Out for another spin, wondered again whether bicycling wastes time. Does not, provided you don’t drop dead prematurely, because life expectancy rises hour for hour due to fitness reacquired, unless your genetic clock’s mainspring has already unwound. Benefits get overlooked, especially for transportational riding, since it cuts creeping malaise, motoring risks, and parking craze. What many dismiss as smug excuses don’t begin to explore existential impact from pedal bicycle versus motor vehicle uses: Carbon neutrality, cleaner air, fuel avoidance, less traffic, lower costs, mental health, neighborhood involvement, no reason to wage war over oil, peace, understanding, whither survival and sustainability. Studies show the same can be said for writing a blog or journal, therapy for what ails you.
Biking oxygenates brain, recalls memories, stimulates creativity, and triggers revelations. Otherwise, boredom prevails, projects end, or sleep ensues with peak experiences tossed in at unexpected intervals unless you plan adventures. Routine tasks can bring pleasures; for example, satisfaction can flow from multitasking when results fall nicely into place. But bicycling depends heavily upon the sum of civilization. Without a human presence and reliable pavement it would be unsafe traversing biodiverse nature among apex predators and cavernous potholes.
After 13 years in print, Bike&Chain finally earned a bibliographical entry in America Goes Green: An Encyclopedia of Eco-friendly Culture in the United States, Volumes 1-3, edited by Kim Kennedy White and Leslie A. Duram (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA, 2012, 1297 pp.) thanks to an article about Bicycle Transportation by Alon Raab. It’s fittingly relegated to an erroneous footnote, as if a minor planet, such as asteroids Agrawain and Ywain, named for nearly forgotten Knights of the Round Table. B&C itself has twice as many pages compiled as a Doppler hub of emerging or fading bicycling culture. What a misspent investment for such a minuscule return! No venture capitalist, questions own motivations.
Labann (not Leban) had a compulsion to share and nothing better to do for whoever might care. Labann does best to never repeat self, but sought to cover all similar ground. Can’t be helped if you ride from home. Each body of knowledge deserves a champion. Doctoral dissertations intentionally delve into unique topics for posterity’s sake to broaden understanding into areas thus far ignored. Mindful of confabulation and exaggeration, individuals excel at describing own experiences versus secondhand accounts likely framed around agendas.
Written out of oppositional defiance and velorutionary noncompliance, B&C offers honest insights into doubts and dreams, personal revelations, and primal screams. Always was and will forever be about best practices, continual improvement, delusion disruption, ethics, factual truth, freedoms, nonetics, non-violence, responsibilities, semiotics, standing upright every day, and watching clichés melt away. Anticipated every survey laden with selection bias and worded to reap approval, then, for maximum efficiency, preempted with actual preferences seldom solicited by any selfish billionaire, rather than ever answer another opportunistic questionaire. Better to share link, then shut up or switch thread, than be driven mad or serve narcissistic word salad.
Could just heed authority’s decrees and obey without dissent or unsought analyses. Makes living a lot easier. Would have made money making readers feel good about themselves or simply distracting them with salacious stories. Left advised should’ve to devious liars. Transgressions aren’t even punished because prevailing stupidity can’t recognize whether or not you’ve complied. But inquisitors do treat objections and questions as disloyalty or threats. They abhor fact fletcherizing and rational thinking, deny proof, and prefer fearful folks groveling and kneeling. For those who act responsibly only a shade of connotation separates blameworthy from trustworthy.
Beside cars and motorcycles, Labann also held licenses to drive school busses, taxis, tractor-trailers, and trucks. Used to think motoring around detours was better than jockeying desks; nevertheless, settled into an intense, nerve-racking, sedentary occupation. Just as well, because stymied with gridlock, highways became hell. Driving beneath a rising or setting sun ceased to be fun. Dispatcher schedules force protocol forsaking and increase accidents from risk taking. By bike day and night with or without a light have been nearly run down by many a big brown and blue and/or white clown. Strangers reported shortages of every necessity due to a lack of drivers and handlers.
Long made same comparison, but New York Times recently admitted that car motoring is more of a youth killer than disease contracting. “Covid appears to present less risk than some other daily activities. Among Americans under 17, fewer than 500 have died of Covid since the pandemic began; many more—a few thousand every year—die in vehicle crashes.” In general, COVID’s 2-year toll on American lives has been eight hundred thousand, fewer than those from automotive crashes this century to date, around nine hundred thousand. Both demand extra care to avoid. Worst outcomes only begin to represent injuries and losses of nation’s 90 million accidents since 2001 along avenues to afterlife, byways to bereavement, paths of perdition, roads to ruin, and streets of sorrow. During double century of bicycle’s popularity, more have died in vehicle crashes than in wars.
When you see two people of opposite sexes with new haircuts who’ve shaved heads except for bantu topknots, you get an idea they are a couple or might be seeking each other. You might be tempted to intervene, tell one who remains where other went. Mind your own business. Though this grooming seems unlikely, it proves nothing about identity, unlike days of yore, when monks and priests had shaved scalps as promises of lifelong piety. Tattoos were forbidden in scripture, but not self mutilation or tonsures. Sports fans wear face paint and team garments, which they wash before resuming Monday business. Piercing and tats are commonplace except when taken to an extreme by people who seem to want to bolster self esteem by defying norms through image transforms that intend social transgressions.
Ironic how bicyclist and pedestrian sightings are chaotic, infrequent and random; once that could have been said about passenger cars. Same applies to books, films and songs spiraling downwards from complexity to simplicity for which everyone longs. Convenience convinces you to abandon activities that you didn’t realize actually sustained. Without some organizing loop, blog entries wind up as word soup.
David Attenborough’s Extinction: The Facts (BBC, 2020) would agree that the list of species on an escalator to extinction because of habitat destruction must also include humans due to an increase in pandemics and resource depleting economics. Honesty dispels delusions, sometimes explosively. Secrets and taboos create victims. Those who are guilty hide facts, but those who communicate candidly get attacked. Whatever you say online is forever accessible, even misconstrued and taken out of context, which serves people in charge the most. Expletive bleep, dodges people apply and secrets they keep run exceptionally deep. History definitely isn’t how it’s been told, since it must continually be updated as evidence emerges and facts unfold. Journey from Alpha has been an extensive plight but Omega destination is now within sight.
“Oh, what's the time again? I think I should get going. I’ve got nothing more to say. Oh, what's that sound again? I think that it was nothing. Just a bird, a leaf, the wind. And I rode my bicycle down by a lake, and noticed how the ripples in the water reach the shore.” - Providence, Rhode Island based indie band Sketch Pilot, Bike Ride, Handshakes with Dinosaur, self, 2021
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