Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 61-63 My mental state

Like Dan, I am susceptible to an accumulation of stimulus, up to a point when it becomes over-stimulating. Once over-stimulated, my mind is overwhelmed until it blows out the energy. I suppose it’s like being an epileptic except I don’t fall over in seizure but instead get very loud and explosively mannered. In short, I flash-over and usually yell and sometimes gesture wildly.

Judging by the reaction over the years, I believe my rage must be very compelling and convincingly evil. Despite the reaction from others, I have never fought the devil. There is no evil inside me, period.

 However, unlike a schizophrenic, I am unaware how my rage fits into the social mesh. I don’t see myself acting negatively, I’m just acting the way I act, and as soon as the flash-over is gone, I’m back to being ‘me’ … except I may continue follow-up muttering and cussing.

I don’t like the way it makes me feel afterward, only because of my vague uneasiness around other people. This means if I got enraged in the middle of the forest, then afterwards I’d feel ok.

It’s like a tree falling when nobody can hear it, and therefore I can skip merrily down the streambed and the forest will understandingly accept my apology.

When my anger happens in the middle of society, everybody standing around has taken the salty-worded verbal abuse and no doubt felt threatened because I am large and quick and sometimes exhibit wild gestural movement with my arms.

Somehow the rage doesn’t fill my legs, so I don’t jump around like a bean. The rage fills just my upper body, mainly my arms and big dumb mouth. I just stand there shouting and waving my arms … like a total fucking idiot … the whole time unaware I just committed social suicide in everybody’s mind. And then I go about my business as if nothing happened.

Usually I have full justification for the flashover … for example the fat cop laughing at me or the paint store refusing to order my regular paint brush.

Life is filled with disappointment, but most people deal with it in an ‘ordinary’ manner. Me, on the other hand, I have no available options, so my mind says the world has just ended and I must rage for a minute to relieve the problem.

Maybe if the world really did end in a nuclear fireball, I would run down the street using my legs while flailing my arms around wildly. Otherwise I am strictly an arm-and-mouth rager.

I have always used my arms to help vent the rage: I threw snowballs and eggs and corn as a youth (and maybe had to run as a result of my raging). I threw something into the wall when my parents got divorced, I clunked cars and smashed mirrors with my arms, and I threw caulk guns down to the ground in later years … and of course I’ve yelled at every living thing on the planet … but I never ran around while raging.

Nor did I get a gun and shoot things. I’m just not a rat-a-tat-tat ... put-a-cap-in-they-ase ... kind of guy. It wouldn’t be satisfying to hide in the bushes and shoot across a field at a man on a bicycle … nope, I’m an ordinary in-your-face rager. I tell you straight to your face.

I guess my raging has a 'code of honor.'

Unlucky for me, practically ever human interaction contains the necessary elements for my combustible rage. Everything pisses me off, so I might explode into an arm-flailing foul-mouthed episode at any time … and the flashover may be more related with something that happened a week ago than anything standing immediately in front of me.

This means that I am in a continual state of rage … which of course is identical to what is reported with serial killers (I read that somewhere recently). The main difference is: I’m a mouth and arm rager and not a hunt-n-kill rager …. Except for one big thing: I carry a weapon when I ride a bike!!

So now you see why the profilers would fit the hate-hat on me.

I love riding a bike because it exercises away all my frustration. It takes me away from myself, and I can see the world and interact vicariously.

Bicycling for me is kind of like letting the rager talk, except I am ‘confused and demeaned’ by much of my human experience, so instead of talking, I like to go visit society while taking a big walk … but bike riding has led to weapon-carrying and ‘extreme thinking.’

Bicycle activism will always be seen as ‘extreme thinking,’ and of course that topic has been covered exhaustively in this 'book.'

Let me speak off handedly about my ‘confused and demeaned’ human state.

I discovered that I am a socially avoidant personality. And perhaps paranoid too. I don’t like prolonged interaction with people because it confuses me, and my mind wanders and I become loud in an attempt to still the extraneous noise and put myself back into focus. This may be why I have never held a job for longer than a year and a half.

This is not hallucination in a schizoid sense; it’s just that I cannot flow forward through a prolonged interaction with people without falling into a loop where I lose focus.

This is especially acute in open-ended situations where there is no shared common goal: For instance a quiet gathering of several people where my contribution is necessary for the completion of a magic social circle. In these situations, I quickly lose track of myself.

During a social conversation, I remember what I have said but start doubting if what I said was good enough and think it necessary to revisit the moment with ever-increasing velocity. I start replaying the tape, and I want very much to be successful and to be socially appropriate … I want equal volleyball teams … but I don’t know how to keep up in a fluid conversation. I can’t follow conversations with multiple players that move forward and really have no educative point …
 
… ah but those fluid conversations do have a point don’t they … they are the social chemistry that determine who you are and what people think of you, and therefore you must perform and execute perfectly … just like my father told me, and you must get it right the first time or you will be beat down verbally and sometimes physically … so you can see the pressure … and when this pressure is added to my inability to read gesture and meaning after a few minutes of sustained interaction … then suddenly there is confusion…

… except I don’t show confusion … I am overwhelmed and get loud and angry.
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Chapter 62 The source of this book: My memory

I am at my best when put inside very short situations. I can read the whole situation at a glance … I can see a mile deep sometimes depending on the energy coming out of the other person. I take a photograph that can be read off for months or even years.

This is how my mind works and this is why it doesn’t work in prolonged situations among people.

Inside my mind is a huge catalog of intuitive photographs and recordings. These are totally interactive to the extend of what I observed, they don’t become distorted or illusory to my knowledge, but they are not interlaced with each other into a contiguous story … to write this book, I made a calendar and arranged the ‘photographs’ into a chronology of events. Prior to this, I was never able to string together the pieces to see the full story … it was always a single photograph or two, but nothing was linked.

The fact that I lived in this cluttered, dissociated manner was a complete surprise … yet the evidence was there the whole time … but most people don’t have a completely stitched memory of why some person did this or that.

By writing this book I have been able to stitch together my own recollections and stories to see my actions and reveal a continuing rage. Before this, I was aware I got mad but never knew that it affected people. Nor did I see how my bike-riding affected people. Nor how my bike-riding reflected the rage inside me. It was just who I was.

To me, I was unimportant in society. Therefore how could my actions be important? Furthermore, since I was a decent human being with good intent, how could my bicycle activism not be positive?

However society doesn’t work on such a linear plane. People judge what they see … and what they saw was the rage … and because I never associated with people in prolonged relationships, then they could never measure the guy inside.

In addition to manners, people also take into account the way a person looks and smells. For some reason I always liked being dirty and sweaty like a big hog. I liked riding a bike in the rain and wandering around in worn-out clothes. Dan the Informer once remarked that I wore rags, but it was no deal to me, it was just what I wore. He added that I made the rags look good ... so I wonder if my appearance inspired the contemporary fashion of torn pants?

Anyway, I never understood that my manner and size and big mouth and intense stares worked against me and intimidated people, and called forth police intervention. Nor did I see how my dirty car and suit cost me jobs. I just never fucking saw how my cussing and foul mouth and rough manners and dirt-covered clothes and anger affected me in the social context that I always wanted to belong to.

I have forever wanted to belong but can’t belong because the necessary components are missing, and instead I get confused and end up verbally tearing the place apart.

This was the reason I couldn’t join the people at the Chicago velodrome. If I stayed, then I would become a failure and if I failed among other cyclist, where could I possibly belong? By riding away I could say honestly that I didn’t fail, and therefore people must exist somewhere that I can relate to … but down deep it hurt like an empty hole because I could never find anybody like me.

By continuing to ride a bike, I felt I could transform the world into a place where I would fit, and while that was true for my body and mind, it never existed because people don’t ride bikes in Chicago in the snow. My body and mind need cycling but cycling is aberrant to our society … and this is true.

Society feels anybody who chooses to ride a bike over car-riding must be aberrant. And maybe the reader disagrees … but this is absolutely true … and I’ll give you an example: the newspaper always says, ‘the math award was given to Mr. Blah, who rides a bike everywhere he goes’ … or ‘the homeless man was arrested for public urination after the police observed him riding a bike.’

OMG … the social stigma of 'riding a bike' … eccentric and unstable and weird to the max ... like wearing a bow tie.
 
Obviously I fit into the social stereotype of bike riders. But I believe cycling is inherently good and the safe practice of such is a desirable societal goal … however this goal fulfills the slightly paranoid belief that the greater society will always push cyclists off the road. Which is true.

Therefore cycle activism became my life’s goal because it was truly where I fit, and truly where my blend of personality could forge a position in society.
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Chapter 63

Throughout my life, when things became stressful, I rode a bike.

When my first major love left me, I began cycling in earnest. When all my friends left and got jobs, I began cycling more. When I was alone in Chicago, I cycled huge miles. When I quit Chicago, I cycled across Florida to New Orleans to burn out the frustration.

As I said in previous chapters, cycling filled me where people couldn’t.

Cycling provides a comfort. Maybe it’s like a psychotic rocking back and forth, or maybe it’s similar to Dan staying in the apartment with the lights turned off.

Cycling slows everything down and lets me move forward even when the world seems to be rushing past. The act of cycling lets me finish the conversations and situations where I failed. This is why I talk to myself … to finish unresolved interactions with people, and to vent the rage over my failure to completely explain myself … thinking somehow that my explanation would matter.
 
The entire book is an effort to complete the goal of fully explaining myself. I am essentially still talking to myself and need to dot the i’s and cross the tees.

The failure to completely explain oneself is probably symptomatic of rage-a-holics. I haven’t read up on the topic and may be wrong, but read once that psychologists want to keep rage-a-holics talking in order to keep them from spilling out their rage.

Under any circumstance, cycling was a very compelling comfort, so much so that I road a bike any time of day or night, and felt fully confident in my ability. I was a very good athlete and could fly over the handlebars after a collision and end up perfectly balanced on my feet.

This leads to the next component of my mental state: a lack of fear … a laughing in the face of threat.

I prefer to ride on a bicycle path away from cars. I prefer car drivers who slow down and act like people. I do not like being threatened and intimidated by drivers on the road.

But regardless of my shortcomings, I feel I have a right to equal protection on the road.

The difference, as I said before, between myself and other cyclists is what I did with the threatening situations inherent with car-driver behavior. I believed so much in my own ability, that I stood up to assaultive drivers.

I had a reduced amount of fear.

When we were kids, we used to sit under the wooden railroad trestle when trains passed. As the train produced this horrendous shaking noise just inches above our heads, I could feel myself lifted up by the sound, and wanted to get closer.

But the unsettling projection of this fearlessness, and the ability to mimic the facial and gestural manners of assaultive car-drivers produced real fear in other people. Prior to this book, I have been unable to match the reason why people responded to me so negatively in the past.

This fearlessness was part ‘real’ and part ‘show,’ and was designed partially to hide my fear of people and my belief that I would fail.

Even so, I felt throughout the years that the socializers made up stories about me in order to explain their fear of me. I’ve seen plenty of made-up stories by the socializers to explain their behavior versus mine. That’s what socializers do…they fabricate a story in their mind that fits their rather irrational collection of facts … and they use their social weight to push over someone less likable than themselves… that’s why it was perfectly acceptable for a friend to tell me she would applaud if my house burned down.

A good example of this came in 1999. I was cycling regularly and carrying a heavy chisel in my hand to ward off cars. There was another fellow from my neighborhood who cycled the same roads and he carried a large baton strapped to his bike. For christ’s sake, cycling is dangerous.

After the police started running the hate on me and forced me off the road, they sent their informer to give me proper reasoning why the other cyclist was ‘acceptable’ for carrying a baton, but I was ‘unacceptable’ for carrying a chisel. I don’t remember what he said, which is odd, but I remember the ridiculousness of their assumption.

You see, the other cyclist was a good neegra and I was a bad neegra because he let cars pass however they wanted. The critical point was not the endangerment, the point was about bike-rider attitude … and I had the improper attitude to believe I deserved to sit in the front of the bus and be treated like all other passengers on the road.

But mostly I was improper because I ‘forced’ my right to equal protection and made car-drivers mad. Car drivers do not want to act like decent and law-abiding people on the road. They do not want to act like they do at the grocery store and wait for their turn.

Car drivers will invent artificial stories so they can continue acting any way they want on the road.

My behavioral shortcomings, and mostly my rage-a-holic nature worked against me, and made the perfect guise for the authorities to write me up in the newspaper as a terrorist, and then later make the claim that I was violent. You see the socializers created a story to match their social requirement for open-range roadway.

Importantly, the authorities did not write that I was an activist … they wrote that I was a terrorist. They didn’t write that I was a lawbreaker … nope … I was a terrorist.

And of course my foul mouth and dirty clothes and inability to associate with people made the perfect cover … and thus the authorities could rally everyone behind their illegal push to get me off the road.

Chapter 64-65 childhood
Index of chapters