the hypothetical wren

You can always go here. There’s no real entries, just an attempt to get used to this “posting” thing again.

Firstly, I’ll just say that entering an apartment building with an Electra Amsterdam is about as easy as bringing a drunk home. If there are steps, you’ve got to drag it up them–and trust me, it does not want to go. Then, if you’ve got a foyer with double doors, you’ve got to try to hold both of them open at the same time and wrangle the thing through, sometimes employing your feet. Even if a helpful neighbor arrives on the scene, they’re powerless to help you, since there’s no way past the bike. Then, once inside, it’s either more steps, or it’s an elevator, and unless you live in a building with a freight elevator this thing will take up most of it. Forget popping the thing up on the rear wheel, which is standard New York City indoor bike-moving procedure. And of course, once you get the drunk inside, you think your work is done, until the drunk collapses on your floor. Similarly, once you roll the Electra into your apartment, you’ve got to find someplace to put it. You can lean, say, a road bike against your wall and it will sit there nearly flush–plus you can even lean another road bike against that one and it still won’t take up that much space. With the Electra, though, I had no option but to just park it in the middle of the living room floor where it actually interfered with the workings of my TV remote.

I love my bike, but this is a too-apt description of the endless Getting The Bike Back Indoors Project that comes with owning an Electra bicycle (with the caveat that I have a Townie [which is even larger], and not an Amsterdam).

It is hard to overemphasize how depressing some of the documents I’m looking for are. Not in an obvious way — I’m not researching mass slaughter or anything — but more in the sense that you start to see, bit by bit, how some of the worst parts of the present world are slowly being created by deliberate actions (or just as often, inactions), ignorance or apathy. The WTF factor with history is always high — things in the past are often genuinely strange in ways that are hard to comprehend — but in my time period (the 1960s and 1970s — not 1956), it’s off the charts. So I’m taking a week off to go visit my dad and play with the dog and befriend television once again.

Pictured above is a park in Denver that has had many names — it was once Robinson Park, then Arlington Park, and then (finally) the Hungarian Freedom Park — a small, triangular, and frequently empty (especially compared with Alamo Placita park, just across Cherry Creek from it) park along Speer Boulevard. There was no one there when I took this picture — but as you can clearly tell, someone had been there in the recent past.

Capitol Hill, Thursday at dusk.

• The breakfast burrito at the 20th Street Cafe in downtown (just on the edge of the Skyline Urban Renewal District - any further to the west, and it would have been demolished in the 1970s) is almost to Burqueño standards. They also have “breakfast fried rice,” which I did not ask about.
• Pacific Mercantile, the Japanese grocery store downtown, was full of hipsters buying wasabi peas.
• Someone at 14th and Larimer a dog, “How’d you get all wet, boy? There’s not a river around here for miles.”
• Macchiatos: they’re not cappuccinos.
• 25% of the reading in this city must be done on the bus or the right rail. 7% of this seems to make place on my own bus line.
• People leave photographs in the library. I take pictures of them.