Can’t keep everyone comfortable all the time

It was a warm sunny day in downtown Mt. Vernon – filled with cars and trucks as usual.

Today I saw someone in their big Expedition in the parking lot of the coop sleeping – while their car was running.  I see people hanging out in their cars while stopped and running all the time here.  It’s fucked that this is considered OK.

I want to rip the heart out of this diseased animal, but not even God can stop the madness of DRIVING.
[The warm heart of a road killed deer]Heart_in_hand

Cars ARE the problem with our cities. If it wasn’t for their stink, noise, and dangerous zooming into every crevice of every city, cities would be paradise.   They are not part of the problem; no problem is bigger than automobiles infiltrating every aspect of urban life, and poisoning people.

As it is, they are barely live-able. But to experience bicycle culture, one must be in a city. This is a suck lose lose situation. Those of us that choose to get ourselves around in a way that doesn’t involve a personal power plant on a 2 ton chassis are oppressed in a way reminiscent of racism, only we’re even more in the minority. Being punished for a CORRECT act – riding a bicycle.

Same laws they say – OK fucko, let’s make cars go the same speed, where I don’t have to be passed continually.

Here, where I live, people freak out when a cyclist dares to take the road. I’m not crawling along the sidewalk or getting off my bike and walking at the crosswalk. PEOPLE THINK THAT I SHOULD BE DOING THIS with my same laws vehicle. I’m disgusted by the same laws doctrine. Sometimes I MUST break the law just to not get hit. I have to choose the safest line, wherever that line is. It might be riding between the lanes full of cars and going through the light right when it changes. It might be cutting through a huge parking lot to avoid a crazy long light. I should have PRIVILEGES because I choose CORRECT ACTION. Because my vehicle is not filling the air with carcinogens, it doesn’t have enough bulk and force to take people out wholesale – where is the Expert Urban Cyclist certification that allows me some immunity from law enforcement harrasement to do riding tactics that KEEP ME ALIVE.  Fuck you, car culture. You can have your 50,000 deaths a year. You can have your cities full of filth and noise (and cancer) you can live in denial until your fucking wasteful selfish LAZY form of transportation collapses.  Take your drive-thru garbage food and eat it in your sedentary boxes.

This is car food for car kids in a car world.
This is car food for car kids in a car world.

To every driver that thinks bicyclists should not have rights to the road: May your coffin be as comfortable as your car.

The only reason for marketing ‘food’ of this type is the automobile.  We put children in cars for long drives and feed them GARBAGE and then expect good behavior??

Where’s MY country?  Where are MY people??  Where’s the sanity???

About littlejar

5 - Learned to ride in paved alley behind liquor store in Lowell. 16 - Road bike riding alone while peers do soccer practice. 18 - First new road bike bought with winnings from Project Graduation. 20 - Burlington VT. Nuff said. 22 - Joined the Air Force. 23 - Joined team Fair Wheel in Tucson - rode the Shootout. 24 - Rode El Tour in under five. 26 - Toured to Quebec City 28 - Toured Oklahoma to Vermont 30 - Found my dream bike - a 1989 58cm LaBan (#22) 32 - Experienced Minneapolis and saw BIKE CULTURE. 34 - Building my first bicycle frame, with a self made jig. USA

25 Replies to “Can’t keep everyone comfortable all the time”

  1. I get it. but….

    “reminiscent of racism, only we’re even more in the minority. Being punished for a CORRECT act – riding a bicycle.” Being of a minority race is incorrect?

    just saying, yaknow

  2. Bro – don’t infer that I’m making a ridiculous claim because of the pattern of my sentence doesn’t directly disclaim that. This kind of comment is just fucked.

  3. Hey now !!!

    If I ain’t mistaken that is a KFC kids meal in that there photo.

    I feel vaguely insulted.

    Or not.

    I’m too bizy feeling nauseous from that deer heart photo.

    Too early in the AM for that kinda shit. Know what I mean ??

  4. seriously man, riding is good, but “bike culture” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  5. bite your tongue mattchew!

    bike or die!

    although I did drive to Cleveland to ride @ ray’s last weekend, what a hoot. I took the the 20″ and the 29″ and they both rocked in that box.

  6. @buck – have been thinking about driving up to rays soon. they are having a huge women’s weekend there next month…..

    @dirty biker – dude – you so need to move here:
    http://www.bicyclecity.com/
    you can keep bitching all you want about this, but in america, the land of the free, we are just getting fatter and fatter, and lazier and lazier. look at our kids – obesity is a HUGE. it’s a sick and fucked up USA.

  7. There’s something super creepy about this Bicycle City planned community. It reminds me of Celebration, Florida. I have a feeling it will either be completely whitewashed or artificially diverse. Plus, they want to build it in South Carolina? Some drunk redneck in a lifted truck is gonna have a field day with that place.

    I prefer to just tough it out on the grimy streets of Chicago. Yeah, I narrowly escape getting doored just about every night on my way home from work, but at least the pizza is good.

  8. I thought Portland OR already was “bicycle city.” Go ride there, it’s pretty awesome.

    Um, might wanna wait another three months for the rain to let up, though.

  9. Nauseating: The swill that they mix up and fry and call a ‘meal’, the refuse of such ‘food’ and the packaging that people like to eat from.

    Heart wrenching: A mother deer dying at the side of the road because you just hit it with your car on the highway. If you get more sickened by the insides of a pure wild animal than by seeing, let alone eating, factory made poop mixed with dying meat and “by-products” – you got perception problems, buddy. Real bad ones.

    By the way, the revolution should and will be defined as such: Highways are for cars, cities are for people (and their bicycles) Car drivers having full reign over each and every part of each and every city has got to change.

    The revolution will come when other cyclists take heed, take their cause seriously, and quit making a laugh out of our tragically unfair condition.

    This drunk cyclist is drunk on FUCK YOU.

  10. … Portland. I love the city, hate the people in it. Fuck you Portland for being too: Trendy, bourgeois, hoyty-toyty, rich, exclusive, pretty and young, alienating, hard-ass cheap, BUSY, hipster-ed out, segregated, and just plain arrogant. For being full of professionals willing to pay $1000 a month rent – – pushing me out of the privilege of residence there. Me, who has ridden a bicycle in nearly every section of that beautiful city, never once driving and parking my car somewhere to do it. Fuck you to all the cyclists who never talk to other cyclists or are spooked by someone that does (who isn’t young, hot, and rich).
    Thanks to every ‘in the know’ person who told me for years: “Go to Portland as Portland is bike Mecca… you should go to Portland” oh, and by the way, a few million kids prettier and younger than me are Hajis to this so called “Mecca” – you’ve never seen such competition for housing in your life, people. Prepare to be and stay homeless when you haaj to Portland.
    Thanks Portland, for every house I ‘interviewed’ to live at where 30 other more hip hipsters also wanted to live. Thanks Portland, for being too cool for me, even though I ride a cyclocross touring bike with fenders.

    And of course, from my wiry pulse beating heart – FUCK YOU.

  11. …also thanks and fuck you to…., wow man, stop drinking the haterade. I’m old, fat, and uncool. Maybe you didn’t ride through my/the SE neighborhood while you were here. It sounds like if you’d stop trying to be hip with the hipsters, you’d probably have a kick ass time.

  12. Lauren, I think maybe the problem is their spectacularly awful website. Although maybe the fact they would have such a website is an indication of what it will be like in real life which, as you note, is . . . . creepy.

    However, in this era of high-capitalism, car-worship, and the sacred nature of private property, I think that using cash to carve out a safe place to live a decent life with others of your ilk isn’t necessarily a bad way to go. I’m for it.

    You can have good pizza, too, if it’s enough of a priority. Which, duh, it would be.

  13. Gotta go with Loren on this. Portland is a great place to ride. I have ridden there a fair amount and have found the hipsters and roadies friendly enough, and much more importantly, the drivers in their steel-and-glass coffins seem unsurprised and tolerant of cyclists. I just adore the bicycle-only lanes at intersections. I adore hammering up Mt. Tabor. I adore the Springwater Corridor. If you don’t want to live there, then don’t. It’s a free country.

    PS— eleven miles on skate skis today in 93 minutes. Perfect corduroy, so I let the HRM beep its ass off (indicating I was above 170 BPM) instead of being all, “ooh, I’m above my LT.” I was dripping with sweat and covered in a crinkly salt glaze when i got back to the truck. Hoot!

  14. Oh the ignorance in my face. Oh the taking what I wrote out of context. Ahh… fuck you???

    Portland is a great place to live. It’s just fucking hard to live there. It’s not a FREE country – that’s the most ignorant thing a person can say.

  15. And I thought I was angry… lj, chill a little. I get what you were saying, but howz-a-boot you put things in context before freaking out? Just sayin’

  16. Fuck cars. Fuck bikes. We were riding horses through the city streets long before your mechanical demon machines dared to foul the streets, carelessly zipping around like possessed bees from below. The revolution will come, and it will be on horseback…long after your factories have burnt to the ground and you can’t get a chain, a wheel, or bearings produced for your hubs by some power gulping, carbon consuming, pollution belching facility…you will be tip toeing through the digested grasses of my 100% natural steed, arrogance long washed away by reality.
    Ha! my horse and I fart in your general direction. Pray for salvation, ye sinners of the wheel.

  17. Flies and honey, my son.

    Yes. To a lot of it. But check this out: if one comes with ferocious aggression, the other will react. Be easier with it. Ride your bike and remember it is awesome. Do what you can. Being angry will only make you unhappy, it won’t make anything better or teach any lessons.

    And, next time, do plug his exhaust.

  18. Think globally, act locally. Start the revolution where you’re at by leaving the cage at home and using the bike instead. Simply adding one more bike on the street increases the ambient awareness of bicycles as legitimate users of the roadway. Seeing bikes on the street being used as transportation ( not just recreation – that is : tools not toys) can inspire fence sitters to finally make a commitment and give it a try – at least in the good weather ( at first ). a positive feedback loop ! When gasoline reaches $8/gal the streets will finally be ours ( and the rich capitalist bastards driving luxo cages ).