Hi! So is the Tour de France Still Going On Or Am I Too Late?

As the sort of person who enjoys toasting Eggo waffles while bathing, I'm not exactly the best decision-maker, but I have made two very good decisions recently with regard to my cycling life.  The first was moving from Brooklyn to wherever it is I live now, and the second was making a New Year's Resolution to not renew my USA Cycling license.  As a result of these two complementary decisions, instead of waking up at 5:00am and Fredding around Prospect Park like a doofus during the weekend, I just hop onto this trail:

Along the way, I stop here to feed the feral rock band:

They've been waiting in there for Rick Rubin since 1990, with only occasional visits from hair stylists:

Then I cut over to the mountain bicycle cycling trails to enjoy some mountain bicycle cycling:

Here's the top of a climb, where I collapsed this past weekend because it was 95 degrees and I suck.

Then I go back home, have some lunch, and take advantage of my loose legs to beat up on my training partner:

Best of all though is that, between the hills and the relative uncoolness of the area, I'm more or less free from "bike culture" and all the stupid cycling-related "controversy" that consumes the rest of the city--though yesterday I did see Citi Bikes as far north as 181st Street:

That's a good seven miles from the nearest docking station:

Hey, if they want to pay the overtime fees that's fine with me, but if I see one of those blue heaps of shit up by my house then that's it, I'm moving again.

With Lob and Dorothy Rabinowitz on my side, I will do everything in my power to keep the Begriming Blue Tide below 59th Street.

But yeah, you can keep your "bike culture."  Sure, I may not get to enjoy the pleasure of being "shoaled" at a red light by fourteen other white people in Bern helments and "shants," but I also don't get the police forcing me out of bike lanes and then ticketing me:

For fucking speeding, no less!

“Then I’ll give you a ticket for being outside of the bike lane, and for speeding.” 

I responded, “I could not stay in the bike lane as you are parked in the bike lane, and the speed limit is 30, and there is no way I was going 30 mph.”

“Lady, you just don’t shut up do you!”

Wow.  So basically they're just fucking with us now.  I'm very much in favor of bike infrastructure and bike share and happy bikey people foffing off about "bi-keen" and all the rest of it, though crap like this makes me dangerously close to becoming one of those old kooks who goes on and on about how much better cycling in the city was when there were no bike lanes and only the strong survived--by riding like Kevin Bacon, of course.

By the way, I'm talking about "Aggro Bacon:"

Not "Bike Dancin' Bacon:

I wonder how the police would ticket you for bike dancing these days.  They'd probably dust off some long-forgotten sodomy statutes from the old days of raiding bathhouses.

Meanwhile, while cyclists are getting tickets for "speeding," we don't want "black boxes" in our cars because it's an invasion of our privacy:

I'm all for privacy, and I don't like that Obama is reading all my emails about penguin sex any more than you do:

However, if there's one thing Americans have been proving since the invention of the automobile, it's that we don't deserve to have privacy while we're driving:

The black boxes “provide critical safety information that might not otherwise be available to N.H.T.S.A. to evaluate what happened during a crash — and what future steps could be taken to save lives and prevent injuries,” David L. Strickland, the safety agency’s administrator, said in a statement.

But to consumer advocates, the data is only the latest example of governments and companies having too much access to private information. Once gathered, they say, the data can be used against car owners, to find fault in accidents or in criminal investigations.

Actually, we don't even deserve to be driving.  We kill tens of thousands of people a year with our cars.  How come they pick me apart before I get on an airplane, yet nobody checks on me when I get into my car?  If you think about it I'm no less dangerous.  Really, I'm shocked we're still even allowed to own cars.  At best, we should have limited access to a small car-sharing system, and as we drive there should be cameras trained on us at all times:

At the very least it would put an end to red light nose-picking.

But I should still be allowed to keep my car and drive without the cameras.  Because I'm special.

Communism worked the same way, which is why it was so successful.

Aww, fuck it, I'm getting a Motoped:


Why settle for a bicycle or a motorcycle when you can own a vehicle that fails at both?