Emily Katseanes
I’m a nice person. I just have one teensy problem. It’s something my mom’s harangued me about for years. She calls it “a lack of compassion.”
It’s not a lack of compassion. My problem is that I have problems. I live in a world so anti-Disney, I practically hate everything. And while this is not a sad situation for me, it does create whirlpools of hate so large they generate their own gravitational fields. And this week, I’m getting sucked into a vortex called “biking culture sucks.”
I’m sick of hearing bikers proselytize their hobby like it’s a religion. Hobbies do not make you a better person on the whole. They make you happy, so everyone else finds you manageable. I hate biking and am sick of people looking at me like I have spiders crawling out of my ears every time I say it. This is a hate born of cool, collected reason and an intense scrutiny of the geared culture.
One of the biggest reasons people embrace biking is to save the environment. This is crap. The environment has always been a problem. People just ignored it until celebrities started endorsing climate change charities. It made climate change the issue du jour (like autism was a few years ago) and when a new “cause” becomes cool, bikes will be left curbside like Christmas trees.
Although I’m glad biking helps some people keep pacemakers out of their chests, I’m not slipping onto Satan’s cycle for that argument either. I was at my physical peak twice in my lifetime. The first time, I regularly and voluntarily ran for several miles a day in high school. The second time, my sophomore year in college, I did several hours of yoga every day. Both times, I had the endurance and energy of a toddler and could bend in all sorts of unnatural ways. However, I was also smoking a pack a week and lived off Twinkies, French fries and Pabst.
Nowadays, I’ve given up smoking and exercising and try to fit green things in my diet. Overall, I feel healthier now than when I had to start my day with a cancer stick and some frosting. So, biking will not make me fitter, happier and more productive. It will make me one of the late, sweaty kids in class with no books and pegged pants. And I’ll probably be so pissed at that state of events, I’d start smoking again.
But by far, my biggest problem with bikers is when they act as though the laws of physics, common decency and the judicial system don’t apply to them. The rest of the world has to choose to be either a pedestrian or a car, but bikers think they can be both.
They think it’s acceptable to leap from sidewalks to car lanes and then go five miles per hour. It’s cool to ignore stop lights, street signs and hand signals. And if a biker runs into a pedestrian or a car, it’ll be like a videogame and the obstacle will disappear in a puff of mist. This is completely untrue and, for a pedestrian or a car, these shenanigans would result in being flipped off, run over and maimed. It’s time for bikers to join the real world and pick a side: stay on the sidewalk or go the speed limit.
I’m not just spouting bile. Bikers are clearly a danger to pedestrians, drivers, smokers, drinkers and people who take climate change seriously and not just as the latest trend. It’s time to unite against the wheel and turn that stinky, sweaty kid in class into the social pariah that he should be. Sweat is never an acceptable aura and biking is not an acceptable behavior.
Emily Katseanes can be reached at editor@nevadasagebrush.com. Now you can write her and let her know what you think, or take her on a "Gang Date"
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