Mary’s Baroque Personage

Minimalist clap trap insouciance get away from my baroque personage. Someone once said they were transpecies extraordinaire, and someone cut in and quailed: surrender your gender; then an acerbic other cut in sniping: exploiters, exploiters, exploiters while standing in gray back-alley New York. Some tinkling, and someone singing this is the day, followed by a slew of pimply-faced youths miming the lyrics and someone doing an accordionist’s job at playing as if they were in earnest. What did it mean as it flashed by, a mere whir of postulates without proofs—proofs without antecedents. And the best you can do now is remember something you read from Kierkegaard, who was too much religious, (and worse a christian, just as you had been hoodwinked into when you were too young to do anything about it) for your palate, but it was an incisive leap on his part, that century and a half ago: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” The angst-y freedom to be a serf to your lifestyle, to your politics, to your country, to your family, to your life and how you’ve lived it … and it dawns upon you in ever sharper cubist shards—it’s awful. It’s offal. It’s awful offal. Oh, take another shot of distilled teenage epistemological tripe and go back to your dark corner counting the moldy efflorescences on your shower stall. Really! No one ever.

What I’m Reading:

I used to think that my experience on the road made me safe. Thousands and thousands of miles. Countless hours mapping routes. A few too many seasons in a bike shop storage room. So, so many rolled-up greasy pant legs. But the tragic death of Louisa Gag, the 36-year-old bike advocate and city worker killed by a driver in a recycling truck this month, has shaken my confidence. Are any of us really safe if one of the most experienced cyclists in the city was killed doing the thing she loved?

— Rami Abou-Sabe / “My bicycle could save the world … if you’d all just stop trying to kill me” / Boston Globe