Returning to Mass

Felt like a real homecoming.

It seemed so long since I'd been to Critical Mass, I really thought my last one was before my heart surgery. It wasn't, I rode in October. Tried again in December, but by the time I got to Westside, the thing had dispersed into a couple of Westport bars, so I went and rode my bike alone.

But that was four months ago, and my memory has gotten a little weird the past year or so, and my perception was that I was out of the saddle all the way through the fall and winter. I can look at my cycling log and see it isn't quite true, but there are enough two week long gaps on top of the four month one from the heart surgery to make it seem like I'd forgotten how to ride a bike for quite a while.

This was Corinna's first Critical Mass since my heart surgery. Right before I went under the knife she had a nasty crash that left her with a gnarly brain injury she's still not all the way back from. She was struggling to do it at some points on Friday, but had her breakthrough moments of actually having fun, especially towards the end when we ended up down at the 'castle' by the old water works off The Paseo. I don't have photos from that late in the ride, not because I quite shooting, but because the light was so bad none of my pictures turned out in even a half-ass sort of way.

Me and Corinna broke from the group in the Crossroads because there was a poetry open mic she wanted to do, something else that's been a long time coming. I think our second date was a poetry open mic, and it used to be a regular feature of our life together, so while I was having fun with the party (Critical Mass is as good as parties get), I couldn't say no to the poetry event. It was at Kultured Chameleon, and tags are near and dear to my heart, so that was a bonus. I spent a lot of my wait reading a coffee table book on the modern history of tags.