Midwest Rock Lobster: June Mass

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

June Mass

This motley crew is one of the absolute highlights of my month. And summertime Critical Masses are the best.

I didn't make a spoke card this time, opted to cut out of work early and get more bike miles in instead. Got RAGBRAI coming up and all.

The weather was perfect, people are back from school, people have moved back from Seattle and Colorado, gotten leave from the military, and so on.

We started, as usual, with a raid of the Country Club Plaza and then, as is pretty usual these days, Loose Park. As we rolled in to Loose Park, we could see a wedding in the rose garden. I joked that we must be invited, if it's in a park. But nobody tried to crash the wedding party, we went around to another edge of the park and hung out there.

I think the consensus was 150 to 200 bicyclists showing up at your wedding, uninvited and unpredicted, would be funny except for it being your wedding. We might be a bunch of Massholes, but we're not jerks.

Like I say, I passed on making spoke cards again. I made them for the first six or seven Masses of 2016, the year I pulled off the unlikely feat of making all twelve rides. Between my frequency of riding and the spoke cards, I got more and more questions from people who had figured me to be the organizer of the event.

Maybe my constant photography contributed to this idea as well, but talk about a spit-take. Critical Mass is the opposite of an organized event. It has no organizer. There are instances where people exhibit what you'd call leadership, say calling out for people to wait at an intersection for the group to catch up, but shouting 'mass up!' doesn't make you the organizer.

The bigger reason I hadn't made any spoke cards lately was I didn't have any ideas that struck my fancy. Now I have one, I'll be missing the July Mass because I'll be riding my bike across Iowa, but I think for August I have a stroke of inspiration and bad taste that should be worthy.