Have bike, will travel

I awoke with a start immediately aware of my numbed arm and cricked neck. I had fallen asleep on the floor while watching an episode of Fight Quest on Netflix; it’s a great show by the way, but apparently not so great as to warrant a second season. Slowly prying myself from the ground I eased back into my body and took a look outside. The fevered heat of the day had apparently broken with a flash thunderstorm leaving a note of coolness in the air. With nothing else to do for at least the next couple hours I set out on my bike intent on exploring a trail down the road from my house.

The ride up to the Cady Way Trail is an uninspiring vista of strip-malls, car lots, and fast food eateries. The only things that really stand out are the slate grey buildings of the Full Sail School of Art and the even grayer wardrobes of the Full Sail students. Full Sail has been slowly acquiring more and more properties, and with it, spreading its drab color palette like the color robbing monster from a movie whose title I have long since forgotten.

I entered the trail where it crosses Semoran Blvd. and in keeping with the spirit of adventure headed west. Relishing the sensation of riding my bike, I noticed that it seems freer than riding in a car. Destinations become less important and in sacrificing expediency, richness is imparted to the experience.

I wove through a parade of vignettes featuring both man and nature. Vibrant purple flowers erupted from a mass of greenery clogging a drainage ditch. An old man with a slightly demented look in his eye sped through puddles on his scooter while his poodle rode shotgun, shivering the way wolves do when they have been twisted into toys by a millennia of human tinkering. A little boy pushed his sister. A dad pushed his daughter while she gazed uncomprehendingly at her training-wheeled bike. A different old man clutched a cane too small for walking with but not too small for beating a would-be attacker with. Animals of all sorts suicidally darted across the trail. Buildings rose up, garishly colored and empty remnants of the most recent real-estate boom, looking like abandoned children’s playhouses. Waters from land sealed up by the buildings reached tea colored pseudopods across the trail.

Eventually the trail spit me out near Colonial Blvd. Uninterested in navigating my way home through urban sprawl, I turned my bike around and headed back down Cady Way for the second act.

Olfactory perceptions featured more prominently on the return leg of the journey. Mushroomy loaminess was traded for the scent of cooking meat, a peculiar vegetable funk accompanied a row of nondescript green bushes, and in the spaces between, the smell of ozone in air-after-rain. Breathing deep, memories drifted up from my subconscious, some idyllic, some uncomfortable, and all unbidden.

Day slowly drifted into twilight and in the fading sun, I left the trail to return home, my cup overflowing.