Took from AIN

“Summertime and the living’s easy...” May be somewhere for someone. Nowadays, it’s when insurance premiums and property taxes come due, property maintenance and vacation spending occur, and utility and water bills peak. Must make hay and work overtime to cover savings hit. You save not for rainy but sunny days. In dead of winter where would anyone be without a warm memory of some primetime odyssey?

Anyone who's the least bit aware of current events already has PTSD. Systems based on humans suffer fatal flaws. From daily interactions one derives many a small insight, might even flesh it out with facts, form paragraphs, pen essays. Fakes scholarship truly but sounds pretty good to those desperate for certainty or security. Who's fooled? Change, violent at times, has always ruled. Agents of chaos and mayhem constantly surround. You only navigate around potholes, never fully alleviate anxiety’s tolls.

Free and wild, aboriginal people fulfilled every necessity themselves, didn’t take survival for granted, moved inland during summer to gather and hunt, shoreline in winter to harvest shellfish that cold kept from spoiling. Refrigeration reversed this perennial migration. A 1971 anti-litter campaign depicted a native chief shedding a tear for what motorists had done, though it was all a ploy aimed at a public shamed for imprudent habits so corporations wouldn’t be blamed. For a while some states did demand bottle and can recovery, pennies and nickels upon return. It didn’t keep America clean, only made a tiny opportunity for homeless trash pickers.

Money grubbers find gobs of drudgery; those who can rather pay someone else to do onerous chores in sweltering heat. Glorious explorers got bankrolled up front upon lure of riches, which resulted in Columbian Exchange that nearly wiped out AIN (American Indian Native) nations through disease, genocide and habitat destruction, though since last ice age they had thrived against animal predators using stone tools under harsh conditions. Americans today squirm in desperation; most scramble to make ends meet. Few care that Le Tour de France has begun. Science and technology over centuries improved quality of life, yet they demand constant renewal and surveillance lest they become a nuisance. Who more exemplified independence or merited a holiday?

Why not do projects for neither compensation nor credit, just because they’re interesting? Later, when others reap rewards, underpaid contributors resent them, too stressful and unsettling for many including millennials. Internships and volunteerism slyly renew slavery. Stubborn souls do just do stuff, pursue as if a hobby, shut up about it, then turn professional due to experience. In collaborative teams, writers used to produce reams being hopefully speculative, it seems. But times have radically changed. You can’t live well scraping up pittances, only by scoring on successive pay days. Patience gets you nowhere; you’ll die before patrons notice or reward your initiative. Does that matter? Getting by will always be a basic goal.

Independently wealthy? You’re free to do whatever pleases your fancy, reciprocate kindness per noblesse oblige, spend a decade updating an unread blog, or such. Even then, situations can quickly complicate, serve nobody’s needs. There’s no idling at an island timeshare for very long. Pleasurable excess catches up and creates a mess, one would guess, steam hissing off your trauma express. Anyway, chasing lifestyles of the rich puts you in opposition’s crosshairs. Must choose among bravery, drudgery, misery or skullduggery, life’s only options. With a right to pursue happiness, you’re offered no guarantee of achieving it.

When you enter “bicycling culture” into any internet browser, you’d think this 10-year blog would come up immediately. No, you get Bicycling Magazine’s Culture tab, Biking USA/EU from Reliance Foundry (bike locker/rack manufacturer), and other commercial references. Eventually you stumble across video Veer (Greg Fredette, dir., 2009), which documents five individuals involved in Portlandia’s hilarious bicycling culture, narrated by actor Matthew Modine, famed for role in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and resident of New York who chooses to commute around city by bike. You might never discover that Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug, dir., 2018), the Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) origin adventure, explains she was an East London bike courier before declaring dad dead and inheriting his millions. What better way to toughen up for nonstop action?

B&C hasn’t undergone search engine optimization and never carried advertising, so garners no notice despite its main focus. Has always avoided being characterized, pinned down, or readily dismissed. Going by bicycle means being immersed in everything, sights, sounds, vegetative life exuding fragrances. Pass a cemetery or church, religion begs attention, or spirituality sticks. See others on streets, clad in bikinis or skintight spandex, politics intervene and sex smolders. Whatever you do requires cash and duty. Big 3 taboos - money, politics, religion - appear integral and ubiquitous. When does freedom occur?

Blacksmith Pierre Michaux just up and put pedals on a velocipede in late 1860’s. A century later relative and world traveller Henri Michaux won a French National Literary award, which he didn’t accept. Private and reclusive, Henri’s notoriety came from asemic writings that mimic oriental calligraphy, represent nothing, yet suggest semantic meaning. His nonfigurative abstractions resemble cave paintings, Pollock canvases, Rorschach inkblots, tipi symbols, visual vocalise, or wallpaper patterns. You sense a struggle between being lost in noise and expressing self aloud. This “bigly” reverberates with Labann, who began devoted to vocabulary’s soundscape and wonders whether B&C was worth all its effort. One must satisfy self or nobody.

If artists create crevices into which audiences can plug themselves, they garner a following. Impenetrability repulses everyone, but then hardly anyone bothers you. You never know beforehand what’s manifest in you will blossom into, reason enough to stay on course. Your ancestral tribe may be extinct, yet your totemic spirit pedals you onward beyond troubles and worries.

Had enough of being serious. Top things to enjoy include familiar moments, great meals, live concerts, lush poetry, recorded films and songs, sexual relations, smart art, and sporting events. Besides bicycling and creativity, anything else constitutes a mundane chore you might abhor, crawls out of darkness into crepuscular light of dawn, and wastes too much of your limited lifetime. Regret 16 years of school, which shunted into 45 of desk jockeying and personally finishing tens of thousands of projects, up to a dozen a day. Education should enrich, not enslave. Might have been better off collecting welfare, doing nothing, entertaining self, going fishing, growing produce, leaving projects to some sucker interested in such nonsense, reading more and sleepwalking. Only favored groups can claim such a status. Yet industrious folks do make for warm memories.

Fondly recall a holiday town with building facades next to a rideable small scale train. Fun for kids! Construction crews would restore for a few months each Fall to everyone's delight. Under your Christmas tree might be gifts of cowboy duds, feather war bonnet, and 2 cap six-shooters, presumably to replay tragic hostilities. Authors recreate mirth to raise hope that such attractions will recur, but failures to repeat, lack of skills, or lapses in funding typically disappoint. Only the alert or lucky get to savor solo ephemera and transitory thrills. Partially explains why TV networks revisit Christmas every July, propaganda to urge later spending upon which they rely.