You may ask yourself, "How did I get here?".

I'm going to tell you all about L'Eroica California in painstaking detail:

Just not now.

I will say though that I've given a lot to cycling over the years.  Selflessly I've blogged for eleven (11) years, written four (4) books, and banged out countless articles in various periodicals, asking nothing in return except for money and adulation.  So why the hell is it that I'm still riding in the cold and rain instead of living somewhere like this permanently?  Let's see that picture again:

I'm not just coming to this realization now, either.  I've had many opportunities over the years to head out west and ask myself why the hell I live where I do:

Even in Los Angeles, which is supposed to be a smoggy automotive hell, you can ride to this in like five minutes:

Well at least you can ride to it in like five minutes from the cool neighborhoods, which is where I stay when I visit.

Anyway, as great as it is to come home and be greeted ebulliently at the front door by my seventeen (17) children, I can't help resenting the fact that I have to go back to riding all bundled up--in late April no less!  Indeed, this very morning as I rode around Central Park in the spitting rain, my California sunburn still itchy beneath my multiple layers of Lycra, I pondered my lot, pulled over, and shouted at the nascent buds, "HURRY THE FUCK UP ALREADY!"

Of course the spring will arrive in earnest eventually, and as always it will be glorious, especially after such a long winter.  When it does, I'll tell myself that there's no other place on earth I'd rather live.  Then it will turn hot as balls, followed by like two and a half sublime weeks in autumn, and the whole cycle will begin anew, netting me like six or seven weeks of ideal riding weather annually.

On top of all that, ironically in middle age I've grown mildly allergic to all the local staples that have sustained me since childhood, namely: pizza, bagels, and hero sandwiches.  Indeed, probably the fact that I ate nothing but pizza, bagels, and hero sandwiches for like 40 years broke something inside of me and I have nobody to blame but myself.  Meanwhile, out there the staple is tacos, which are not only right in line with my current dietary requirements, but also delicious.  

Alas, I'll most likely never leave New York, not only because my wife has an awesome job here, but also because I'm awesome at not having a real job here:

Plus, I could never give up my apartment, which is not only legally habitable according to city and state law but also has a full-time doorman!

Sorry, did I say full-time doorman?  I meant full-time door:

A lot of people in New York have to make do with door share, and that's no way to live.

Hey, I've even got exposed brick.  Granted, it's in a pile in the living room, but I'm confident that one day the contractor will come back and finish the job.

After all, I paid him in full before he even got started, so why wouldn't he return?

Moving on, as you know I've been enjoying a bit of a Fredly Renaissance lately, part of which involves swallowing what's left of my dignity and supplicating myself to Strava, and recently I see they've added some new feature called "relative effort:"

I stood there for an embarrassingly long time wondering what the number "28" meant and what exactly it was relative to until I realized that it's all just an eye-catching graphic telling me that I suck.  Indeed, the whole app is just a You Suck-ometer that helps you visualize your suckitude in the form of numbers, colors, and tiny gold cup icons that mean nothing, all of which I new already anyway.

So obviously I use it all the time now.

(I also assume "managing your effort" is a nice way of saying "riding really slowly.)

Finally, I checked, and yes, people are still making fixie videos:

This is truly a daredevil feat--not the riding briskly in a straight line part, but the willingly placing yourself anywhere in the vicinity of Times Square, bike or no bike, part.