D&F 11/19/23

Greetings from hangover town. I rode my new bike to a brewpub last night for a friend’s birthday and I quickly learned that my gut microbiome-enhancing diet isn’t leading to the same tolerance to copious beers as my previous fat and grease-first one. This was a good lesson, since it’s probably healthier to avoid over-drinking. I only have a few more days of cycling before I head for Japan, and I am stoked! I’ll try to send a newsletter entry while I’m there, but a lot depends on timing and how exhausted I am at the end of each day. My hope is that the weather is gorgeous and the roads are smooth.

Until then, let’s see those…

Links

• I bought an e-bike finally, after hearing their virtues extolled and thinking about its utility for months. I’m happy to report that they are awesome, and running errands and buying groceries is super easy now. I’ve also used it to go to therapy on a rest day, which saved my legs for more cycling later. I ran to IKEA yesterday and carried home multiple large pegboards strapped to the front rack, and hauled home a dozen bottles of wine. Th range isn’t infinite, but 25-60 miles depending on power usage and weight means I can go most anywhere in the bay.
• Cycling is just one part of building an ecological society. If we’re able to embrace sustainable living and work towards equity and preservation of our planet, future generations will have hope. Currently all we have is horrible infighting and a sort of global nimbyism.
• Bring back the good kind of shame. It’s been great for me to return to sharing in smaller forums like private discords and Slacks. My desire to talk about my life is sated by chatting with friends and therapists, and means I’m much less likely to be yelled at by strangers or make a mistake in full view of whoever retweets and reposts my error. I don’t think people were meant to live in such a broad public sphere. It’s tough to expose your thoughts, dreams, and fears to a world with almost no context and even less empathy.
• Rest is the key to growth, health, and happiness. I grew up with a protestant work ethic that encouraged overwork and grinding until retirement, but there’s no benefit to it that I can see. Instead, we can pair living in an ecologically sustainable way with working at a pace that supports degrowth and community.

Closing

It’s F1 race day with the Las Vegas Grand Prix starting at 10pm PST on Saturday—mere hours from when I’m writing this, and besides Vegas being a soulless hell, the track seems setup for a pretty boring time unless we get more wrecks from a poorly setup track. The best part of the whole race weekend so far is watching extremely exhausted commentators try to keep their banter going on at 4am. I’ll admit that my love of F1 is pretty at odds with sustainable ecology, but everyone needs one toxic trait.

Have a chill holiday this week, and I’ll talk to you from the other side of the world, space cowgirls~