Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Night Rider: Series Pilot

Getting ready for the car-free July. Did my first night ride yesterday. Correction: did my first night ride with my new headlight and rear LED reflector. Some things I noticed that I'd forgotten since last year's travels:

  • stagnant rainwater smells like fish caught from the Mohawk River
  • this is primo roadkill season
  • teenagers - fresh out of school - find nothing more novel or hilarious than a biker*
  • biking is a really intimate way to get to know the landscape; slow & immediate, but, like a car, you also retain a sense of power and remove. It's like the difference between watching a movie and a movie in HD. Bikes are Hi-Def. And extensions of the self. I think biking is akin to what a cyborg feels.

* I think the teenagers were just jealous of my LED reflector. It has three settings. One of them looks just like the front red lights on Kit.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oooh, night riding. I'm not quite that brave.

Here I've gone a whole year riding to campus and back, to campus and back, with nary a shouted insult or reaction of any kind from pedestrians or drivers, and then Monday, as I waited behind a car in the turning lane, I heard a truck pull up behind me. Real close-like. And then the asshole laid on the horn. Fortunately, I possess superior powers of highly specific dissociation, and went about my business of riding home like nothing had happened.

Sometimes I just don't know what's wrong with some people.