Lehe: Bikers worthy of better insults

It happened again last week. I was riding down Dawson Street at 2 a.m., and as a guy passed… It happened again last week. I was riding down Dawson Street at 2 a.m., and as a guy passed me in his Land Rover, he rolled down the window and yelled, ‘Bikes suck!’ Then he sped away into the night.

If you ride a bicycle, people yell at you all the time. But this isn’t a column for bikers, it’s a column for people who yell at bikers. I want to let you know that you can do a lot better.

No one ever yells anything really biting or clever. It’s almost always, ‘Bikes suck!’ The thing about ‘Bikes suck!’ is that no one really believes bikes suck. It’s like saying that free speech or babies or sunshine sucks. Bikes are something everybody likes from the time they’re 5.

I know what happens: You see someone on a bike and think, ‘They’re different, and I can drive away really fast.’ It’s obvious what needs to be done. It’s the perfect setup: you yell an insult and leave it to burn long after you’ve escaped with your mighty engine.

But then when you roll down the window, suddenly nothing comes out. What was that you were gonna shout from your half-ton bully pulpit? It eludes you.

The possibility of the situation towers over your barren faculties, and you know that you will never live up to this. The moment is slipping, so you say, ‘Bikes suck!’ You pump your fist in triumph and juice the gas in the hope that enthusiasm will eclipse content, but the void leaves you empty as you streak away — not flying, but escaping!

And the biker in your dust isn’t stung. He’s just amused. So amused that later he will write a column about you and the horde of dispensable grunts just like you. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

What is it that made you want to yell in the first place? There must have been some motive. Look deep in your heart of hearts. Maybe it’s not the bikes you hate, so much as the people who ride them: their tight pants, messenger bags, beards, thick-rimmed glasses, ridiculously tiny little hats and worst of all the way they roll up one pant leg!

We all rode bikes from 5 years old and onward, and no kid in the whole barrio thought there was any danger back then of your pant leg getting stuck in the gears, though the pant-leg-rolling-up phenomenon suggests it’s a mortal hazard of bike-riding.

Then there is the unsupportable trend of bikers walking around with their pant-legs rolled up hours after the bike is chained up. It’s a carefully calculated, conscious act of absentmindedness that lets everyone with their ear to the ground know that the kid in those pants is none other than a bona fide biker — like if fat cat bankers tallied all their profits on their arms with sharpies. The hypocrisy is infuriating.

Also, you can assume rightly that these biker types are feeling very pleased with themselves over the way they are riding around in traffic, getting fit, sparing the environment and saving money. So, when you roll down your window, yell something that strikes at the heart of this smugness. And they go so fast!

After practice and with some maneuvering, they can dance around your traffic jams. They further believe that everyone chooses to be in a car over riding a bike and are silently judging you in proportion to their self-congratulation. Here is something I recommend for you to yell:

‘Global warming is inevitable! Your contribution is marginal! And obesity is genetic!’

If you yell this out of your car at a biker, I guarantee you will leave a bigger impression than the proverbial ‘Bikes suck!’ It exposes the fruitlessness of their enterprise. But we’re just getting started, because biking is only one arena of human accomplishment that dangles over a void. Something else you could yell:

‘I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors! And neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability! For time and chance overtake them all!’

Finally, remind them of their mortality:

‘Death greets us all with the same cold handshake, alone and unremarkable, as deaf to the brave as to the coward.’

So go ahead and yell. But one thing to keep in mind is that, while you and your target biker might be worlds apart, geographically you might live on the same street. Awkward! Once I had the experience of getting yelled at by a would-be John Doe … only to pass him five minutes later unloading groceries down the block from my house. Awkward!

That wasn’t the end of it, either. Later I implanted an audio recording of a beating heart in the floorboards of his room and drove him to insanity. When the police found out, the judge said that the guy totally deserved it for being such a huge jerk, and let me off with community service involving helping people yell at bikers better.

E-mail Lewis at lewis500@gmail.com.

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