Time isn’t Holding Us

If a really strange kidnapper ever asked me at gunpoint to name my favorite song, I think I’d say “Once in a Lifetime”

Everyone knows this song as an anthem of midlife crisis. (“This is not my beautiful house.”) A few people pick up on the existential theme. (“Same as it ever was.”) I think they’re missing that this is a song about the irrational absurdity of natural reality, which is utterly indifferent to a human life. (“Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.”) Byrne himself makes this connection explicit in the video, and in his twitchy marionnette dance, evoking images of voudoun possession — the rational mind completely consumed by a primal animism. He also stares in the depth of infinity, and comes away with what Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of being. Against the unimaginable span of infinity, the ethereal nonsubstance of our lives provides us with liberation. “Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us.”

For years — from 1980 until today, in fact, when I looked up the actual lyrics on the Internet — I thought that last verse was “Time isn’t holding us, time is ineffluous.” There is no such word as “ineffluous” (I checked), but there should be.

Things Orion Says

• dig
• dada
• mama
• big
• baby
• mine
• banana
• apple
• cheese
• more
• mouth
• eye
• that
• up
• down
• dog
• ball
• bubble
• no
• Bob [the Builder]
• duck
• owie
• uh oh
• hi
• bye

animal and machine sounds:

• dog panting
• cat meow
• sheep baaa
• cow moo
• duck quack
• pig snort
• fish gulp
• horse gallop
• lion roar
• peacock yelp
• bird caw
• car/motorcycle vroom
• airplane/ helicopter zoom
• beep beep

And motorists wonder why cyclists are so combative...

So this morning a guy yelled at me for signalling a legal lane change.

I made a (signalled, legal) lane change into the far right lane on a one-way street. Then I noticed that on the next block, this lane was closed for construction. So I immediately signalled a change back into the lane I had been in. I noticed the car that I had just changed in front of was immediately to my left (i.e. in my line of travel), so, while signalling my lane change I gave him a little wave-wave gesture meaning “you pull ahead so I can pull in behind you.”

At which point he rolled down the window and shouted at me: “You just changed out of this lane!” (For the record, he was driving an Acura, which I’m fast learning is the preferred car make of egotists with entitlement issues.)

I knew he couldn’t see the lane ahead like I could (cyclists have good visual command of the roadway, being up at SUV height and having no blind spots). So I said, as politely as I could while being yelled at, in traffic, with only one hand on my handlebars: “The lane ahead is closed, you fucking moron.” (OK, I left out the last part).

He dropped back (!) so I changed lanes in front of him. As we passed the obstruction I pointed at the lane closure and mimed “This is what I was talking about. You fucking moron.” I don’t know how well this translated, especially that last part.

But here’s what gets me: everything I did was completely, totally legal. Courteous, even. And we were all moving at the same (downtown rush hour) speed: about 13mph. There were a great many nonlegal, noncourteous things I could have done in this situation, including ride through the lane closure past the construction equipment, cut the guy off without signalling, or ride down the lane stripes. I didn’t, but got yelled at as if I had.

On my last few blocks into work, I tried to parse exactly what the Acura guy wanted me to do, and the best I can figure is “vanish from the face of the Earth.” Not just me, specifically, but all traffic between his present location and his intended destination. It’s just that I was on a bike and therefore a) unprotected and b) available for yelling at in a way I wouldn’t have been were I in a car. So he felt he could yell at me without fear of retribution.

So this reminds me of two stories.

Story the First

When I was in elementary school, all the teachers held the boys in my grade late one day. Someone, they said, had pooped in a urinal in the boys’ room, and we would all be punished until the culprit(s) stepped forward. No one stepped forward, so we were all punished. (I forget the punishment.) Indignant, all the fifth grade boys met at recess to find the bad guy, but again, no one stepped forward. While we were meeting, some of the popular girls came over and asked what we were doing, so we told them. They started laughing: because one of them had pooped in a urinal one day. (In thinking about it now, I wonder if she — one of the really pretty teacher pet types who teachers would never imagine doing such a thing, but who was one of the chief psychological tormentors on the playground — hadn’t done this particular deed to achieve just this effect: to get some boy(s) in trouble.)

A few days later, a couple of the more-troublesome boys pooped on the floor in the girls’ bathroom. The logic was flawless: if we’re going to be punished regardless of our behavior, we might as well do the things we’re being punished for. Of course, we were all punished again, but this time we knew who did it, and why, and we felt triumphant, not indignant.

So the next time you see a cyclist blow a red light, remember this story about fifth graders pooping, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

Story the Second

At some point in the 1980s, when systemic homelessness was a relatively new problem, I recall watching a talking head TV show about the subject. One of the panelists was a lady Reaganite, someone in the Phyllis Schafly mold. Hell, it might have been Phyllis Schafly. She offered no useful solutions to the problem of homelessness beyond, basically, “people shouldn’t allow themselves to be homeless.” When pressed about confounding factors like drug addiction or mental illness, she had no quick answer and kind of got flustered. She blurted out something like “if we quit feeding the homeless, pretty soon they’ll all go away.” The subtext was obvious: they would either clean up, or die. (This might actually be a workable solution, I dunno. This story isn’t really about homelessness, so lets don’t talk about that.)

Her “solution” to homelessness was exactly the same “solution” that many noisy anti-bicycle commentators (and I imagine Acura Guy) offer: ”couldn’t you all just vanish?” This is the de facto behavior of many drivers. They cut me off, hook me while turning, jump stop signs in front of me, refuse to yield right of way. They fail to see bicycles as legitimate traffic. They may (like Acura Guy) hold this view consciously, which is bad enough, but I have enough faith in humanity to assume most of the people who honk and yell at me won’t, when pressed, actually murder me.

But most drivers hold this view unconsciously, like the woman who damn near right-hooked me (i.e. turned right across my line of travel) this very morning at the Vermont/Capital Highway intersection. She wasn’t mad at me — she didn’t even recognize my humanity enough to hate me. I was not even worth looking for. These are the people that scare me, although they don’t make me nearly as mad. I have such encounters — which could quickly injure or kill me — probably two or three times a week. I’m still alive after commuting by bike in this city for nearly a decade, because I have to make the sad assumption that I actually am invisible, unless I’m directly in front of someone’s bumper, pissing them off. I’d rather have a motorist angrily acknowledge my existence than accidently kill me. Equal road access isn’t just an abstract principle; to someone on a bicycle it’s a matter of life and death.

In the “war” between cyclists and motorists (which I think is bogus, BTW, but let’s just play along for now), cyclists “win” if they continue to exist. Conversely, motorists will “win” when all the cyclists have either given up and quit riding, or died gruesome deaths in traffic collisions. These are not morally equivalent outcomes.

So the next time you hear a pro-cycling commentator bluster about equal access to the roads, remember this story about the lady Reaganite and homelessness, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

Most People Don’t Know How To Drive

By which I mean: they don't understand basic principles of operating a motor vehicle.

This has been a painful realization for me. For most of my life, most bad drivers were people who either knew the law but chose to drive otherwise, or who simply didn't know the law. It was only a tiny subset of drivers who showed no indication of, for example, the size of their vehicle, or how long it would take to bring it to a stop, or how to park. (Not parallel park, just regular park. Like the kind of parking where you just point the front of your car at the place you want to park it, and then put it in that place. I see someone stymied by this intractable puzzle almost daily.)

The last couple of years I've noticed a rash of people who not only don't know the law, they show no clue of knowing how to drive. They don't know how wide their cars are, whether their turn signals are on, how fast they're going, whether the stoplight is green, or other basic driving facts.

I don't think we need to outlaw texting, or improve road safety with hinky methods with roundabouts or somesuch. I just think that getting a driver's license should be at least as hard as passing seventh grade.

An open letter to Patrick Appel (writing on Andrew Sullivan's blog about cars and bikes).

Responding to Ryan Avent on the subject of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, Patrick tosses out this old chestnut:

but the roads for bikes wouldn't exist without the cars

Which prompted me to reply:

If this is the best argument you can muster for the continued existence of cars, I heartily endorse the alternative.

I have two bikes that frankly ride better without any roads at all. And the other two bikes would do just fine with a strip of concrete about 4' wide (OK, 8' wide for two-way traffic). You know, the kind of sidewalk you can pour for yourself on a weekend for a few thousand bucks.

Roads exist for the health and pleasure of cars, and if the “price” we pay for a car-free world is no roads ... crap, hang on, “price” isn't the right word at all. It’d be like walking into a nice restaurant and the waiter says, “please take this food off our hands for us. We’ll give you $5 if you’d just eat some of it for us.”

I think about this particular issue a lot, because every so often someone will have the brilliant flash that cyclists should “pay for their share of the road.” Let’s set aside the fact that, in Oregon at least, roads are subsidized from the general fund (so therefore cyclists pay more for the road than motorists); and let’s also aside the relative wear-and-tear a car causes a road vs. a bike; and we won’t even get into the degree of engineering required to build a road for such wear-and-tear. And the incidental costs of collisions (and resulting funerals), and the police patrols required to reduce same. Let’s just set that all aside. If the alternative to “bicycles should pay road taxes” is “let’s not have any roads,” well Option Number Two works just fine for me.

Let’s be clear: I own a car and like driving places. I like living in a civilized world where we can drive to the hospital when we’re ready to have a baby (instead of ride bikes, I guess). But this is a crap-awful argument, both against bikes and for roads.