Bad Bike Week- Part 1

June 12th, 2009

6:15pm

"Um... I'm sorry, but there's something in your back tire." I'm on the L train at first avenue and I'm just slightly damp. This has been the rainiest year that I can remember, and global weirding is the only answer. (It doesn't just get "warmer" folks. . .) So I'm riding the subway again, which I grumble about every time cause I buy pay-per-rides now as a way to trying to make myself bike everywhere. Well, this weekend I was going to spend biking all over the Northside Festival and across the Pulaski to Astoria to make some honey-time and instead, I'm idiotically pulling a thumb-tack out of my back tire.

"Don't pull it out!" The skinny-dress wearing hipster-chick yelped. She was the one who first alerted me to the problem.

SSSSSssssssss Oh no. and my whole evening starts to cascade. . . 

7:02pm- I SHOULD BE

walking in my front door, ready to make curried-chicken quesadillas and ginger-mango cocktails as I ready myself for The Hold Steady at The Music Hall of Williamsburg

7:02pm- I AM

Pulling up to the bike shop as the lights go out and Richard, the portly Puerto Rican man who runs the place and shares my penchant for fedoras tells me I had to be there at least 15 minutes earlier.

7:36pm- I SHOULD BE

Pleasantly and calmly enjoying my quesadillas and cocktails

7:36PM- I AM

Sitting in the back of Spuyten Duyvil Bar The finest beer & wine bar in Brooklyn with my friend and fellow human sky-scraper Vanessa, bitching about bikes, taxes, and relationships. She sent me a very sweet E-card recently.

8:41PM- I SHOULD BE

Calmly bicycling through a curry-and-rum buzz in South Williamsburg while keeping a keen-eye for fully black-clad Hasids walking out right in front of my bicycle. I'll get to the Music Hall over an hour before The Hold Steady, easy.

8:41PM I AM

Shoving quesadilla and cocktail down my throat while buttoning my last buttons and wondering what second I should call the car service that I'll spent $10 on to take me a half mile, which I could have bicycled  in 10 minutes, tops.

12:31AM

I'm sitting at some Bar in Greenpoint with my two brothers, and bestest buds, bitching about how fucking tired we were at the start of a four-day music fest. For the elder Matt, it was working another weeklong Aussie-fest with the wonderful people at Contiki Holidays . Jonah had been juggling acting in a play, working on a web-series and working his first full spring-season of tour guiding, and I was bitching about my popped tire.

I missed The Hold Steady of course, but instead saw a sweet band called Discovery (don't love the name though) fronted by a hoarse-voiced blues broad who also serves up drinks at one of my favorite bars, Barette. Discovery, check 'em out.

Then I walked  by another band rehearsing called The Press. Pretty good as well.

Now how the hell am I going to get myself to Astoria?

2:31am

$35 and counting on cabs. 

But yeah, it was worth it.