Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Special Rider

My sister-in-law went to Uganda and I got a T-shirt. I can’t say all I got was the T-shirt, because I got the biker dude who’s wearing it too. Both his jersey and his leggings are more stylish than anything I usually wear on two wheels, so he’s an inspiration to me.

Although it may appear that his ride is fueled by firewood and charcoal, I have studied the physics of the equipment and determined that those are just extra freight, not an integral part of the propulsion system. Like my bike, his is a hybrid: It stores energy on the way up hills and converts that into velocity on the way down the other side.

My sister-in-law assures me that all the non-metallic parts of the sculpture are made from some kind of obscure nonrenewable rainforest materials—bark and leaves and so on. As Bukowski said, art should be dangerous.

(I think it was Edward Abbey who said that national parks should be a little dangerous too.)

1 comment:

CaliforniaGirl said...

Funny you should mention the hybrid bike thing. Yesterday someone asked me if my bike was a hybrid. Actually the answer was yes, neither the road bike folks nor the mountain bike folks think my bike is one of theirs. I think of it as comfortable. It does do a good job of storing energy on the way up hills to release it on the way down. I have been riding it a lot lately. So much so that I was caught in the rain yesterday about 10 minutes from home, just as my daughter called me on the cell phone.