Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 31-32)  I was done playing / police attitudes reinforce car-driver threats
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By that year I had easily amassed 60,000+ miles on a bike, and sitting in the saddle was second nature. My bike and my body and my soul perfectly notched together when I pedaled, and it was the only experience in life that filled me that way. (Except of course seixual matters which must have been thumping in my head manically as much as they ran women at me).

They assigned me a ’guy’ … a specific policeman who was designated to stop me. He was well-mannered, very low-key, and I respected him, and perhaps from a small corner in his mind, he had at least a professional respect for me … meaning he respected his job.

I was obviously a topic of conversation at fairly high levels after he stopped me one day and said, ’we know you believe [in your bike riding],’ to which I lost all gentleness in my voice and retorted back, ‘well then.’

‘Well then’ is right.
Is this a free fucking equal country or not? Cars didn’t follow the law. They passed bikes at intersections, they passed within my lane, they passed with on-coming traffic, they were speeding 90% of the time, they passed at railroad crossings where I could easily spill my beans … so why should I follow the law when car drivers dilly-forked the law any way they wanted, and gleefully endangered me while doing it?

I had taken a lot of shit on the road, and what road cyclist hasn’t? Mostly it’s just the little endangerments that add up to an uneasy picture of threat. One time a car pulled up behind me and blew his horn in agitation because I was in ‘his’ right wheel track during a snowstorm. A snowstorm. And I’m supposed to do what? Jump in the snow bank so horn-blower can whiz by? He spun his tires in the snow as he passed and threw muck all over.

Now I wonder if that guy would act the same way around members of his church as they walked across the parking lot and then flip cow mud on their shirts? Do you think the church members would put a stop to that cowshit if someone assaulted them in that manner?

Another fellow intentionally drove close to me twice, and the third time, after squealing his tires behind me in a threat; he ran to the police because I pulled out in front of him and dared him to come at me. I woulda cracked that mf through his windshield, and he knew it, and ran to the police to report me …

… but look at what the car driver was demanding … he was demanding his right to threaten me. He was demanding the right to be my ‘socializer’ and to push me off the road.

Do you think this is how he’d treat his grand-ma-ma while she walked across the Sears parking lot?

This guy was just an ordinary Roger doing what acceptable and decent people do … why else would he run to the police anticipating full support from the authorities?

That’s what drivers do; they intentionally, and I mean intentionally, endanger you, and when you fight back, they run to the police. And believe me; the police will fight for that guy’s right to run your ase down. The police themselves drove like that around me. Unbelievably, the police swerved cars at me and tailgated me more than once. I’ve seen it all.

I was done playing. I was done being intentionally endangered by street-holers. You pull shit on me and I’m going to menace your dumb ass in front of everybody on the road. I’m going to crush my fist across your side-view mirror, I’m going to kick a dent in your door panel … I’m going to force you to turn yourself into the police and the whole fucking time, I’m going to run every stop light and stop sign in my way. Fuck you, is what I started giving back to cars.

The cars fucked with me, the police fucked with me, so fuck you twice too.

But you can see this rage was in part aimed at a society that, in my mind, refused to let me participate in the only way I knew how.

Dan the Informer incredulously asked me why I acted that way. What a ripe mf. And I asked him: ‘aren’t you tired of cars pulling up and grabbing your backpack when you’re out riding?’ Yeah, how about that Danny Dil-bo? … remember telling me how a group of boys did that to you and almost knocked you down under their wheels? Did you think that was funny? I didn’t hear you say that was funny. Where was law enforcement when that funny thing happened to you? And just who the hell was going to protect you from that? The police? The courts? The law? LOL.

I asked myself repeatedly, what societal rule lets people think that squirting juice on defenseless people is all good sport? Yeah, that’s what people think … why else do homeless people report night beatings and assaults … it’s human nature to attack the defenseless. This was the reason police steered their cars at me.

People think it’s funny when they poo-fart bicycle riders. No wonder I thought it was funny when that policeman tumbled in the bushes while chasing me on the motorcycle. No wonder I thought it was funny to throw eggs at cars … and thought it hilarious when that fool cop went back to pick up his hat and let me get away.

I tell you precisely what protects you from funny people on the road… it’s an equal threat of damage to their vehicle or person. Just ask yourself, who’s gonna kick a homeless man that jumps up and slices a 2x4 at the assaulter’s head? But if that happened, the police would stun gun the teeth out of that homeless man. Hell, James would shoot the mf for you, and giggle pretty while bullfrogging another doughnut.

Bottom line is this: the police and courts will defend illegal and assaultive driving by motorists. The proof is obvious: Ask yourself why there has been no change in law despite protests over many years by thousands of cyclists? And majority-rule aside, ask yourself why the court has not engendered a program to meet the needs of anyone except motor vehicle drivers?

In America today, as long as the motorist doesn’t actually hit you, then they are legally allowed to play goose-a-cycle all day long. And cyclists are expected to take it. But I didn’t.
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Chapter 32)  Bicycle safety is a number’s game, with every car as dangerous as a loaded gun.

Most drivers say they would never play goose-a-cycle, and honest to god that’s probably true.

But ‘most drivers’ is not ‘all drivers’ and to understand the problem, you have to realize the road is a numbers game.

Let’s round off for mathematical ease and say I rode a bike 50,000 miles by 1976 … so how many cars passed me in those 50,000 miles? … let’s say I was passed by 12 cars per mile, plus 12 cars coming from the opposite direction … so 24 cars per mile x 50,000 is 1.1 million cars. But let’s say the estimate is high and the figure is 500,000 cars instead. I don’t want to lose the reader over a trifling in math because the percentages that follow are the main point.

So by 1976 I had been passed by 500,000 cars … so let’s spin the salad and say 10% of those drivers had been drinking … so that means I was passed by 50,000 drivers who exhibited a risk of impairment by alcohol … and this number ignores all other human impairments like blindness, dribbling hot coffee down your crack, frosted windshields, or driving while swatting the kids in the back seat.

The numbers game continues. If one in ten has been drinking, then one in a hundred is stone-drunk … which means I saw the stone-drunk driver 5,000 times. Factoring again by 10: one in a thousand drivers is outright dangerous from time to time for other reasons … so I saw that driver 500 times. Again factoring by ten: one in ten-thousand drivers is spooky dangerous … so I saw that driver 50 times. Again by 10: one in hundred thousand drivers will intentionally hurt someone now and then … and I saw him 5 times or once every 10,000 miles.

The numbers show that once every 10,000 miles I encountered a situation that outright threatened my life. But it also shows I was seriously endangered at a minimum of once every other month, but more likely, every day I rode … which was every day.

The reality is, nobody on the road has a color-coded license plate to mark their driving status. Nope, it’s just like when the police pull someone to the side of the road … they tell their officers, ‘anybody can pull out a gun and shoot you.’ And conversly, a cop can pull a gun and shoot you too, after all, he's driving a loaded car all day long.

Believe me, any car driver can come up the road … and every car is just as dangerous as a loaded gun.

And this is because people are continually cycling through parts of their personalities. Nobody is one thing at all times; sometime they’re belligerent drunk and sometimes they’re sober; sometimes they’re homicidal and sometimes they’re feeling pretty good. Lots of different things work in people’s minds at different moments and that’s why everyone is urged to take precautions. The whole world is a block of swiss cheese holes waiting to line up.

You see, the car-bike relationship is like the ultimate internet dating scenario where you leave your house to meet a total stranger … except with a bike, it goes on-and-on with stranger after stranger piling up the road behind you.

You have to stomach a lot of shit, especially when riding on busy roadways. It’s not at all like driving a 4-wheel coffee-fart wagon surrounded by a ton of steel. No-sir-eee, you’re a soft target precariously balanced in the wind and rain, and I was fighting back against that shit with a vengeance because there was no rule of law to protect me.

Realistically, law enforcement cannot leave any kind of bicycle activist on the street for long, especially one as blatant and angry as me, but the problem for them was a conflict in law that allows everyone to defend themselves from endangerment.

This conflict enraged the police on their side of the fence because they drive cars … and you don’t need a big algorithm to see their primary goal must enforce car-culture.

But I didn’t really want to live like that. I thought freedom was found through exercise and by avoiding people.

My ideas were folly-arse laughable, and so my experience let me see first-hand, by omission in law alone, the force of culture that permits motorists to push aside alternative forms of transportation. Still, it was my arrogance and flat-out determination that acerbated the situation.

Chapter 33) The police tailgater: open warfare begins
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