Se Freni, non Vinci
He who breaks, loses
Pick your hobbies well and pick them sincerely. Know *why* they are your hobbies. If you’re going to do anything, do it for yourself. Never as an escape.
The Capital Crescent Trail winds from suburban outer Southern Maryland, Bethesda into Georgetown, DC. It might be one of the most beautiful bike trails on the entire American east coast despite being located in one of the more boring cities on the American east coast. A repurposed mid century rail line for military supplies cuts through the woods wrapping the edge of the Potomac River. Its geography takes many forms. You can find wounded cardinals, ticks dropping from tree tops on to your skin, and baby foxes leaping out of the underbrush in ways that connect your skin and breaths to the forest’s firmament. You can touch the edge of the woods without being in the woods. Its beauty takes many forms moving through two different microclimates, the dense forests to the riverside.
My bicycle was a 2005 Marin Larkspur hybrid.
Silver.
Modified gears.
It was a labor of love for myself and only myself.
There was a time when I thought I could live in Bethesda for the rest of my life, so long as I had the Capital Crescent Trail. Delusion takes many forms. You can make excuses for any living situation if there is one glaring beautiful thing that keeps you there.
The bike trail was more real than my apartment was.
I tell people they should exercise, swim, run, and cycle under fields of greenery. The body needs it, the mind needs it. We tell ourselves natural mangroves don’t exist inside of American cities. We tell ourselves the bucolic can only exist in certain places. Scan the ads in New York City Subway trains advertising the scenic upstate New York to we prurient city denizens. There is a superstition to this thinking. We are prisoners of our own context. Every new space is procedurally generated. Spaces are both creations of our perceptions and somehow related to some objective outside.
I will never find something as meaningful as this bike trail in another place.
Careful to never let a practice become the only reason why you remain in a life. Soon you will remain only for the sake of the practice itself.
I started renting NYC citibikes at the end of spring in 2024 while living in my most recent home in Brooklyn. It never started as a process of recreating the capital crescent trail - that was to escape someone or some life - but rather as an attempt to have any remaining intimacy with the walls and streets of a neighborhood and home so pastoral that they had started to become a gaol of beautiful uninhibited delirium. Leaping onto the bicycle and cutting through head on traffic in Brooklyn and Manhattan streets is a test of death, and also a test of becoming one of the most hated people in New York City.
Everyone hates cyclists in New York City.
Sometimes, playing the street villain is easier than sitting in your own apartment.
My first long cycling trip in New York City I took alone from my old house to Bryant Park. Screaming cars and pedestrians give way to a flow state that can only be compared to prayer. It is a routine you see. And I was just starting the same routine again in a new city for better or for worse. I cycled through Prospect Park and crossed trigger memories going back fifteen years of a life lived, spent, earned, never wasted. The intimacy of moving faster than walking but without the steel, plastic, and formaldehyde barriers of driving in a car forces realizations about physical space. New York City as a whole is an organism that is well beyond its time. It is a city from another era that stubbornly survives against its own odds. The 1975 NYC fiscal crisis buried the city in crime, poverty and decay. Talk to older New Yorkers and find out about what Brooklyn, north Manhattan, the Lower East Side all looked like through the 1980s. The photographs look like old pictures of bombed out East Berlin factories and housing blocks. The city is a patchwork of components. Its infrastructure so bereft of temporal consistency or design order. Get off one train station and enter a different decade, turn a corner underground and confront moving advertisement severance time, a beatboxer, unattended tables covered in fundamentalist Christian comics. New York’s undergrounds are primordial rhizomes, not erotic but obscene. The city aboveground shares this temporal disorientation. Salesforce Tower overlooks the 1897 library where there are evening bingo games in the park.
Explore cities around the world. There are used and unused futures, but cities always have a core identity that is made up of its architecture and its people. What is a city’s dasein? New York’s core identity can be many things, but if there was one thing I realized cycling through its many streets for two weeks at the end of June 2024, its the city’s stubborn refusal to die. The expansion will never stop. It has no morality, no philosophical goal. Just a single will to continue beyond its borders, within itself and into every manifold configuration that can bring - for better or for worse. It is a characteristic you will find in the many people you will meet here, the many who come here, the many who were born here.
New York City is ensouled with the desire for desire.
“There, look” I tell myself passing a law school I barely remember.
Several former lovers’ neighborhoods. The many restaurants are the headstones to people gone and passed. Brooklyn is massive and moving from one side of Prospect Park can be just as breathtaking as the most wooded rural trails you can find on the east coast.
But take your citibike across the East River and the setting changes. It isn’t any less breathtaking, just breathtaking in a different way. On my second long bicycle trip over the bridge I cycled behind a woman I barely remember as she practiced songs for her musical, hair bows in the wind behind her. The moving silhouette in front of me is a memory ten feet away that resembles VHS ghosting. I could not describe what her face looked like the same way you recall a stranger in a dream. You can call out to a monad, a character in sleep and wait for them to turn their head. Think of a dream you are having where a singing girl is moving away from you faster and faster, her face turns to you as you call out a name you don’t know, or don’t remember and wake up. Maybe you saw her in the dream, maybe you did not, but the vision remains the same. If you don’t remember the dream woman’s face, you never saw it. The singing fades into background noise against traffic music. Every piece of the sensory experience is fractal, its every branch carrying microtones of song. When you are in the dream, the dream is clear as waking life. The dream can last years. When you wake it fades so quickly that every second counts. You’re lucky if you can remember that there was a girl on the bicycle in front of you at all, let alone that she had a face to turn back at you. Cycling against the vertical energy of urban monoliths plays contrast with the softer encounters on the ground. You can play the catch up and pull away game of your cycling partner and yet the steel and concrete stone draw the eye upward. You are in the city of Babylon, cycling behind Babalon the woman, together to Mega Therion himself under tower shadows.
Years earlier in Bethesda, the Capital Crescent Trail was the last space left to escape what I’ve come to refer to as domestic decay.
Have you ever tried to live a normal life? By normal we mean here, strictly domestic. You have an apartment. Maybe a house. Maybe a wife. Maybe a retirement fund. Clock in. Attend local concert event. Go to the same restaurant every Friday night. You can have a high rise double balcony, grow your own couple’s branded peppers, There are some lives more infinitely soul crushing than the worst tragedies of excess and the Dionysian.
Break some bones, break some hearts, but for God’s sake don’t be boring.
There were a lot of ways people suffered through the lockdowns starting in 2020 and whatever excuses they made for them. Myself? In pursuit of an imagined self, I created a tulpa of myself. An artificial version of myself.. one responsible, one successful, one honest, one loving and pure. I would live in my high tower with my white witch forever, collecting an endless supply of gold and surrounded by forests. But you can’t defy nature. I could not defy my deeper inner nature. A thirst for annihilation? A thirst for something. A thirst to feel anything, even if horrible, bewildering, and disorienting. I wanted to feel anything, something. I grew to hate my apartment and all that dwelled in it because desire was the cancer that spread in me. My problem was being ensouled like New York City itself. It’s believed among esoteric writers that what you think about becomes what you worship. What intentions you put your attentions to become what you seek and what you find. Whether you’re going to be religious about it or not, people really do create the worlds they want. Desire is the seed of action. I didn’t want a quiet life I wanted noise and risk. I didn’t want a loyal stable lover, I wanted a Scarlett Woman. I didn’t want my kitten, I wanted addictions. I didn’t want certainty, I wanted chaos.
I left the boring city. All of it behind. Love. Warmth. I left *certainty* and lost a cat. But the truth is I had left that life the second I got onto my bicycle every evening after work to escape for thirteen miles to and from my own home. I had left it years before. The daily bicycle trips meant everything. The natural world around projected before me a cyclopean ripple of green that represented everything life was not. The danger and novelty I wanted didn’t exist in my beautiful high rise apartment, but they existed in primordial nature, her life death symphonic bird call wasp wings on tree humidity. No white witch in the tower, but instead a singing femme fatale in abyssal fractal dream music and ankle socks, deep underground where rhizomes tangle horrible beautiful things like floral stem hemiparasites and blossom out of every tunnel. I wanted what became my place in Brooklyn years later. Babylon, the dream girl, narcotic chaos, and the new life I had for a moment manifested for myself, where I “could count on nothing”.
New York is Babylon ensouled with desire for desire.
I tell people they should exercise, swim, run, and cycle under fields of greenery. The body needs it, the mind needs it. “Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar”. Sometimes a bicycle is not just a bicycle. Sometimes a routine is not just a routine. We cultivate little rituals as nightly prayers. Many run away from the things that frighten them most into areas they can control. Fitness routines, trivia clubs, video games, art projects, the pursuit of wealth, power. They can be healthy or unhealthy rituals, but they’re the same. They’re surrogate activities that the domestic being performs to escape the nightmare of being domestic.
Pick your hobbies well and pick them sincerely. Know *why* they are your hobbies. If you’re going to do anything, do it for yourself. Never as an escape.
Where once I had a hobby via escape, it nearly happened again. Thankfully it didn’t.
I don’t advocate a right hand path or a left hand path.. or a middle path even. Our personal journeys are strange and don’t always line up with a permanent state. Change is everything, and you’re never the same person you were yesterday. And when you zoom out and gaze upon your life as one giant centipede-like being reverberating through time all of it collapses into a single waveform where you were both right and left, where you were both Apollonian and Dionysian and you have the option to follow the better advice to live for yourself and not merely desire for desire.
What many fail to realize is that your life itself is the artwork you are working on. That is not just some libertine platitude. It is the truth. You can create nothing unless you have been yourself created. Your selfless acts and your sins are both part of this artwork.
I wrote back on Valentine’s Day 2023 on my essay about love:
Take a risk, meet someone in the world, and know it can go horrifically, but that’s the point, there’s beauty in the risk. It can go wonderfully too, and it will always end in separation or death even when it works. That’s the whole point of Socrates’s ladder of love. When you finally understand that, you can accept eros for all that it is.
You can apply this to anything, career, art, love, it doesn’t matter. The biggest mistake most people make is not lack of experience or risk but lack of sincerity in the experience and risks they take. Desire merely for the sake of desire misses the mark but on some level at least it’s contradictorily sincere. The more severe crime to the soul is picking up escape hobbies. It’s loving something because it alleviates pain instead of inspiring pleasure and growth.
My thoughts on the contrast between lives remind me of a favorite passage from Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly which ends this essay below.
There had been a time, once, when he had not lived like this, a .32 under his pillow, a lunatic in the back yard fining off a pistol for God knew what purpose, some other nut or perhaps the same one imposing a brain-print of his own shorted-out upstairs on an incredibly expensive and valued cephscope that everyone in the house, plus all their friends, loved and enjoyed. In former days Bob Arctor had run his affairs differently: there had been a wife much like other wives, two small daughters, a stable household that got swept and cleaned and emptied out daily, the dead newspapers not even opened carried from the front walk to the garbage pail, on even, sometimes, read. But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life, lacking all of that.
Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not. That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.
But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; and he could count on nothing.