Evolutionary Cycling Gifts

We all know that cyclists are the highest form of humanity.  We are the ne plus ultra of evolution.  

This is not a biased opinion.  It's cold, hard scientific fact--or, at least, a very well-founded theory.  I have evidence:

 



That T-shirt can be found on Zazzle, where I also found this poster:


 


among other fun and interesting cycling gifts.

Hmm...Is it hypocritical of me to promote the purchase of gifts the day after I wrote a diatribe against Black Friday?  If it is, I'm sorry:  I'm human--though the most evolved sort because I am, after all, a cyclist.;-)

Black Friday Bicycle Shaped Objects

"Toys come in boxes.  Real bicycles come assembled and ready to ride."

I don't remember who said that.  I'm guessing it was the proprietor or a salesperson in one of the bike shops in which I worked.  And I'm guessing the proprietor or salesperson was admonishing someone who brought in a department-store bicycle for assembly or who tried to assemble such a bike and made a bad thing hopeless.

I'm recalling that bit of wisdom, if not the sage who imparted it, because today is Black Friday.

For those of you who are not in the US, this day--the day after we give thanks and exchange heart-warming stories (or get into fights) with people with whom we would not sit at the same table at any other time--and give thanks for, well, whatever.   This is the day on which stores--mainly the big-box variety--run "sales" on some of the worst junk imaginable, much of which will end up under Christmas trees four weeks later and in landfills four years--or even four months--later.

The boxes full of stuff meant to be assembled into bicycle-shaped objects are among the sale items I'm talking about. One of the "big-box" retailers--which, thankfully, does not have a store anywhere near me--has offered, on each of the few Black Fridays--a "freestyle BMX" bike with pegs and helmet for $49.99 and boys' and girls' 20 inch bicycles for $29. 

If you're a vegan,  bear with me for a moment as I use an analogy most people (Americans, anyway) will understand.  It's scarcely possible to get a steak dinner, let alone a good one, for $29.  Add drinks and dessert and you'd be hard-pressed to keep the tab below $50.   At least, that's the case here in New York.

Now, you might be thinking that buying a cheap bike for a kid isn't such a bad idea because he or she will trash or outgrow it within a couple of years.   Or you might be on a tight budget (Trust me, I understand!) and are shopping for a few kids or grandkids.  I don't have kids or grandkids, but I understand the joy in seeing a kid's eyes light up on Christmas morning.  (I've experienced it with my nieces and nephews as well as the children of friends, if that counts.)   However, I'd think about what I'm teaching kids when I give them disposable junk.  

More to the point, though, I'd be concerned about giving a kid (or anyone) something that's potentially unsafe.  In bikes, as in most things, you get what you pay for (up to a point, anyway).  Cheap bikes are made cheaply, from cheap materials.  Now, if I were buying such a bike for a kid (which, of course, I wouldn't), I at least have some residual level of skill as a mechanic and could at least ensure the bike is properly assembled.  However, not everyone who buys such a bike can make such a claim. Nor can some of the "mechanics" employed by some stores that offer assembly.

If you were to bring such a bike to a shop to be assembled, you'll pay enough for the service that it, combined with the price of the bike, will total not much less than the price of  a bike shop bike.  Shops don't charge what they charge out of spite or to gouge customers:  Proper assembly and repair (which bikes in boxes sometimes need) takes time and therefore costs money.  And a mechanic in any bike shop worthy of the name wants to take the time to do it right because the shop's reputation rides on the work done in it.

So...If you really, truly, must participate in that orgy of consumerism called Black Friday--which has been likened to the running of the bulls--don't buy a bike, especially one for a kid, in a big-box store.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, I don't have to tell you that.  But you might want to tell your less-informed (about bikes, anyway) friends and relatives what I've said--or pass along this post.

A Wheel Disappears

If you saw my post from the other day, you may have noticed something different about my LeTour.

Last week, I left it parked outside overnight, next to the candy store/newsstand on the corner.  It’s a pretty visible corner, and people walk by it even in the wee-est hours of the morning.

But, apparently, someone keeps very different hours from theirs, or mine. 

Last Friday morning, I went to the candy store and discovered that the LeTour had been turned into a unicycle.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised:  the front wheel wasn’t locked.  Also, it has a black hub with a nutted (non-quick release), black spokes and  a black deep-V rim on which the sidewalls aren’t machined for brakes.  So, perhaps, someone wanted it for a “stealth” bike—or to sell to someone who’ll use it for that purpose.

Fortunately, I wasn’t going to use the bike when I discovered the theft.  I took a trip down to Recycle A Bicycle and asked them for the cheapest 700C front wheel they had.  It’s actually decent: all name-brand components, if the lowest-level model of each.  Heck, it even had a Velox rim tape in good condition.

So far, it’s working fine.  For twenty bucks, I got a wheel that someone trued and tensioned with a hub that seemed to have been regreased.  Good folks, they are, at Recycle A Bicycle.

Black Friday Bike

I did the Black Friday store circuit twice--once on my bike.  Neither time was worth the effort.  I guess I didn't go early enough in the morning or shop for the right stuff.

It seems that bikes and books don't figure much into BF sales.  A few online retailers had sales on one thing or another for today.  I guess I've become jaded: I didn't bother to check them out.  Bricks-and-mortar bike shops and book stores (the independent ones, anyway) don't seem to participate in the madness. Maybe that's one reason why I love them.

I'll admit that, just for fun, I typed "Black Friday bicycles" into a search window.  The first few entries featured Bike Friday machines.  I've met a few owners; all of them raved about their bikes.  If I were shopping for a high-end foldable bike, I might consider them--and, of course, Brompton.

My search also yielded, among other things, this:

From The Top Christmas Gadgets Gift Guide

It's an Exerpeutic Folding Magnetic Upright Bike.  Doesn't it just sound like something someone would buy on Black Friday?

Why I Didn't Give Up Cycling

I have been cycling, in one way or another, for more than four decades.  Now I do not pedal nearly as many miles (or kilometres) as I did "back in the day."  But I feel that, in some way, cycling is as much a part of my life now as it was then.

Through all of those years, there was one period when I seriously considered giving up cycling altogether.  I was going to keep one bike "for old time's sake" and, perhaps, for errands and transportation.  But I thought that my days as a regular rider were going to come to an end.

That time came early in my life as Justine.  I really didn't know how, or even whether, I could combine cycling--or, more precisely, my identity as a cyclist (There were years in which I pedaled 360 days and 25,000 or more kilometers!) with the life on which I was about to embark.  One reason for that was, frankly, I had practically no idea of what the life on which I was embarking would be like.  Oh, I had visions of who and what Justine would be.  But, as happens with nearly everyone who undergoes a gender transition, my expectations--and the sort of woman I would become--differed, at least somewhat. Although my therapist, social worker, doctor and other transgender people who were further along in their transitions--or who'd had surgery and were living fully in their "new" genders--told me such a thing would probably happen, I had no idea of what I would become as a woman.

Also, I was trying so hard to be the sort of woman I envisioned at the beginning of my transition that it took me time to realize that it could encompass much more than I imagined at the time--and that, of course, the sort of woman I could, and would, become could be different.  I'd entered my transition with ideas of what women in the '40's and '50's were like, which were the ideas to which early transsexuals like Christine Jorgensen conformed, and what the public expected of transsexuals (to the extent that they paid attention to us).

But, perhaps the most important reason why I thought I might not ride anymore was that so much of my cycling had been a means of escape, however temporary.  Whether I was pedaling 180 rpm on the Prospect Park loop or hugging the edge of a virage in the Alps--or dodging taxis and giving the one-fingered peace sign to drivers who got in my way--bicycling had always been a means of escape for me.  I think now of a friendly acquaintance who was one of the first women to attend her undergraduate college on a track and field scholarship.  She has told me that whether she was training on local streets or pumping away during the state championships, she was "running for my life by running from my life".  She never would have been able to attend her college without that scholarship, she said.  But, perhaps even more important, she says she doesn't know  how she would have "survived, in one piece" a childhood that included incest and other forms of dysfunction and disease in her family.

My childhood wasn't nearly as Dickensian as hers.  Perhaps I shouldn't say that, for such a comparison may not make any sense:  After all, she suffered at the hands of other people, while most of my torment came from within me.  Still, I could relate to what she said as much as anything anyone else has said to me.  Her running and my cycling had been means of escape, however momentary.  

She hasn't run, even for fitness, in more than two decades.  She has taken up other sports (including cycling, which is how I know her) and forms of training, but she has not run since the day she was doing laps in the park and "asking myself why," she said.

But I didn't give up cycling because, frankly, I probably have always enjoyed it more than she liked running, and I now have more reasons to continue on two wheels than she does on the training loop.  Also, during my second year of living as Justine, I was running errands and shopping after work one Friday.  It was a pleasantly cool day in May,and I was still in the blouse, skirt and low heels I'd worn to work that day. I had just come out of a store and was unlocking my bike from a parking meter when a tall black man chatted me up.  "Are you European?", he wondered.

"Well, I've lived and traveled there," I explained.  "But I'm from here, and I've lived most of my life here."

"You look more like a European woman, getting around on your bike," he said.  He confirmed what I suspected, from his accent and mannerisms, that he was born in Africa but had lived much of his life in Europe--specifically, France.

By Harmonyhalo

That day I realized that, one way or another, I would probably continue to ride my bicycle in my new life.  I would never be the same kind of cyclist I was when I was living as Nick--and, honestly, at that time, I didn't want to be.  But I knew that as Justine, a newly-born woman in her 40's, I would be able to ride her bike in my new life--and my job and those stores wouldn't be my only destinations, any more than commuting and store-hopping would be my only rides.  

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(!):