WWRKD (What Would Ralph Kramden Do?)

Today I had to take the bus to the Jersey Shore.  Now, you're probably looking at my last name and wondering whether I did myself up like Snooki.  As if I could, or would want to...


Anyway, on the way out of , and back into, New York, I passed through the Port Authority Bus Terminal.  I committed, shall we say, a few of my youthful indiscretions there.  So did more than a few other people.  In recent years, the place has been cleaned up and made much safer, along with neighboring Times Square.  (Once, when I was drunk, I stopped a would-be mugger by laughing in his face.)  But the ticket counters are just as understaffed, and the staff in other parts of the terminal are just as rude and surly, as they were.


But I digress.  On my way out, I noticed a monument to a character and TV show that, as far as I can tell, are acquired tastes that I never acquired.  

Ralph Kramden was always threatening to send his wife Alice "to the moon."  I can only imagine how he'd talk to cyclists.  


To be fair, when cycling, I don't have many encounters with long-distance bus drivers, as we tend not to be on the same roads.  However, some of my more harrowing experiences in city cycling have been with bus drivers.  They're not as reckless as some cab drivers, but they are angrier.  I guess having to maneuver a bus into the same tight spaces afforded taxis would make anyone surly, if not psychotic.


How would Ralph Kramden have reacted to a lycra-clad messenger on a hipster fixie?

The Cycles of Black Friday

No, I didn't go to any of the "Black Friday" sales today.  To me, they're like New Year's Eve in Times Square:  something to be done once, to say that you've done it.   Yes, I've done both.  No, I don't intend to do either again.


The simple explanation is that I don't like being among the BF or NYETS crowds.  Actually, I don't like being among crowds generally.  So what am I doing living in New York, you ask.  Well, I live in the Big Apple precisely because I don't like great masses of people, just as I became a writer and teacher because I was, and in some ways still am, shy.  No, I'm not being cute, contrarian or Zen.  Actually, I never have been any of those things, and Zen is the only one of them I have even the remotest chance of becoming.  But I digress.


It goes something like this:  the more I like people--well, some individual people, anyway--the more I dislike being among masses of them.   And the more I live with and by my shyness, the more I find to say and the more I have the need to say it.  Likewise, the more I enjoy shopping, the less I like to be part of the throngs who are hunting bargains.


All of this has to do with what led me to a lifelong passion for cycling.  When I first started to take long rides and realized that I would benefit from a bike with gears, pedaling while astride two wheels when you were old enough to step on a gas pedal and accelerate four wheels was still something of an act of rebellion, at least in the US.  Also, counterculturism and consumerism were still seen as antithetical to each other:  Birkenstocks weren't yet a brand, or at least a consumer tag.  I still believe that good consumer choices might save you money, but they're not going to save the planet.  I also realize what a position of privilege it is to be able to make choices according to a company's "carbon footprint" or to be a locivore.  Maybe that's the reason I never was a liberal and never will be a hipster.


Anyway, I have my own bragging rights.  I once moved myself from one apartment to another entirely on my bicycle.   Black Friday shoppers, including the one in the photo, had nothing on me(!):

Giving Thanks on a Quick Morning Ride

I heard it was going to rain today.  So I tried to sneak in an early ride:  just a few miles on Tosca.  It felt about ten degrees colder than it was when I pedaled home last night after teaching in the technical institute.  And yesterday was at least that much colder than the day before.  At least, it seemed that way, for the wind blew hard enough to strip nearly all of the remaining leaves from wizening branches. 


One of the things that amazes me about cycling is that, even after all of these years, I can ride down some street I've pedaled dozens of times before and a moment, an image, will imprint itself in my mind.  Just south of LaGuardia Airport, in East Elmhurst, an elderly black woman stepped, with dignity if not grace, from behind a door on which dark green paint bubbled and the wood splintered and cracked into ashen hues like the ones on her coat, which she expects, or at least hopes, wil get her through another winter.


She is probably thankful for even that.  You might say that I am, too, for being able to ride by and see that, and to be able to ride home, then to Millie's house for Thanksgiving dinner.


I hope yours was at least as good as mine.

Riding Into The Sunrise...All Right, It's My Morning Commute!

OK.  So yesterday I embellished things just a bit when I said I rode off into the sunset.


Well, this morning, my commute took me into the sunrise.

I always thought it was kind of strange that when the guy got the girl, he rode off into the sunset with her.  I mean, if they're starting a relationship, wouldn't a sunrise be more appropriate?


And what about when the girl gets the guy?  Or when the girl gets the girl?


For any of those scenarios:  Should the guy-who-gets-girl, girl-who-gets-guy or whomever-gets-whomever ride tandems?  Or should they ride solo bikes abreast of each other?  Or single file--and who should lead?


If these questions are academic, well, I guess that's appropriate.  After all, I am riding off to teach in a college.


Into the sunrise.  In Queens, yet!

Old Bikes Never Die, They Just...

Sometimes I'll see the same bikes parked in the same place for what seem to be aeons.  

These golden oldies have been parked on Broadway at 11th Street (by the post office) for as long as I can remember.   The nearest one is a Ross "compact" bike from, I think, the 1970's.  But those other two bikes are much older. 

I've been known to "rescue" books from unsavory surroundings.  As an example, during a ride I used to take regularly when I was a Rutgers student, I stopped at a truck stop in the foothills of the Watchungs.  On my way out, I saw, from the corner of my eye, a little paperback volume of "Silver" poets.  Even if I hadn't been interested in some of the poems that were in it, I would have felt sorry for that book, stuck among the 57 varieties of porn on the racks.

I brought it to the man at the counter, who looked as if he could have been one of the truck drivers who patronized the place.  He squinted.  "Give me 75 cents for it." 

I rolled it up, tucked it into the rails of my saddle and pedalled off into the sunset.  Well, maybe I'm exaggerating, er, taking poetic license, about the sunset.

Sometimes I have a similar impulse when I see old bikes, unless they're absolutely awful.  The problem is that it takes a lot more space and money to rescue old bikes than old books, or even cats.  I know about the latter:  Charlie and Max were both rescued from the street and the pleasure they give me makes what I spend on them one of the great bargains of my life.

Anyway, I often wonder how Charlie and Max ended up on the street.  Or how a volume of Silver Poets ends up in a rack full of porn at a New Jersey truck stop.  Or how bikes end up locked forlornly to various sign posts, parking meters and other immovable objects for geological ages.

Did those bikes' owners suddenly have to leave town?  At least books can be left with the Strand Bookstore, which is only a block from where I saw the bikes in the photos.  And cats, dogs and other animals can be left with the ASPCA, though I will do my damndest never to leave Charlie, Max or any other animal I may adopt (or, more accurately, who adopts me) to such a fate.  But where is there a Strand Bookstore or ASPCA for bikes?  I know, you can leave them with the thrift stores--when they have the room.  Otherwise, those bikes end up on the same streets as those benighted animals.