Here's the story of the day:
As we biked up to the Golden Gate bridge, I couldn't help but think of how epic it looked. The green hills on the other side gave me the feeling, strange as this may sound, that the bridge had been built yesterday. It gave the feeling of the grandeur of its completion in the 1930s, of how it must have felt to have a bridge to those verdant hills where there wasn't one before.
I've had a couple conversations in the last several months about suicides on the Golden Gate bridge. So when I got on it on my bike, I was going to stop at some point and look over the edge and kind of imagine what I would be like to jump. I noticed that there was no fence or barrier of any sort which would make it really easy.
A kind of little golf cart-esque car was heading towards me on the pedestrian part of the bridge and I had to stop to let it pass. As I was stopping anyway I looked over the edge and saw the water. It didn't really look as high as I thought it would.
A cyclist right next to me turned and said to me, "We just saw a guy get up on the railing and jump off!" I was like, "No way, you're kidding, seriously?" And he was adamant that he was serious. I still thought he might be fucking with me until I actually *saw the body* floating in the water through a crack in the bridge's railing. I couldn't fucking believe it! A second earlier and I would have actually seen him jump! That would have really made me question if I'm living in a dreamworld where my thoughts manifest events.
If he was dead, that was the first dead body I have ever seen. It was surreal.
The bike trip was awesome. It actually was easier than I thought. We went along the 1 which skirts the coast. Beautiful.
I want more bike trips. Seattle to SF this summer?