day 2: i make this look easy

So day 2 has come and gone. I feel that I may be doing the reader a disservice, because the commute itself is quite uneventful after the fact. Don't get me wrong - I LOVE it, and it is incredibly exciting for me. But those are hard feelings to convey on a blog.

Today was smoother - having taken the calmer route both to and from work. I forgot to bring my camera with me, and therefore do not have any pictures to share today. But I have taken a mental note to carry my camera with me each day. I pass through some very colorful neighborhoods - the kind of places you just don't see on the main drags everyday. There is this one shopping center with a "Discoteca" that I have noticed both days on the way home - door wide open with a pleasant buzz of fun music emanating from within at 3:30 in the afternoon. Needless to say, not the kind of thing you see in Alabama, where I spent the first 22 years of my life.

Because the actual ride itself does not provide the most thrilling story, I want to delve a bit deeper into the matter for now. Last summer I read Robert Pirsig's well-known book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I picked up a copy at a garage sale or something last year, and had always heard talk of the book. I like to read. It made sense.

Today while I was riding to work I kept thinking of a part of the book where the narrator describes the difference of riding in a car as opposed to a motorcycle - or in my case, a bicycle:

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness [Pirsig, 14]

How beautiful and appropriate are these words! Aside from the whizzing concrete part, this is what it has meant to me to use my bike for transportation, even in such a short amount of time. I feel more connected with the world around me - and in a city as large as Phoenix, where community is not easy to come by, that connectedness is nourishing.

The illusion of Phoenix as a network of freeways and Wal-Marts seen through that TV frame is disappearing. In two days, this city has revealed more of its personality to me as it has in the previous 11 months that I have been here.

The Velorution is as much a revolution of thought and perception as it is a revolution of method. I have received questions about where the word "Velorution" came from. Tomorrow I will explain it - it deserves its own post.

So until then, long live experience in the scene, and not viewing through the screen. Here's to the Velorution!