Bicycles are the indicator species of a community, like shellfish in a bay. ~ P. Martin Scott
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. ~ Ernest Hemingway
Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. ~ H.G. Wells
There is probably no nostalgia more unbearable to me than that of the elder millennials, a generation to which I nominally belong and largely do not relate to. I hated, and continue to hate, the pop-culture which surrounded my youth. I fought against it in every way I could. It was the time of Columbine and 9/11, the peak of military boot-licking, fear of the other, of cheap gas, low standards in art, and udder cowardice. I hated it all then, and seeing early-2000’s pop culture re-spawn itself in this current age of complete cruelty, ignorance and complicit omnicide, I still hate it. I hated that America as much as I hate this America, and I still hate N*SYNC.
Throughout my adolescence, I did my best to cope, mostly through punk rock and skating. I was never good at skateboarding, but I always appreciated the strange and wondrous transformation that plastic wheels, smooth bearings, and lithe plywood made out of our oppressive playground of steel, asphalt, and concrete. I managed to get the secret service brought out to my high school, on account of some imagery I created for a house-show flyer… a story I will only tell to you in person. Having survived both public education and the many literal beatings I took in the halls, I look for life outside that cruel playground. At some point, I got sucked in to Food Not Bombs, quickly found chickpea-centered activism to be too safe for my personal enjoyment, and eventually stumbled into the anarcho-punk cycling subculture– a strange meeting place between the tender-hearted and more than a few privileged contrarians with death wishes. I place myself, at the time (2005?), as firmly centered between the two.
I’ll admit that reconsidering this era does kindle a certain unwelcome nostalgia– but not one that I can share with too many other 40-year-olds today. I learned a few basic life skills– how to eat out of dumpsters, how to find enough bike parts to scrap together transportation, how to smoke on an Amtrak train without getting caught, some basic squatting and shoplifting– all skills that could aid a young person in surviving the dystopia of excess and extraction. I met people and was introduced to ideas that my young, boy brain would need years to fully comprehend as there was no internet, at least outside of the library— concepts like oppression, privilege, feminism, class inequality, racism, the existence of trans folks or even people my age with disabilities was almost like secret information that could only be communicated in person or through experience.
I opted out of the mainstream as completely as I could, though in those days, the mainstream did not yet have the tentacles of co-option it has today to monetize basic human thought in the form of social media, though we did promote shows on MySpace. Zines were only in paper format, you needed a payphone and a pager to buy drugs that were hardly ever available, and at some point I looked back on my loose crowd of friends and acquaintances– some combination of future sell-outs and deeply hardcore human beings, and with one sweep of my leg, sat astride my clunky-ass ‘70’s era goth-black Ross 10-Speed, and pushed down the road, stroke by stroke and tooth by tooth, into some strange world.
