Bike Ride

I was riding my bike home from the coffee shop, and in my chemical induced state (caffeine, alcohol, adrenaline, in that order too) I started thinking about how I was riding my bike. Of course, I've realized that a circular push in my feet is more energy efficient than a straight down push on either foot, but after achieving that rhythm I started thinking about indices. I know nothing about indices, but that's what I'm calling it. Specifically I was thinking about my energy to speed ratio. I realized that there is a direct relation in how much energy it took to go a certain speed versus how much energy it took to get up to that speed. And this came in handy because if I wanted to get home faster, and I had the chemical impetus to allow me to do whatever I wanted, than it made more sense to go faster, and exercise whatever amount of energy/pain to stay at that speed than it did to pedal hard and go fast and then coast and then go fast, in this way making a stupid expression of a graph of changing speeds and getting tired really quick. And I was thinking about this in terms of energy and speed and indices and what a graph of the most efficient speed to energy to time ratio would look like, and then I was thinking about all of the complications that would be thrown into that puzzling looking graph, like how you have to adjust speed when turning but when you are looking at beating the oncoming traffic the angle of your turn gets incredibly acute and hella uncomfortable w/r/t speed, and how pothole equals the enemy of speed and then how traffic lights always turn green when you know you can't make it but you have to try anyways and how that completely fucks conservation ratios up, and I was thinking about how graphing this out would be really hard because I'm really bad at math (unfortunately) but how I do know about other things, like how this is a perfect example of work. Not the work of physics, though that may be applicable, but the kind of work that is essentially the act of creation, and so it made a really good analogy for that idea to me. See, I can know intrinsically, intuitively (intellectually, inter-spatially) how all of this speed and efficiency works, and I can see how math would be a really great tool for expressing and understanding the exact relationships between my actions and what was happening on an essential level and how all of that compared to each other. But without doing the actual work of sitting down and painstakingly graphing all of this out and using the mental tools of math, I would never express or understand this, and the thoughts and ideas of this understanding that I had received from a moment of experience and inspiration would float away into subconscious and un-recognition and be rendered, ultimately, useless. Creation is like this. Having an idea is like riding a bicycle, it is not like and is not at all creation. Creation is the boring, painstaking math work. It is the work of sitting down and figuring out how to express the event, experience, and non-real essence of inspiration into a form that can be understood, and hopefully enjoyed by yourself and others. It took me a long time to understand this, but I am utterly convicted of this now. Creating things is only fun in a really oblique way, which is not to say that it is unfun misery and monotony, just that its pleasures are oblique to the event of creating.

I need to remember to take more pictures while I am riding my bike.

Which may or may not appeal to anyone else but me, and this may have more to do with my current immersion in 'Infinite Jest' than, but actually I've always thought that those two A's were curious looking for graffiti.