1. You get all hot and sweaty.
Yup. It gets hot and when you are actually using your own power to get from point A to point B, you will probably work up a sweat. And we all know that sweating is the absolute worst thing you could possibly do. When humans sweat, they more or less start to smell like pigs and pigs are smart, but also kind of gross. There’s the French thing, but who wants to go down that road.
Then again, it’s really only hot for about 2 months out of the year. And then for the rest of the year it’s cold, cool or nice. I mean, the coldest I’ve ever ridden my bike in SG was somewhere around 15 degrees. That’s not hot and I can guarantee you that I wasn’t sweating when I got to the other side of town, I was fucking cold. You could live closer to town or in downtown so you never have to ride more than 1-2 miles, but who wants life to be convenient. Living in the suburbs is the American Dream and we all have to achieve the American Dream or the whole world falls apart.
2. It’s not possible to “roll coal.”
If you are a 16 year old boy whose daddy bought him a diesel truck, you probably know what “rolling coal” means and it’s also likely to be your top search term. For the rest of you, this is Rolling Coal.
This is an extremely important thing to be able to do because it shows how much you don’t care about the environment and is your big, fat middle finger to the establishment of car driving folks who are also spewing toxins into the air but can’t do it in such an aesthetically displeasing way. It’s also a great way to call attention to your over-compensating vehicle that does nothing for anybody but you and your 16 year old son who thinks that it’s super bad ass. It is completely impossible to roll coal on a bicycle. To be fair, you can spew as much methane gas as you can personally produce on any given day.
3. Everyone will laugh at you.
It is impossible to look cool on a bicycle. We all know that if you ride your bike to work, you will in fact look like this:
It’s a fact of life that if you ride your bike you will not get laid, everyone will make fun of you and you will probably have a low tolerance for alcohol. I mean, we all know that the hot chicks are going for guys in big diesel trucks who can roll coal all day long (see #2). It is also impossible to commute by bike without a basket and as soon as you get a basket, you will put stuff in it which will make your bike heavier and in turn make you sweat more. So it’s best to never start down that road.
4. Parking is a bitch.
When I lived in the Polar North and it was freezing cold outside, there was nothing worse than rolling up to school on my nerd machine and having to park right next to the front door. This holds true in SG as well. The parking lots are always full and rolling through with my basket on the front of my bike to get groceries and having to park so close to the entrance is a serious pain in the ass. It’s not like I want people to see me (See #3). And chances are the meth heads will be hanging out by the pay phone and I might actually have to talk to someone outside of my socio-economic class who has been sweating. It’s just not a good situation.
5. Nobody else does it, so you are all alone.
Being a non-conformist is really just conforming to what isn’t the norm, right? We all know that the “nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” So there isn’t any reason to stick up or out. It’s best to just go along with what everyone else is doing. The easiest way to get through life is to be a sheep and just do what everyone else is doing regardless of how it effects the place you live, your health or mental sanity. Just go along, follow the rules and you will be happy. So unless you live in a place like Tucson or Bend, Oregon there is absolutely no good way to ride your bike.
6. It’s hard.
Not only is there the above mentioned difficulty of not doing what everyone else is, but it is difficult to commute by bike. Our entire existence is based on trying to not be uncomfortable. This is the exact opposite of riding your bike. Using your own power to get around is what we were designed to do, yet we have invented so many ways to not do that. We can spend our days driving around in large SUVs and sitting at computer desks not having to move unless we absolutely have to and we are comfortable. Riding a bike makes you elevate your heart rate, makes you breath hard, probably sweat and feel the burn of anaerobic exercise. It’s uncomfortable and we didn’t spend the last how many thousands of years developing technology so we could suddenly not be comfortable.
7. You get helmet hair.
This also goes along with #3. Unless you’re bald, like me, you have hair. When you put a helmet on top of that hair that has lots of vents, the hair will try to flow up and through those vents and leave you with some funny looking hair. And people will laugh at you. Unfortunately, no one has ever created a helmet that looks cool or that won’t cause helmet hair.
8. Breathing in fresh air is probably not as good for you as they say.
Everyone’s always talking about the latest food or exercise fad and how it’s sooo good for you. And then the next week they are talking about how bad it is for you. I’m sure that if we wait long enough, someone will finally discover the downside to breathing fresh air. I’m sure it causes cancer in California or maybe that’s just their “fresh air.” Regardless, it is certain that whatever is healthy and good for us this week will be bad for us next week, so we should continue to breath recycled air that has been dragged through some sort of filtering device and made to be just the right temperature for us.
9. Your butt will hurt.
This is just obvious. Those little saddles are akin to torture devices designed to split you in half. And I don’t care what anyone tells you, saddle sores suck.
10. It’s just not cool.
This is the most important thing. If we add it all up, it comes down to the fact that riding a bicycle is just nerdy, uncool and people will laugh at you. Oh yeah and it’s hard.
P. L. and R.
