It’s Bike To Work Day here in Colorado, but it seemed silly to go out to the garage to fetch a bike for the 27-step slog from bed to coffeemaker to iMac. So I walked instead. Sorry ’bout that.
I don’t see a word about BTWD on either of the websites attached to the newspapers that grace our fair community, surprise, surprise. In fairness, there are other stories to be covered, like the Supremes wiping their black-robed asses with the Voting Rights Act, Fort Cartoon losing a brigade and our summer-tourism piggy bank roasting on a very big spit.
Still, if more of us were encouraged to cycle to work instead of firing up the family battlewagon, maybe we would be less inclined to build our homes 30 miles from the cube farm, up in Yahweh’s kindling pile.
Editor’s note: The Twitterati are abuzz with references to various wave/not wave essays, which goes to show you that the times, they are not a-changin’, no matter what Mr. Dylan said. I wrote this piece for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News back in 1995.
I swear to Eddy Merckx, the next time I wave cheerily at a passing cyclist and he just gives me The Look, I’m gonna chase his arrogant ass down, knock him off his bike, drag him back to my house and chain him to a wind trainer in front of the television, where a steady diet of anaerobic-threshold intervals and “Full House” reruns — coupled with a chamois full of red ants and occasional encouragement from a Bull Buster cattle prod — should drive home the argument that courtesy is the grease which keeps society’s bottom bracket spinning freely.
What is with these guys? Unlike passing motorists, I generally wave with all five fingers on a given hand, and there are no pentagrams tattooed on my palms. Has the mousse that grips their so-carefully coiffed ’dos soaked through their scalps to enmire the already-sluggish machinations of their brains? Are their Oakleys so dark that they simply can’t see my friendly salutation? Have they heard the ugly rumors about me, their sisters and the Sonoran donkey?
Beats me. I have no answers. But, as you might expect, I have a few theories. And here they are:
• Me Cool, You Lame — You, the non-waver, may think that your bike and/or cycling attire is way neater than mine, and that to wave would be to compromise your coolness. But I’m a Media Dude, see, and that means my bike is so much cooler than anybody else’s that I have to let it get all grunged up and filthy-looking just to keep wanna-bes like Claudia Schiffer and Tom Hanks from trying to steal it. Should anyone make off with this bike, of course, I can track them by the hideous shrieking of its 4-year-old, unlubed Dura-Ace chain. But I won’t bother, because I’ve got three or four even cooler ones at home that I never, ever ride, and I didn’t pay a nickel for any of them. Hahahahah.
• I Have a Goatee and You Do Not. This is a corollary to Me Cool, You Lame. It’s also on a par with thinking a Murray preferable to a Merlin. I sport a full salt-and-pepper beard and a sizable bald spot because of a nagging case of testosterone poisoning picked up in Vietnam when I was teaching Chuck Norris all about karate. You, on the other hand, wear a straggly soup-strainer named for a smelly barnyard animal fond of eating garbage, and it doesn’t even cover your zits all that well. As my daddy was fond of saying, if you can’t grow more hair on your face than you can on your butt, you should shave.
• I’m Too Scared to Take One Hand Off the Bars. This is a theory with potential, since most velo-snobs seem to spend all their free time rifling Mom’s purse for the cash to buy purple chainrings and trying to trials-ride the tables at Espresso Yourself instead of practicing basic cycling skills, like waving to other cyclists, riding a straight line, and and blowing your nose without getting boogers all over your Banesto jersey.
• I’m Dumber Than a Food Stamp Office Full of Suntour Executives. Also a theory with potential, this assumes big lag time between the eyes registering an occurrence — a friendly wave, a big smile, the development of trouble-free indexed shifting — and the brain processing the information: “Duhhh … hand up; smile on face; duhhhh … he was WAVING, George! Yuh, yuh, that’s right … he was WAVING, George! Can I pet the rabbits now, George?” That’s a Steinbeck reference, dude. Jeez, four years in grammar school and four years of reform school, and you didn’t learn nothing in either place.
• Don’t Bother Me, I Am a Racer. “Look, Marlin, it’s a USCF licensee! And here we thought they were extinct! We’ve got to move quickly — I’ll get the tranquilizer rifle and the ear tags; you call the Smithsonian and National Geographic!”
• Exercise is Serious Business. Sure it is. So is getting chained to a wind trainer by an irate stranger with a sound-proofed basement, an ant farm and a cattle prod. Think about it … then wave.
That’s No. 2, a’ight. (I’d credit the shooter but I can’t nail down its source.)
I thought cycling fans worshiped the hard men at the spring classics until I endured the online wailing, the virtual gnashing of teeth and the rending of digital garments that accompanied Peter Sagan’s gruesomely juvenile fondling of a podium girl at the Ronde van Vlaanderen.
Heavens to Merckx. A 23-year-old jock does something knuckleheaded in front of the cameras and from the caterwauling you’d think HBO had canceled “Game of Thrones.”
Some perspective, if you please. Ours is a sport focused on men who compete wearing garments that would shame a Lexington Avenue shemale for the honor of getting trophies that look like Home Depot garden-center remainders and air kisses from killer hotties who are holding their breath until they can rub up against something that smells better, like the homeless guy talking to himself on the train, or maybe a paycheck.
Then the guys in the plastic pants work up a big one and ejaculate a frothy fluid all over anyone within range.
I mean, as George Carlin once quipped, you don’t have to be Fellini to figure this one out.
Was Sagan out of line? Of course. Did you ever do anything stupid in public without the questionable excuse of being The Next Big Thing In Pro Cycling at an age when many a young fellow has just graduated college and is trying to decide which Mickey D’s can make best use of his B.A. in English? Seems likely. I know that if Twitter had been around when I was 23 I’d never have lived to see 24.
Hot links from two prominent bicycle-racing websites.
It would have been swell if the podium girl in question had swung around and slapped the smirk off Sagan’s face and hissed, “Only the winner gets to touch me!” Or if Bernard Hinault had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and hurled him off the stage. Then we could all move on from our long international nightmare.
But this tempest on Twitter strikes me as a bit over the top.
How about a little outrage over the lack of opportunities for (and coverage of) women racers? Doesn’t anyone find it disturbing that slender models smooching smelly Belgians get more TV time than women pros? Has anyone on the fainting couch noticed that certain bicycle-racing websites derive some of their revenue from links that could more charitably be described as “questionable?”
Maybe it’s time cycling did without the podium ceremony, in which beautiful women are among the spoils claimed by victorious male gladiators. It seems anachronistic, a bit of theater that has outlived its usefulness, a dinosaur long overdue for its date with the tar pits — you know, like the UCI.
The biting of the medals, the spraying of the bubbly, the raising of the arms (at which the podium girls take a few paces back) — it all makes for lousy imagery, until some hormone-crazed showboat decides to play a little grab-ass.
And then what on the cobbles is a thing of beauty starts to look like your cousin’s wedding, with drunk Uncle Buster mistaking a bridesmaid for an hors d’oeuvre.
• Late update: Young Master Sagan apparently has been taken to the woodshed, from whence issues this video apology.
• Even later update: Good lord, the putz has apologized and they’re still at it on Twitter. These people need to get laid. Get jobs. Get stuffed. Jaysis.
The good news is, gas is cheap for anyone who wants to leave town in search of greener pastures.
The local unemployment rate has been at or above 8.9 percent for three and a half years, and would be more like 12 percent had not some 4,000 Bibleburgers given up looking for work altogether, according to the Gazette.
Interestingly, local number-cruncher Tom Binnings of Summit Economics LLC estimates that 24 percent of Bibleburgers are self-employed, “making money where they can and finding a way to survive, but not much more.”
That number seemed steep at first, until I started thinking about most of the local folks I know. A couple are educators, one has a gummint job, and a few are private-sector employees, but a substantial percentage of the others is self-employed: artist, screen printer, construction contractor, bike-shop owner.
We’re not all struggling to survive, but I’m certain we’d all like to be doing better. Thing is, how do we get there? Ranching the view doesn’t put beans in your burrito, blowing shit up seems likely to go out of fashion if DeeCee ever gets serious about reining in spending, and cheap gas isn’t much of a solace if you have nowhere to go.
Mad Blog Media 