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.

Dining With the Enemy: URS, Meat Paste, and the Dutch

Gathering together with family is often a momentous and healing experience, and joining in the giving of collective thanks creates moments of revelation and empathy.  Unless you're in my family, where your Mother forgets which holiday we're celebrating and festoons the house in preparation for Passover.

Though the remembering of the Spirit of the Lord culling the first born is always a fun-filled family event, I tried to gently and tactfully reorient the festivities toward the correct holiday.  I'd nearly succeeded when someone asked (as someone is wont to do every year in a desperate attempt to think outside a non-existent box), "Why don't we try something other than turkey this year?"

I was initially pleased to be spared an Homeric dual of with my arch-aminonemesis, but when my Mother decided to take cues from the Dutch in preparing the alternative mode of celebration and prepared hutspot and pea soup served in clogs, I took one look at what had been placed before me and fainted face-first into my dish.

Food?!

I'm beginning to fear the Dutch want me dead.  Their recipe for hutspot creates a goo with the perfect consistency to drown a man at a depth of 25.4mm.

The National Post captures the Dutch chanting, "Death to The Clog!"

For the time being, however, I am pleased to announce that I have survived all plots by the Dutch against my life ...and also against my palette.  To save the Thanksgiving feast, I fought fire with fire and, borrowing from both the Dutch technique of deep frying meat paste to create vaguely edible objects and Felt's advanced mold optimization strategies, I fashioned the hutspot into a turkey, deep-fried it to create the illusion of skin, and then baked it over a roaring clog-fueled fire.

The end result was an olfactory and gustatory obscenity ...but it was still better than hutspot.

Bidding goodbye to my family and returning to the other olfactory and gustatory obscenity, Toronto, I was affronted by headlines about Rob Ford dressing in drag to launch a tirade against cyclists eating the babies of poor harmless Scarborough drivers.  In search of more positive news, I turned to Herb Van Den Drool's blog and was enthralled to learn that the Urban Repair Squad has installed yet more infrastructure to guide and enable the cycling aspirants of Toronto for whom paying-attention-to-what-you're-doing is just too tedious.

Incapable of following basic traffic requirements?
That's OK.  Just go where you think is best.

Billed as another Toronto first, this unique piece of alternative infrastructure joins the pharrow as the second piece of Urban Repair Squad's program to provide alternatives geared to all riding skill levels ('incompetent boob' is a skill level in the Urban Repair Squad's manual) by alleviating Toronto cyclists of the responsibility to ride in any predictable direction.  Instead, the Urban Repair Squad encourages us, if we're incapable of riding sensibly, to go where ever we darn well feel like.

I'm pleased to see that the Urban Repair Squad is attending to the needs of all Toronto cyclists, and not just those of us with some sense and a will to remain alive.  The next time I'm riding downtown, I can look at the boob salmoning toward me in the bike lane and think "Thanks, Urban Repair Squad, for enabling this person to ride a bike."

When two imbecile cyclists collide head-on on this street, I hope I can be there to witness the coming together of misplaced entitlement and progressive infrastructure first hand.  If they're going fast enough, perhaps the world will be a better place afterwards.

Good: Bad

As a socially-challenged and pessimistic person (read, 'asshole'), I find it difficult to see the best in people.  However, I was genuinely inspired to a rare plateau of optimism yesterday by an empathetic Sysco Foods truck driver, who graciously parked his vehicle while making a delivery at College St & Huron St.

Curious, I asked the driver if his parking job was a reflection of progressive protocols at Sysco Foods.  "No," he replied, "I park this way because I ride a bike myself.  I know how it is."  Though heartened by the gesture, my optimism immediately evaporated the moment I turned around and saw the more typical state of affairs directly behind me:

So common is bike lane imbecility in Toronto that even the Toronto Police Service, who recently brayed about their wide-sweeping blitz of cyclists and pedestrians, can't use them properly:

Police 'salmon' in the Jarvis St bike lane.

...much less enforce the most basic rules, even when an offender is right in front of a flock of officers:

Out of eight officers, not even one could bother to ask the motorist to move along?

Certainly all major cities struggle with infrastructure issues and enforcement of traffic regulations is immensely difficult given the sheer volume of users.  London, Paris, and New York all wrestle with the counter-productive behaviour of their populuses populi? populae? pupae? citizens.  However, whereas the Thrivy League of major world cities have embraced the challenge of implementing progressive transportation policies and infrastructure, Toronto faces a bevy of incumbent politicians who will either stall such change or actively remove it.

Rocco Rossi: "When I'm elected mayor, I will take this city backwards."
Rob Ford: "But you won't take it back far enough.  We need to go right back to the dawn of humanity!"

One could either laugh or cry, depending on what mood one's in.

Rhododactylos Fordos: Here Comes The Big One

As I prepare to heave my intellectual flab onto the pile-on of Toronto cycling bloggers, I do so with the same cautious optimism that has seen humanity through all Dark Ages.  I believe the coming four years will warrant much introspection and reflection from the Toronto cycling community.  Toronto's self-flagellation by municipal election has spilled considerable ink (and hastened the thermodynamic collapse of the universe through copious electron use) and imbecile-turned-professional-imbecile Rob Ford's election looms.  But even if the rosy hues of Ford's panting mug fail to rise on Toronto in the wee morning hours of October 26th, the mood reflected in the polls will remain.  And that's something Toronto cyclists will need to deal with.

That's not sweat he's bathed in; that's glory.

One wishes Toronto residents could simply ride their bicycles like normal people, but given the confusion and rampant mitosis of cycling into various alt.cultures, no one seems to know what a normal person riding a bike looks like anymore.  Oh yes, certain amongst us have tried to tell the rest of us, from hyper-correct Cyclists who observe every decorum like an Obsessive-Compulsive John Forrester to Danish pervert-turned-socially-acceptable stalker Mikael Colville-Andersen, who thinks pictures of the fatuously fashionable traveling trivial distances on cumbersome bicycles will move the rest of us to life-altering epiphanies about ecology and sustainability in style.  Yet fashion never translates into real life and so the confusion remains.

Fortunately Toronto is not Copenhagen (people who think it should be should try pronouncing 'Søren Kierkegaard' correctly and then count their blessings).  Though people are the same the world over, regionalisms and inherited attitudes drive apart what universal physiological and psychological traits bind together.  Muddy York was built for the bourgeois carriage and the pedestrian prole.  Toronto, on the other Oury grip, was built for the car and people genuinely seem to like it that way.  Toronto is not a cycling city.  Christopher Hume, The Toronto Star's Urban Affairs snob, got it right: "Cycling in Toronto is a joke."

And (in Dr Seuss's style of adroit brevity) this blog will be to that theme.

Casting about for an apt name for the blog I seized on iClogTO for a few very, very poor reasons.  Firstly, it's a lousy parody of Toronto's heretofore most successful cycling blog, I Bike T.O.  Secondly, it's a cheesy coalescence of the terms 'cycling' and 'blog'.  Thirdly, the lower-case 'i' is 'strategically positioned' to capture the 20-through-40somethings audience by referencing their Borg-like tendencies to mate with their Apple technology and achieve unity of identity with it.

The Dutch cultural reference is also highly convenient; Dutch cycling being all the rage, even though most consider the Dutch to be a funny lot.  Cycling does factor quite highly in Dutch culture, however, as is seen in this obviously official question from the Centraal Bureau Rijvaardigheidsbewijzen's written test:

A government commission from Mikael Coleville-Anderson's pre-Cyclechic portfolio.

 
In fact, the Dutch, if the Americans are to be believed, practically invented cycling.  Like you, I'm eagerly awaiting Curbside Cycle proprietor Eric Kamphoff's blog entry on how the Dutch practice of cycling in clogs was the sole source of inspiration for Batavus to design pedals specifically to allow for the use of foot covers with excessive and vestigial soles (or F-CEVS for short) while cycling through the use of large wide black foot platforms.  I think they call them 'pedals'.  Ha, those Hollanders!  What a funny language they speak!

Anyway, finally and least importantly, the blog's name is a funny cyclist-holding-up-traffic pun and potty reference all in one.  I like to be efficient.