My tricycle tattoo turns out to be a big hit around here. People nod and smile, point to it and say, “bicycle!” Then give a big thumbs up. Doesn’t matter if they’re on a bike themselves. In fact, typically they’ll be on a scooter, but I’m thinking the brotherhood is around all things two wheeled. (The fact that my tat is of the three-wheeled variety of bicycle bothers them not at all.)
When I’m riding the Hero, the effect is multiplied somewhat. Cool bike; white dude riding the bike, sometimes fast; tattoo celebrating two-wheeled transportation on arm of white dude on cool bike. What’s not to like about that?
Though I will confess to a recent narrowing of appreciation for my bike’s poetic charms. I’d fallen into a functional view of my bike driven by my need to get from point to point. The store, the pool, the school, a restaurant; the various and sundry things on a house-husband’s to-do list. No life or death stuff, just things to take care of which require physical movement, and the bike has been my steed.
Then something shifted. Yesterday I set off to check on a cooking school I’d heard about on the north side of the city palace, maybe ten minutes from our apartment if I pedaled hard. But when I located the place, I saw the gate was padlocked, so I swung the Hero around with the intention of heading back to the apartment. All good, I pedaled south on 80th—a well-worn path for the Hero— until I came to 26th, a street I normally whiz past as it’s not my usual route and tends to be a bit busier than I like. But something struck my sensibilities, and I swung into a wide, arcing turn onto this different path. It occurred to me this was a stretch of road I had never travelled before. Close to our place, but somehow off the chart. So I stopped pedaling and simply glided for a bit, taking in the occasional teak house and looking at the nature of businesses along this unspied strip.
It was a rare slight downhill stretch, which meant I didn’t have to pedal for quite a while, and was suddenly struck with the notion of not touching the pedals until I hit our cross road, three blocks hence, just to see if I could. Just to see. Cross streets were the obvious challenge, and sure enough, one block before my street (83rd) I ghosted along into what quickly shaped up as the certain path of the local trash man and his great blue Mastodon of a truck. My choice was to either hit the brakes and mess with my goal of slow-riding to the next street or to pedal hard and shoot past his nose—also a break from my goal. Let me say this: I’ve come to appreciate the value of certitude when it comes to intersections. One must act with confidence and faith in both one’s own reflexes and those of his fellow commuters, not to mention a higher power which—hopefully— has deemed that this is not your day to die. But even then, a ready thumb on the bike bell and a forceful push of the pedals tends to bolster one’s chances significantly.
Further, beyond the world of chance, I think there are lines of communication that erupt with the brevity and force of a neutrino. They might not be there at all, but something tells me they are, and can be best understood outside of rational experience. Like at that point when one is ghosting in front of a garbage truck and willing the driver to understand your need to not shift or alter in any way your constant state of velocity. Or, rather, not to understand so much as to know. Each part of the drama is as a fossilized bit of life that has been bound by time and circumstance into this perfect moment. The challenge, as I see it, is to accept the whole rather than allow a rational digression of curb weight, velocity, and braking power to challenge the poetry of the moment.
Which is not to say my passage before said truck at the intersection of 26th and 82nd was a challenge. I’d rather think of it as a calculated and necessary risk. A stretching of my comfort zone in the service of climbing inner walls. Confronting the barriers we occupy under the many thumbs of perception, habit, and fear. For me to shoot the gap between truck and death without the benefit of pedal power required an only slight brake on his part and, of course, a willingness to apply it. Certainly, had I just applied a modicum of pressure to pedal this whole mess could have been avoided and I would have passed unscathed—and even unnoticed—before big blue. Who would know? What was the pull of this challenge in which I’d become so entwined? To make the next block without pedaling? Really? Well, yes. So I went for it. Which is to say, stayed the course!
Technically, what I did was wrong. It violated an elemental code of conduct in which we strive to avoid contact if at all possible. From our earliest tribal swamp of suffering there was—I’m sure—a primal reach for survival which placed the practice of non-confrontation above the violence of impact. Be it club to head or truck to Hero. My insistence that trash man bear all responsibility for avoiding impact was selfish in the extreme—an adolescent-tinged tug of war between the ethical and whimsical played out on the seat of a hero bicycle. Shameful. But I made it! And continued my wobbly-wheeled glide for the duration of twenty-sixth street and even for a bit of 83rd following my turn. Hah!
I’m not going to pretend. I won’t suggest this foolhardy bit of folly brought about a seismic shift in how I read the world. But I will say this: For the next two hours, there followed an extremely slow ride over the bumpy streets of eastern Mandalay with no real goal other than the taking in of the world as it opened before me, which happened with startling clarity and beauty.
There’s a fellow by the name of John Kitchin who goes by the name SloMo. He gave up a successful profession as a psychiatrist and neurologist to simply skate along the bike paths of southern California. He’s featured in a New York Times Doc Op which goes a long way to helping the average bear understand his path. A big part of his awakening is based on the physiology of lateral acceleration as a means of achieving a meditative state of higher consciousness. Skateboarders know it. Surfers know it. In-line skaters, too. Certainly the effect could be rendered via any form of locomotion, including walking.
SloMo’s conscious effort is to find a mind equivalent to that of a child at roughly the age of eleven, before the burden of puberty and life’s demands set in. Not so easy!
Just now I’m kind of putting off getting on the bike and riding to a wine store I know of to pick up a couple of bottles for tonight’s dinner. It’s kind of a long way, along a dusty, busy road. There’s sure to be much honking and jostling. Exhaust to the face. I’m wondering how my eleven year old self would face such a trip, but I know the answer. Time to go!
More about SloMo-
http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000002796999/slomo.html
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