“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”

― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

I am going to write tonight about something that you don’t care about… don’t pretend… I know you don’t. It is something that I care about – and that is a fact that I’m more than a little embarrassed and ashamed. Such trivialities.

At any rate, the City of Richardson (where I live) is in the middle of spending some taxpayer largess in executing the idea of an Active Transportation Plan. This is something that I am interested and involved in. All in all it is a good thing… a very good thing. However, it is not what I’m writing about tonight

One minor part of the plan is the putting together of an inventory of bike parking in the city. I became way too enthused about this – wasting a lot of time riding around looking for bike racks. These were then entered into an interactive map. I did win a fifty dollar gift certificate in a contest… so there is that.

But one thing really frustrated me. There is an LA Fitness – a health club/exercise place at the end of my neighborhood. Back when we had a disposable income the whole family belonged and we worked out there regularly. I have been there literally hundreds of times (though not in the last few years).

It always bothered me that the club did not have a bike rack. The gas station on the corner has a bike rack. The Mexican rotisserie chicken place across the street has a bike rack. The new Dunkin Donuts down the road has a bike rack. But this place – big and dedicated to health and exercise… did not have a bike rack. Not one in front… not one on the side where the parking is.

But the other day, I was out for a walk, trying to get some non-stressful exercise in, and strolled past the health club. This was the first time I walked to it – all the time, over the years I rode my bike (and locked it to the railing because there was no bike rack). Because I was on foot – I turned a corner I never had before and looked down the narrow alley-like space between the health club and the Korean Bar-B-Que place… and there, lo and behold was:

a bike rack. It has been there all this time. I never noticed it.

I don’t feel too bad – it’s really hidden, off to an obscure side and behind a pillar. I seriously doubt that there has ever been a bike locked up to this thing (though I’ll try to ride there this weekend and lock up… for no reason). But still…. I thought I was good at finding these things.

So there it is. The high point of my day. Now you all can go back to what you find interesting and important and leave my with my pitiful useless epiphanies.