Just this Tuesday past I was pedaling up the road muttering about a large ugly broad whose chest was so wide and shelf-like that it looked to be resting on her steering wheel. She had run a stop sign and made a left and now her car was a few feet in front of me and we stared at each other, bull and matador. I stared into her tiny saurian eyes and saw reflected back exactly...nothing. She was waiting for that obstacle to move so she could continue on her way.
I still love bad language but I intuitively know the situations in which the best expletive is dust in the wind and this was one of them. Instead I gave her my best "I Know Why Your Grandchildren Never Call" look and slowly pedaled on. I could write an entire post on the different looks I cultivate for different Situations. You have your looks too, if you bicycle for instance I have yet to see a bicyclist who has not perfected their "I Was Just Shot In The Back" look. Mine is Oscar ready.
So now I'm bicycling along grumbling and I do alright at this for the first quarter of a mile but as soon as half a mile from ground zero I start to notice the way the pale green on the trees meets the deepening blue of the sky and I'm smitten. The air is warm and light and caresses my head, at least where it can reach it around my "pompous plastic helmet.*" Thinking about that twat makes me mad all over again.
But the weather is so fucking nice. Christ riding on the hood of a '88 Saab 900S covered in liberal bumper stickers but the weather is beautiful. By the time I arrived at my usual destination all I could do was lie down on the sidewalk, still clipped in, and slur something about how warm the air was and how I could smell the trees flowering and how it was February but I was riding in shorts and a tee shirt. One of my co-workers had to un-clip my feet from the pedals, pull me off the bicycle, slap me a few times and then carry me up the stairs to my computer where I started to recover in my safe relatively window-free environment.
*wtf. No srsly. Wtf. To the Guardian columnist who described those things we stick on our heads in the sad hope of protecting our brains as "Pompous plastic helmets"? Your neighbors called. Your verbal flatulence polluted the entire neighborhood and they're ticked off about it. People in other countries than your own dislike you.
Chafe,
ReplyDeleteThat's a really nice post. I do have a few looks for motorists. I try to make sure some of them are nice and friendly. And then I come across scenes like the one I came upon outside the Mansion House this morning. A cyclist had slapped the side of a car to warn the driver he was pulling out on him. The motorist got out and slapped the cyclist.
Isn't it one of the joys how being out on one's bike can suddenly surprise one with joy or a sudden thought about something one encounters on the way?
We're not having California-style weather in London this February. But I've just put together a post ( http://invisiblevisibleman.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-have-romans-ever-done-for-us-well.html ) starting from the premise that part of my ride home in the evening is on an old Roman road. I keep coming across bits of London's history as I ride around - good and bad history. It's so much better than being stuck in the underground.
Invisible.