When you’re a bike messenger, a real bike messenger, not a jimmy john or an uber eats or a panda express… …when you’re a bike messenger there’s a part of your brain that grows to absorb street addresses, numbers, letters, directionals and subtle clues that make a big difference. It all gets whittled down to a shorthand lexicon lingo spoken by those in the know and it fits like a glove or maybe a tea cozy over a 3-D map of the city that exists only in your brain.
you know
I know
you know
Just as the brains of baristas burn new neural pathways to absorb all the nonfat decaf no foam extra hot 3 sweet-n-low vanilla fucking bullshit without blinking an eye, keeping a straight face.
Your messenger brain is trained to visualize, categorize, optimize, epitomize the traveling salesman problem. Working it out in real time and space on two wheels with a satchel over your shoulder cutting through traffic and parked cars and pedestrians and MID ambassadors as well as legal...
With all the good/evil that is google, they make it very easy to create documents and keep track of them. google.docs beats the shit out of Microsoft's offerings in the same category. google makes it very easy to generate word clouds and look back on things. to sum it up. retrospectively.
If I was technologically proficient I’d be sharing actual word clouds with you, not just screen shots of them. Then you could scroll over them with your cursor and the tally for each word would pop up as well as its percentage of the total word count.
I recently created seven word clouds from this site in the past six years or so. I saved a few of them here, because they’re all so similar, there's no need to save seven. As you know I’m repeatedly repeating the same old shit.
The words in the previous 12 years of this site are not so easy to clump together, to run the numbers. Perhaps I could refer back to the printed pages I have stored in large 3-ring binders from 2011, to tally word counts by hand with a pencil in a small spiral notebook. Or not....
On the slow uphill grind that is my commute home I was rolling slowly up Cowlitz Road to the corner at Lincoln Way yesterday when a guy in a wheelchair approached the crosswalk. I gave him a little nod and when he knew I was going to wait for him, he rolled across Cowlitz, all the while saying “number nine, number nine, number nine” and I thought, whatever, just another U-district wack job. Until I realized he was a Beattles fan and only then did I understand that my new Justin Tucker shirt kicked off his Revolution 9 rant and perhaps he would proceed to repeat “number nine” 101 times over the next eight minutes and twenty-two seconds.
