first post

some French theorist said something like: walking in the city is to the map as speaking a langage is to the dictionary. parole, not langue (sp)

and I say: the nice thing about blogging (as, say, compared to writing a book or a masters' thesis) is that you can dispense with references and correct attribution.

and you can make the topic whatever you darn well please.

my topic is the moments that come without warning from the practice of moving around the city. the city, in this case, being Melbourne. and my chosen language being the bicycle. the velocipede: fast-feet.

as for my title, it's Wordsworth:

Surprised by joy -impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport

Sunday, December 6.

Awake: 5 am. Riding: through the city to St Kilda and on down Beach Road.

I saw: the balloons rising one by one over to the west, probably from Princes Park. they emerged from the suburban horizon like a chain of slow-moving bubbles. A giant underground fish, breathing out coloured globes. later, I could see them far off to the east, over the hills.

I saw: on Beach Road, heading south as I rode north; a woman in her 20s try to get off her bike while it was still rolling at what must have been a minimum of 10 ks an hour. she lifted her right foot over the frame and was suddenly running, or trying to, beside the bike. the bike threw itself over her and she became a hunched tangle on the ground. I did a U-ey and asked if she was OK. She said "I must need more practice." She tried to get back onto her bike, shaking and bleeding from the hands, saying she was fine. I said, using the authority of someone who hadn't just fallen off her bike for no reason, and throwing in my middle-aged motherly act as well: "sit down and have a drink before you go. rest." and she did, making a seat out of the gutter, and I turned again and rode north, glancing back at her a few times as I went.

I saw: behind me, as I came off the beach bike trail onto Beaconsfield Parade in St Kilda, hundreds of runners, starting a race in a brightly coloured mass, bobbing up and down. One red car drove slowly in front of them. I rode for a while along the bike trail beside the road, looking out across the bleached sand to the bay, then I stopped to let the runners catch up. They were the women's race, and one women in blue shorts and a halter top was 30 metres ahead of the rest, running into the wind. I tracked alongside her for a while. She was running at about 22 kilometres an hour, leading those hundreds, winning the race.