Some of you have literary aspirations, I can tell. Maybe an unpublished novel buried in the back of a desk drawer?
What gives the ambition away is the purple prose that sneaks into BikePortland comments: “waste bin of bike dreams,” “slaughtered on our blood-soaked streets,” “I’ve been looking for years and I know it’s out there.”
Whew.
Is this Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles? No, it’s not. But maybe Portland needs its own poet of despair.
TrikeGuy might fit the bill. He wrote a colorful comment last week about a commute that didn’t go according to plan, and he manage to tie it into our post about McLoughlin Blvd, barely. Here are his first two paragraphs:
Wednesday I really wanted to take the 4:12am red line into Goose Hollow then ride the relatively flat 15 miles to Clackamas – couldn’t do that because they canceled it.
Of course, you don’t know they canceled until 4:12 comes and goes and you walk down to the only readerboard at the west end of the center platform (past a group of 5 guys smoking meth) and see the next train scheduled at 4:42.
I tried my hand at his prose and with some small edits arrived at this:
It was early. Too early. Even the 4:12 was sleeping it off ‘till 4:42. But I had somewhere to be, and I wasn’t going to let a late train or five meth-heads get in my way.
Clackamas will do that to you.
Go ahead, embrace your inner noir! Here’s the rest of TrikeGuy’s raw material:
Naturally I hopped on the trike, rode north and up out of Beaverton to Wilshire, up and over 217, up along 26, up through the Zoo to Fairview. A fast drop, then deal with the really awful roadway on lower Fairview and Park to get down to Goose Hollow (don’t even think about going up over Salmon past Lincoln – potholes big enough to lose my trike in).
Nothing like adding 8miles and 900ft of climbing to the morning commute on a day when I didn’t plan to.
Still better than the poor guy who only goes into the office 2 times a week who had to pay $$$ for an Uber to get to work in time (I chatted with him Thu morning).
Then, on the way home, I decided to ride the shortest distance to a MAX due to the smoke in the air (sucking that in is not good for you).
Waited 15minutes at CTC for a Green Line to show up just to hear that it was going to be stopping at Main Street – there was a MAX broken down between there and Gateway. Yep, great mainenance TriMet
Naturally I hopped off there and rode the worst section of 205 (crossing several busy streets where cyclists are very much discouraged) and through 2 small linear camps with debris all over the path.
This ignores the lack of safety officers on TriMet enforcing such basic courtesies as not playing loud music, not blocking the aisles with bikes/e-bikes and (of course) not smoking meth on the platforms.
Thank you TrikeGuy! (My apologies to you and Mr. Chandler.) You can read TrikeGuy’s comment under the original post. And keep your eye out, BikePortland commenters sometimes transcend the genre.