Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 6     I am consenting to a strip search, a turning out of the pockets if you will, to find the truth.
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Over the years I’ve had people tell me they ‘ride a bike too.’ Some have said this in defiance of my activism and some just to mention their own lives. And it’s true, most people have ridden a bike … they’ve ridden about a half mile down their own neighborhood … which is doctoral enough for them to roll down a window and yell: ‘keep your bicycle outta the way you dam fool.’

In real-life, not many people have experienced the sum of endangerment that comes from being constantly on the road among drivers who really don’t want to share with a cyclist.

It’s like caving: over time the extent of death and injury was total enough for the government to close the Monroe county caves. However no amount of death and destruction to cyclists will force the government to invade the ‘high-mountain’ sanctity of car-world attitudes.

It’s a re-hash of unimportant detail to list the incidents that figure into my endangerment on the road. All bicyclists tell the same stories; the drunk, the mad, the indifferent, the selfish, the psychos, the blind, the ignorant. Hardened road riders can tell you about thrown objects, and intentional swerving, and repeated indifference … but to me, the most important issue is the power law enforcement has used to protect and maintain this system of abuse. But maybe while I was fighting abuse on the road, I was really just re-fighting abuse from my family ... or maybe one abuse has nothing to do with the other.

This is where my personal story takes a turn.

The key difference between most bicyclists’ stories and my own story is the actions I took in defiance of the car-bike code. Unlike most cyclists, who are slowly pushed out of the sport or killed outright, I elected to forcefully act on the matter … except for one minor obstacle, I never meshed well with other human beings, so my outright defiance and retaliation were seen as a threat to society, not as a contribution.

The only path that makes sense at this point is to explain how and where my attitudes formed, and by doing so, I am consenting to a strip search, a turning out of the pockets if you will, to find the truth. And I am committed to say the truth frankly, so if a crack pipe falls out, I will admit it’s mine. On the other hand, if I claim another man’s actions were dangerous to me, then I will call that a truth also.

Chapters 7-8) The charging bull
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