The Commute

Every morning I take this path to work. I am blessed because I live close to where I work. But blessed isn't quite right. It is by design that I live near where I work. The bike ride is, Google predicts, 2.7miles, but I round up to three. I can make it in 15 minute on average which puts my speed at roughly 12mi/hr. Impress? I know.


Notice the zig-zag theme, it persists.


Traveling through my neighborhood is quite easy. It may only be three streets long , but its ordered and safe even with high traffic in the mornings due to the high school. Every intersection is a four-way stop and half the streets are one-ways. Now, Google won't let me plan a car route by going the wrong way down a one way, but, in truth, I usually take Hearthstone to the light at Government Street rather than cross on my own.




The aforementioned high school, Baton Rouge Magnet High School, despite its magnetic pull, I avoid at all costs. The parents of the high school students may be worse than their teenage drivers.













Government Street is not friendly to pedestrians.

There's a light just past the high school on Eugene and another at Hearthstone leading through a parking lot and to Kenmore Street, the nearest street that leads to the outer fringes of the garden district.



Again, the zig-zag pattern emerges. Zigging off Government and quickly zagging past Eugene Street, which can also be hairy, I pass through my old stomping ground Rittner Street.










There's a sign in front of the quasi-cul-de-sac now that calls it Rittner Terrace, we just called it summer camp. It's a geographic anomaly and a planners nightmarish horror. In the shape of a semicircle, it awkwardly connect half a dozen other streets in the most inefficient way possible





It seems like an area where the bourgeois well-to-do people in the heart of the Garden District think of fondly, but don't exactly want want to admit to. It's somewhat of a bohemian ghetto, where people live on the street almost as much live on their living room floor.

It lets out onto the first major artery of my daily commute, Myrtle Street.




I pass right by my friend Marty's house. Hey Marty. He's not up at this hour anyway. I can put a good distance behind me on Myrtle. There are stops signs at every intersection, most of them 4-way, and Google maps puts this distance at near 1/2 of a mile, one sixth of my total trek.






This leads me to a popular thoroughfare any tiger fan could tell you about, Dalrymple Dr. There's a right decent bike trail following this road, which at this point is called Park. It's name changes to Dalrymple after the park on Park, the Park park. Following that road will lead straight into the heart of LSU campus, but that is a story for another blog.

Here at the bottom of the hill I am zooming, but immediately to my right there is my next turn, Washington Street, and a huge fucking hill. Now I don't want to bitch about my commute, especially when I made this decision consciously and of my own accord, but I hate this area. There is a nutso downhill past the Park park, which is fine, but then there is an immediate uphill, which is not fine, up Washington Street.



I don't understand the purpose of this hill and these juxtaposed altitudes. If the land were left flat it'd be so much nicer. I do know there seems to be development. At the bottom of the hill, immediately to my left is a golf course, further on an overpass under train tracks, further still the man-made LSU lakes, and, after the battle up Washington, the Interstate, I-10.





Immediately after the Interstate I get off Washington. The lanes are big enough, but not well kept. I dart off into Georgia Street through a quite neighborhood. The neighborhood I work in seems, as with most neighborhoods in Baton Rouge, cutoff. It is on the outskirts of LSU but it is completely isolated by campus, the lakes, and the Interstate that runs through the heart of it. Where the neighborhood meets the lakes, in some parts, is a nice park which acts more as a buffer zone. In other parts, it is as if the neighborhood has been cut off by a sharp guillotine, i.e. my uphill battle on Washington St. The boundaries are evident.

I pass through these neighborhoods every day and my path serves as the conduit to which all these places are connected. Driving in a car, it is easy to detach where you are with where the road is taking you. So often, without purpose, I find myself behind a wheel just going . Because it takes more energy not to go.

The endorphins kick in somewhere around this point and I am at work, albeit 5-10 minutes late. Although I was 5-10 minutes late even when I drove - I am not a punctual person. The path I drove is not so different from the path I bike now. Believe it or not, it takes the same amount of time either way. I attribute this to the numerous stop signs and lights throughout the neighborhoods. I will never complain about a 4-way stop sign again, so help me God.


And God Bless Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/


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A New Year's Resolution

I am not a man who makes resolutions. I find my attention span fickle, my interests varied, and my discipline lacking. I was never one to make a promise to myself, or anyone else for that matter, that I will attempt to better myself this upcoming year. To do right what I once did wrong. To be more healthy. To drink less. That's not me. I'd surely cave and feel like a hypocrite. I enjoy drinking, I find unhealthy food to be delicious, and working out at gym feels like masturbation, feels artificial.

This year was different. It wasn't a spur of the moment decision. It was a gradual progression towards the concept with painstaking preparation to be ready on the day in question, New Year's Day. For my birthday last November my wife bought me a rack and a head light and tail light, gifts I had been more than hinting at for sometime. I already had a great bag and a raincoat. Ever since I got my new one back in September, I had been planning on making biking my primary form of transportation.

It wasn't a decision I made lightly. In fact I had to bike quite often two years back when I totaled a brand-new car, but even then I had my wife drop me off at work and I pedaled back. That wasn't about laziness, it was about necessity. I get up at the crack of dawn, and, depending on the time of daylight we happen to be saving, it's black as pitch on my way to work. A helmet was the first thing I bought. A new/used car came along and I hopped back behind those horse powers.

I seem to remember being discouraged all my life from any form of transportation other than vehicular. In elementary school we lived across the street from our school. My father would not let us walk there or ride a bike because there was a busy street disconnecting our neighborhood from it. In my brother's final year there, fifth grade, he did indeed ride his bike to school, and I assumed the same privilege would be bestowed upon me when I got to his age. I was asked to continue to ride the bus with my little sister, who never like bikes anyway.

I never stopped loving bicycles. I remember my brother riding down the street when he was 8 or so, making me 5. He had a blue bicycle that one day became mine. I had training wheels on it until I was 7, a fact my cousin teased me to no end on account of. I remember desperately awaiting the day when our parents would allow my best friend and I to bicycle down to the local K&B to read comic books for hours. I remember learning how to calculate speeds on a bike, multiply the number of gears on the pedals by the number of gears on the wheel, - my first example of combinatorials - and it seemed the more the better. Again, I was covetous of my brother in sixth grade when he got a 21 speed bike with a grip shift built into the handle bars, it was so cool!

High school was a blur of engine exhaust. We were so excited to be allowed to operate a vehicle that bikes seemed like a child's thing. For all of high school my mother, who worked there, and we took separate cars to school - which was also across the street. That had to stop my brother's senior year when I got detention for tardiness because my brother overslept and made me late too often. After that I took the bus until I was old to drive myself, which I did.

I never considered a bicycle to be a legitimate form of travel until college. My godfather, who is my cousin maybe 10 year older than I am, has always been great to me. He was an avid cyclist and willed me his old bicycle, a hot pink road bike from Allez. It was glorious! It was dubbed the pink hotness. Allez is french for "you go" using the formal "you". It is also a damn good bike. The road style took some getting use to, but now I can never go back. That bike was fast. It allowed me to move off campus, where it is cheaper, and still get to and from campus, where I worked and schooled, in a timely manner. Sadly, the pink hotness was stolen. Taken from a rack which I foolishly left it chained to for a long, lonely weekend. As a poor college student I could never afford a bicycle that nice again, and probably still cannot.

Since then several used bikes have come and gone. I made half-hearted attempt to bike around for recreation, but it felt too forced. I don't want to be one of those guys who rides through crowded street paths in biker shorts shooing people out of my way, or one of those clumsy people who bike a short distance and turn around suddenly and head back to where they started from. If I wanted to experience the full joy of cycling, for me, my rides had to have purpose. I can make it to the store, I've done it before. I can meet friends at local restaurant, my wife and I have made the trip often. One reason we live here in Mid-City is the connectivity and we have taken advantage of that in the past so why not full time.

I am a creature of proximity, and what gives you more proximal development than getting from A to B with your two legs and one of the most efficient machines mankind has ever built. With a few new tools by my side and more as I see the need, I can make this resolution stick. I drive with my wife in her car often. Long distances are often cut by a dangerous road. I am not cutting out driving all together. My resolution is not to bike more, it's to drive-less. There's no reason not to.

Since the beginning of this year I have driven my personal vehicle once, to move it out of the way of the trashcans on the street.