If you write a column every Friday for enough Fridays, you’ll end up having to point out over and over that it’s Friday the thirteenth.

I’d much rather point out over and over that it’s Norfolk Bike Month, and that next week is Bike To Work Week.

Everybody's doing it.

Every day next week, the entire population of Norfolk will bike to work/school and then bike home again. Well, that’s not true. Still, I’m sorry to have to miss even an approximation of that lie during my exile in France. I’ll try to participate from afar. Out my window I can see Mont Ventoux, whose moonlike summit landscape has contributed to many a thrilling stage of the Tour de France. British cyclist Tom Simpson died while climbing Mont Ventoux in 1967; his alleged last words were “Put me back on my bike!”

I hope these won’t be my own last words when I celebrate Norfolk Bike Month by making my ascent in two weeks.

I’m excited about Bike Month and Bike to Work Week. Why? Because while Norfolk isn’t yet the world’s best city for cycling, plenty of Norfolk’s residents are committed to improving it. And it’s a fairly good bike city already, one that easily can become a great one. We’ve got the necessary ingredients: flat terrain, short distances across town, some wide streets, several stretches of waterfront. Our winter weather isn’t perfect, but it’s surely no worse than Holland’s or Denmark’s, where every man woman and child rides a bike thousands of kilometers per day.

If you’re unsure how cycling could behoove your own wellbeing in addition to the environment, click here.

Virginians are almost evenly split on gay marriage, Post poll finds

Within four years, Virginia lawmakers who oppose gay marriage will be disobeying the will of the people, because the recent stunning shift in national opinion doesn’t exclude Virginia and shows no sign of abating.

Report shows marriage equality would earn NY $391 million

A group of New York state senators estimates that legalized gay marriage “would earn the state $283,810,725 in wedding revenue and tourism, $3,792,400 in marriage license fees, $22,704,858 in sales taxes, and $259,669 in NYC hotel occupancy taxes for a total of $310,567,652 in new state revenue and economic activity” over three years.

Look at those numbers for a minute, and let yourself dream about what we could do with all that money. I’ll grant, of course, that when Virginia legalizes gay marriage, the sum of our new revenue won’t be so grand; New York has twice as many people as Virginia. And there will be less wedding tourism as more states end marriage discrimination. Then again, southerners spend more on weddings, and legal equality will attract new residents, and even $155 million is nothing to sneeze at.

Virginia could have made money off this.

There’s also this: “Many same-sex couples, by virtue of getting married, would also become ineligible for state public assistance programs, creating an additional $80,848,457 in state budget savings. Combined, the “positive impact of marriage equality” in New York is $391 million.”

I realize Republican lawmakers who are spending millions to defend DOMA won’t be swayed by this argument. But sensible people ought to be.

Health care equals slavery, says Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul

Rand Paul had a bit of an outburst yesterday. The “right to health care,” he said, “means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. … You have a right to beat down my door with the police? … That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.”

Since I’m spending May in a country whose citizens all must pay for compulsory health insurance, I’m well poised to test Paul’s theory. My plan is to walk the streets of Paris with a megaphone shouting “You’re all slaves! You’re all slaves!” The problem is I’ll have to say it in French: “Vous êtes esclaves! Vous êtes esclaves!” Will my accent hurt my credibility?

We’ll know soon, but in the meantime here’s some information that portends a likely answer:

The French pay 5.25% of earned income and 3.95% of benefits toward health insurance. In return they’re reimbursed (in most cases) for seventy percent of the already low fees. They pay 6,60 € to see a doctor, 7,50 € to see a specialist, 14,17 € to see a cardiologist. (Today’s exchange rate is $1.42 to the euro.) When I’ve seen doctors in France, I’ve had to pay the full price—a staggering 23 €.

Each time I’ve obtained health care in France, I paid the fee directly to the doctor, who put my money in a cash box himself and gave me change. I also never waited more than a few minutes before being seen. And medicine is subsidized, too; if you pay exorbitantly for prescriptions, I’ll bet you could save money by purchasing the drugs here, even when taking into account the roundtrip airfare.

According to this chart, the total health care expenditure per capita in France is less than half of what it is in the United States.

Vermont closing in on single-payer health care

It so happens that I’ll be in Vermont in late June; my plan is to walk the streets of Burlington shouting “You’re all slaves! You’re all slaves!” If I want credibility up there, I guess I’ll sing the words to the tune of Phish songs.

Support passenger rail in the Virginia six-year transportation plan

Even if you dislike passenger rail, maybe you’ll start supporting it just to shut me up.

New ticks in Hampton Roads

If you’ve never heard of Tidewater Spotted Fever, read about it here.

A philosopher’s take on former State Dept spokesman PJ Crowley

If you’ve never heard of parrhesia, read about it here.

Execution set, for now, for man who killed Richmond family

Virginia gears up again to make murderers of its residents, as our commonwealth is wont to do. In our state we execute more people than Europe and South America combined, since all those continents’ countries have banned the death penalty. (Here are the nations that executed people in 2009: China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, United States, Yemen, Sudan, Vietnam, Syria, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Bangladesh, Thailand, Singapore, Botswana, Malaysia, North Korea.)

Capital punishment makes a murderer out of Steve Earle and all of us.

Steve Earle, the country singer/songwriter whose new album I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive came out on April 26, gives this reason for his death-penalty abolitionism: “I object to the damage it does to my spirit if I kill somebody. And if my government kills somebody in what’s ostensibly a democracy, then I’m killing somebody, period.” I’ve never been able to grasp how one can dispute this point.

Norfolk & Portsmouth Herald, May 13, 1811

Google News archives improve by the minute as microfilm from around the globe is digitized. If you’d read our local paper 200 years ago today, you’d have learned about the sale of Havana sugars, Indian corn, iron, nuns thread, gin, rye whiskey, Lisbon salt, and gunpowder. You’d know that shoemaker T. Porter “presumes to think, without puffing or exaggerating, that he is enabled to turn out work [of] neatness and durability.” And you’d be warned by one Charles Peterson that “all persons are forewarned from crediting Levina Peterson, on my account, as I am determined to pay no debts of her contracting.”

Of course there are items on the sale of slaves and the apprehension of escaped slaves. Sen. Rand Paul, who equates slavery with health care, might do well to read the announcement placed here by Mathew Hubbard. It offers fifty dollars out-of-state or ten dollars in-state to anyone who “take[s]” and then “secure[s]” a “Negro man named DAVY; slim made, about 6 feet high, and about 36 years old; marked with the small-pox; has a yellowish eye; he follows painting; he formerly belonged to captain Pennock; he was raised in Hampton, where it is probable he may be lurking.”

I’ve been reading the news online for fifteen years, yet there remains something uncanny about perusing articles from 1811 on my MacBook via WiFi. The past already comes alive in stories like these; the computer, I guess, just heightens the effect of their currency, so that I root in the present tense for Davy to escape the South despite his having died at least 150 years ago.

In other news from 13 May 1811, Norfolk resident Joseph C. Maigne informs “his Friends and the Public” that “his BATHS are now ready, and that no attention on his part shall be wanting to make them useful and agreeable. Price as formerly—3 Bathings 1 Dollar—37 1-2 Cents single one.”

Stanley Kunitz

As long as we’re marking anniversaries of dates, let me point out that former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz died five years ago this weekend at the age of 101. I’ll end with a poem of his, called “The Layers.”
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.