Hip. You should see the pavement
I had a bike accident on the bridge on Friday. I don’t know what happened only that when the nice man picked me up off the ground my shoe was stuck in the spokes of the front tire, so I’m guessing my foot slipped off the pedal and got caught in the tire.
Nothing broken, lots of bruises, some bleeding. Hurt like a motherfucker.
The bike is pretty messed up, though it is fixable. But, like lots of broken things in this life, that does not mean necessarily that it should be fixed. There’s obviously been a lot of energy around the bike this summer, and I’m still processing everything that just happened. My feelings about it are really complicated. So…TBD.
In the meantime, my favorite neighbor Erica loaned me a bike, so I still have transportation around town. Also my friend Molly is a star for coming over to my house with ice packs and whiskey. A ++ on the friend front.
But let’s get to the best part of the story: the guy who picked me up off the ground, showed me extreme compassion, and then walked my bike from the middle of the bridge to my house while holding it straight up in the air on its rear wheel the entire way. It was easily a mile.
Would you do that for a stranger? That guy rules. He’s my hero!
In other news, I started working at the bookstore yesterday and basically they are paying me to touch books for four hours and I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty fetishistic experience. Like I’m not saying I was turned on necessarily, because that would be weird (not that there’s anything wrong with being weird, and also I don’t even know what “weird” means anymore, because we’re all weird. I mean, kind of I do. But hopefully you get my point. Judge not, etc.), but I did find it deeply satisfying. Like way down deep.
My bookshelves at home are a total mess. I’m always pulling out books for reference and then shoving them back in carelessly, and also I tend to stack up books I haven’t read yet all over the place, and then reshelve them when I can’t stand looking at them anymore, and then pull them out again six months later, and these stacks go up and down and live on my desk and on the bench on the kitchen and on the tops of two different bookshelves in the living room.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle has made five guest appearances in my to-read stack but I just can’t bring myself to crack the cover. Who knows why one book gets read and another doesn’t? This is actually a super important question in my universe, one for which I have never been able to develop a satisfying answer. There’s no accounting for taste, good or bad. Although I suspect it has something to do with the fact that it is a large, unwieldy hardcover which looks pretty on the shelf, but won’t fit in my purse, and if I can’t carry a book with me wherever I go then I tend to be not as drawn to it. I can’t decide if this is weak or not.
Anyway, the point is I’m a sloppy stack person at home. But I pledge to keep the stacks of WORD Brooklyn straight. On my honor.
And finally, I had a party last night. I showed everyone my bruises. People brought food and wine. I talked A LOT. Only one beer bottle got broken. We went on the roof for a while. I gave my neighbors cookies and they gave us meat. Two people brought me galleys and I got really excited about both of them for the exact same reason, even though they are very different books.
Later I wanted to turn it into a dance party, but when I had my bike accident I fell on my chest, and my breasts hurt too much to bounce around.
Someone made peanut butter cups, and left them quietly on the table, behind the cheese plate. They were then ignored for much of the night because everyone was too busy drinking and gabbing. I think we all thought they were muffins because they were dark and in a muffin tin. No one wanted a muffin. Muffins are for breakfast. Finally I looked closely in the tin. Those were no muffins. I tried one and holy crap they were good. There they were, just sitting there, all casual. Masquerading as nothing special.
Secret genius is my favorite kind of genius.
