A LITTLE BIT ABOUT OUR RIDE BY JB:
"Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost."
I thought about that line from Philip Seymour Hoffman's character in the Big Lebowski tonight as I was riding out to the beach with a handful of folks for the "Aliens Love Cake Ride"
And all I could think of is that maybe the "bums" are winning this round. Across America, but especially in California, a lot of what had been apparently successful folks are finding out that being a big spender is not all it's cracked up to be.
Having a nice house in the outer suburbs and a couple of SUVs in the garage is suddenly becoming less of a status symbol and more of a drag. We're seeing the mainstream media come out with headlines like "Could rising gas prices kill the suburbs?" Yikes!
Meanwhile, the slackers who were looked down for the past 5-6 years for not being able to or choosing not to buy a home, and were criticized for "throwing money away on rent", are all of a sudden looking pretty smart. A cheap in-town rental provides housing, with free maintenance, for a fixed mothly cost, and best of all, you can never be hundreds of thousands of dollars upside down in a home you rent.
And, since you're in-town, you can bike or walk where you need to be for many of your errands, skipping the ever closer to $5 a gallon gas, and the ever increasing frustration of sitting in traffic.
I feel like the Lebowski-esque "bums" are winning this round, in the sense that working hard to make lots of money to buy lots of stuff and getting caught up in bubbles (tech, housing, gas, the growing corn/wheat/commodities bubble) and trends is something of a mistake, and that should you choose to rent/bike/nap/slack off, you may not necessarily be worse off, in that you don't benefit from the booms, but you don't get crushed by the bursting bubbles either.
I thought about this as I was biking tonight, not because my friendly fellow riders (Scott, Richard, Cesar, Cody, Cailin and some other guy whose name escapes me that met us during the ride) were bums in any sense of the word, but because I had a fantastic evening that was, essentially, free. It wasn't one of those nights out where you have to make a trip to the ATM beforehand, or wake up wondering exactly how that particular hangover cost so much.
That's the great thing about the bike scene in Los Angeles. I get the feeling it's a lot like the hot rod scene was back in the 50's (or at least as it's reminisced about, not having been alive then).
People show up, hang out, show off, goof off, go out for a spin, go from place to place, hang out some more, ride further, and a good time is generally had by all, with the occasional accident to remind one to be careful.
The hot rod scene is alive and well today, but between the demand for old metal, the level of technology involved in performance parts, and the sheer cost of both vehicles and gasoline, it's not the sort of hobby you can take up casually or inexpensively.
Cycling, on the other hand, is an extraordinarily inexpensive sport. Just about anyone can afford a bicycle. This is why it's the most popular form of wheeled transport in the world (400 million cars worldwide, 1.4 BILLION bicycles).
While I do love fast cars, in a traffic congested city in L.A., it's awesome to be able to have a fast, light, gasoline free vehicle the total cost of which is a fraction of the cost of a set of performance cylinder heads or a racing transmission that would be just a fraction of the total cost of building a decent hot rod.
So, while I'm not giving up my dreams of a fast convertible just yet, and I'm not going to stop wasting way too much time drooling over the cars at www.pro-touring.com/forum, it's definitely nice to own a fun affordable wheeled vehicle on which I can go as fast as I want on city streets.
It's also nice to have fun people with similar interests to hang out with, which is where we tie that long and rambling tangent back into the main issue of this particular posting, the Aliens Love Cake Ride, which was number 2 of what is supposed to be 100 weekly rides, set up by Scott.
We (Scott, Richard, Cesar, Cody, Cailin and myself) met up behind Rae's, a dive bar a block or two from my house. We rode to the Ballona Creek Bike Path out to Mustache Bridge in Marina
Del Rey.
Cesar provided the music for the trip, and probably has the best taste in music of anyone I've met recently. A UPS from a computer to provide the power, attached to a car amp, attached to a speaker, attached to an Ipod, attached to his bike, made for a pretty kick ass sound system.
Just as music makes you drive faster, it makes you ride faster too. Zipping along the bike path under an underpass hearing the Dead Kennedy's "California Uberalles" echoing off the walls was a highlight, as was Morrissey's "Last of the Famous International Playboys".
(Here are the lights of MDR from the bridge in shakyvision from my cell phone).
From there it was off to Venice Pier
Then up the boardwalk and over to the Windward Avenue traffic circle, which we rode around a few times, then out to Venice Blvd., with a brief stop at Venice High, where we hung out for a few minutes and Cody launched his skateboard off a good-sized flight of steps and nailed the landing.
Then back to our starting point at Rae's, where we went our separate ways until we meet up at one of the numerous random rides around L.A., probably sometime later this week.
All in all an A-1 evening! Thanks Scott!
I highly recommend this ride, and there will be another one next Tuesday.
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X-Large07.10.08 - 1:48 am
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