brooklyn bridge, extremely lengthy meditation on

micah and i have started a pop duo named The Young Dads.  micah lives in kensington, a neighborhood that claims to be in brooklyn but is actually in rhode island.  he also has no running water, and the bottom half of his building is tenanted by feral poodles, but that is impertinent.  the two-thirds mark (53:20.00) of the eighty-minute bike ride from my home to his falls roughly on the brooklyn bridge, which has a magnificent and much-used pedestrian/cyclist pathway suspended over the road itself.  the pathway is bisected by a white painted line. the northeast-facing side of the pathway is for bikes; the southwest-facing side, pedestrians.  within each, cyclist and pedestrian traffic stays to the right and passes on the left. this is the theoretical framework of the pedestrian/cyclist pathway of the brooklyn bridge, and it is simple, perhaps even elegant.

in practice, there is a lot of yelling. i do some of it. i try to sound as cheery as possible. i have experimented with a number of phrases:
“excuse me! excuse me!”
“whoops? um… whoops?”
“ON your left! on your LEFT.”
“it’s the bike lane!!!”
they’re all obnoxious. i don’t know what to do. i’ve played around especially with variations on the last phrase (the one i’ve settled on uses the same cadence and inflection as “it’s your berfday” from “berfday jamz,” a regular feature on WAMO, the celebrated pittsburgh hip-hop station: IT’S [long, circa middle C] your/the [short, middle C] berf/bike [mid-length, low C] day/lane [long, low C])–but there’s no correct way, in the end, to say what needs to be said.

first complicating factor: brevity of pedestrian-cyclist encounter. by the time the pedestrian–and let’s stop fooling ourselves with generalities here; henceforth we shall say “tourist”–by the time the tourist in the bike lane can hear you, you are, at most, twenty feet away. usually it’s more like ten. you are also on a bike. even if you slow down, the difference in velocity between you and the (frequently stationary or transversely drifting, in the manner of the jellyfish) tourist is unlikely to be less than five miles per hour, or about 8 feet per second. good then. you have at most two point five seconds before you pass the tourist, or brake shudderingly to a halt, or commit manslaughter.

it takes about a quarter of a second to bark out the kind of wordless emission that will fill the tourist with either fear or righteous indignation. “YARG,” i have said to tourists, hoping to give them sufficient time to flee the bike lane. “HORF.” “FLOYD.” never has this made me feel good about our interaction. no one enjoys having (in retrospect, vaguely teutonic) monosyllables barked at them. if instead you opt for intelligibility, you need at least a second, maybe more. “IT’S the bike lane” runs about one point two five, and it is the most streamlined evocation i have yet discovered of the sentiment(s) i hope to express.*

right. you have exhausted half of your two point five seconds making the tourist aware of you, and now the tourist will spend their time thusly:
0:01.25-0:01.75 tourist registers what you have said
0:01.75-0:02.00 tourist whirls awkwardly to face you, confused
0:02.00-0:02.20 tourist registers that HOLY FUCK A BIKE
0:02.20-0:02.50 tourist, terrified, lurches fractionally to one side, often in the direction that you, now moments from contact, are yourself swerving
0:02.50+ fate: brutal, ineluctable, final.

second complicating factor: lack of resolution of pedestrian-cyclist encounter. you do not get to sit down with the tourist after your two point five seconds together and discuss what went right and what went wrong. you do not get to turn around and see if the tourist is resentful (yes) or gravely accepting of their own error (no). you do not even get any time immediately afterward for self-reflection because JESUS CHRIST THERE IS AN ENTIRE SEVENTY-PERSON ITALIAN TOURIST GROUP DRIFTING INTO THE BIKE LANE AND SOME OF THEM ARE CASUALLY ASSEMBLING A GRILLING APPARATUS

third complicating factor: cyclist has ridden all the way from the bronx and has achey thighs. every time i have to slow down and then speed back up, i become minutely yet non-negligibly more likely to freak out and bite someone’s face.

the assumption underpinning all of the above, of course, is that it is possible and desirable to harmonize cyclist/pedestrian relations. but now i am not so sure. perhaps there is a necessary sort of class warfare here. in terms of use, pedestrians outnumber cyclists on the bridge about a hundred to one. multiplied by time spent on the bridge, the ratio is probably closer to a thousand to one. (if these numbers sound extreme, it may be because i have just sort of made them up. maybe someone other than me can look into this. [ha ha! that is of course a joke. no one is reading this blog entry at this point. i personally would have given up around the WAMO reference.])
——
i’m not sure i have anything useful to say about david foster wallace. stupidly, i am compelled to write that i’m very sad that he’s dead. it’s–please excuse me if i’ve already said this to you in person–bizarre to see someone who could explore, with this kind of unflinching objectivity and sensitivity, things like depression and drug addiction and consumerist emptiness–it’s bizarre to see someone with that sort of mastery succumb to a suicidal inclination. and sad, and frustrating. for many hours during my senior year of college, during the time i should have spent drinking and having regrettable sexual encounters, i was locked away in my room, reading infinite jest. i like to cheapen superlatives on this blog, so i won’t apply any to that book. but now i think i’m going to reread it.

*sentiment in full:
I. the brooklyn bridge pedestrian/cyclist pathway is divided into two lanes.
 A. the pedestrian lane
 B. the bike lane
II. you are in the bike lane.
 A. and yet you are a pedestrian
  1. the potential reasons for your confusion are manifold:
   a. you are normally a cyclist, and henceforth accustomed to traveling in the bike lane
   b. the ass-kicking splendor of new york has rendered you, temporarily, an imbecile
   c.
   d. in your city of origin, everyone is a jerk
  2. but one thing is certain: pedestrians do not belong in the bike lane.
 B. we can conclude, then, that you do not belong in the bike lane
III. get out of the bike lane.
 A. that is why i am yelling at you
 B. in a tone whose essential warmth/charity will probably be transcended by our mutual fear/disgust
IV. i want a sandwich.
 A. preferably a large one
 B. if you make me a sandwich your guilt shall be assuaged