Serenity: Dispensing Sanctimony (pun intended?)

Being an unsightly clod, who suffers from nervous gas and a debilitating need to constantly know my wattage output for any given task, I've grown accustomed to ridicule and rejection.  However, I was recently informed that my presence on Toronto's cycling forums is a bit of a downer.  Apparently, I'm too cynical and negative.

Thankfully, however, scientific analysis has proven that my blog is actually enfused with positivity:

"iclogto.blogspot.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time."

This appraisal is correct.  I am happy, often even serene, but I have achieved this sense of happiness through great struggle and rejection.  Being a misshapen fool with a compulsive need to lick used deodorant sticks during my youth, I was subject to constant ridicule and rejection.  However, I achieved a transcendence beyond my betters the day I watched a hipster on a de rigeur brakeless fixie pedal very slowly down Queen St, execute a de rigeur little skid, track-stand uncertainly, then weave into traffic and nearly get struck by a car, then mount the opposite sidewalk and collide with a pedestrian.  Watching the hispter's foray into the hardship known as Reality, a flowering of self-esteem blossomed within my bosom.

"I may be a misshapen fool," I thought, "but you ride a bicycle like an idiot."

Thinking that you're better than someone else is a heartening discovery, and there's no shame in it.  We all do it.  Sometimes it's even actually true, but it comes with a great deal of responsibility.  Like any sensible person with the usual urge to remain alive, I affix appropriate and visible lights to my bicycle, and use them.  Users of Urban Repair Squad's pharrow infrastructure do this:

Compact disc reflector seen on the Pathway to Enlightenment.

This type of nonsense is just not acceptable, but it's pretty much the standard sort of garbage one encounters when cycling in Toronto.  I'd like to be positive about progressive infrastructure and attitudes being fostered in Toronto, but when cars seem more capable of using Toronto's new bike boxes correctly than Toronto's cyclists, I cannot.

Toronto's cycling community needs encouragement.  Certainly, it does.  However, it also needs a bit more perspective than its smug, self-righteous, snobby cheerleaders are willing or capable of providing.

Unfortunately, I'm not the one to provide it ...but since no one else has as of yet volunteered to do it, I intend to do my best until they arrive.

Waiting for the Great Pumpkin: Epherma & Other Epiphanies

As a connoisseur of vintage Hallowe'en dross and other ephemera, I keep a keen watch on pumpkin crop predictions.  However, unlike previous years where I just wait for The Weather Network to run some human interest story to fill in the gaps between the rote repetition of plausible but improbable predictions about the weather, this year I planned an Homeric bicycle tour of local artisan pumpkin nurturers ('organic farming' is so over, the more holistic 'food nurturing' is topping teen trend charts at the moment) to survey their colour, heft, and general orbness personally.

Pumpkin surveying is thankless work.

In preparation for my fantastic voyage, I donned a pair of vintage Rayban Wayfarers, enwrapped myself in a plaid hoodie to brace myself against the frigid elements, and saddled 200lbs of touring supplies on my moderately immoral and sniffly brakeless touring bike (I stop by the sheer power of my will), and then walked it down the sidewalk like a pretentious twat

Walking my moderately immoral and sniffly brakeless touring bike of doom down the sidewalk to the outskirts of town, I realized that I would be missing tomorrow's much vaunted Art Spin finale.  Since traveling trivial distances by bicycle to view trivial visual stimulus is also an important part of my life, I decided to catch The Weather Network's round the clock coverage of this season's pumpkin nurturing on the TV later and turned back to prepare for the Art Spin ride instead.

Wondering about the proposed route for the Art Spin ride, I sat down beneath a tree and pulled out my Toronto Cycling Map to review what route planning the City of Toronto thought fit to send cyclists out upon.  However after staring at the map for sometime in a desperate search for some sensible and meaningful route, my mind gradually began to wander and my eyesight began to blur.  Gradually my sight focused and my mind noticed, not the bike lanes and proposed routes, but the enormous blank spaces between them.

I saw meaningless stubs and yawning chasms and began to feel strangely trapped.  Gripped by this alien sense of entrapment, I wondered when new urban planning would liberate Toronto with more facilitating infrastructure till a kindly hobo interrupted my train of thought and offered me a cupcake and a swig of his bourbon.  We chewed the moist cupcake in thoughtful silence when he suddenly extended a hand and introduced himself: "Estragon."  At that moment, I was suddenly seized by a realization so shocking I nearly added extra cushioning to my riding shorts.

I glanced up at the barren tree leaning over me.  Sitting under a barren tree?  With a hobo named Estragon?  Waiting for something that will never come in my life time?  And then I saw it...

I fell into a dizzy stupour and swooned into the kindly hobo's arms.  Coming to my senses, I stuttered madly like St Michael of Monday, so overflowing was I with prophetic revelation.  The hallmarks were all there: the apparent randomness of our journey; the search for meaning and guidance; the ultimate realization of the aimlessness of it all; the frustration and despair at the emptiness and the sense of insignificance; the attempt to impose a path to meaning and instill a sense of personal significance from within if not from without.

A gap in a bike lane that dead ends a few blocks away anyway?

Yes, I suddenly understood: Toronto's infrastructure isn't real infrastructure at all; it's actually an enormous Absurdist art installation.

Seen in Etobicoke: 'Use other sidewalk'?  What other sidewalk?!

Toronto cyclists aren't participants in an alternate modal scheme; they're the audience of the greatest wool-pulling in human history.  They pick their way across a patchwork of ridiculous routes, encountering disparate and random bits of 'infrastructure' that appear to offer meaningful guidance but ultimately lead no where.  Some search for guidance, but find none and begin to despair.  In the face of such despair, some impose their own routing of their journey and set forth regardless, while others wait for the Godot of Progressive Infrastructure under the wilting tree of city hall.

This realization got me wondering: who needs Art Spin when there's an entire exhibit waiting outside your door?

A Bicycle: Just Ride the Damn Thing

As part of the instituted regime of proselytization, cycling advocates often market cycling to the uninitiated by highlighting the benefits of cycling over driving, like improved physical fitness, the opportunity to flaunt your enviable sense of inappropriate attire for the physical task at hand, and the chance to relish hidden cafés nestled in vibrant communities while other patrons politely nestle themselves away from your olfactorally assertive person.  (I'm sure there's some dope somewhere trying to market the pungent reek of a sweaty cyclist as a trendy 'green' fragrance.)  Some even market the personal transformation that follows one's conversion of modal choice as practically a religious experience, which is plausible given this post I recently saw at BikingToronto.com:

One can literally watch the author's prose deteriorate into incoherent babbling as he ascends from jubilation to ecstasy until, stuttering madly, his mortal soul is conveyed by angels unto the rapturous heights of beatification.  

Unfortunately, I've never been so lucky.  I just ride my bicycle.

For me, riding is rarely so satisfying, much less so orgasmic.  I rarely notice the rich, vibrant neighborhoods I ride through nor do I chance upon some hip new boutique selling artisanal oven mitts while I'm cycling.  All I notice is crappy pavement, crappy art on the pavement, actual crap on the pavement, nuisance traffic, nuisance orange pylons, and so on.  For me, commuting is a blur of honkbumphonkpylonbumpbumpzoomhonks.

In other words, it's like being humped by a Dutch clown.

As a oafish and misshapen clod with a poor sense of smell and socialization issues, being humped by a Dutch clown is sometimes the only human touch I receive during the month.  To make matters worse, my personal time with the Dutch clown is often invaded by swingers hoping to join in and make it an orgy and the whole thing just gets very messy: the roadies are always too fast; the randonneurs are too slow and have those unsightly, saggy bags; the art bike crowd wants to play with their toys; the fixie pixies don't know when to stop; the recumbent riders are only interested in one position; the sartorial cruisers insist on the pull-out method, rather than using a rubber, to maximize their quality of life; the messengers are only in it for the money ...and then there's the so-called utility cyclists, always the repressive Calvinists, who try to quash the fun by pushing their agenda of bicycle chastity by covering up the bits with naughty names 'bottom bracket', 'nut', and 'push rod', and by browbeating others into wholesome and sensible cycling, which as near as I can tell entails becoming an uptight tit with a reflective orange vest and a helmet mirror.

I find it all very intimidating and confusing, and so try to ignore it.  Again, I just ride my bicycle.

Finding one's self in cycling is difficult to do because there's so many prepared molds ready to shape your doughy mass.  Watching new cyclists crank their first timorous few gear-inches is fascinating because one can watch a grown adult re-endure all the uncertainty, image anxiety, and eagre but naïve exploration of their teenage years as they strive desperately to fit in.  I too went through bicycle puberty, but being an misshapen clod my misshapen peg didn't fit into any hole.  So I just ride my bicycle.

As some guy once said, "Go, and do thou likewise."