Bike Snob - Anonymous [27]
Then my bike got yoinked.
But in retrospect, that was a good thing. Actually, it now seems uncannily like fate. Even though I got another bike, having my bike stolen really dampened my enthusiasm for messengering, mostly because the financial loss was sobering. Not only is messengering on (what was for me at the time) an expensive bike pretty foolish, but doing so with no medical coverage is doubly foolish. Really, compared to an injury a bike loss is pretty mild. Plus, almost immediately after my bike was stolen I was finally hired for a new job I’d been hoping to get for months. It’s almost as if the Great Obvious Bicycle Metaphor had stepped aside so that my life could enter into a new phase, and once things settled down It returned.
“So is that it, Great Obvious Bicycle Metaphor? Have you really been with me all along, just like in the parable?”
“No, idiot. You locked your bike to a mailbox. What did you expect?”
You’re probably familiar with the famous Joseph Campbell quote: “Follow your bliss.” (This is not to be confused with the first lesson in mohel school: “Follow your bris.”) Well, I finally understand what’s so irritating about the beach parable. It’s that it’s passive, and that there’s someone always walking beside you who will help you out of a jam. Cycling has always been a part of my life not because it follows me around, but because I follow cycling around. It’s my bliss.
Knowing what you love is knowing yourself, and something that you love can serve as a guide. It’s a fixed and tangible point in the world on which you can pin your passions and hopes. You can have a relationship with cycling. You can enjoy the discipline of cycling, or the freedom; you can enjoy the physical exertion, or the convenience and relative ease. Regardless, a strong relationship based on love will take you far, and it will also improve other areas of your life. You can depend on cycling in a way you can depend on little else. And it’s always there even when it’s forced aside due to injury or circumstances. Sure, it may be more about the love than the cycling, but if you’re going to love something cycling’s a good choice.
PART TWO
Road Rules
“WHY IS EVERYBODY TRYING TO KILL ME?”
Fear, and How to Survive on a Bike
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.
—Mark Twain
Vehicular Intimidation
Dominance Through Stupidity
When you’re a cyclist and you talk to non-cyclists about riding a bike on the road, one of the first questions you hear is, “Aren’t you afraid?” Fear of traffic is one of the main reasons people cite for not cycling, and when you do ride a bike you’re sharing the road (or, more accurately, fighting for your small sliver of it) with motorized vehicles that vastly outweigh, overpower, and outnumber you. Moreover, very often the drivers of these motor vehicles out-stupid you as well, since their vehicles allow them to forget they’re driving and to become distracted by things like stereos, cell phones, beverages, their children, their dogs, and entire meals that they’ve ordered at fast-food drive-throughs. It is sobering to think that, as a cyclist, all that’s between you and being run over by a Ford Explorer is the driver bending down for half a second to retrieve a dropped McNugget.
Yes, the truth is that when you ride a bike you really do sometimes feel like you’re Emilio Estevez in Maximum Overdrive, and it’s often easy to forget that these roving death machines are actually piloted by human beings—that is, until a tinted window finally lowers to reveal a face, from which emanates a voice demanding that you “Get out of the road!” This is infuriating in the way that only truly stupid statements can be. Telling cyclists to get out of the road is like telling women to get out of the voting booth and go back into the kitchen, or telling Japanese-American people to “Go back to China!” The ignorance inherent in the statement is almost more offensive than the sentiment behind it.
But even worse than “Get out of the road!” is “I