(Excerpt from an email)

Oh! The fabulous thing about vending in Providence was catching the 7:10am commuter rail back with my commuting host family, the Fruitbat, after a hilly mile fast-hike with heavy pack (merch). We got off the train at South Station and figured there must have been a couple of thousand people walking up the platform. Fruitbat was floored by their numbers - dunno, maybe he's floored by it every weekday - with such an intensity that you couldn't tell if he thought it was a good, bad, or neutral sort of stunning. (I was dubious about: "Maybe some of them are happy..")

Then this voice, this unbelievable old-black-man voice, comes over the loudspeaker - telling us good things are going to happen - maybe a dozen sentences of this, all different. It was dizzying. I wish I remembered what he said. He does it again, along similar but not identical lines, a minute or two later, as we're nearly to the building. Fruitbat's never heard this happen before, in his short/steady rush-hour-commute history.

This probably snapped some people right in half, in the best of ways; it might have done me if I'd been a little different that day - as it was, I was doing all right already - happy adventure for a start, now springier, giddy on top of that.

So F. is ...oh, catalyzed, and he tells me about the sergeant in Aliens ("Another glorious day in the corps!") and I told him about being psyched by fiat and also the fellow in Union Square at the stoplight with the crosswalk timer counting down, reading the numbers along with it at the top of his lungs, head sticking out of a passenger-seat window, and, when it got to zero, yelling, with earnestly-cracking voice, "Happy New Year!" (I told you about that, I should think..?)

A couple of days, I was supposed to give a friend a wake-up/coordinate call. I got voice mail, so I played the soundbite into the phone:

"All right sweethearts, what are you waiting for, breakfast in bed? Another glorious day in the corps. A day in the marine corps is like a day on the farm; every meal is a banquet, every paycheck a fortune, every formation a parade. I love the corps!"

Dunno, I liked the Fruitbat version better :^/ More a thoughtful conspiratorial/intense reverie/ponder and less loud/pep-rally/?? More like you'd expect from someone on a radio show, and less like was probably just right for the actual scene in the movie. Or something.

It was a fine thing.

  later,
  E

(second email)

Things have started falling off my bike, the last couple of days - no disasters, no disaster. Dealing with the flat tire took loads of effort in the heat of two days, but I managed to feel psyched about it anyway. Oddly psyched.

My bike is a heavy mother, and I had the panniers loaded with survival gear (like a thermos of iced dehalf and a can of lentil soup - forgot my wrench?!). It took a nail on Broadway about 1/4 of the way from McGrath to Sullivan Square Station - couldn't have been much more convenient, really, there's a bus from SSS right to work - but still. Carrying it up that hill was a serious feat of strength, and I'm reasonably good at things. At one point, I was telling myself the reason to go another fifty feet feet was because it'd be even harder to pick the bike up again. Later, it was because it'd be too hard to put it down. (Hmm, I need to rig one of those top-tube shoulder-pads.)

Heh. Pulling out of the driveway, earlier that morning, I'd been thinking "Another glorious day in the corps! Every meal is a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune!" but I wasn't really managing to visualize the "Every formation a parade!" of the situation. By the time I was most of the way up the hill, I was profoundly down with that as well.

(Anyway, then I took a bus in the rest of the way. (Later, I managed to get on the wrong bus back to Sulli once and I thought I was on the wrong bus home from there, too, but I was just phrasing the "Oh wait which way are we going?" question wrong - I'll admit, I felt neutral at best about those.) A kind person at work lent me a wrench so I could take just the wheel home to work on, though I hated to leave the rest of it there overnight. I grocery-bagged the greasy bits against the storm, cable-locked all the halfway-nice bits and the bag, and took the seat home. The weather was perfectly timed to cover my half-mile walk from bus-closest-approach to home and then peter out, and that was fine, too.)

Friday night after aikido, one of the pulleys fell off a mile from home, and I found 2/5 of the parts (pulley, bolt, no bushing, no covers), and rigged it rideable. Today, in a to-my-knowledge-unprecedented act of failing-to-overcharge, the Wheelworks folks found me some discard bushings in a couple of sizes and two sets of covers.

It's a treat to have the trashpicked bike around to run errands like that. A friend of mine has offered me some more old bikes, if I help him finish up moving. Yuh!

(Mmm. Another convenient thing is that the pricier repairs - you know, like $10 - are the ones that can wait for first paycheck.)

  Take it easy - as in Do What Works -
  E