[Published in issue #42-300]

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BONESHAKER (Evan P. Schneider and Michael Matson): On your website, you offer paraphernalia for bicyclists to buy and display, offering riders a chance to “Be righteous! Be contemptuous!” and to “Make drivers jealous with the original Zero Per Gallon (ZPG) sticker.” To what extent do you think that a haughty, better-than-thou attitude is the most productive disposition cyclists should extend on roadways they share with motorists, pedestrians, and other cyclists? Cycling is, of course, harrowing at times, and we are a minority out there, but why the bombast?

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JONNY: OK, EPS and MM, here we go.

Why the self-righteous bombast?

I’ve commuted by bike for eight years now, and I’d be fibbing if I claimed that I no longer feel some sort of ideological superiority over your average drive-everywhere type. (That’s not to say I’m actually superior. I violate my share of traffic laws.) I think it’s some sort of psychological protection mechanism. The world we inhabit is designed to accommodate automobiles, and it’s just plain tough to survive any other way, especially in a culture that labels us outsiders or freaks. Our fellow citizens — Americans! — run us over in every capacity. Taking the moral high road makes the struggle that much easier. It’s like a big fat pat on the back, from a big fat self-patting-on-the-back machine, when the world is busy honking at, swerving around, spewing mud at, scaring the bejesus out of, and otherwise threatening and annoying us just for trying to get around in a smart, simple, elegant manner.

Of course, there are precious moments when I’m able to let go of the grudge, and enjoy the freedom and vitality that I suspect car drivers are missing. But that’s not my default mode, not even here in super-bike-friendly San Francisco. And, since I like to think I’m in the business (personal investment-wise, not just financial-wise) of supporting other brave people trying to get by on bicycles, I’d be remiss not to offer a message that explicitly recognizes the condition most bicyclists find themselves in. I’m hoping that my little message, that biking costs so little — righteous and contemptuous as it may be — allows bikers to unplug their big fat self-patting-on-the-back machines just a little bit more.

There’s a bike shop out there in America somewhere (I forget, exactly) where the staff likes to remind customers that smiling makes you ride faster. They’re totally right. Smiling is like caffeine, well, except that smiling doesn’t make you poop, and if it does, that’s one messed-up disorder that I sure as hell am glad I didn’t inherit. But I digress. My point is: letting out a little worthy righteousness here, a smidgeon of deserved contempt there certainly makes me smile. So if by some convoluted, but not-entirely-ridiculous logic, my message helps me (and others) ride faster, I’ve hit the jackpot. (Again: obviously not in a financial sense.)

But your question was stealthier than my paraphrasing. You asked if such a haughty disposition is the “most productive” attitude for cyclists. Because your question reminds me of a high-school essay assignment, it seems fitting to answer in multiple-choice format. Take that, wanna-be-high-school-English-teachers!

Q: To what extent is such a haughty, better-than-thou attitude the most productive disposition for cyclists?

A) Look, man, I’m not a politician. I’m just some guy trying to ride my bike. And I now how I feel when I ride my bike in this place and this time. Sometimes I get angry. Sometimes I can’t stomach the whole system. So what do I do? I let my emotions out, rather than letting them build up, because I know that pretending to be something you’re not never works.

B) Taking the high road means setting an example. It means being considerate, law-abiding, patient, and diplomatic — a representative of the bicycling community. Only as such will we earn the respect and political/lobbying power we are striving for. Only then can the true revolution begin.

C) David Brower always regretted that he and the Sierra Club sacrificed Hetch Hetchy in order to save Yosemite Valley. At the time, he thought it prudent to make a concession – Californians needed water, after all. Later in life, though, he regretted his decision, and claimed he shouldn’t have conceded a damn thing. He realized he should have fought tooth and nail for everything he could, because that’s how the opposition fought, and besides, nobody else was going to advocate for the environment. So who ought to make more concessions: cyclists or drivers? What strategy ought guide the velorution? Should we go big from the outset? Should we bide our time? Should we studiously monitor the Twitter feed of the American Automobile Association, dissect it, and formulate a plan based on that analysis? Who’s in charge, anyway?

D) Technically, your phrasing is forcing me to concede a point I never claimed. At times, my attitude may be haughty, it may be arrogant, and it may even be contemptuous, but it’s not better-than-thou. It’s just trying-to-address-transportation/the environment/health/energy independence-more-than-thou. That’s an important distinction, actually. Bikers are optimists, dreamers, believers still that they can change the way the world works. They never claim to be any better — though they may claim to be trying a little harder.

Please use a number 2 pencil, and fill in the ENTIRE circle.

Next Q, please?

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BONESHAKER: Excellent. We’re onto something here. The multiple choice exam you are in effect offering the bicycle-riding world is asking exactly the sort of questions and eliciting exactly the sort of discussion that needs to be had in our country as soon as possible. Despite the spike in gas prices last summer, numbers of drivers on the road are not significantly diminishing (we have often wondered what would have happened should gas have stayed at or near $5.00/gallon or higher), even though the number of cyclists is noticeably rising. And since it takes years, if not decades, for even progressive cities to implement bicycle-friendly infrastructure, we are quite simply on course for escalated conflict as cycling and driving are not easily nor comfortably combined in the same cities on the same roads.

So, while we’ll leave your exam for readers to take, we’re still wondering whether the symbolic impact of “0.00 9/10″ isn’t in itself enough? It’s an extremely powerful image, the 0.00 9/10, as you’re well aware and to which its growing ubiquity attests. The message behind those numbers, seen in that format, presented in that manner, is both simplistic and yet semiotically riveting. In fact, we love it very, very much. The question, I suppose, though, is: why not just let the numbers speak for themselves? Why purposely load them with anger and contemptuousness? Yes, “taking the moral high road makes the struggle that much easier,” but isn’t one of the problems we face as cyclists the fact that drivers are doing the exactly same thing: taking what they think is the high road, teaching us that we should “Get a car!” if we’re going to live in the 21st century? (In fact, this very phrase has been yelled at us and our brethren from car windows all across the country.)

And if it’s not enough to allow the numbers to speak for themselves (in order to achieve whatever aims we have in this ongoing verbal and nonverbal conversation we’re each having with motorists and others on a daily basis as cyclists), then it seems that we may be scheduled for a very real and actual civic confrontation with drivers. And if that is indeed the case, which it very well may be, how in your mind would it play out?

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JONNY: Indeed, we’re getting somewhere. This is fun.

But first: the passivity of the phrase “discussion that needs to be had in our country as soon as possible” freaks me out. It makes me feel like I’m talking to one of Nixon’s henchmen or something.

Second: patience, brothas! Driving decreased last year for the first time since the invention of the friggin’ wheel. These things take time. We’re talking about very very VERY entrenched behaviors here – I mean, the ability to drive is almost an inherited trait by now. Besides, it’s worth asking how much those numbers really mean. What if just as many people are driving, but 95% of them now hate it, like really really loathe everything about it, and are looking for some alternative? What if everyone is trying to sell his car, but can’t find a buyer, because the economy is in the shitter and nobody wants cars anymore? Judge not too quickly! Similarly, gas prices will rise again — it’s the only direction they can go.

Third: you hinted at another intriguing scenario: that cycling/motorist conflicts will only decrease once cities implement bike-friendly infrastructures. I’d beg to look at things differently. Dems will offer bikers a tax break, and Repubs will, I dunno, deregulate the bike-manufacturing industry. Will either make things easier for “Joe the biker?” Are we really all biting our nails and waiting for our local (or state or federal) governments to act on our behalf? Must the solutions come hence? I think something like 80% of the transportation challenge is perceptual — and I’ll come back to that idea. We (all of us) need to think for ourselves.

Fourth: What’s with the pessimism, bro? I think cycling and driving can exist together, in today’s cities, on today’s roads. Conflict is OK. Discomfort is OK. We’re talking about reality here, not some “city of the future,” all tricked out with flying cars and robotic navigation and Star Trek outfits. And if it were easy, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Now, your question: is a symbol enough? No way. It’s just a symbol. I mean, I can’t eat the word CHEERIOS for breakfast. For god sakes, I’d much rather live in a world in which everybody rides bikes and nobody buys my stickers because they’re just so damned obvious. I’d love to see the day when, riding hands-free, some girl checks her email on her iPhone, clicks on a link her grandma emailed to her, ends up on ZeroPerGallon.com, and is like, “Geez, grandma, the symbolic gesture here is so L-A-M-E,” and then watches the latest Justin Timberlake Jr. video and is like, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” and then puts her hands back on the bars to take some wicked tight turns on a crazy descent.

But thanks for calling it powerful, ubiquitous, and semiotically-interesting. I appreciate that. To take a Kindergartener’s approach, “If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?”

But really: the numbers do speak for themselves. That’s why my stickers keep selling. The loading of anger/contempt/etc. is only done by my words, on my website, and intended as sort of a comfort — a soft welcome mat, or a clean, dry bench in a heavy rain — for bicyclists who visit my website. “Aha,” I hope they’ll say. “This guy understands my situation. He feels like I do. He’s just like me. Except hairier, and taller, and better looking, and more awesome.” (Just kidding about that last part.)

As for the ideological head-butting with drivers who yell “Get a car,” I’m not sure it’s fair to give those drivers credit for having an ideology. Someone once yelled at me, “Get a horse,” but that didn’t make it so, even if it did make me laugh. Yelling “Get a car” is like yelling “Get a job,” or “Be smarter.” Bikers and drivers may be at odds, but drivers who yell “Get a car” are not actually arguing anything. They’re yelling into the wind, asking that the world be simple and uniform and understandable and the-way-it-used-to-be. What’s the point of that? We’re not gonna get a car, no matter how loud they yell. Shit, even if the feds decide that, as part of the auto-industry’s bailout package, cars will be provided to every card-carrying bicyclist, many of us STILL wouldn’t take ‘em. We just don’t see things that way.

This unwillingness to drink the Kool Aid is a fascinating phenomenon. The futurists of 1950’s promised us that technology would make life better — that blenders and toasters and dishwashers and bread-makers and waffle irons and cars and suburbs and malls would save us so much time and hassle that we could get on with the best parts of living. Of course, to many of us, what they’ve really done is make life that much more complicated and clogged-up, blurting out the good parts. I think many current trends, from fixed-gear bikes to Make magazine to urban farming, have arisen in response to that sentiment, which feeds a larger urge to simplify and get back to basics. And I think making cities more bike-able, breathable, playable, livable places is at the center of it all.

It’s like we’re all singing that Limp Bizkit song: “You can take this car, and stick it up your ass! Stick it up your ass! Stick it up your ass!”

The way I see it, the driver-yelling phenomenon is just an indicator that there’s a problem. Like honking. In that regard, counterintuitive as it may be, you can take comfort at every honk you hear. Every honk is someone announcing: “I’m impatient! Driving isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! I’m vexed!” For every honk, there’s someone just as fed up with the system as you (we) are.

So, drivers and bikers alike are annoyed. But I think bikers deserve credit for trying something different. They’re taking up less space, spitting out no fumes, making far less noise, and on and on and on. I’m not sure what credit drivers are due. They’ve had things their way for a very long time, and it’s still relatively easy for them. They just push a bunch of buttons and pedals, and sit there, while we subsidize the shit out of the system. I’m supposed to sympathize?

Nevertheless, back in March, Robert Sulluvan wrote a convincing little plea in the NY Times, asking for bicyclists to adopt more courtesy. He had four requests: that we 1) stop at major intersections; 2) ride with traffic; 3) stay off the sidewalks; 4) signal if we’re gonna turn. It’s a good list, and I have no beef with it. In fact, I’d add a fifth item: that we be prepared to communicate. I’m not saying we need a concerted PR effort full of talking points, but that we need to be able to express, reasonably, that we’re just as frustrated as drivers are. If there’s one thing Americans understand, it’s frustration.

The way I see it, If we’re gonna cram ourselves into dense cities, and try to do a gajillion things at once, the need for the ability to communicate seems pretty obvious. But we’ve erected sound-proof walls and windows around half of us and crammed earbuds into the other half. When we do try to communicate, its pathetic. HONK! What’s that supposed to mean? It’s either “I hate this!” or “On your left!” or “Get out of the road!” or “Nice ass!” We’re like Neanderthals out there. It’s absurd.

So we bikers, softer and fleshier and more human than automobiles, ought to take advantage of the situation, and communicate as such.

An example, if I may:

I used to (and still do) get pissed at people who throw their cigarette butts in the street, for reasons that seem all-too-obvious. Once, in Boston, some guy in red convertible threw his cigarette butt on the sidewalk, just in front of me. I was on a one-way road, and the guy — not very big, I should add — was stopped at a red light. I’d been waiting for this scenario to unfold for a while. I picked it up and threw it back in his car, and readied myself to run the opposite direction.

Now, I felt a certain glee in having done that, but I didn’t accomplish anything. I might as well have yelled “Get an ashtray!” at the top of my lungs, as if he could have just whipped one out of thin air. But I got something off my chest, which allowed me to approach the situation differently the next time it happened, which was in DC a few years later. I’d just rolled up to a red light, and some guy in a shiny SUV threw a butt onto the street only feet in front of me. I was about to pick it up and lob it back in the guy’s window, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the driver had the build of a linebacker. A 300-lb, pro NFL linebacker. So I changed my tactic. I turned to him, and said, “You know, if I weren’t so intimidated by your size, I’d have thrown that cigarette butt back in your car, but I decided not to because I didn’t wanna get my butt kicked.” The guy laughed — a good response! Never underestimate the power of laughter! — and said, “That was a smart move, because you would have.” But now he was on defense, and he added, “It’s my wife’s car, and she doesn’t want me to smoke in here,” and raised his big NFL-sized shoulders in a gesture of sympathy. He felt bad, guilty even.

Get it? We communicated! It was funny! I didn’t suffer an ass-whupping, and he wasn’t insulted by my complaint, and neither of us rode off in a fury of annoyance and pride.

I’ve tried the same thing with people in public parks who don’t clean up their dog’s poop, to similar results. Which is all to say, you gotta give a little, even if it’s just some of your ego. Nobody wants to be belittled, trodden, patronized, or yelled at.

As for non-verbal confrontations — like the horror stories that involve a deranged motorist intentionally running over a biker — I think those situations are very rare. Rarer, even, than people going “postal,” or pirates seizing ships, or shark attacks. We just focus on those stories, and can’t forget them, because they’re so unusual. I actually think it’s a waste of time/energy to search for a “solution” to such situations. But that’s not how things work in this country. 99.99% isn’t good enough for us litigious bastards. We’re just not that practical.

And that’s what I was saying about perception, earlier. We focus on the most ridiculous things. All this formal education, and we freak out about the West Nile virus like it’s the friggin’ plague. We really are Neanderthals. We play up the hazards to the extent that non-bikers become convinced that riding a bike to work is veritable suicide. It’s a lot like rock climbing, actually. Most non-climbers think I’m some extreme freak, risking life and limb, and that, like Spiderman, I have silk coming out of my palms. Climbing is really fucking safe. More people die from coconut-related injuries. And way more people — about 43,000 every year in the US — die driving their cars. Most of us are just numb to it.

American biking is young, that’s all. Bikers cause some of the friction, but not nearly as much as public perception would have us believe. In most of Europe, they get it. (They also get drinking, sex, and climbing.) It’s like we’ve got this giant thumb up our collective butt, and it’s so far up there we can’t see straight, let alone walk straight.

All we know is that biking is different, and everything different has to be crazy, and everything crazy has to be wrong. So good luck changing that.

OK, my Rant-Meter-2000 is going berserk. Apparently it’s time for a break. Golly, I hope you’ll ask me about critical mass, biker identity, drug enforcement, and the civil rights movement next.

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BONESHAKER: Your thoughts on communication are very nicely put, not to mention extremely poignant, especially considering how admittedly difficult it is to fight having a sense of entitlement while riding a bicycle. It’s so easy to think, “These drivers owe me this space, and I should be allowed to ride right here in the middle of these roads, and I should be able to run this stoplight, or move ahead to the front of this line of traffic, and that some of these rules don’t apply to me because I’m moving under my own power.” In fact, this editor thinks about it every time he rides.

I’m torn, therefore, about what exactly I should feel out there. On the one hand, I want to fight everyone all the time. I find myself yelling and cussing and wanting to pull over and explain to someone that they can’t park there, you see, because you’re right where I need to go. This happens despite myself because I don’t even want to be that guy. But sometimes it just happens and I explode verbally and/or mentally. I want to push cars out of the bike lane and want to bang on their windows when they don’t see me. I even once thought of making a sticker that read, “I don’t have kids; I ride my bike so that *your* kids will have a healthy planet to inherit, so get off my ass!” I’m perpetually ready to jump all over everyone for the littlest traffic transgression that they’re probably not even aware they are making. But what does this accomplish, I continually wonder, this antipathy and sense of entitlement? Should drivers really move just because I need to get around them or else lose my momentum? Should people really pay any more attention to me than they do people in cars? Isn’t that pretty goddamn selfish of me, and of cyclists in general? Is that why we’re labeled elitists, because we think what we’re doing is better and wiser than what other people are doing, and that we should therefore be granted certain exceptions and exemptions?

So on the other hand, if I want the same privileges cars enjoy (full use of the lane, use of all roads in a city equally), shouldn’t I have to obey exactly the same laws, down to even having to register my bike and get licensed to ride? The smiling advice you once received is very apt, then, and we would be wise to remember it, but is there a way, in your opinion, to balance the rights and needs of cyclists with those who choose different transportation methods? Because I find myself even getting angry at buses, who I know are in turn angry at me, even though we’re both alternative forms of transportation and both are working to improve the way people get around our cities. We are both working towards the same goal and yet we are doing so in the same space in different ways, which leads to resentment.

It seems, therefore, that the smile you mention that makes you ride faster isn’t so much a smile as it is a smirk, and that’s what I suppose we’re getting at here—the smirk innate to broadcasting that our form of transportation costs 0.00 9/10. Of course we can’t help but smirk once in a while as we’re riding when we see people lined up in these metal boxes with wheels, waiting and sealed off from the weather and the world, but that smirk, if we extend it too far and wide and too often, only complicates and endangers this fragile truce that seems to be upheld on the roads day in and day out.

This conversation we are having will not wrap up anytime soon. It is our hope, in fact, that it will continue in traffic and in bars and at cafes and at public forums and at transportation meetings and in legislative offices at the city, state, and national levels for years to come. As it is, though, we’ll leave you with a summative question, reductive, perhaps, but concise and reproducible in any case: if you had any one piece of advice or sentiment to share with cyclists, one statement that you as nationally-known and well-recognized bicycling advocate would like people out there on two wheels to consider, what might that be? What, in short, should we remember in all this?

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JONNY: Jeez, and I thought I’d had a lot of caffiene.

Rest assured, Evan: you’re definitely not the only biker out there yelling and cussing and angry. In DC, where apparently people drive facing backwards, I used to get so fed up that on more than one occasion I yearned to throw shit — my own feces! — at the worst offenders. I contemplated shitting in a Zip-loc bag, and carrying it with me, like in my pocket, so that at the right moment I could lob it at some poor driver’s windshield, whereupon it would explode in a big brown glob of nastiness. Again: Neanderthal, right? I mean, filling a water gun with piss wasn’t good enough. I was angrier than that. I wanted justice, because it sure as hell felt like justice had thus far eluded me. That resentment, that entitlement -  it just boils up.

Yesterday, in fact, while I was riding on a narrow, curvy road, some jerk passed me on a blind turn, oncoming traffic be damned. But instead of screaming FUCK YOU! and making a gesture that needs no translation, I belted out, “You drive like a Californian!” — which was both fact and insult. Sneaky, huh? (It works well in Boston and New York, too.) Here’s the cool part –  by taking it in stride, I made myself less mad. It didn’t ruin my ride, and I certainly didn’t go home and shit in a bag and then try to track that guy down.

So here’s my take on it. We’ll always get angry out there. But I get angry when I have to pay my taxes, too, and that doesn’t mean my anger is justified. But it does mean we’re onto something…Which brings me to a little fable…

A long time ago, in a land far away, back when I was in college — we didn’t have computers then; all we had was rocks — a bunch of us came up with our own term for complacency/laziness/settling-for-the-way-things-are. We called it kableeb, and we vowed to combat it. We wanted our lives to be full of surprises and adventures, fresh, wild, and free. I still have a mix tape (yes, we recorded audio onto magnetic tapes, and wiped our asses with our hands) called “combat kableeb.”

It seems to me now that biking is one of the surest ways to combat kableeb. And I think that our anger is proof. It’s just like honking. Every mumbled curse, every sneer, every grumble, every yearning for a Zip-loc full of feces on hand, is one more wish for things to be different.

Furthermore, if we restrain ourselves, and don’t scream every epithet that comes to mind, the emotion establishes that we have a high regard for public goods. It’s one thing to let food rot in your own fridge, or to park a rusty old clunker up on blocks on your own front lawn — but it’s another to misuse/disregard/hoard/lay-claim-to public space. You’re right to be mad. In going from private affair to private affair (in cars 99.99% of the time) we pass through public space (at 60 mph) — an end up treating it like something private, which is to say, we treat it like crap. We all forget that the streets are public. That’s the best thing about them. If we treat ‘em that way, maybe people will start to notice.

So I don’t think it’s selfish to yearn for an altered transportation network. And I don’t think it’s elitist to await its arrival with a little impatience.

But I think it’s important not to confuse rights with privileges, or legality with morality. Here in San Francisco, I can roll down the middle of the road, on my unregistered bike, and take the whole friggin lane, and be perfectly within the law. Shit, I could probably do it naked while smoking a bong, too. But that doesn’t make it civil or respectful. And that’s the thing: our rights haven’t been taken away (in most places, none were every given to bikers), and we’re not asking for special privileges (as Benjamin Solomon so well put it, “like children or old ladies”). Sometimes we’re talking about our wants, and sometimes we’re talking about our needs, and the wacked-out part is figuring out how  to incorporate those fairly/safely/smartly into a giant tangled up legal system.

In that regard the sense of entitlement you mentioned is a confusion of cause and effect. We believe we are entitled to run red lights because we are able to get away with running red lights. None of us likes rules, but I put on pants when I go outside, whether I feel like it or not. I don’t know how you do business over there in Colorado. We’re guilty of bending the rules we don’t like, and then relying on the perhaps-lamentable fact that traffic enforcement is a lot like drug enforcement — stopping every infraction is just untenable. Perhaps, someday, we’ll automatically regulate, fine, and collect fees from traffic violators, thanks to some digital tracking system made by Diebold, but I doubt it. There’s just not a metric shit-ton of impetus behind the let’s-live-in-1984-agenda. We like chance, the wind blowing through our hair, believing that we’re choosing our own destiny. So pinch yourself, man, before that entitlement gets to you.

That’s why I can’t stand Critical Mass. It’s billed as this identity-building civil-rights struggle, but it’s not about “we shall overcome,” and pissed-off drivers aren’t gonna write their local representatives and be like, “Dear Mr. Congressman, I saw an assload of bicyclists out in the streets tonight, in a crazy drunken mob, running red lights and screaming and scaring tourists and blocking traffic, and I just wanted to let you know that it looked awesome, and I think we should do more to promote bicycling in our fair city.”

Worse, and I mentioned this earlier, our cultural nametag already says: “Hello, my name is _biker_ – I’m an outsider/freak” and we — through Critical Mass, and other silly behaviors — are as much to blame for this as others. Even Robert Sullivan, in that NY Times courtesy plea, pigeon-holed us as either Lance-Armstrong types or Really Cool Hipsters. Partly, these identities have arisen so at least we can pretend to choose our roles, rather than be scorned as freaks or hippies or lowlifes or failures. We play it up, wear “biker” clothes, sport-specific gear — as peacock-like as a friggin equestrian team. We make bike-riding a club activity, as if some sort of membership dues are required. In trying to be inclusive, we’ve become exclusive. What the F? We gotta lighten up, you know? It’s just two friggin’ wheels! Are our egos made of soft French cheese?

If there’s one good thing about Critical Mass, though, it’s that the ride is slow and fun, as traveling ought to be. Traveling should be a thrill! Imagine riding a horse from Philadelphia to Washington, or taking a boat up the Missouri river, or riding a train across Canada. Those things tickle you a bit, don’t they? Biking does that too — unless we get sucked in and treat it like a cold, robotic process that it isn’t. The joy of riding is as important as the destination — and maybe if we thought about that before every ride we wouldn’t get so angry.

Where was I? Whatever. I’ve got two small things, and then a big one – a Grand Finale, if you will — and then I’ll put the crack pipe down, I swear.

Small thing #1) What’s with the “fragile truce,” again? Have drivers there, like, declared war? Did I not get the memo? I just don’t see it that way.

Small thing #2) You offhandedly mentioned that ZPG stickers “broadcast” a message to drivers. For what it’s worth, the stickers are so small (4.25″ x 1.38″) that I doubt they broadcast a damn thing. From a car whizzing by, your mom broadcasts a message. My stickers: not so much. As I said before, they’re mostly a little pat on the back to bikers. A toast. A high five. A friendly wave from out here in San Francisco.

Grand Finale) There’s a Jewish Passover song called Dayenu, which, as far as melody and rhyme go, is the most annoying thing I’ve ever heard, but which, as far as lyrics go, is pretty cool. It’s a song about perspective, since Passover is all about remembering how great it is not to be enslaved. Gratefully, humbly, the song thanks god for all the badass stuff god did, through the incessant chorus –Dayenu — which means  “that would have been enough.” So we’re like, “God, if you’d just brought us out of Egypt, that would have been enough. If you’d just watched over us, that would have been enough. If you’d just given us shomer fucking shabbas, that would have been enough. If you’d only invented the internet, that would have been enough.” You get the idea.

It seems to me that we’d not be smitten (smote?) for singing something similar to the god of biking, a deity no less glorious or worthy, and probably far sexier. It’d go like this:

-if you’d only provided us with lithe, strong legs — that would have been enough
-if you’d only given us the wind in our hair — that would have been enough
-if you’d only protected us from the pain of searching for a parking space — that would have been enough
-If you’d only sculpted our asses so firmly — that would have been enough.
-if you’d only granted us mobility withouout debt – that would have been enough.
-if you’d only fed us burritos, rather than petroleum — that would have been enough.
-if you’d only wowed us with the technological simplicity of a bicycle, that would have been enough.
Amen.

That’s sorta how I feel. Our lot aint so terrible. Sure, sometimes I smirk, but very often it’s a pure smile.

I hope this conversation goes on forever, too, because I so do like embarrassing myself with talk of projectile poop. I can’t wait to bring up this interview during dinner sometime with my parents.

As for one, solid-gold piece of advice, how bout this: Whatever you ride, wherever you go, whenever you roll: look out for goats. They’re up to no good.