The new bicycle
Two weeks ago, I bought a bike because SS, A, and FLV were going on a lot of bike trips together and would report back on how much fun they had. "You should get a bike so you can join us."
I went all in. The plan was to go to the bike shop, buy a bike, then ride to Floyd Bennett Field. Without knowing anything at all about bicycles, I picked on based on the kinds of virtues I look for in consumer products: affordability, utility, no-frillsiness. I wanted a bike that was a tool and not a lifestyle choice.
I got this Manhattan Green cruiser. It's fun. It's robust. It's not efficient, but my theory was that if it's a heavier bike, that just means when I ride it I'll get more exercise. It's got a fly wheel, which means I can peddle hard and then coast. It has coaster brakes, which means that no matter how fast I'm going I can slam back on the peddles and skid to a stop.
This is how I remember bikes--as toys--and it didn't occur to me until much later in the day that all of this goes against every principle about how one "should" ride a bike. One "should" ride it efficiently. One "should" peddle in such a way that coasting is at a minimum and abrupt stops are unnecessary.
The Floyd Bennet Field trip made this much clearer to me than it had been in the bike shop. Halfway through the trip I was falling down off the bike due more or less to sheer exhaustion and had to take the subway home.
This throws me into a state of inner conflict which my friends find hard to understand, especially because I express it as all kinds of irrational neurosis (when, as I work through it while writing this, it's in fact probably a hyper-rational neurosis....)
On the one hand, I have a deep-seated attitude towards things which is perhaps best described simply as my not liking them at all. I don't like having to think about objects in my surroundings. I don't like having to care about their maintenance. I don't like anything which implies that they are an "extension of myself" or determinative of my identity. I especially don't like that objects of certain kinds of quality correlated with price are indicative of some kind of social status, feel deeply that that's an injustice even, and resist any force that tries to make me complicit in such a system. So when forced to purchase something, I just want something base and functional and nothing more.
[I realize that this is in many ways a typical attitude for somebody of my background, that it is in fact hypocritical, that it is insufferable to listen too. I'd defend myself by saying that some of my exceptions prove the rule, but don't we all?]
On the other hand, I am porous to obligation and standards of performance in activities I commit myself to. This makes me a huge nerd and chump, and makes the close guarding of my allegiances and participation a matter of self-defense. (This is a recent revelation for me, and probably obvious and irritating to the people who know me well.) So, for example, the feeling that ones bicycle is an extension of ones body (as opposed to a machine you operate via its controls) is apparently a virtuous feeling for a bicyclist.
The upshot is that having committed to a particular bicycle due to one value set, I am now confronted by the fact that the bicycle puts me in a negative relationship to the standards of good cyclemanship, which are standards to which I am suddenly vulnerable.
In short, the bicycle has exposed an inconsistency in my value system. Consequently, it makes me ill at ease and insecure. Had I thought about it, and realized that bicycling is an activity, like so many others, where virtue depends in part of commodity price, I probably would have rejected the idea entirely on principle.
But that have gone against another value that I have been trying very hard to nurture in the past few years, which is to not be such an inflexible S.O.B., to live a little, to be willing to trade devotion to principle for friendship and sociability and shared experience.
I don't have good way out of it. As I've mentioned, I suspect that anyone who hears my anxieties about the bicycle finds them obnoxious--confusing, self-righteous, irrational, overblown. So I don't have a good way of working through them.
The best I can do is consider the bike a part of objective reality. It is an object with certain properties in a certain location (my living room, currently). I can sit on it and ride around on it, to go places faster than I could on foot. It has two wheels and a comfortable seat and brakes that let me skid around.
And yet, The bike draws attention--"That looks like a new bike," a friend told me today. This thrusts it unavoidably out of the objective and into the symbolic domain again. People have opinions about bicycles in my social spheres; they have opinions about my bike in particular. They don't express them; "it's very black," they say, as if that mattered. Does that matter? I have no idea. I have no understanding of the semiotics of bicycles. I don't know how to engage in these conversations except to abbreviate my anxieties, to attempt to roll them into a funny story which I'm sure just demonstrates my ignorance and insecurity about such things.
But today I went on a ride through Prospect Park. Alone. Except for the conversation with the friend (which was great, really) on a stop in the middle, there was nobody who would notice me or project their symbolism onto me or cause me to invent symbolism to project onto myself. There was just me and the bike road, with potholes in it that I can roll right over because I've got hybrid tires and a cushy seat. On the uphill part I found myself breathing hard and feeling a healthy burn in my quads. "Ah, exercise. That's a reason why I got this bike!"
It was sweet.