill there sit two giant turkeys.

Not a jealous bird the turkey, they welcome me with an astonishing placidity. I climb into the grass and squat with them awhile.

Nothing can ever be owned, and the wild things belong to no one ever. And yet it remains. These are my turkeys.

In the eye of the sun

The current version of my river walk is a great improvement on all my previous routes. I now leave the river road and its well traveled paths, descend roughly 200 stairs (passing, twice in a row now, an Indian man in orange Syracuse University sportswear who likes to walk with his eyes closed) until I am on a quiet, spacious path skirting the edge of the Mississippi River. It is a secret world down there of geese, brilliant graffiti, and strangely appealing city drains, tunnels and sewers. It is an underbridge land of trolls and walking trees and trickling cliffs. Walk through the river paths and you thread the needle of the city, floating through its mystical heart. Like all things that are slightly too good to be true it is prone to be forgotten. I forgot it. I just remembered it again.

What a thing to stand alone in a paradise, in a magic looking glass of the sun, on the banks of a legendary river, and see two bridges, high up, full of cars in construction traffic, all lost souls in line with some demonic plan.

My exalted superiority is temporary. I'm on my way to my car too. I'll join them soon enough, but for now, the whole city is mine alone...

Minneapolis

I don't know how many American Cities have so brilliant a casual display of public art as does the very route I walked this morning in my own city, Minneapolis. All of them, perhaps? Most of them? None of them? If they are as good as my city there is probably the same trick to it. You have to go to just the right places. This is not Rome where there are few wrong routes. There is no Rome in America. We have to get by on something less than Bernini fountains everywhere, corkscrew towers by Borromini, and 600 year old churches full of Caravaggios to wander into. But if you thread your way correctly here you can stumble on a satisfactory enough magic. 

You can head down from Franklin Avenue through bits of Gothic river wilderness festooned with bizarre and seriously accomplished graffiti art. I saw one piece featuring the unlikely colors of army greens and sick-candy pink, all popping with sparkling special effects of lighting. A striking piece that says "Obertparf" is not quite as visually accomplished as "pink and green", but I am pretty sure the creator of it can fly like a hummingbird. They'd have to have flown to have gotten their paint onto the hair raising ramparts of the Highway 94 understructure. Not much further along one can climb an epic series of staircases out from the river until it terminates in a curving and luscious 17th Century Florentine fountain by Pietro Tacca. I'm not kidding. Some kind of dual bronze Merman spouts streams of water into a pool from atop a stained marble column. Bronze fish of twisting late baroque detail hang from the side. It was donated in the sixties before rich people became completely useless. From the fountain you can step through the Coffman Union, full of an astonishing number of nearly dead students jacked into their laptops' portable realities, and turn left at the light rail for Frank Gehry's Weisman Museum building, our shimmering, aluminum, best piece of architecture, gleaming out above the river in a jumble of undefinable shapes.

And then of course, there's the turkeys. Not a bad city in the right light.

Care and feeding of volunteers

The word has come down from on high in my library system. Fortunately that is not a very long way to travel, just a very short, steep pitch. And the word is about our volunteers.

We have a lot of volunteers working at my library. Some are good, some are not, but it doesn't matter a lot either way because most of their work is in the more bulk categories. I know some of the volunteer's names well. Some volunteer's names I should know but don't and have to ask my co-workers "What's his name again?" before I slowly begin to forget it again. But there is no reason I should know all of their names.  Too many come and go in too many ways and at too many times for me to know that.

But the word is that the volunteers are precious and valuable. The word is that the volunteers often work here to be part of a community. The word is that many volunteers seek to be part of our socially maladjusted library world.

Lo, the word is, from on high, that we are to, indeed, treat the volunteers as staff.

I feel all kinds of different ways about all kinds of different volunteers, but that, treating the volunteers like staff, is more unkind than I am willing to be.

A question

Welcome to the Internet. You are now asleep. Everything here must be done in dreams. Your eyes are shut here. You believe phantoms, and this is all your imagination.

"Why would I imagine this?" You ask.

And I am heartened by your question.

If I am merely now an agent of your dreams why don't I behave like all the other agents of your dreams? Why do I keep calling out "Wake up. Wake up." What is the purpose of a dream that asks you to wake up? All the waking up in the world will not get you there. Neither will sleeping. There is a third way.

I implore you to create me, your agent, as the person who describes the third way. 

I have no other way here to find out.

As I would tell Chuang Tzu in order to head him off: We wake up to find ourselves asleep, and we must wake up again.

The immortal quote

There is no shorter path to immortality than writing a really, really, fantastic quote.  The person who coined the phrase "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" will be remembered forever. Why, I was fondly remembering John Capgrave just the other day, good old John Capgrave, and it has been vast hundreds of years since he jotted down that pithy piece of advice! Aye, the quote is so old that it originally looked like this:

It is more sykyr a bryd in youre fyste
Than to have thre in the sky above


"Hey," You wonder in an only mildly interrupting way "How, in the excitement of dashing off a really splendid bon mot, do I know if it's just pretty clever or if it's a quote for the ages. How do I know if I've struck pay dirt, achieved immortality, and can finally relax and stop trying to say wise and witty things which so wear me out?"

I am here to provide you with a litmus test for your clever sayings. It is not enough for you to think you have hit upon something witty to the point of legendary. You must observe at least three of the following signs to be assured that people will be echoing your statement for millennia to come.


1. You are already famous. Sorry, this one sets the bar kind of high at the outset. It may be a little like this (adapted version of a) Steve Martin joke: I will tell you an easy way to make a million dollars! First, get a hundred million dollars... And, actually, the principle of the thing is pretty much the same.

2. When you say your brilliant, pithy quote people act as if they've been hit by a bolt of lightning. Then they either say "Wait. Say that again." or "That's really quite good. No, seriously, that is quite good!"

3. After a reasonable gestation period you start to find your quote being attributed to Mark Twain or possibly Lady Gaga. Hold tight, eventually the quote will be re-attributed to you, unless, of course, you stole it yourself. If that's the case you should try to limit your time with Lady Gaga for awhile.

4. You are killed in what is clearly a miraculous act of God just moments after speaking your for the ages quote.

5. Your quote clearly seems to fix the world for the better. But beware, the bar is high on this one, only two quotes have ever met this standard, one by Chuang Tzu and one by Groucho.

Remember, you only need for three of these conditions to be true, but it has to be at least three. Bartlett awaits.

Go Tigers!

In the fantasy version of my blog people were so distraught when I raised the subject of "what I am currently reading", but did not actually say what I am currently reading, that I was besieged by irate Western Union Telegrams. I received so many telegrams asking me what I am currently reading that I am now sort of friendly with the Western Union Telegram boy and am planning on going to his high school baseball game this weekend (Go Tigers!). I also learned about his sick sister and his family's struggles on their small farm near Faribault. Everything seems to hinge on this year's beet crop. Did you know that many cultures believe that if a man and woman eat from the same beet they will fall in love? If I had known that useful fact I would have been sneaking portions of my beets into my wife's food back when I was 17. Although everything worked out, beets or no, eventually.

But aren't we drifting rather far afield from my fake subject? I believe we are. I believe we were pretending that everyone is dying to know what I'm reading, and that everyone around here prefers to communicate with telegrams, and that they grow a lot of beets in the Faribault area. And that the Faribault Tigers are three and one thanks to their star pitcher, a Western Union Telegram boy, who has yet to allow an earned run all season. Go Tigers!

Hmm. We drifted again. There must be a strong northwesterly wind again on my blog. My blog is frequently beset by gusty winds!


 Here are the books I am currently reading:


Golden Son, sequel to Red Rising. Not exactly dystopian, Sci Fi class struggle revolutionary military soap opera. Yes, it's all a bit breathless, but pretty good on the occasions I understand what's going on.


Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. Speaking of not understanding what's going on! This is a 2300 year old collection of Taoist blog posts! Yes, blog posts! Exactly like mine, only slightly more so. Which of ours is better? There is no better. We are the same, but different, but the same because we're different, but different because we're the same.


Sisters, an appealing YA graphic novel memoir. It's about sisters! Actually, I finished it in something close to one sitting somewhere in the vicinity of writing this post, so I think it counts as "What I'm Reading."

The Sellout. A breathless, very funny satirical snark on matters of race. I spotted it while feeding items onto the library check in machine. It made me laugh very quickly so I proceeded to carry it around with me for a couple hours at work, reading it every chance I got. However, it turns out that critics of stature are pretty crazy about this book so there's a wait list. I am on the wait list now. That wait list is a killer for me though, I rarely make it through books that are so admired, and so there's a good chance I will never read this book again.

Father Goose. The memoir of an inventor and ultra light pilot who started flying with geese and then teaching them new migration patterns. This inspired the lovely movie Fly Away Home. The girl character and thus the whole main plot of that movie though is all made up.


Cats and Other People. I am slowly reading it to my wife at night. In the 60's and 70's there were a lot of memoirs about life with a cat or cats. It's a forgotten genre I am interested in. Most of the ones I've read so far involve single men living in New York and the story of their relationship (mostly) with one cat. This one is about a woman on the East Coast and all her relationships with all the cats in her life ever. 

Those are all the books I can remember and piece together from my list of items checked out. The odds are that in the next few days I will come across one or two books and say "Oh yeah. I forgot to include this one."  Nevertheless, being able to report six books is, I feel, a very respectable showing, and should be enough to stem the flow of irate imaginary telegrams, which, after all, is the reason for this accounting.

Fountainhead meets Communist Manifesto

As you probably know, as many books as possible these days are sold through use of the mashup; that is, the comparison of said book in your hands to the confluence of two other well known books. The mashup is irresistible marketing. You can do it in one short sentence taking up surprisingly little space on your precious covers. You get to put your book into the direct company of two other vastly more famous, beloved, and respected books. And you get to allude to a dynamic frisson of alchemy, a brand new taste made up of your favorite old tastes. I can futilely try to describe my blog for hours, but if I said my blog is like Don Quixote meets Bartleby, the Scrivener you would probably, um, be just as confused as ever. But that is only because I am a really bad marketer. A good marketer would probably say something more like "Clerkmanifesto is like Alice in Wonderland meets Catcher in the Rye." and you'd probably want to read it even if neither of us have any idea what that might mean.

But all this is an almost entirely pointless introduction to the trivial thing I am bursting at the seams to tell you. While shelving up here at the library today I saw a book with a truly terrible mashup on it. It was: "Catch 22 meets Tom Clancy".

And so here is my lesson to all you many book marketers who pour over my blog in a wildly misguided attempt to glean tips: You cannot have a mashup of books that are too similar to each other (It's Pride and Prejudice meets Bridget Jones Diary, for instance), and you cannot, absolutely cannot mashup two things that are intrinsically opposed to each other- no Fahrenheit 451 meets Mein Kampf, no Fountainhead meets The Communist Manifesto and definitely no Catch 22 meets Tom Clancy. I don't care if you were able to trick our fiction librarian into buying it. It's wrong. It's wrong, and I will be hiding it in one of our cushy chairs until it's time to weed it.

What are you reading?

Not long ago I was frequently getting asked "What are you reading?"

I find this a distressing question. Not because I don't like it. I do. If anything I like it too much. What a glorious opportunity to talk about me, books, and my opinion. What a lovely time to reflect, notice, and coalesce all my feelings and opinions about what I read. 

I have a lot of feelings and opinions about what I read.

You may have noticed that, in general, I have a lot of feelings and opinions about everything. Indeed I am aflame with feelings and opinions around here, especially ones you cannot find anywhere else, like:

Cashews are delicious.

What's that?

Really?

I don't know. I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to notice that, but I'm not here to argue.

I'm here to tell you that, despite relishing being asked what I'm reading, I'm bizarrely terrible at answering the question. I may be reading eleven books, staying up too late to do so, squeezing 15 minutes of reading into impossibly small spaces, like seven minutes, for instance, but ask me what I'm reading and, poof, it's all gone. I can't remember a thing!

But since I kept getting asked what I was reading I started paying attention and sort of memorizing it. Sick of these weird brain freezes of mine I have made the effort to prepare. I have started walking around with a wee, updated list in my head of just exactly what I'm reading. I am ready.

Ahem, I am ready.

And then suddenly no one is asking what I'm reading.

No one.

Nobody.

What's that?

Really, you really want to know what I'm reading?

You're not just asking to be nice?

Okay! Ready?

Oh bollocks!

I think there was something with a bluish cover. Does that help?

Enough with the wrath of god stuff

Yes, it does not meet with much success to cast onto the Internet the intimations that I am the only voice of the gods currently speaking. If I read such a thing I'm inclined to think I wouldn't believe it either. Aye, I mostly don't believe it even though I am the very person who on occasion becomes the flaming sword of truth, the subtle knife, and the last rebellion against silence.

What does it look like anyway? There I am looking at some total nonsense on the Internet, just to put off, or to warm up to, writing. And reading along, your regular generic consumer, I am barely differentiated from millions of others. The differentiation is only in that I am just me, particularly and uniquely me. Only that slight and overwhelming distinction exists. And then I open up a document, I lay out the white page, and I am taken up as a pen in the hand of god. 

I am dipped in ink.

I am all the useless magic in the word.

Once again though I am just me, for there is nothing else to separate any of us but that, no act, no glory, and no agency.

And though I burn with the flaming branding of truth, the gods have never had anything particularly useful to say. What should I tell you? That we were made wrong?

No, I will say this: the heat is good, burning as the flaming sword of truth comes in handy late at night, writing in my basement. It can get quite chilly down here.

We are all immortal until we die

I ask you this:

Who will the gods give to be their voice but the one who cannot be heard?

Who will the gods give to be their voice but the one who faults them according to their powers?

Who will the gods give to be their voice but the one who so readily fails to persuade?

Who will the gods give to be their voice but the one who rewrites their scripts?



They are gods. I will fall into every one of their traps every time. But if I am lucky I will occasionally be able to take a couple down with me. 

The truth can be sad

I have always, through my life, done and said things that haunted me a little or sometimes more. I don't mean to speak here of things I regret. These, rather, are hauntings. The things that leave a strange aftertaste lingering in me for awhile. It is not easy to trouble out their meaning.

It would be safer to say less. I have learned slowly to keep my council some. But the power of that always is strange to me, even as sometimes it is essential. I am a jester, the word of god, a pin among the balloons, nonsense, a friendly word, a lot of thinking, and some not thinking enough.

All of them.

And so today my wife and I were driving home from a plumbing supply store. Near to the plumbing supply store is a Planned Parenthood. Out in front were the endless protesters, servants all, but only of men. I looked in the eyes of one of them, from the passenger seat of our car.

Did I flip him off?

No, no. I didn't feel angry.

Looking at him, I made the sign for madness, and we rode on to the next errand.

Fitness

I have been exercising more these days than I have in a long time. A back injury last fall led to a sort of rehab and then a steady routine of core exercising. That's three times a week and, despite my unideal inclination to think of it as half an hour of torture, it seems to be going okay. I feel very solid. I've been walking more too, and now that spring seems to be serious I am bicycling as part of my regular commute.

It's the biking that really seems to illustrate something essential about how I feel about all this fitness.

I walk over to the city bike rental station. There's a new one that's even closer to my house! Walking is splendid and beautiful, but it is hard not to appreciate the extra time that biking's quickness gives me. I get on a bike and the litany of its extreme virtues starts rolling through my head:

1. This is so lovely and quick.

2. This is much more real exercise than walking!

3. I can tell because I get winded.

4. And my thighs hurt.

5. The hills make my heart race!

6. I'm faster than joggers!

7. This is so healthy!

8. My thighs really hurt.

9. This is brilliant exercise! I should bike everywhere all the time!

10. I really wish this bike were electric.