Why Ride?

Q: Why do I still ride a bike?

A: Because I want to.

One of the reasons I wanted to move downtown was to be able to ride my bike all over the place. Now its important to note that I have both a mountain bike and a city bike. My mountain bike has shock absorbers, was expensive and has more gears than I can count on my fingers. My city bike is a different story. My city bike is an all black 10-speed from the early eighties that I bought at Goodwill last fall for 12 bucks. I took the gears and shifters off first thing and then spent 30 or 40 dollars "fixing it up". It's perfect for the city: it's cheap, light and in some areas of town faster than traffic.

I took the picture on the top of the page on a midnight bike ride last summer from the top of an unnamed parking structure. It somehow captures the feeling of experiencing the city on a bike.

Different modes of transportation make the city feel completely different: On my bike I feel connected to the city, like I'm a part of it. In my car I'm usually just looking for parking. Last week when I was given the keys to an oversized SUV to get it washed I couldn't believe how disconnected I felt from everything. I felt like those guys you see traveling to the bottom of the ocean in those little glass bubbles, observing but not being a part of it. I could see the resentment on the faces of strangers on the sidewalks. The grid of streets stopped being a thing in and of itself and became nothing more than a way to connect to a destination. I wasn't in the city anymore, I was in a self-contained environment on wheels, I could have been anywhere.

I just don't see any reason to bring 3 tons of metal with me everywhere I go. I still drive because of necessity, but biking is where I want to be - its how I want to experience the world around me. There's other reasons for riding a bike, too:
-I don't have to spend all my money on gas
-No more parking tickets, in fact the money I've saved by not getting parking tickets has more than payed for my bike
-I get daily exercise which makes me a healthier and happier person
-I'm living a more efficient lifestyle, I'm not creating as much waste and I'm not polluting the air that I breathe

In the spirit of keeping the blog all multimedia and what not, here's some footage of a New York bike messenger race.

Its been a long time.

Let's see, how much has changed in a year?
-I moved, quit my job and retired at the early age of 26
-I moved into my car and onto couches for several months
-I made plans to move to the pacific northwest then didn't follow through
-I came out of retirement like Michael Jordan, except now I'm better
-I somehow settled in downtown Denver, where I guess I was heading all along -

Strange, after all of the moving around only thirty miles and three hundred days separate me from my last blog post a year ago. No matter how far you travel in a day when you're back in your bed you're back where you started.

It's kind of like playing certain songs, they're always in the same time and when you play them you're back where you were long ago. I used to associate those songs with the time and place they became so meaningful to me, and I'd feel nostalgic over the growing distance between now and then. Now I see that some songs don't have their context in time, but in something much bigger than that. I wonder how it felt for Joe Strummer to play this next one some decades after he played it with The Clash. This song will likely be on my top five favorite songs list for the rest of my life.

Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros - White Man in Hammersmith Palais


If you get the chance you should check out "Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten", which I sadly can't find a good link to at the moment.