“I ride my bike through speeds like flavors”

Possibly the best money I spent in Provincetown was the tip I gave the guy at Arnold’s Bicycle Shop to put a comfort seat on my hybrid. He looked at me askance when I asked (he was totally hungover and it was five hundred degrees outside) but I guess my sweet smile convinced him to help me out (by sweet smile I mean handful of cash).

I’ve been dealing with PVD this week (in addition to an unfortunate viral thing), and my strategy for mourning Provincetown this time has taken the form of submerging myself in more Provincetown! I’ve been reading Michael Cunningham’s Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, in which I have found language to describe realities I’ve known but that were heretofore inexpressible.

Being in the dunes, for instance, where I spent a good deal of time riding and hiking:

“You feel as if you are in the eye of something. You are aware – I am aware, anyway – of the world as a place that doesn’t know or care that it’s beautiful, that produces beauty incidentally while pursuing its true imperatives to simply exist and change; a world that is, more than anything else, silent and unpopulated as it lives according to geological time.”

Finished reading Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

*The title quote is from the poem “Proof of Gold” by Michael Klein, in Land’s End.