Imagine, for a few minutes, that your parents, for whatever reason (they were too busy or lazy), never bought you a bicycle nor taught you how to ride one. And that you were also kind of lazy and would rather play video games or watch TV, and anyway you had no friends to ride with or houses to visit, so you just let that slide.
Fast forward to a time when, now grown up, you find that gas prices are rising to prohibitive levels (hard to picture, eh?), and that bicycling is the most economical solution to transportation. Now you are taught by your significant other, who is enthusiastic about finding another potential trail-riding partner, and who rattles off all these trails in a radius of thirty miles around your abode, glossing over the fact that you cannot even get on the fucking thing, let alone ride it for recreational sporting purposes.
In a gambit to familiarize yourself with the contraption, you decide to get up at the crack of 7 o’ clock (before the traffic and the party people in your complex recover from their hangovers) to practice riding. You hope that if you practice enough, your terror of the machine will eventually disappear. Yet you are lazy, and your day starts more or less at the crack of 10 a.m., and you dither and dally about, stretching and writing snarky blog posts about your neighbors, before attempting the ride.
So, you eventually get off your duff and lug the heavy bicycle (why didn’t you get a road bike??) down the stairwell, to the parking lot, and attempt several times to both push off and get on the seat and not fall over like a dumbass. In the process, your neighbor steps out for a smoke, leans over the balcony and watches as you tip the bike over on yourself. You might get angry and be tempted to yell at him: “at least I don’t listen to polka trance, asshole!” but instead you wheel the bicycle to the other end of the parking lot and attempt again.
Success! You are riding, you are riding, you even shift a gear, holy crap, a hill! You brake the whole way down the hill, swearing to never again get impatient at being held up in traffic by a bicyclist, and panic as a car (!) approaches the stop sign. But the car goes first, so you don’t worry about it.
You bike freely on the street, down a slight slope, thinking all is well, – then a dip looms ahead, a very sharp dip! You chicken out and turn onto another street that has a steep hill, and simultaneously brake and hop off your bike, and there are cars and dogs and all sorts of terrifying obstacles around, and you are in the throes of a panic attack! Trying to talk yourself through the attack helps very little, as suddenly traffic has increased and there are now lots of cars speeding by on the residential road (are they really going only 30?). People gape at you as they pass and you stand there, looking stupid, pretending to just catch your breath for a second. Or two. Or fifteen hundred.
Eventually, you get back on (after a few tries) and try riding around in the parking lot of a nearby church. So nice, flat, and relatively empty. After riding around awhile, you see a mother and her kids walking out of the building, and the kids remind you: although you have graduated university with two degrees, honors, and a rockstar GPA, you are wretchedly incapable of operating a mere device that even simple children and hippies can handle with ease. Gamely, you pretend they are not there and circle around the lot a few more times before returning home.
Not even the cat, who is a giant pussy himself, is intimidated by you on a bike; when you wheel the death contraption directly towards him in frustration, he responds with a little jump-hop as if you are greeting him with a salmon. Stupid cat.
If I ever spawn, I am going to do everything within my power to ensure that they will never know what it’s like to be ‘on karenology’s wheels.’ Forget Montessori. I’ll make them learn to bike, camp, skin bears with their teeth, and do judo, karate, ki aikido and feng shui. I’ll force them to juggle reef sharks while tightrope walking on a cobweb on fire, suspended between two moving helicopters. If they are not dead or utterly shell-shocked after this education, then they shall never fear anything.
3 Comments
I totally wish you luck with the bike riding. :)
Thanks :) I’ll need all the luck I can get, as you can probably tell!
You are so cute
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