fred the creative terrorist

somewhere beneath boylston street
fred the creative terrorist: a biker approaches! quick, release the gas.
henchman: it is done! HA HA HA HA.
at street level
pedestrians: SUDDENLY WE ARE MORONS
me: fuck! please get out of the way! ACK WHY ARE YOU LYING DOWN IN THE BIKE LANE
pedestrians: NOW SEEMS LIKE A GOOD TIME TO BUY REAL ESTATE

there aren’t too many other explanations for this. i’ve memorized a lot of the salient attributes of my route to work—traffic light patterns, blind corners, traffic probabilities, left turns designed by sadists, etc—and i realized with a pang today that i have also subconsciously registered parts of boston as Moron Pedestrian Zones. primarily, these are the central square stretch of mass ave and pretty much all of boylston st, and if you are a biker navigating these areas, all bets are off. this is the normal pedestrian order of operations:

1. check for traffic
2. cross street

but in the abovementioned, it goes something more like this:

1. begin crossing street
2. check for traffic

so already this is stupid.

3. fuck! oncoming traffic exists!
- a. freeze in path of oncoming traffic
- b. blurt garbled obscenity, perhaps also fall down
4. wait for oncoming traffic to come to complete stop
- a. …staring resentfully at driver/biker
- b. (as if somehow pedestrian has moral authority)
- c. (when in fact pedestrian is unwitting agent of satan or terrorists)
5. slowly finish crossing street

i mean what the shit. i would also like to point out that while it is not technically illegal to double-park in the bike lane, it is incredibly annoying, especially if your vehicle is commercial aircraft or larger. i am not far from becoming an urban, less-morally-defensible version of this guy.

our last show at the lily pad went very well, and i’d say something about how we’re likely to youtube the video we have of it except that all of my previous band-related promises have gone blatantly unfulfilled. so, um. here’s a promise: i am shaving my beard TONIGHT. definitely the sides of it, perhaps all of it. i might leave the mustache, if only to sketch people out.

beer: i spent about five minutes trying to figure out where you worked, and couldn’t. patagonia? that seems too easy.

my thanksgiving was good. it turns out “no country for old men” is spectacular. also, i can eat 5.4 pounds of food before my stomach wall ruptures, and then an additional 1.8 pounds before it’s time to go to the ER.