He cycles past me going the wrong way on a one-way street. He is mounted on an old city-style bicycle. Of course the bike is old enough that when he bought it, it didn’t have the descriptor city-style, it was just a bike, maybe even simply, a bicycle. He is quite a bit older than the rusted bicycle. He wears some worn khakis that I’m sure he says have quite a few good years left on them, a dusty windbreaker, and some shoes (not sneakers). His only concession to bike culture is his bike helmet. And to that he has affixed a doughnut of corrugated cardboard–all the better to reduce the glare from the sun. It is unclear whether this cardboard doughnut (patent-pending) reveals that he is a genius, a nut-case, or simply couldn’t give two plugs what the world thinks of him. The sun is bright dammit! and cardboard is cheap.

It could be that he is the Oberon to the Titania I spotted the other day. Perhaps they divorced and she got all the money, which is why he’s on a 40-year-old bicycle and she is driving a Harley.

Who can say?

Regardless of their checkered pasts, both of them in their own way have a certain regality about them–an owning of their own world–that I admire.