Don't Fake The Funk

Insomnia & Bicycles

Here I go with the insomnia again. I think I can't sleep because I'm hungry. Or maybe it's because I went to the gym really late. I dunno. For some reason I keep thinking of bicycles.

Someone suggested to me today that I rent a bike and bike around and stuff. I guess around Manhattan, or maybe all over the city. This would be a cool thing to do and it would give me an opportunity to take pictures with my camera. Of course I haven't ridden a bicycle since grade school and if I recall correctly I used to fall off of it all the time.

Bicycles, to me, are a symbol of those innocent summers when you were a kid, when your greatest concern was getting a splinter and your greatest joy was hearing the ice cream man motor down your block. Remember those days? When the summer heat wasn't so oppressive as it is when you're an adult? When you can jump through the sprinkler as it watered your lawn? Where the rules of the games you played would change on the fly and nobody seemed to mind? When you could pop a wheelie on your dirt bike and everyone thought you were cool?

You could always tell who the cool kids were because their houses always had lots of bikes laying on the ground by their front steps -- the cool kids had all the visitors. You could tell who the tough kids were because their bikes had mud caked all over the wheels.

I don't see many dirt bikes these days. In fact I don't see much dirt. Somehow, I miss the open expanses of half-developed land. I miss daring my friends and my kuya to bike down that steep dirt hill up the block. I miss pretending I was Luke Skywalker on a speeder as I biked through the woods behind my house. Where have all the dirt bikes gone?

Last week I took a picture of a lone dirt bike, laying in the grass, its owner nowhere to be seen. I thought, "wow what a fitting sight to see at the end of summer."

Posted by glenn at September 10, 2004 02:20 AM