People Who Write About Bikes

The Austrian keyboards are tantalisingly close to Qwerty except that they are qwertz, real fucking annoying let me assure you. I return today to cycling as subject, you know when I posted a message on www.levelorouge.ch to wish Benno who fell just shy of 27,000km in his cycling journey that I didn't include my own blog url. Largely because of the blog posts he put up and how nice and humanistic they were made me not want to share the insight that I was infact a snide antisocial person.
Then weeks later while trawling through bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com the most entertaining blog I have ever reads'* archives which included a very hilarious bicycling magazine article (unpublished by bicycling) and also lead me to discover fat cyclist another blog which finally shed light on my own moral cowardice.
You know when I was between ages 8-14 I had embarrasment attacks whenever I had the thought that someone I know may actually be a mind reader, and would hope they hadn't been reading my mind when I thought this or that**
Obviously as a blogger this is not a good insecurity to have, and fortunatelly with the second episode of futurama I was cured forever by the scene where Bender's antenna screws up the tv reception and a lady can hear his thoughts on her cellphone, she opens it up and you hear bender's thoughts 'that lady has a huge ass' and bender responds 'those could be anyone's thoughts fatass'
At anyrate thoughts should remain private, and once shared should be nothing to be ashamed of if you have the balls to stand by them.
Anyway, the place where I found a link to fat cyclist was on bikesnob's blog where he was commenting on the ying and yang of things, and indeed they seem to be quite opposite. For one thing Fat Cyclist is open about his identity, encouraging and generally positive, he uses self depreciating humour.
Bikensnob on the otherhand guards his identity, picks on other people, people who can't really defend themselves, is highly judgemental and alltogether negative.
Take for example his latest post as of this writing and just play the first youtube selected video you don=t have to watch it all. Anyway as courageous as it is to sit smugly behind a secret identity and criticise people, I have to play devil's advocate for Bikesnob for a minute namely because fo years I employed the same tactics to make myself feel big, like batman or something.
Anyway, if you watch the aforementioned youtube clip, the question comes to mind 'why do people do this to themselves?' why do people put themselves out there just waiting to be judged in what is so obviously pretentious.
Its a question that runs deep, that has baffled me for years.
Example, why do people in Australia knowing that saying 'ciao' is pretentious still do it, then go see a comedian like Craig Ryan at the comedy festival do his bit 'do italians finish they're conversations by saying "see'ya" and laugh at it? why do people still wear beret's? infact you could pretty much some up the deep questions by saying 'why does almost everyone on earth try to be more european?'
Why do American teenagers still punctuate with the 'Valley Girl' lingo of 'Oh my God!' and 'Like' and 'Eww' and shit, don't they realise how uncute and just plain fucking annoying it is?
I think that while deep down in my heart I wish I was more like fat cyclist and could convince people to take up cycling, and have fans wear my own branded jersey's and enquire into my wellbeing, I think that I veer towards a more contemtuous position for reasons cultural and geographic.
May I elaborate? there is one thing I saw in Melbourne that is superior to all other countries of the world, and that is the anti-dooring technique of putting the bike lane inside of the parking lane hugging the curb, and putting concrete islands between the park and the lane. Admittedly this was only done recently (and they gritted the path too with some kind of permanentesque grit) and as a result a lot of the students getting out of their cars talking on their mobile phones and walking back to their apartments don't expect bikes to be coming at them from the inside and just step into your path alot.
But let me put it like this, I would rather my pretty face crash into a scrawny 50 kg asian dentistry student than into some metal car door. so I think it a win for cyclists and a loss for pedestrians.
But aside from that the most noticeable advantage in Europe of my cycling so far is a type of infrastructure I can't comprehend - attitude.
I have said before, and numerously do I spontaneously jump off my bike on the pavement for fear of copping abuse from a pedestrian, who instead looks at me like I'm insane. Or on the road I slow down to give a much heavier car way only to find them frustratedly waving me on.
And I can ride distances of 100km and not hear a single piece of abuse hurled at me from a car. And I can ride without a helmet and not fear the police ever pulling up and telling me to put my helmet on, like the time a cop did in Brunswick when I was riding a mere 500m to pick up Miki on Sydney Road. (if you don't think picking up a girlfriend on a bicycle is cool you need a lighter girlfriend then I expect you to apologise and tell me how the bike scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the best love scene ever).
Yes it seems here, that the world is not trying to reject cyclists like some kind of virus that has infected an otherwise healthy body.
And it isn't smug either, there are just as many, if not more cars on the ridiculous rodes here, they still usually contain one person only. I see SUVs and shit, but also the ridiculous Smart cars.
In all it seems like rather than Europe being some anti-car, pro-cycling haven, they both just coexist. And I find myself much less adversarial as a result.
Contrast that to I suspect the riding culture in Australia, firstly, the majority of people with road bikes are most likely, elderly executives, that put it in the bock of their Tourag or BMW whatever SUV, drive it down to St Kilda, get it out and then ride it around the bay for a bit before stopping off for a cafe LA. The next most populist group on road bikes are triathletes, and nobody likes them.
After that you have BMX bogans, that look like trouble. And then you have a measly group of commuters and serious cyclers.
If any of these take the road then they immediately recieve a barrage of 'public service announcements' from well meaning automobile drivers that like when I inadvertantly tried to cycle to Florence withouta map and through nothing but my own stupid naivete ended up on the Autostrade and 2 or 3 trucks out of 100 honked to let me know I should get off as soon as possible, Australians assume similarly that you should not be on whatever road or footpath you are on anywhere as it is surely illegal.
Of course bikes aren't vehicles, vehicles use petrol and have four wheels.
So friendly car driving Australians, ironically even the same drivers who are on their way back with expensive road bike loaded in the rear warn you to get on the footpath, or friendly australian pedestrians warn you to get off the footpath onto the road.
And lastly, groups of Chinese elderly tourists meander along 5 abreast on any and all bike paths for reasons I expect have somthing to do with the subtle change of the gravitational pull of southern hemisphere constellations that effect small neaurons in the brain.
In short, there is nowhere you are welcome to ride in Australia, and since the friendly warnings usually take the form of 'off the fucking road/footpath' or occasionally the extra friendly pet or glass bottle hurled at speed, or even once a loogie spat impressively from at least 2 stories up off an apartment balcony to connect with my left wrist.
And this makes me adversarial, and I go off on a tangent that has nothing to do with what otherwise should be isolated traffic incidents that generally involve one or more people being stupid with vehicles involved.
That is to say, if someone parks, or waits in the bike lane, someone cuts me off, someone runs me over and so fourth it is so much more personal than if someone bumps your car with their car.
It suddenly is all about the environment, fitness and obesiety, petroleum costs and of course accusations of some greater conspiracy.
I choose to call this the 'call center phenomena' based on my own experiences of working in a call center.
You see before the introduction of the wonderful do not call list there was a huge employer in Australia of an abundence of cal centers all operating on various different standards of management. Some had really pushy salesreps calling from an autodialer or even photocopied pages of a directory using blackmail and exploiting elderly people to get sales. and some were professional organisations that spent a week training all their staff, monitored their calls and had quality standards and supervisors people could complain to. And then all customers identified all call centers diverse though they were as but a single face on a signle enemy.
So you having never called someone before could get a furious lecture, whistles being blown down the phone and all sorts of shit.
Same phenomena happens with the bike vs car war, a war I now know is wholey unnecessary but likely to continue.
All cyclists see all drivers as one single enemy, and all drivers see all cyclists as one single enemy.
The arguement isn't 'you fucken dickhead you fucken almost killed me' it has become 'you fucken drivers think you can do anything just because you've got momentum on your side, but your children are on our side, and one day when you are old and feeble we cyclists will rise up against you and overthrow you oppressors, we will overcome, we're saving the planet you know and keeping fuel prices down, if anything cars should drop gritty rose petals down for us cyclists to ride on...' blah blah blah.
And I find myself totally sympathetic with cyclists. If you ride a 20k circuit from brunswick to St Kilda, I-m sure you will agree with me too.
The conversion is remarkably fast, and I can't keep my anger from overflowing, whenever I see that familiar sydney road conversation between a office professional off to work standing beside their Mazda and some bogan cyclist lying on their back, their bike a crumpled mess.
But at anyrate, I now have two quality blogs about cycling I can read.

*and believe me I have read +5 including a swarm of blogs started by friends who after initial enthusiasm become board with their own life and stop posting about it, not even dignyfying this realisation by resorting to creatively make shit up like their double life as a vampire nicknamed 'daywalker' by the rest of the homoerotic community. Although deep down I suspect the phenomena is more akin to the similar reason that people who read are also incresingly eccentrics in society, the perception that they currently spend all their time doing important shit.

**most likely something sexual, like Brain from Primus squatting over a mirror while masturbating for example, or something sensitive like wishing Adam Hill's cancer would come back***, or something particularly critical like 'does she know how beneath my standards she is when she is asking me out?'

***obviously though cancer is horrible (fat cyclists partner is undergoing chemo therapy I understand and I would never wish such an affliction on anyone with any serious intent) and it really is insensitive of me, it would only be necessary to fire Adam Hill from Spicks and Specks and replace him with some backoffice beauracrat who could read the questions and not try to be funny in that patented scripted-auto-que-good-news-week-do-they-realise-this-is-how-paul-mcdermott-came-across-as-so-witty way.