Discussions about bikes vs. cars eventually devolve into bitter shouting matches, so let's just skip the preliminaries and get right to the clichéd accusations, OK?
Bikers are insufferable self-righteous narcissists who feel virtuous because they are helping the earth and are thus entitled to treat STOP signs with the same careful respect Vladimir Putin pays to Ukrainian borders. But they also expect cars to treat them like a nun with a walker carrying a Fabergé egg.
Car drivers are wasteful planet-killers who regard their plastic guzzle-box as an extension of their ego, and the only time they're happier than watching YouTube videos of bikers getting doored and cartwheeling in the air like scarecrows shot from a cannon is when they're idling in a McDonald's drive-through lane alone in their 12-passenger car.
There. Everyone happy now? Let us all calm down and discuss the matter calmly and reach a sensible concord for the benefit of all. We have much in common. For example, motorcycles? Those guys who laid down on the bike in a posture usually associated with a colonoscopy, revving their engines and darting around in traffic? Both bikers and drivers hate them. See, we can agree. Let's build on that.
OK. So. The other day I was driving down a one-way, and lo, I saw a bike in the middle of the street. Going the wrong way. He was on one of those recumbent bikes — you know, the ones that make you look like you couldn't decide whether to ride a bike or go down a water slide.
I like the idea of recumbent bikes, since you're sitting down and leaning back, a posture I associate with having a remote in one hand and a cool beverage in the other. Alas, I know I would look dorky, and from observation it seems you also have to grow a white beard, and perhaps have some quirky health routine. No sir, don't eat anything except a nutritious mush of pineberries and quail livers. Look at me! Sixty-five and shins like bowling pins.
At least they're not unicycles, which are a sensible mode of transportation if your job requires you to follow clowns and precede elephants. I suppose they're different, but so is getting to work by repeatedly pole-vaulting. Surely the recumbent unicycle is next, for those who think ordinary unicycles are too mainstream.
Anyway. The bike was going the wrong way, so I stopped. He waved, the universal signal for "sorry/thanks," the small gesture of goodwill that absolves all. I think I know why he was going the wrong way — the bike path nearby had a fork that took it around the creek, and if you missed the turn you were stuck. Hey, it happens. We've all found ourselves going the wrong way at some point. But here's the question:
