Having decided that it was excessive, but needing a bike I could lock up outside the grocery store or library or ditch on the ground at ultimate practice, I bought a steel-framed fixed-gear beater from a girl messenger. I even rode it, for the first time, about forty minutes from Williamsburg back to Park Slope. Night was beginning to fall and I didn't have lights, mildly frightening by any terms but decidedly thrilling since I'd lost the ability to coast. It had been too long since my muddy last farewall to Page Mill Road, and flying down the impossibly potholed Marcy Ave on two wheels put the first true grin on my face in weeks.

The other twist was learning to drive a stick shift. It's a skill I've inexplicably wanted to acquire for years. Beginning with a pickup truck in the middle of a tobacco field in rural North Carolina when I was eighteen, strings of well-meaning friends and acquaintances had each let me try once, too many months or years in between to piece anything together. Oddly—or awesomely—enough it's the women around me with stick shifts who finally made it happen. Iga or Elizabeth and I be pulling into College Terrace from a completely uneventful run to Safeway or the Milk Pail, when housemate-of-the-month would stop abruptly at the side of the road, right next to the Corbin Sparrow and three Priuses, and boot me out of the comfortable passenger seat. As it turned out, it was Sarah who finally got me over the hump, talking me from Ocean Beach all the way back to the Castro.

I like this, this practicing a familiar habit with a twist. Funny that I've gotten to the point where riding a bike at night the wrong way down the street with no lights feels comfortable if not exactly wise, but in any case... It's a way of feeling more vulnerable, more deliberate in my instincts, more alive.