wow…

thursday night, thirty-odd kids and sixty-odd wheels came out to mass at henri frenay square in paris.

their goal? raise a bit of hell.

i’ll describe it all later. i’m much too tired right now (i think i picked up a bug over the past few days).

needless to say, there’s something surreal about hanging out with the ultra-cool bike scene at midnight on the butte de montmartre…only to be followed by bombing down the hill all the way to notre-dame-de-paris to the pumping of sweet disco music.

this could be the start of something good.

not to rest on my laurels…

…but the éclipCycle page is getting more hits than my personal blog.

i guess big-ups go out to the folks at vélorution (the parisian version of critical mass), for linking to my page on their welcome screen…

a note to myself.

je crois t’avoir apperçu; si je te retrouve, je te paye un verre.
- sten (no. 259)

mike, you really have to learn to work with yourself instead of against yourself. you have a way of sabotaging your options by going for the first one. granted, sometimes, you have good feelings – and those, you should go for, absolutely. but you can’t be afraid of holding out for what you want!

take your carte orange [monthly metro pass], for example. you could have waited until you had your navigo card [a chip card insured for the value stored on it] before buying it. or even better yet, you could have realized that you’re not gonna get enough use out of your three zone pass in april and not wasted 40€. but nope…you figured “hey, i’ll get this taken care of ahead of time and not worry about it later.” you ended up saving, maybe, 10 minutes of your time. but at 4€ a minute (which works out to 240€ an hour), it wasn’t worth your not thinking it through.

so here’s my advice (and you’d be wise to take it to heart): whenever you are going to make a decision of any kind of importance, don’t do anything until your information is as complete as you can make it.

on the bright side, however, you learned tonight that your written french is pretty good. now, they’ll only know that you’re not french yourself by your canadian-style handwriting.

work on your oral french and – before you know it – you’ll be in med school.

and if you ever see sten again, don’t be so goddamn shy, ok?

a lame poem.

ten thousand songs surge in my head,
fighting for something that never was
and can never be.

our silent game -
played with a hundred thrusts and parries -
is over, your ivory army
standing still, my king toppled over.

your intentions were good,
(and so were mine,)
but our sparring got the best of us.

memories better left undisturbed.
a palimpsest of ruin.

yet – strangely – i’m happy.

a mystery phone call.

someone called me from vernon, bc, on april 4 at about 6 am (local time). the number was 250-549-8096. no message was left.

i don’t think it’s very likely for me to get a wrong number from my home province.

if you called me, or know of who this might be, please let me know.