Oh...A Camping We Will Go...A Camping We Will Go...

Here's another side benefit to being unemployed. I called my brother last night to relay my joblessness, and he invited me to join him and some friends on a camping trip down in Virginny, near Madison (that's off route 29, about 1.5 hours due south and a little west of DC, for you city slickers who think anything outside the Beltway might as well be Tadjikistan). So this evening we will camp with friends and spend some time together.
My brother lives about two hours away. We're close, but not supremely close. He's older than me by eight years. I won't say I was an accident, oops baby; but let's just say the best laid plans of mom and dad took about seven years longer than anticipated. So, given our age difference, my brother Rob and I were really in totally different spheres. He was running around with his high school party crowd when I was still mesmerized by Scooby Doo.
( Hmmm...Actually, I still am, but that's another matter. And Dexter's Lab; and, oh Johnny Quest is the best of all!).

Suffice to say, I think we missed out on a deep connection. Yet, at times like these, when life decides I'm just a target for overhead birds, Rob seems to be there for me. Oh, he hasn't signed on to be my therapist on this trip. But I already know his generous spirit shines in times like these. He'll commiserate and share a brew. What more does a brother need? So here's to the irony of being out of work: it's hard work; yet it can afford these moments to spend time with family, reconnect and just take a deep breath. Now what was the name of the campground he mentioned we were going to...Camp Crystal Lake I think he called it...

What I Have Learned about my Neighborhood while Unemployed

1. Whole Foods is surprisingly crowded at 2:30pm on a Wednesday.

2. The scraped part of Reno Rd (as they prepare to resurface it) really sucks for bike riding. It feels like a washboard.

3. They do no allow bikes in the Tenleytown Post Office.

4. If you attempt to wheel your bike into the Tenley Post Office, you will be quickly rebuked.

5. They will still help you mail a package to Germany; no hard feelings.

6. The ads/flyers that get placed semi-monthly on my car windshield, underneath the wiper arm, and which flap flaccidly yet with an annoying staccato in the wind as I drive around, are not placed there by evil gremlins as previously assumed.

7. It rains a lot. Intermittently all day, every day in the DC springtime. This is not readily apparent when you sit in a windowless cubicle for 9 hours a day.

Washington Caps--beer caps!

Angry Detroit Red Wings fans are pretty cool. Four of them said hello to me and my bike as I waited for the Metro at the Shady Grove Station. They were headed into DC for a little fun. I think the out-of-town conference was over and it was definitely party time. So where did I steer them?

Well, interest was expressed in "beer bars" (my term to them) so here's the list:

Bedrock Billiards

Brickskeller

RFD

Birreria Paradiso



It's a quick0-and-dirty list, but gets the job done if one desires copious beer choices and some cool atmospheres. Bedrock tops the list for laid-back funky with a clientele that manages to largely be hip without being pretentious douchebags. You'll find tattoos aplenty along with smiles and old friends trading insults. The tap list is short but usually has a couple good brews. The magic fridge behind the bar has an assortment of ass-kicking goodness!



Brickskeller wins on sheer volume. It's also a great hovel of a bar, particularly the basement. Server beer knowledge ain't what it used to be, but some of the bartenders are sharp and you can ask them to keep 'em coming in a certain style, and not be disappointed.



RFD is like the bastard child of TGI Friday's and a Sports Bar, with a generous helping of good taps and bottles, only because of its lineage to the Brickskeller--it's the offspring of the same owners. Great spot for belgian beers.



Birrerira Paradiso is awesome because--let me count the ways: it's Pizza Paradiso's underground beer bar. That means underground, which means cool, and Pizza from the best pizza shop in town--even cooler. It also means roughly fifteen taps of always awesome and varied microbrews. Now what else-oh yeah! A LARGE fridge full of beer bottles from around the world. Enough said. Go here. The 90's Metro buses down Wisconsin Ave will get you close. Walk, or bike the few blocks here. Hell, you could walk across the Key Bridge from Virginia, too.



I HIGHLY recommend public transportation to all these fine establishments. Bike down, Metro back. It is seriously hard to leave these places sober. I know, I have been trying for years. Trust me, I'm the son of a doctor.

A Little CCT and Yes Album Cover Art

I love the smell of napalm in the....wait, wrong movie. This is my life, no surfing (yet). Just a scene repeated since last Wednesday---no need to get up and go to work. So what calls at 10:00am? A ride on the Capital Crescent Trail. Hey, it's in-between rain squalls at the moment.
The trail is great at 10:00am on a Thursday. Just a few biker superheroes, some joggers (and one damned fast, honest-to-God runner who I think might have been running at about the pace I was riding), and assorted others ambling along with, as Chuck Berry sings "no particular place to go".
Before I knew it, I was down at the boat houses in Georgetown, watching the 'ere-do well skulking around the skulling hulls and tuning up for their mid-day rides on the Potomac. We're all hoping for just a little more time without rain.

On the way back, once I left the trail, I snaked through some neighborhoods just on the Maryland side of Western Ave. I wanted to avoid Massachussetts Avenue as they are working on the road just east of where the CCT trail crosses. Due to the construction, there's only one lane going up a steep hill, and I didn't feel like being "that jackass on the bike" holding everyone up as I inched up the incline. So I ducked into some fetching side streets to try and connect back to Western and over towards Tenleytown.

Tucked away on Allan Drive, amidst the familiar brick colonials and bungalow houses, wow! A house like the cover of Yes albums circa nineteen-mega-ballad. It was huge and gray and, well, not a right angle in site. It's like when Eddie Murphy, as detective Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop II, "steals" a house by pretending to be a building inspector. He shouts to the workers: "Stop! Stop working! Didn't you all see the revised plans? The homeowners don't want a right angle on this whole place. If they want to live in a donut, that's their perogative". So was the visage before me. A house that was the very mist itself; part oversized hobbit hovel, part Lego set piece that no-one knows how to use.

Do You Fit Into Those Genes?

One of the great benefits of biking for practical reasons (commuting to work, running errands, doctors visits, etc) is that it gets you into shape without your having to do anything much else. There's no thinking about going to the gym, or how I'm going to stay in shape. I bike to the grocery store, haul the load home, and I've just had a workout--no fuss!
Another benefit is that life slows down. The old cliche rings true: you do notice the little things that before might have escaped attention. For example, standing at CVS to drop off a prescription. There's only so long you can stare at the assorted condoms on the rack while you wait. So I looked behind the pharmacy counter and noticed a box labeled IdentiGene---a take-at-home paternity test. Maybe this is a new product. It's prescription only, though I don't know why. I don't imagine you could abuse it, or sell it in high schools or college campuses, or get hooked on it and suffer withdrawals. But there it was, front and center. Much more interesting than the condoms. Though I suppose the condom/IdentiGene corollary is pretty much exactly inverse (1:1): know condom, no father; no condom, know father?
So I love this biking about town. How many times have I been to CVS, rushed in, rushed out. Now I've slowed down, and ironically, have more time to ponder the mysteries of the universe and the contents of the IdentiGene box.
Bikes, it has been said, are a human scale machine. They move at a pace a human can relate to: a natural pace that we, after all, control. They are human sized. They roll on smoothly. They are easy on, easy off. Kind of like a condom.

When Work Doesn't Call--the Stomach Does!

So what does an unemployed bike commuter do when the road no longer goes north to the office? He goes to Safeway for groceries. Where else! Instead of spread sheets it's sandwich spread. Excel? How about Ex-lax. From Power Point to Power Bars.
By George, a standard pannier for a small wheel bike does hold three bags of groceries. And the rack, along with several cubic yards of bungee cord, will successfully portage a case of Coke. Or, if you've gazed at this blog's flagship photo, a 20 pound bag of Dog Chow, with nary a kibble split loose on the way home, despite DC's adeptness at preventing level pavement for any stretch longer than your middle finger.
There is one bike rack at the Safeway on Davenport, but you might miss it. It looks more like Mork from Ork's L'eggs spaceship; or some twisted precambrian bivalve you might see on late-night Discovery Channel science geek porn. The standard welded dual-bike rack is covered with a hot tub-shell-like gray casing that you lift up like Delorean doors, and once your bike is parked beneath, envelops the cycle in a never-to-decompose plastic sheath which you then lock with your U-lock. Magic! It's kind of a pain to hold the pod open while maneuvering your bike underneath, but once in, it provides (what might be merely an illusion of) safety in disguising your bike. All you can see once you've batoned down the hatches is three inches of wheel.
There's nothing like walking around Safeway in a neon reflective vest, either. Until they spot my bike helmet in the cart, their facial expressions range from "oh, he's just off shift at the construction site" to "the poor dear. Jim, hand him the broccoli."
So while I may not be bringing home the bacon, I've got the greens safely tucked away in the pannier. Heading home laden with the groceries gets me a wide berth from traffic, too. Especially when carting the aforementioned twenty pound sack of dog food: "Look Margaret, he had to sell his car to pay for dog food". Hey, I hold my head high and proud. I may be employment challenged at the moment, but I challenge anyone to race me and my groceries home! On second thought, by the end of the trip I'm ready to send the canned goods flying like so much chaff and ballast along Connecticut Ave. I get exercise and feed the homeless all at once. Brilliant.

Strollercize on the CCT

When I got the axe from work, on the way home I took the early Red Line Stop at Bethesda, instead of coming down to Friendship or Tenley, closer to my house. I wanted to meander and ponder the suddenness of my newly gained employment status. Permanent Vacation, Aerosmith album title style. Extended holiday. Work challenged. Leisure Engineer. Whatever the term, I had become a statistic, and not a good statistic. Something more akin to the back of a health clinic pamphlet. And yet, this is reality. I still have my legs and my Bike Friday. The IRS can pry that from my cold, dead hands! So, you can see the meanderings of this post exactly echo my mind and my bike ride on that fateful day. The Capital Crescent Trail wends on, oblivious to the chaos in my head. Eyes front. Watch for peds and dogs! Well...

What to my wondering eyes should appear but a group of young mothers, all gathered in near--well, nearly to the side of the CCT, in a half-circle. There they were ensconced, a veritable gaggle of Gracos, babies in various states of WTF as the moms, clutching stroller handlebars and brakes, jumped and juked and swayed to the marching orders of Head Mom. She whipped them through a rousing round of trailside Strollercize. Maybe they have a denoument of lattes and light stretching. I'll never know, as I was out of sight by then. And I applaud them, each one, for getting out there and getting active, being social and, well, for being damned creative. I'd have never thought to organize a Strollercize class. I merely rode by on my bike with thoughts of how to cover the mortgage.