Local Color
This week’s essay is for paid subscribers of this project. All free and paid subscribers are what make this whole project spin round. Paid subscriptions go to paying for web hosting, silly stickers, and materials for my weaving. Every other week, a free essay is available. If you want to read all my essays, a paid subscription gets you access to all the essays published as part of this projects. Thanks for caring enough to read and support. Your attention means the world to me.
Have you ever heard the term local color before? It’s a term I learned growing up in the Midwest to refer to someone or something that lights a neighborhood up or makes it special. It most often refers to someone who is an endearing eccentric that people identify with a place. Yet, I also think of local color as all the things and idiosyncrasies that make a neighborhood a place that is unique. Those things could be architectural details, coffee shops, tattoo parlors, specific graffiti tags or art installations that you only see in that neighborhood, or just odd happenstance things that the weather and fate brought into your pathway that you cannot separate from that place. It’s those people, places, and features that make a neighborhood feel alive in a way that no corporate activated space can. As bicyclists, I think we are local color and incredibly attuned to the local color around us.
To embrace local color as a bicyclist is to live fully the philosophy that Sir Isaac Ramos, head honcho of peace sports productions, shared in issue five of Peace Sports Illustrated:
“The internet only shows a slice of the story. Visit new places, meet new people, and try new food.”
Yes, get off the internet and embed yourself into the world around you. Use your bike, any bike, and go places you have never been before. You don’t even have to ride far. Chortle mightily as you greet your fellow carbon-based life forms in the streets. Wave at strangers and wish them well. Refer to your baristas as the unholy triumvirate and call them “my liege” as you thank them for your drink. Go visit your friends in the middle of the day and make them talk to you. Take photos of the community art that was put up on light posts. To be local color you have to be the cringe you want to see in the world. You have to open yourself up to wonder and awe.
Isn’t that surprise, wonder, and awe of what bikes are all about? I can’t think of a better way, besides walking, to really soak in all the tiny miracles that exist outside your door. Yes, I said miracles. Here I am talking about those secular miracles that make one feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. Take a person spending countless hours making a faery garden or a tattoo shop cover a busted up window with a sign that says, “we forgive you.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Quiet Practice to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.