Ruminations on biking Los Angeles

Ie, procrastinating whilst filing up ones blog with old bits one wrote to procrastinate in the past now serving as a form of procrastination in the present...

If You Can’t Find it on Hyperion,
Did You Really Need it in the First Place?
Kate Coyer
August, 2003

I grew up in Pasadena and spent a respectable portion of my youth riding around town. I rode through Old Town (when there were prostitutes and pawn shops), to the Mall (when there were Contempo Casuals and black girls), and around Lacy Park (before San Marino neo-fascist scum decided to charge admission to avoid sharing their green grass with brown people). I owned that city and nothing seemed too far out of my reach. My world was small and my bike a forest green Schwinn. In college, my bike was stolen within the first two weeks and it’s taken me over a decade to regain the fever of the road ride and the glory of the bike as transportation.

In this renewed spirit, however, I find myself confronting a few lessons I have learned about myself in the process.

1. Cars are an addiction. Trying to exist in a carless world has made me a shut-in. I work at home so I have that luxury of opting not to leave the house if I just can’t be bothered. Every day, however, I am forced into a face-to-face meeting with my innermost Demons of Lethargy. Each day I find my lazy self fraught with anxiety, trapped in a bitter contest between my most whiny ‘it’s too fucking hot to ride!’ and the more heroic ‘I will not give in! I will not drive that filthy gas guzzling Volvo!’ So it takes me four days to channel the energy to post a letter. If only there was a nicorette gum for driving.

2. It takes longer to get somewhere on a bike. Example – Silver Lake to Santa Monica for me – 1 hour 30 minutes. Blimey. However, my riding is rarely about the efficiency of getting somewhere. I suppose this is the flip side of my struggle to get out of the house and on the bike – my inability to get off it once I get going. Another example, last week I rode to meet a friend for lunch at the Riverside Café (yum!) near the Pickwick Stables. Afterwards, I decided to run a couple of errands. After leaving barely-Burbank to reach my credit union at Alvarado and Temple, drop off film on Vermont and Santa Monica, and back home to Silver Lake, my day had vanished. But I didn’t care. This brings me to my final lesson.

3. Biking makes me smug. Real smug. I feel smug in the shadow of confused looks from strangers when dragging my bike into some establishment wearing a protruding white plastic helmet and shoes that click on the ground. I feel smug when I’m the only rider in Griffith Park the morning after that kook went on a beebee gun binger in some low-rent sniper attack and shot a local CBS reporter in the leg, even if I was the only person out because everyone else was at work. I go so far as to feel smug when my crotch throbs from tender seat, cos I earned that pain, dammit. I feel especially smug, however, with my absolute intolerance for SUVs and the people who drive them. In fact, my whole sensibility since turning thirty has been that of increasing intolerance. And smugness I reckon.

Maybe I’ll leave the house today after all.

For more bicycle reading pleasure, check out the definitive biking LA zine by Lisa Anne Auerbach, Saddlesore.