10 September 2019

An observation about biking in suburbia

I like this fragment of an ad as it appears here with another snippet from a further ad taped on top of it. Note that one pair of hands belongs to the frame of the man who is clutching his back, and the other pair of hands is floating disembodied in a clasp. (I wonder what type of country might take this image as its flag.)

Dear diary,

The suburbs, where I live, were designed for motorcars, as opposed to human pedestrians. That’s why the streets are so wide and all the houses are spaced far apart, and every house’s most prominent aspect is its garage; and the driveways are huge and they cause each house to be situated from the street at a distance that is out-of-scale to the perspective of a pedestrian.

I like to bike — not on a motorcycle but just the regular kind that you use your legs to pedal — which is different from going afoot, but it’s closer to walking than it is to driving a car; so I’m always feeling out-of-place here in suburbia, where the drivers of motorized vehicles don’t understand bikes any more than they do pedestrians: “What are these things, where did they come from, they’re like bugs, get rid of them,” they say.

And if you try to walk anywhere in the suburbs, on your two soft feet, you feel like a mouse that got lost in a big factory. And you’re always surrounded by pavement, not grass or flowers.

Cars vs. Bikes:
a suburban comparison

Coming home after a hard day’s work in your motorcar, you cruise down the street & pull into your driveway. Your windows are tinted so nobody can see that you are mortal. Once you exit your vehicle, you’re safely inside your garage. Even if the garage’s door is open, the neighbors cannot make out your form: You remain a mystery. Yet if you shut the garage’s door while still sitting inside your car, and only open your driver’s side door to get out after the garage’s door has closed, then no living creature outside of your house will ever be able to tell what you look like. They will not even know what style of robe you are wearing.

Now let us compare the above scenario, where we drove home in a motorcar and parked inside our garage and remained unseen, to the things that occur when we ride our bicycle home:

First, when we pedal down the street, everyone can plainly view our hairstyle and clothing. If we’re wearing a tailored suit, the neighbors know it; and if we’re wearing shorts and a blouse, the neighbors know it. There’s nothing that our neighbors will not know about us, with regard to our appearance. They’ll even be able to read the expression on our face, to tell if we are afraid or sad. Consider also that, when riding a bike down the street, we can lock eyes with people; we can also wave to people. And people might wave back; they might even motion for us to stop and chat with them.

Yet even if we do not look around at our fellow beings, but keep our attention fixed on the road and gaze only straight ahead until we reach our own driveway, think about how odd it looks to guide a bike into a garage, compared to a motorcar performing the same feat. To a bicyclist, everything about suburban homecoming is oversize: the driveway could fit more than ten bikes at once upon its asphalt, it’s so broad; and the garage could shelter more than one hundred bikes, easily, if we had a bulldozer to pack them all in there. But here we are, on our one single puny bicycle, heading into a garage whose entryway gapes like the mouth of hell.

And if our neighbors happen to be outdoors when we arrive, then we cannot politely avoid interacting with them. One of our neighbors stands only meters away, raking his lawn. Our other neighbor is within shouting-distance, at the end of his driveway, caressing his truck with a sponge. A third neighbor, or rather a pair of neighbors this time, a man & his wife, are crouched by the flowerbed under the mailbox. — Now, after coasting home on your bicycle, if you close your garage door without greeting each of these neighbors, you will come off as some sort of sicko: a psychopath with something to hide; perhaps a serial murderer; a thief; or a misanthrope.

So, after parking our bike on its kickstand, we walk back out of our garage and exchange pleasantries with each of our neighbors in turn. This we do, despite the fact that we’re hungry (it’s been a long day of working in the lumber yard) and needing to urinate (we finished off our water bottle several blocks ago). But it turns out to be well worth it: it’s not even an exaggeration to say that such friendly interactions make our day: they prove to be among the higher points of existence. We’ll remember these exchanges with affection when we’re resting on our deathbed.

(I have nowhere else to go with this: I only wanted to emphasize how different life can be if you drive a bicycle thru the suburbs instead of a motorcar.)

2 comments:

Not there said...

These are the seemingly meaningless things to others that will remain seared into your mind

Bryan Ray said...

I am glad that you modify "meaningless things" with "seemingly". It brings to mind Whitman, from "Respondez! Respondez!"

Let the she-harlot and the he-harlots be prudent! Let them dance on, while seeming lasts! (O seeming! seeming! seeming!)

If everything is truly meaningless, so that all meaning must be appointed by the mind both TO as well as FROM the things "seared into" it (your phrase reminds me of Guy Maddin's 2006 film Brand upon the Brain!), then, according to potential and possibility, calling everything meaningless is tantamount to calling everything meaningFUL. In the same way, either all or nothing is sacred.

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