I've been trying to ride my bike more lately, and I did during my spring break a week ago, when the sun was out and I felt mobile. But my building is tall and it's annoying to shove my bike into the elevator, and I'm scared of keeping my bike in the underground parking lot, which kind of seems like a rape factory (although that's an unfair thing to say and maybe insensitive to people who have been raped; at any rate it makes me nervous.) Now that it's daylight savings time I really have no excuse not to ride my bike everywhere, all the time. Well, I guess I still have the elevator excuse, but I'm getting better at that, and my other excuse, that if I rode my bike after dark I would be murdered, is less relevant because there is less dark. I can totally ride it to class if I want.

And today I went for a ride at about 5:30, when it was still sunny and breezy and warm, and let me tell you: I love this city! Everyone in other cities lifts an eyebrow when I tell them I live here, and people who do live here make knowing comments about the crime and the cruddiness, but where I live it is just adorable and beautiful, and where I don't live I suppose it's cruddy and shabby and dangerous, but I like that! I like rust, and shambles (in the figurative sense; I am, in my advancing age, tiring of blood, as I learned from watching V for Vendetta the other night. After about the eighth beautifully-choreographed jet of blood arabesqued out of someone's neck, I was like, "I get the picture! Enough already!) Apparently this is not uncommon: people come here and get really, really into it, and mope about it when they leave.

Anyway, I rode my bike down to the harbor, where I saw a magician being heckled, and the magician stopped his show for like five minutes to CALL THE POLICE ON THE HECKLER, and the crowd just sat there patiently in the sunshine waiting for him to be finished with his phone call to the police, and then he started up his trick again (but only after a lot of business where he was bending over and saying to the wheelchaired man behind him, "Pardon the view," and the man was like, "You're great," and the magician was like, "Wow, you think I'm great?" and so on) only to stop when the police showed up, and I thought, "Well, this could be interesting," but then I thought, "This is interrupting my bike ride." And then I rode down to this other harbor and everything smelled like old, bilgey harbor water, and also subtly like watermelon, and I myself was heckled by a gentleman in an SUV who may have yelled, "Want to get in my car?" or "Want to buy my car?"--I couldn't tell. I guess it was reasonable to ask if I wanted to buy his car, since the truth is I don't have a car of my own, and maybe I need one, but on the other hand if I don't have a car, isn't it probably because I don't want one or can't afford one? And then I was going over cobblestones and every bone in my body was jangling and all my flesh was vibrating crazily and there was a post office with big barn doors. And then I was back downtown and all the magnolia trees are in bloom! And there is this church made of greenish and reddish and black stone and it has tall pointed spires and it and the blue sky and the magnolia and all the little charming Italianate/classical villas all around the square were slashed with that soft gold pre-sunset light. And now I am home at my writing desk, which I never use, and looking out the window at another window, tar-black, set in a black mansard roof, with a brick chimney jutting out,and the black frame of the window is glowing rose-red with the light that comes even closer to sunset. O happiness. The trouble is I am not spending the summer here and I think I will miss it. But of course a summer is nice everywhere, except when it's too too sticky and you have to lie around on the porch pouring water on your head and drinking whiskey and refusing to move.