Bicycle Tales

You can tell a culture by the way they ride bicycles. Not on the right or wrong side of the road. That's irrelevant to this particular case. Rather, the riding is in where they go and how they stop. Especially in how they stop.

Remember when you first learned how to cycle? Getting started wasn't half so hard as figuring out how to stop the wheels from turning and turning and turning. Turning. It's like narrating a story. Once you start, you cannot stop until you've figured out how to end it and so you ramble on and on and on.* Hoping there exists a deity which might take pity on you and blast a lightning storm of inspiration through your skull, without it having to hit concrete and see the stars first, of course.

That's irrelevant.

Stopping, on the other hand, now that's where everything goes. Newton didn't get hit by an apple for nothing. Even gravity requires a good ending and nothing says a good ending like a solid concussion.

Humans like noise and injury tends to bring a lot of it. Starting with oww and ending in the earth-shattering sound universally known as the eeeoooeeeooo. The ambulance. Except it tends to be more of a hurdler than an ambulator. Even cyclists must nose-dive in the face of that history. It's do or die.

That's today's lesson.

There's an either or to cycling. Nobody in the history of cycling has managed to go slow and steady without falling up and dying and nobody in the history of cycling has managed to go quick and heavy without crashing down and dying.

So what culture is better? The one's who will ring their bells and barrel you over anyway, or the ones who will ring their bells and beeline for the between you regardless?

Considering the cave-men played tic-tac-toe and we still play it today. We must consider cycling will be as incomprehensible as chalk on rock for as long as humans bother to remember history.

Then again, even if humans forget history, like a bicycle wheel, the question of who is better than who will probably come back 'round again.

That's called the circle of life. So, where are you next cycling to?

Moony.





*This is the point where I tell you to just imagine if I actually did ramble on and on. Imagine lots of "ons" to such a point where the word starts to sound incomprehensible. Unfortunately even though this is pixellated space, I would rather not force you to spend the rest of your portion of cycling** in the unfortunate situation of reading the same word over and over, just so the author can prove a point.

**Cycling: verb. The act of living a mundane life full of laundry and grocery shopping and jobs.