Fussy note of the day: *** Not from the bicycle's perspective as the title may suggest (though that would be degrees more poignant and desolate); title has the right rhythm/cadence/feeling as is, so it's there, though misleading ***
Bikes should never be stolen, especially ones that take on the intimacy of pain, self-reliance and companionship that accompanies a simple existence made concrete by muscle-pedal-chain-wheel transportation.
Of course, who's to blame? The victim or the thief? Most often the victim probably. In this case for sure - a beautiful, hot bike cable-locked to a tree in the heart of midday Cal-Berkeley's campus. Tragic ignorance.
Walked around the Oakland Flea Market the next morning: cars, a blue, aching god-knows-what machine, bicycle tires, more than a few disabled, rough armoires, a restful chaos of perhaps useful things - just focus on one rusty or semi-tattered item at a time. Dance along the miraculous, apparently straight paths through the junk, the piled, ramshackled Toy Story despair of usefulness in a hopeless borderland.
I arrived a little after opening time, a guy in a semi-nice VW pulled up and looked to get in. We talked for a second, re-determining the opening time, now 20 minutes past. "It's one of those places where that's fluid," I said, with a slight glance to the junk in the open-air, and then I walked back down the street to the corner "not just another wifi shack" cafe to not-contemplate the soul-crushing reality of a beloved, used-everyday bicycle, stolen, gone, vaporized into the blue, sunny sky of the East Bay, dissipated through the red-green-gold redwood trees of Cal-Berkeley's grand entrance, just down-slope of one small, perhaps justified, tyranny.
It's the second life-altering stolen bicycle: the first was worse, just because a 10,000-plus logged miles and four-year, cross-country relationship is more like losing a partner than an item. Okay have to stop here ... RIP GF Paragon.
Hope, a useful endeavor? Craigslist, the Berkeley flea market, the absurdity of any immediate-action faultless despair.
"Ayaaaa..."
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