Incident Report: Mea Culpa

For those who don't know (and probably don't care): yes, I got hit today.  Yes, The Clog, the "I ride a bicycle like a sensible person" blogger who looks down his nose at lesser-skilled cyclists, got hit today.  It was a truly humbling and was wholly caused by a gross error in judgment on my part and I regret all the turmoil that I caused.  For my repugnant selfishness and careless concern for the safety of others, I humbly apologize to Torontonians and to Toronto cyclists for my failings.

It was entirely my fault for walking down the sidewalk of Queen St W, keeping to the right and minding my own business, when some asshat cyclist came jaunting down the middle of the sidewalk and tried to squeeze between another pedestrian and myself, striking me in the attempt.  My left forearm took the brunt of the impact and is still very tender.

However, I realize that it was entirely my fault.  How dare I walk down a sidewalk?  We darn meat pylons just dart out from no where sometimes, and I apologize to this poor and frightened soul for giving him only a fraction of a minute to notice that I was walking in straight line in a predictable trajectory.

It was also entirely my fault for failing to give this timorous cyclist an exact 0.9144 meters of clearance as he rode down the sidewalk.  As any well-meaning Toronto cycling activist will point out, in The Netherlands cyclists have right of way even over pedestrians, so clearly it should be so here as well.

It was also in a spirit of immature churlishness that I failed to help him up after wards.  Furthermore, I also committed the presumably illegal act of leaving the scene of an 'incident' without reporting it, for which I'm sure I will be shortly hunted down by the local police, arrested, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law (no snickering please, we're trying to be serious here.  Really, we are.).  We both knew, he and I, of the complete and utter futility of calling the police in such instances.  Sure, they'll eventually show up, complete tedious paperwork, 'speak' to both parties, and then do nothing of any consequence.  So we let it be.  I had an injured forearm; he, a injured ego.  Together, we had a large audience of vaguely curious onlookers who turned away in apathy when it became wholly apparent that I wasn't going to take further issue with the cyclist.

I also apologize obsequiously to Toronto's cyclists for causing cycling in Toronto to appear dangerous.  I fear many children were traumatized and will no longer pedal their little hearts out along Toronto's sidewalks, thereby slowing the cull of the aged and leaving the lion's share of the work to couriers (who are already over worked) and pimply teenagers too poor to drive a car.

Perhaps the Urban Repair Squad will save the future of sidewalk cycling in Toronto by installing more of their innovative pharrows on more pedestrian byways throughout the core to promote continued ridership.

A pharrow guides cyclists into groups of pedestrians on the pedestrian path in The Grange.

Toronto, I'm sorry.  I'm truly repentant for the setbacks to progress for cycling in Toronto that I may have caused.

I truly am very sorry.

Heavy Sigh: Stupid Holes & Other Essays

I hope you all had a more pleasant Hallowe'en weekend than I did.  I spent the weekend recovering from Friday's toilet-induced head injury.  The ER staff were kind enough to co-wrap my injuries with advanced carbon-based fibre technology, and even complimented the manner in which my bulbous head acted as an effective mold to optimize the coverage of the wrapping.  Unfortunately, when I stepped out from the ER onto the street, children shrieked, grabbed their parents by the hand, and fled, crying "Have you no shame?!  Think of the adults!!" as they ran.

I gave thought to lurking in the shadows till dark and then fleeing home, but decided against this strategy ...mainly because the darkness makes me pee my pants.  It's scary.  So, I quietly shuffled home, hid in my hovel, and passed the weekend by carefully licking the dirt off my bike (I eschew poisonous, corporate bike cleaners in favour of more earth-friendly methods).

With the weekend over and my head wound healed, I kitted up this morning for the daily commute to my place of drudgery and set out.  Shortly after setting out, I felt uneasy and disconcerted about the coming ride and I soon found the cause of my anxiety: I'd set out a little later than usual and was riding into the white-capped crest of the wave of morning cycling commuters and I feared to witness the formation of another Stupid Hole, a blackhole-like sucking vortex generated by the convergence of multiple strands of stupidity, drawing them in closer to the point of collision, unless a rare moment of good sense deflects their trajectories.

My unease was justified shortly thereafter.  I'd heardtell of epic shoals but I'd ne'er heretofore seen one.  As I waited at a stop light like a dullard, a budget athlete swooped around from my left, mounted the sidewalk, and began orbiting a nucleus of compressed stupidity as he waited for the light to change.

Not once, nor twice, but thrice did he circle around on the sidewalk.

I watched this performance in gobsmacked awe, but regained mental clarity when my subconscious fault-finder bade me to survey what sort of sophisticated foot retention system drove this persecuted man to circle endlessly at intersections rather than succumb to the horrors of putting a foot down: plastic platform pedals and generic sneakers.  I sighed so heavily that Simon Cowell was moved to compassion by my expression of suffering.

When the light turned, the budget athlete took off at a mad cadence, furiously leveraging his downtube friction shifters to coax another meager few gear inches from his battered Suntour drive train.  I calmly followed behind and suckled his wheel out of mild curiosity, and watched with much mirth as he glared back at me with annoyance for drafting.  Pulling up to another red light, I stopped, unclipped and put a foot down on the curb, and settled down to watch the delicate ballet anew.

Self-conscious from my chuckling, he eventually stopped and put a foot down...

Unfortunately, the fool and I were soon parted, and I passed a few blocks playing a pleasant game of leap-frog with a gravel-laden dump truck, until an impatient imbecile on two wheels began salmoning toward me rather than wait for a gap in traffic like a normal person.  Hearing the dump truck coming up behind me, sensing the lack of space available to me, and glancing a head at the jackass still riding right at me, I paused and thought, "Thank you, Urban Repair Squad, for enabling this person to ride a bicycle.  Your innovative contra-flow infrastructure is truly increasing safety for all."

I watched with much amusement (and mild concern) as this wretched imbecile, rather than pulling over and stopping to allow me to go by, actually moved out into the path of the dump truck to go around me as though they were drawn to it by the suction of some swirling Stupid Hole underneath its wheels.  Hearing the sudden application of air brakes and watching the slow swerve of the dump truck over my shoulder, I reflected with dismay that Toronto cyclists had just lost another small skirmish in the overall push for progress with their jackass behaviour.

The phrase 'Epic Fail' ain't over till it's over ...and after this morning, it ain't over.

Got Sense?: Unbridled Entitlement & Fixies

When the mind ruminates on subject matter of great import, it's best to take lengthy walks to aid reflection and clear the mind.  Practitioners of the peripatetic tradition such as Aristotle and Immanuel Kant achieved great progress this way.  Consequently, when my mind was overborne with the heady and perplexing quandary of whether or not I did in fact have milk, I set out on foot to purge my mind of distractions.

While plodding out my front door, I abandoned my usual stroll along the Pathway to Enlightenment because I sought not enlightenment but quietude.  One would think that out-of-doors in Toronto's core would be a poor place to seek solitude, but being a rank and malodorous clod, I part crowds of people like a sidewalk Moses:

AJ Jacob's models the Old Testament line in BikeSnobNYC's 'hood.

Strolling thusly, I was alone to chew my mental cud for some time till I stopped for a red-light at an intersection.  [Here, I regretfully must pause and make a brief description of what I'm talking about for Toronto's cyclists, since the vast majority of them don't seem to understand what they are:

A red light.

A red light is a traffic control device meant to interrupt traffic flow to allow for crossing and merging traffic to enter the traffic flow.  By stopping, users of the road allow for a safe and predictable crossing and merging of other traffic.]

Standing silently on the street corner pondering various methodologies of dairy product ownership, my subconscious fault-finder began frantically clanging resounding alarms about a metaphysical disturbance in the fabric of my immediate surroundings and that I should, as a person of good sense and will toward self-preservation, take a step back.

I glanced over at west-bound cyclist enter the intersection and instead of turning north or south continued on, at the Urban Repair Squad's insistence, against obviously on-coming traffic.  However as this cyclist did so a cyclist heading north along the sidewalk rode through the red light into the intersection into the path of the west-bound cyclist.  Not to be outdone, a south-bound cyclist also skipped the red-light without looking for cross-traffic and also rode into the path of the west-bound (and now salmoning) cyclist.

The confluence of idiocy: you can't make this stuff up.

The stunning confluence of idiocy was enough to create a black hole-like vortex into which the universe suddenly and precipitously teetered for a brief moment before some well-timed swerving and an exchange of wrath-laden glares and other bits of nerd rage righted the universe back to normalcy.

Shaken and stirred to new heights of pessimism, I pondered various aspects of the indelicate ballet I had just witnessed: Does stupidity have mass?  If so, would it explain why some people seem to be Stupidity personified?  Did the sudden confluence of stupid mass create a sucking black hole that caused all three cyclists to gravitate towards each other uncontrollably?  Could you roll stupidity in to a ball and push it down a hill?  Is that how Rob Ford's campaign gained momentum?

Certainly, no real harm had been done because no accident occurred.  And certainly, Toronto cyclists had embarrassed themselves awfully, but no one was really surprised to see cyclists ride down sidewalks, run red lights, and salmon down one-way streets.  Ruefully, this is all regrettably common in Toronto.  Truly, the only real consequence of the incident was an entrenchment of negative stereotypes of Toronto cyclists.

Having realized the incident was insignificant, I wondered whether something was wrong with my subconscious fault-finder?  Hearing the irksome sound of a hipster skidding, my attention regrouped with fresh annoyance and immediately grasped his lack of adequate foot-rention for riding brakeless effectively, thereby reassuring me that my subconscious fault-finder was in fact working perfectly.  Moreover, it also reminded me that there's only one more sleep till Tom Mosher's Hell Track 3, an attempt to create sustainable entertainment for Toronto's hipsters by doing the same thing over and over again, but differently.

[Yet more laps around the school at Bickford Park?  What is that?  Gym class for hipsters?!]

Fortunately, it appears that it will rain tomorrow evening.

The weatherway courtesy of The Weather Network.

This is fortunate because rain terrifies sissy cyclists and will keep them from spoiling Mosher's event with their sissyness, which will help apply a convenient veneer of dedication to those who are willing to endure the savage beating of raindrops on their skin for the sake of glory.  However, having been force-fed my fill of stupidity for the week, I won't be attending.

I have more important things to think about.