I thought about buying a bike again today. This has been a slight obsession of mine since moving to Austin at the end of August and I don't really know why. I have never in my adult life owned a bike and in fact, the few times I have been on a bike as an adult, I've managed to crash into things with it. And yet, I find myself wanting a bike.
When I lived in Boston I used to lovingly refer to the cities cyclists as "stealth pedestrians." The moniker arose due to the number of times I would find myself nearly run down by someone on a bike whilst shifting from one side of the sidewalk to the other. Unlike a runner, whose footfalls are likely to be audible several seconds before passing beside you, people on bikes tend to make very little noise and are moving fast enough that your reaction time is diminished in attempting to avoid them. Add to that the fact that Boston is hardly designed to be used by cars let alone bikes and you've got a lot of cyclists forced to use the sidewalk along with the rest of us, stealthily weaving their way down Comm ave or Newbury street. I never had any desire to own a bike in Boston, why then do I suddenly find myself interested in one now?
It's not that I've all of a sudden started living some "green" lifestyle into which a bike would perfectly fit, neither do I believe that I would be using said bike as a primary mode of transportation, and yet this cycling seed continues to grow in the back of my mind. To be honest I think it may be a combination of a couple different things, but more than anything I think it's the result of my subconscious need to (as my Dad would say) "enjoy every sandwich." This is a saying apparently attributed to the late singer-songwriter Warren Zevon. Zevon might best be known as the artist responsible for the song "Werewolves of London" and several years back found out that he was dying of cancer and had not much longer to live. He put out a very well received final album and appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman (where he often subbed for Paul Shaffer) and it was during this interview that he said something about enjoying every sandwich, another way of saying "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we may die" only not having been sullied by the Dave Matthews Band. But to get back on the subject at hand, the most recent time I lived in Boston I felt I never got the chance to take advantage of the city in the way I would have liked, the way I had in college. When I left Boston it was for a job in Fairfax, Virginia. The job was great, as were the people I met there, but a more boring location I would be hard pressed to find. Sure, Washington DC wasn't far away, but it was a trek to get there and even once there, the ease of access was nothing like that of Boston. When I got my current job in Austin I made some sort of vow with myself that if the city did indeed turn out to be everything I was always told it was (ie. the Boston of the south) then I would take full advantage of it; I would "enjoy every sandwich."
For me this tends to be a fairly simple thing to do. I don't require much, at least I don't think of it as much. I need several things really: an independent coffee shop, record store(s) with a large enough selection to satisfy my eclectic tastes, a well stocked comic book store, movie theatres that show a wide variety of films from mainstream to foreign, and ideally as much of this as possible within walking distance of my apartment. So far Austin has matched this criteria perfectly, although walking around isn't as easy as it is in Boston due to somewhat greater distances and maybe that's what brings the idea of getting a bike to mind.
Whatever the case, I've been having a hard time convincing myself to get a bike. This is partly because I don't want to have to buy a bike, which in itself is partly because a bike is a specialty item I know nothing about. I think of it like a computer. I have no problem buying stuff for my computer or advising people to buy stuff for their computers, but this is because I know a lot about computers and I've built my last 3 machines from scratch. Other people are a little nervous about computers. It's like bringing your car in for service. On the one hand you don't want to end up paying for service you don't need and on the other you don't want to look like you don't know a damn thing about cars to begin with. Or maybe that's just me. But anyway, that's part of the bike thing with me. I guess the rest is just convincing myself I'll be able to use it without getting myself killed. I've never really driven on the street before and in some areas here it would be required. And yet there's something that's pushing me towards getting a bike. Is it simply that my subconscious thinks this will be the way to "enjoy every sandwich?" Do I just enjoy the novelty (to me anyway) of being a person who rides a bike? I don't know, but today I thought about buying a bike again and someday soon I might actually do it.
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