Day 107: Long Range Motorcycle

2026-05-24

Hello! Day 100 is out to the public, and so any links there will stay the same. I hope they don't rot and make the listing fall apart.

This is a photo of a Harley Davidson Street Glide. That's all I know, and since there's no Wikipedia article (or easily-available good source) about this, that's all I can say about it. It's red. Moving on.

This is still from the art market that I've been talking about for the past few days. I bring it up again because I've been thinking about local communities and their impact on the local civilians. This kind of urban planning requires a lot of involvement from so many different fields of study, and I don't know where to begin.

We know that big pickup trucks or SUVs — the cars that seem everywhere in the US today — are bad for local business, and the parking lot for this art market was on a grassy field some good distance away. A satellite view of the field reveals just how much space you need to dedicate to cars compared to the actual attraction. The market looks tiny compared to the giant valley of cars!

But for once, I'm going to switch sides and focus on the positive spaces that make a community great, rather than the automobile machine that make a community suck.

Third places, the public areas that aren't home or work, are for hanging out or socializing. But in a country whose culture is about "no loitering", you need dedicated spaces for it. This isn't a bad thing, but those spaces are limited. Some examples of third spaces are libraries, theaters, community welcome centers, arcades, shops or markets, pubs and bars, a town square, restaurants, and churches. You probably live near a third place, but if it's not close to home, and you need to dedicate time and plan to get there, it's not great for spontaneous wanderings and interactions.

I'm one of the lucky ones (I think?). From where I'm writing this, I can walk to a shop one mile away, and I can get to a library nearly three miles away without a car, if I'm willing to cross a high-speed road without any crosswalk.

From school, I could walk downtown to a theater, a main street of restaurants, and a local bookshop within two miles, on a sidewalk that's quiet enough if you ignore the screaming freight trucks every once in a while.

And so our neighborhood community creates friends and business acquaintances on its own. People read the local news, delivered to their front door or through website, and turn up in droves to events such as this art market. It's great!

Dedicated social events like these prove that people want to be together in-person, putting their partisan politics aside and instead exploring a clay factory, or buying and selling little crafts. Or admiring a red motorcycle.

It's good for business. If that's how you need to convince your local representative that local community development matters, then sure.

Finally, a music recommendation. I'm listening to instrumental pieces by ミツキヨ, or Mitsukiyo. Now, I must have gotten really bad at internet research in the past few years, because I don't know who he is, and all his music is in different places with different version on each platform. I've treated Bandcamp as the canonical version, of course. As far as I can tell, he's from Korea and makes music titled in the Japanese language. Mitsukiyo is known for his video game soundtracks, but I've only ever listened to his original instrumentals, and this album (which translates to Dream Box) of twenty-four pieces, one for each hour of the day, is beautiful. I used to use the nighttime hour songs to fall asleep, and they worked well!

Cheers,
David