I am going to read Ulysses. The particulars are still to be worked out – I’m trying to get my travel pack slimmed down and in paper form Ulysses would be a clear step in the wrong direction. It feels like a divine reminder – I have always considered myself the Ulysses type (Homeric not Joycean) – not cowardly but not hot for battle, too clever by half, a homebody set awander by the gods.
This morning I woke up and needed to be in on a web meeting which, given that the main participants are in San Francisco, I could’ve attended in person, but I hadn’t mentioned I was going to be in town again so I took this shambles of a bike that I bought off of Craigslist and rode down to the Mission District.
After the meeting I went to Receiver to adjust the brakes on the bike which are of the ‘v-brake’ variety – rather than the familiar wishbone shape of old, they’re like antennae attached on the fork below the rim each itself. After about an hour I figured out that they were in fact unadjustable – there were deep gouges in the plastic that allowed the springs to slip and made them unadjustable. I obtained a new set of brakes at Valencia Cycle for $30, which brings this fiasco up to $95 and climbing. The back, it seems, is beyond repair. The rear for flexes outwards when I’m seated and inwards when I’m not – any adjustment made won’t work for the other state. So I’ll either be able to brake when not seated but not while seated, or brake when seated but not be able to walk the bike uphill when not seated.
At this point, for no discernible reason, I started biking back towards Inner Richmond where I’m staying. I say no discernible reason because I should’ve stayed in the Mission District and parked myself at Ritual or the Marsh and gotten some work done. I also should’ve taken Castro instead of Noe, but I took Noe on this rickety bike which, just outside of Jumpin’ Java, wore out my legs completely.
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So I returned to the Green Apple where the night before I’d seen a multi-tool with a pliers I could use to loosen the rear brakes so they wouldn’t be adding a constant drag on my progress. In the used book section I was checking for any unfamiliar Umberto Eco essay collections when I came across “The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce”. And around the corner there, it could’ve been the same book that I had abandoned to the library in 2001, the black cover with the extended U flowing into darkness off the cover.
And then yes, it is time to finish reading Ulysses, and get a guitar and busker on the street, and smoke and drink whiskey and ride a motorcycle without a license across half the country
