The wheel deal

I have come to realize that getting moderately serious about biking has made me both more and less tolerant of other bikers.
On one hand, I support all other bikers. I want other people to get out and enjoy this hobby. I want them to have fun and get fit and spread the word to all of their friends. Just so long as they don’t weave like Billy Joel leaving a party when I try to pass them.
This is the hand that makes me look good. It’s the hand on which I am an ambassador for goodwill among the bicycling community. Unfortunately, compared to the other hand it is small and withered not all that appealing. It’s like the Strom Thurmond of theoretical hands. On the other, much more robust, hand there is a long list of bike-related pet peeves.
Most of these have to do with types of bikes. In roughly ascending order I am annoyed by:
• Tandem bikes. I suppose there are situations where these are of use. Like when two fugitives find themselves chained together in a comical fashion, or when you’re courting someone in the 1920s. Mostly, though, I find them ridiculous. Ride your own bike. Show a little independence. This is America, after all.
• Recumbent bikes. Again, I realize there is a use for these. Some people have back problems and can’t ride a regular bike without horrible pain. They get a pass. Still, if you have to put a flag on your bike so cars can see you, we’ve got a problem.
Recumbents also seem more likely than other bikes to be modified in some unspeakable ways. I have seen recumbent bikes encased in aerodynamic fiberglass shells. It’s like watching an egg bike down the street, only without the possibility of a giant omelet.
Then there’s the tandem recumbent. I have seen these, but I refuse to acknowledge their existence.
And still, none of these is as bad as:
• The tall bike. Have you seen these? Apparently here is a certain subset of the Twin Cities bicycling community that has decided it is a good idea to weld one bike frame on top of another. Riders have to climb on top of cars or walls or tall friends to mount them, and I don’t want to think about what happens if they have to stop suddenly. Essentially, they have created the Paris Hilton of the bicycle community: kind of intriguing at first glance yet awkward-looking and vaguely useless the more you think about it, relying more on unique looks than actual usefulness to get attention.
I try to be accepting. But when I see someone riding a tall bike, I mostly feel like pushing them over. Which, now that I think about it, is actually how I feel pretty much every time I see Paris Hilton, too.
Maybe this all makes me sound petty and elitist. I don’t think that’s the case, though. Biking has changed the way I look at the world. I pay more attention when I drive. I watch out for bikers on the road. Although when I see them I’m mostly thinking about whether I’m faster than they are. Usually, I figure I am. I’m pretty sure if I saw Lance Armstrong and his entire team rolling down the road, as long as I was safe in my car my first thought would be, “I could take ‘em.”
Confidence is important, I think.
There is one final issue I want to address today, and it’s going to take a little explaining. It goes back to tandems, and who should be riding them. I made some jokes about this earlier, but there really are situations where tandems are acceptable. If one member of a couple is really into biking and the other isn’t, I’m open to tandems as a compromise. The biker gets his or her partner to go along for the ride and the non-biker gets to make his or her partner look ridiculous. Everyone wins. I think they’re also nice for parents and their children.
But they are never acceptable for two dudes.
This isn’t a homophobic thing. I think two men should be able to do just about anything they want together. They can get married as far as I’m concerned, or compete in doubles luge. But ride a tandem? That’s just a little too weird.
Two women on a bike, though? Everyone knows that’s hot.

This one's for the peeps

I need to take a moment here to wish everyone out there a very happy Easter.
I realize I might well have just offended half of my reading audience. To those four of you, I apologize. But I’ve never backed away from controversy. If there are hard things to say about frog guns or turkey funerals or flaming mice, well, I’m going to say them.
So, yes, I’m taking a stand. I’m speaking out about the removal of holidays from our public lives. I’m pretty sure I’m the first one to do this. At the very least I imagine I’m the first to do it while also talking about frog guns.
On the surface it sounds a little strange to talk about the elimination of Easter. Most stores are currently filled with egg-themed decorations and marshmallow candies shaped like bunnies and birds. Families everywhere will be up to their rabbit-ears in chocolate for months to come.
But those are all commercial components of the holiday. They will be around for as long as there are people in the world willing to decorate their yards with six-foot tall inflatable eggs. What I’m talking is far more disturbing.
That’s right. More disturbing than giant inflatable lawn ornaments. Can you imagine such a thing?
The city of St. Paul made the news recently when it removed Easter decorations from its offices. The fear, as I understand it, was that the display — presumably Easter Bunnies and eggs and not Jesus on the cross — would offend non-Christians. Meanwhile, nobody seems to worry who might be offended by those “I can only please one person today ... today’s not your day” signs that seem to be in nearly every government office I’ve seen.
The whole thing is a little bit ridiculous, although it has the benefit of leading to one of my favorite political statements of all time, in which people piled marshmallow peeps at the base of the stately Vision of Peace statue at St. Paul city hall. It was a kind of peeps-ful resistance, I guess.
According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, one protester added a sign renaming the statue, through the Easter season, “Vision of Peeps.” I haven’t been so entertained by a sign since the impromptu memorial a couple of years ago to the turkey that lived along Pilot Knob Road.
Last Saturday, the city of Rosemount held its annual egg hunt. It was not, parks and recreation officials were clear, an Easter egg hunt. It was just a chance for Rosemount kids to gather and scrounge in the grass for plastic eggs filled with toys and candy. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure takes place year-round in some communities. The fact Rosemount’s hunt took place just a week before Easter was a coincidence, I guess.
I don’t see what the problem is with Easter. My churchgoing experience has mostly been limited to the occasional performance in my youth as a member of the St. Croix Valley Boy’s Choir, but that never stopped me from enjoying a hunt for brightly-colored eggs or kept me from eating a piece of candy. Although I always felt a little guilty eating the chocolate rabbits.
If other religions want in on the action, that’s fine with me, too. If Hallmark can find a market for Ramadan cards or Yom Kippur gift baskets, then so be it. More fun for everyone.
Our holidays are being taken away from us one by one. First, we weren’t supposed to wish anyone a Merry Christmas. Now we’re losing our only major bunny-based holiday. What’s next? Will we be forbidden from putting up handprint turkeys at Thanksgiving?
I realize Thanksgiving isn’t actually a religious holiday, but I couldn’t think of any good jokes about Ash Wednesday.
I think this is a dangerous path we are on. The more we worry about being entirely correct in all situations — about not offending anyone in any situation — the more we will foster a backlash against that kind of behavior. And when that happens people start mistaking being “politically incorrect” as being entertaining. Then terrible television shows like “The War at Home” turn political incorrectness into a marketing campaign. And if “The War at Home” wins, we all lose.

Making tracks

At the end of February, desperate to get away from an apartment with a collapsing ceiling and non-functioning light fixtures in two rooms, I rented a room from my step-sister.
So far, it’s working out pretty well. The rent is a lot cheaper, getting to work is easier and I don’t have to worry about getting hit on the head by falling chunks of plaster. It’s pretty much good news all around.
The new living arrangement also means I share the house with a dog, a semi-dopey black lab mix named Sophie, and my 4-year-old nephew, Mackinley, whose mother would probably not appreciate it if I described him as dopey. I don’t think even semi-dopey would go over very well.
I like both Sophie and Mackinley a lot — honestly, I’d missed living in a house with a dog — but both present certain challenges I’m not used to dealing with.
Sophie is probably a little easier to deal with. She can be a little pushy, and some of my clothes are more covered with dog hair than they have been in years. But if she ever gets to be too big a nuisance I can always let her outside to run around in the yard for a while. My step-sister made it very clear after the first time that is not an acceptable solution with her son. In my defense, it was only raining a little that day.
Living with a 4-year-old has introduced me to skills I never realized would be so important in day-to-day life. I’m still developing the ability to step around toys on the floor, for example, but it’s getting better. With Mackinley, that mostly means threading my way around the large, elaborate train tracks he sets up in the living room.
Mackinley is crazy about trains. He loves Thomas the Tank Engine, a children’s series with surprisingly bad animation and creepy trains that think for themselves yet still for some reason have people driving them. In the time I have lived there he has watched his Thomas movie (specifically, Thomas and Friends: Making Tracks to Great Destinations, a name I know only because that’s how Mackinley refers to it every single time he mentions the movie) more times than I have seen any movie in my life.
Spend any amount of time around him and there is a good chance you will be asked — although “asked” might be too mild a word for this particular circumstance; instructed is maybe better — to “play trains.” Mostly, this means working on the track while Mackinley runs his Thomas toys back and forth. Mistakes made while playing trains — there are more ways to mess up than you might expect — bring swift and fierce corrections.
Playing trains with my nephew also frequently means being witness to terrible tragedies. In the weeks I have shared a house with him I have seen enough plane and train crashes to occupy the front page of USA Today for months. Although, for all the collisions and collapses, there seems to be very little loss of life. Even the plane full of kids that crashed into the ocean one day seemed to be having a fine time living underwater. If Mackinley weren’t too young for it, I’d suspect he had actually crash-landed a plane full of Snorks, the deep-sea Smurfs rip-off that had their own cartoon for a while when I was a kid.
It’s a good thing, I guess, because there seemed to be discouragingly little interest in mounting a rescue effort.
Living with Mackinley has also broadened my music knowledge, albeit very slightly. Thanks to my nephew, I now have two songs — I have no idea what they’re called, but one is about clocks and the other one is about broccoli — permanently burned into my mind. That kind of thing can happen when you listen to the same song about 20 times a night. From time to time I’ll find myself sitting at my desk and singing — usually in my head, thankfully, “No, don’t give me that broccoli.” It’s a little unsettling.
This new living arrangement takes some getting used to, I’ll admit. On the bright side,though, I’m better than ever at putting together train tracks.