I watched this movie the other night, featuring famous contemporary thinkers taking walks, sitting in airports, riding in cabs, and rowing on lakes while talking about stuff. In one of the segments Sunaura Taylor is talking to Judith Butler about the question, what can a body do? They talk about how bodies move, how they move through social space, how space enables certain kinds of movement but not others, and how impairment is socially organized to become disability. It’s a fantastic ten minutes of film set amongst seventy others that all take place at this slow pace in public places through which others are moving or playing or resting. I was thinking about this movie when I rode down to the Treme tonight to watch it again with R. and J.. The streets are built for cars, or at least that’s what cars think. Sometimes they’ll honk at me, I think because they want me to move further to the right to aid their passing on my left. What they don’t see, because they are in their cars and their experience of the road largely ignores the shoulders, is the gap that’s opened up where the asphalt is splitting or the car doors that I’m trying to avoid should they suddenly fling open. For drivers, the road is theirs; they cannot imagine the experience of moving through space on two wheels, no protection, streets always trying to grab your tire and throw you off. After the movie I hopped back on the Surly and rode home in the rain. I wear glasses, and once they get wet and fogged, I can’t see anything. I moved slowly, staring at the road, glad to know my potholes. But they are filling them over there on Magazine between Girod and Julia. I wasn’t expecting to run into the mounds of clay and stone that has replaced my trusty (because I know them) potholes. I had to get off the bike and walk around. Cars were zipping around me, but hey, I can only do what I can do. These roads are hazardous. I snapped this picture as I got near home, because this is pretty much what I saw while riding my bike around tonight. Sometimes you’ve just got to keep your eyes on the street, remembering that it’s not expecting you, not at all.