For most of my adult life, I used New York City’s subway system to commute to and from work. I love the subway. The river of people in which I would swim each morning and each evening was invigorating, nourishing, reassuring, grounding. Every day, I reminded myself that notwithstanding my fairly conventional, fairly segregated experience, most people actually don’t look like me. Most people haven’t had my life experiences. Difference is the norm.
For the last fifteen or so years, I’ve translated at least some of my morning or evening journeys into paeans that I’ve written on this blog, little verbal appreciations of women I’ve seen as I start or end my work day. The paeans themselves call attention to one of the things that I love about commuting: daily reminders of beauty, vitality, and sexuality, and sensuality. Taking in the world through sexual lenses, appreciating it, and occasionally sharing that with you has been itself an enlivening endeavor.
For two years now, my commute has changed. My habits have changed. It began with a morning subway commute gone awry. For uninteresting reasons, the details of which I won’t share, about two years ago, I unexpectedly found myself on an e-assist bike, part of New York’s bike share program, journeying the six miles from my home to my place of work. The trip took me about 35 minutes, that first time – compared to 40-60 minutes by subway. (Today, it takes me 23-26 minutes, now that I know what I’m doing.) I didn’t go the most efficient route or the safest route, and I wasn’t wearing a helmet. The bike trip was unplanned and somewhat harrowing. But it pointed to a new possibility for me, one that I’ve availed myself of nearly every day (rain or snow stop me) since.
Basically, I no longer take the subway. Not to and from work, not when I’m traveling around for social or other reasons. I have a helmet, always, wherever I go, and I take the e-bikes, or sometimes, the old-school unassisted bikes, for just about every journey I make. As I write this, I literally cannot remember the last subway I took, but it was almost certainly on a weekend evening after the theater or a social event at which I drank. I do not drink and bike, and I do drink.
I love my morning and evening bike rides (I’m dictating this on one of them, right now). I see the city in a different light when all the distances I cover are distances I cover, rather than distances under which I voyage. I’m more in touch with geography, and weather, and nature, by virtue of my newfound biking habit. At the same time, there’s one big loss: I don’t see nearly the volume of people I used to, and the ways I see them are so much more atomized and distant.
This morning, I had what literally might have been my first opportunity to write a pian in two years of biking. It was a pretty limited opportunity on every dimension. Basically, a woman with a great ass in very nearly translucent biking pants, with a black thong visible beneath, attached to a body that I could barely make out until, at a red light, its owner turned her head slightly to the left, and revealed herself to be a stunning, approachable-seeming brunette in her thirties, with a bright, winning smile.
That was it.
We didn’t have an interaction, and she was a much faster bicyclist than I.
Moments later, our days diverged.
