The Indignity of Commuting by Bicycle: Mindless Coffee Zombies

As a cyclist and commuter, I’ve never managed to become completely numb to the stupidity of others. In a city of eight million people, the sheer volume of idiotic acts committed on a daily basis is almost too staggering to comprehend. One would think that I’d build up a tolerance to it eventually, in the same way that people in India can drink the water but a westerner’s face will melt if he so much as uses it to brush his teeth. But this is not the case. I’d say that at least once a morning during my commute I encounter someone doing something so stupid that the stupidity doubles over on itself and becomes a sort of perverse grace, and all I can do is watch and be amazed. (Assuming, that is, that I’m not too busy trying to survive it.)

This morning, I was riding in the bike lane at a leisurely clip on a busy Manhattan street. Things were going as smoothly as you please—so smoothly, in fact, that I should have known stupidity was about to pounce. Sure enough, from amid the cars, a woman suddenly emerged and ran into the bike lane. I don’t know how she made it through multiple lanes of fast-moving rush-hour traffic, but she did. Fortunately (for me) I managed not to hit her.

I wondered what would compel a person to risk her life like that. Was she being pursued by an assailant? Had she in fact been trying to kill herself, only to Frogger her way across the street unscathed by pure dumb luck? Had she been psychically alerted to the fact that, somewhere across town, dingoes were eating her baby? I replayed the scene in my mind, and suddenly it hit me: the coffee.

She had been holding a cup of coffee in her hand, her arm fully outstretched before her like she was handing off a relay baton. No, not like it was a relay baton—like the coffee was somehow pulling her. And her face didn’t have that look of determination you’d expect from someone who’s just risked her life; rather, she had looked at me with a bewildered expression, as though she couldn’t help what she was doing. Her lips moved, too, and while this certainly could have been my imagination, it looked like she was mouthing the words, “Help me.”

I felt like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in “They Live” when he puts on the sunglasses and is suddenly able to see all the subliminal advertising that the aliens are using to take over the world. I thought of all the stupid things I’ve seen over the years, and I realized most of them had one thing in common: cups of coffee. The idiots who cross against the light and look right through you are holding cups of coffee. The drivers who cut across two lanes of traffic to make a left, or who blow a stop sign, or who run a red light, or who fail to start driving again at a green light, are holding cups of coffee. Even the bike lane salmon coming straight at you on their three-speeds are holding cups of coffee.

I used to think it was cell phones. But stupidity existed before cell phones. It’s the coffee.

So am I saying that cups of coffee are literally pulling people around town against their wills like an Upper East Side dowager drags her recalcitrant Yorkie into Bergdorf Goodman? Yes. What else could explain this kind of behavior? I mean, it's possible that the woman I almost hit had a liver in that coffee cup and was rushing it to the hospital for a transplant, but I find this unlikely. It's got to be the coffee. I’m not sure why this is happening or what the cups of coffee want. They may simply be virus-like, existing only to replicate themselves. This would explain why they drag people to work so vehemently. Work, get paid, buy more coffee. This would also explain the preponderance of Starbucks. It could even explain why roadies in New York City ride endlessly up and down 9W, to and from the cafe in Nyack, even on frigid, blustery days when anybody with any sense would be in the woods on a mountain bike.

Coffee zombies. Mindless coffee zombies.