Patch and writing by Ali Potvin, a friend of mine

I’m not the sort of person who puts much faith in dreams.  Wisps of thought with no substance, the residue of real life dredged up for the mind to reshape while the body sleeps.  Psychology is not something I pretend to understand.  I don’t.  I don’t really understand anything.  But sometimes I think I do.

I had a dream once, not long ago, and when I woke from it, I felt refreshed.  In my dream, I was riding on an old blue Schwinn, not unlike the one my mother used to ride.  Hers was a yellow collegiate with a heavy rounded out frame, and a basket on the front.  She left it behind last time she moved, and it has, no doubt, rusted out in the humidity of that place.  It is, in any case lost to me now.

The appearance of this bicycle was a surprise to me then.  In my dream, I rode it everywhere.  I rode across the entire country on it, and I felt happy.  My mom’s old bike had always been too slow for me, and too small.  But nothing of that sort mattered with my blue Schwinn.  It was perfect.  Idyllic.  There is nothing I can say to explain the way it felt.  I have only words, and few at that, and if I could share that feeling I would.

When I woke up, I decided that I needed that bike.  A bike with something like suburban or collegiate emblazoned on the frame.  I went looking for it, and I haven’t found it yet.  Then it occurred to me that I wasn’t really looking for the bike, but for something that the bike represented, which, it turns out, is something like fulfillment.

I started thinking about this in terms of my own goals, because somehow I got the impression that that was what this was supposed to be about.  It isn’t a message to the world, and it isn’t a defining moment.  I am small and quiet, and defined by disappointments.  But it is hopeful.  It occurred to me at some point that I don’t have any goals, per se.  That it isn’t about arriving at a particular solution, but about the process.  Because living isn’t about death, for me.  I am in a state of constant movement, of constant change, as is the world, and there is infinite potential in that.  When death does come around, I want to have lived my life as if on that ride.  To have lived in constant flux, and ended the better for it. 

So – I think that what I am trying to say here is that the bicycle is a sort of representation of potential.  And I think that everyone has their own blue Schwinn to pursue or to ride, as cheesy as that may sound.  If everyone rides, and agrees not to run anyone else over, this world might be a better place.