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We’ve done a lot of bike riding during this pandemic (it’s still not over at the time of this posting). We’d ride through the city, averaging at least 13 miles every time we rode. We’d also do the trails around Maryland as well, sometimes going all the way out to the Anacostia. It was one of the ways we could safely break up the monotony of not bring able to be somewhere. No more stints at the cafe down the street or a casual lunch at a restaurant. Riding bikes is what we had to do and we tried to enjoy every bit of the pedaling and posting up.

Truth in mid thought at Ft. Stevens.

We’d stop at some of our favorite spots to relax, read, draw and more often just talk. The range of conversations would go from interpreting something in the insane current events or news, to this kind of conversation, examining the unreality of superheroes.

We were in the heat of discussion about what super-power we’d like to be endowed with and somehow got into a debate about the Marvel mutant Domino and what her real power was.

Below is one of five clips I recorded that day. This was the first recording and I tried to be low-key on my recording, so the image is everywhere. I didn’t want the openness and tone of the conversation to be affected by a camera starring them down. Excel did the captions and some funky accents to liven it up (he’s practicing his editing).

My contention was that the idea of “luck” as a superpower is just a powerful person being lazy or naive. Perhaps someone that has lost ambition or drive. Or even more interesting, a highly stylized presentation of one’s ultimate power of being able to do whatever they wanted to do. I argued that if in fact someone like Domino always made it out of bad situations because of so-called luck, what would happen if she got aggressive or proactive and actually initiated some objectives. To me, her luck was only untapped power. She just wasn’t ambitious enough or had low expectations.

Excel is listening to a bright idea.

In a later conversation, a continuation of this one at another stop, I’d argue that I was a lot like Domino. Just nearly surviving because I didn’t know any better, or had such a small mind when it came to accomplishing things. I’ll be back at some point to debate this in a different forum.

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