Efflux Riparian

What attracts humans to water? Endless thirst? Despite floods, people pay a premium to live alongside bays, coves, estuaries, lakes, ponds, or rivers, sometimes want burial at sea. Frequent fog and rain cut any sense of posh riparian space. During storms a rising sea is an unseen menace. Droplets of water exhibit cohesion; they are chemically designed to chase and cling. Humans flock and gang together, or insist, even stalk, whenever ignored. Tears sting with salt. Also like seawater, blood dissolves, foams, pulses, perhaps stains, and rushes to intermingle. A body wants to be inside another body, back in a warm, wet sack. At 7 weeks embryos of fish and humans appear identical.

Aquatic craniates are man’s earliest ancestors, evolutionarily speaking, and everybody still has structures related to fins and gills. So, a woman does need a man like a fish needs a bicycle, after all, which is to say a partner for species propagation if not traditional monogamy.

In contemporary Russia, Pussy Riot rejects patriarchy and pretty much has had it with Putin’s repressive politics. Barely adults, they’ve already spent years incarcerated for their dissent, as portrayed in recently screened HBO documentary, A Punk Prayer, directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin. Not confined to Eastern Europe, female issues peaked in 2013, a year of gender controversy. Conservative policies that exclusively cater to state religions endlessly result in tentacles of inequality. Yet without prayer and respect world would definitely be poorer, perhaps unlivable. Studies in America report that females get 75-93% as much as males for same jobs. Their view to the top is clear through a prohibitive glass ceiling. Why let an eroding undercurrent poison business, governance and interpersonal relations? Why ignore 50% of the population? Why not listen instead and proactively act? After effluxion over time, any social contract expires.

Routes cyclists take are not quite as fluid, more like taffy; you squish to hurry up, stretch to get in more miles. Firmament will always be fiction. Nothing lasts. Solid ground crumbles, sometimes turns into rushing mud. As a book, Bike&Chain likewise runs all over the place, torn in a thousand directions. Yet there’s an arc and center, even denouement, if no plot or purpose. Who isn’t pushed and tugged all over these days? Writers only mirror events, milieu, what’s happening. You weren’t born onto one side of issues promulgated only to exploit you. Matriarchy or patriarchy? Why not equality? Humanity moves forward united, will fall divided, wouldn’t survive without diversity. Growth and improvement can distance self from persistent deceptions and transitory illusions. To get there you must swim in facts within a school surrounded by sharks, not remain stuck on a shore of suppositions. This was B&C’s departure from fiction.

Agreed, novels have enormous influence, yet legitimize violence, whitewash root causes, and worsen insanity. Criminals and terrorists are inspired by novelists who write details that can be used to harm and maim. Fiction tends to fit into genres, tired plots with only names and places changed, and worship conflict. Instead, life itself resembles long stretches of boredom punctuated by rebellious bursts against inhuman oligarchs, not a scenario that fits neatly into a derivative genre. Devoid of any entertainment distractions, B&C tried to fathom the emotional bottom of interpersonal ethics. Is that even possible? Feel readers would rather be fishing for themselves than getting along by sharing.