#185

Rode a bicycle today. That's a real releasing thing right there once you find the groove and work up that speed. A state of being particular to itself. Bicycles are an incredible invention and have figured largely in my life; so many bicycle stories. Rather than begin with any specific anecdotes, I'll illustrate something of my mindset.

Though, I will conclude ahead of time that my case is spectacularly weak and simulates cogency only when received by someone who is the same flavor of crazy as me or is open to understanding the motives and calculations of fundamentally weird dudes.

*

Feeling the wind in my hair is, to me, an essential part of the cycling experience. So I haven't worn a head protection for the main bulk of the hours that I've spent on a bicycle. Used to hang my helmet from my handlebar, since like any good parent my mother compelled me to wear one. As I took plenty of spills on my bicycle, and also just plain dropped the things a lot, my artificial carapaces grew convincingly scuffed at a reasonable pace.

This is not to endorse riding your bicycle without a helmet. I think everybody should do that. I should do that. My bad and unwise decision not to is the product of a part of myself that I have to live with but cannot be dealt with. It's that thing in a dude, what in Achilles was his inability to stay and in Hector his inability to leave. It's what makes people climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. It is the thing that kills you, but makes sure you live first. It is also, I would bet, responsible for a lot of unprotected sex. If it were to find expression in a gene, we could call it the "fuck it, go--and go hard."

Personally I do wear a helmet on a motorized two-wheeled vehicle, but I respect folks who do not. I definitely get it. 

Anyhow sure, I've come pretty close to crackin' open the ole cosmic egg a time or two, but who's counting? Every time I've passed a truck on the highway I've been playing fast and loose with all kinds of fucked-up odds, not to mention when you imagine how many times I've been passed myself by some unreachably methed-out wheeltwitcher with one eye screwed shut and a sweaty cauldron of hemorrhoids burning in their coin purse like a lit cigar.

What am I writing about? Helmets? People should wear them on their bicycles. I don't and rarely will, even though it's unsafe. You are never safe anywhere.

But especially not, in my opinion, when you ride your bicycle in the street, where the cars are. I don't give a damn what ordinances they pass, how many people give me the stinkeye, I ride on the sidewalk. I want a curb between me and the cars. That's final. Drivers see you as not only not a person but an actively hostile element invading their driving environment; not only will they kill you on instinct and mask it even to themselves as an "accident", but there is a certain kind of person who will deliberately try to fucking murder you if they think no one is there to see, and this is not counting the vast segment of the population that actively sucks at driving and will kill you without so much as looking up from the text they are composing as they apply makeup and eat a sandwich to absorb the pint of vodka they had for lunch. Sidewalks only, fuck the street, fuck the law, and may a monster made of angry cocks fuck a cycling activist* flapping their whiny business in my face about how my behavior "hurts the cause". I bury your cause with a spade one hundred meters from my area when I am camping. Do you understand.

Contradiction, you say, to worry about cars when I disregard the easy safety of a helmet? Well, surely then I must be the first man to live his life this way, with contradictions. Someday you must tell me what it is like, this life of yours, so engineered as to ensure that none of your choices or ideas conflict with any of the others or the overarching structure as readable for logical cohesion, coherence, and correctness. If you're not sure, and want to double-check, though, I recommend the purchase of a few red pens.

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Watching this Seth Rogen movie last night (Observe And Report, made me kinda sick with its hackneyed reliances but also definitely had its many moments, some even pretty great, and made its salient points) I was reminded (by soundtrack decisions [really good in this movie]), as I sometimes am, that Queen is basically my favorite band of all time. I've spent more time liking Queen than I have spent liking any music, with the exception of the classical selections from Disney's Fantasia, and possibly, Little Richard. Bohemian Rhapsody is the first piece of art that I can remember interpreting, and my introduction to the problems of fatalism, judgment, regret, meaninglessness, inevitable death, and the indelible nature of decision/irretrievable action. Also the embattled pity and pitilessness of the choir, which is literal within the composition. I'm sure plenty of dissertations and twatter threads make the case ahead of me, but Bohemian Rhapsody is a pretty heavy text. Some density there.

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Fat Bottomed Girls is the most flawless composition of all time. They could put it in that French building with the meter and the gram and all that other shit that isn't even accurate anymore**. All songs would be measured in thousandths of a part of Fat Bottomed Girls, the only complete song in the world.

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Queen also has that song Bicycle Race.

I do enjoy riding a bicycle and I am glad I got to today; it's not quite all I wanna do, but I'd definitely rather do that than argue about fake opposites, unimportant connections, and meaningless loyalties, which is the main point of the song as I remember it.


--JL

*fucking listen to yourself, look at what you call yourself, by all rights you should make yourself sick

**untrue? not looking it up