Confessions of a dangerous mind

Enjoy...
Bicycle Diaries asked me to write a guest blogitorial – that’s my cross between a guest blog entry and the traditional guest editorial submitted to mainstream media publications. He sent me an email invitation send my thoughts and I responded with a lightening quick yes.
Wow what an honor, I thought, here I am a budding writer and journalist with my own fledgling blog and now I’m being asked to write for someone else. As quickly as the euphoria had set in, so too did the fear of having to produce something that might be interesting to bicyclists reading the blog.


And still no inspiration.

But regardless of the fault, in this country there exist very little safe space between auto and bicycle. On too many occasions when tensions run high between the two it is usually the motorist who is unwilling to share the road and the bicyclist who suffers.
Then I got my inspiration.




Okay, so back to reality. If someone offended me in traffic I hunted them down and left my mark on their car; if there was a hood ornament I took it a as trophy. I was particularly fond of carrying a piece of brick with me, then if a motorist cut me off I’d mark them right there and then on the spot. My own version of brick-a-hick – a game involving throwing a brick at drunken hicks at small town bars. It was developed by a couple of high school students I met during my teaching days.
[Editor's note: the following from Denmark certainly shows that the US is not the only country suffering from rolling terrorists:However, I bought a motorcycle and then a car and soon I was commuting on a regular basis. In time a family came along that resulted in the addition of a minivan (although I still respect bicyclist and will stop a line of traffic behind me to give the right-of-way to a bicycle). It seemed as if my will to tilt against the cars and trucks in America had been sucked from me.I often hear foreigners saying that Denmark is a quiet country. It's not! It's plagued by gangs of bicycle terrorists. Denmark is a "green" country. That's why so many people are using bicycles as means of transportation. At least that's the official version. The real reason is that new cars are taxed 200%. The bikers are the kings of the road. The highway code does not apply to them, or at least so they think. They bike on pavements, pedestrian crossings, pass red lights, drive opposite the direction in one-way streets, and they don't carry lights when it's dark. Should a police officer dare fining them for such behaviour, they will be seriously offended. When I went to high school in Copenhagen, the teacher came in one morning after having been fined for passing a red light to turn right. He lectured us about how unfair it was. What a way to educate young people! If for some reason they get annoyed with your car driving, they'll politely tell you by bending your antenna or hammering on the roof. Beware that the bicycles enjoy a de facto absolute right of way. If they cause an accident and the car driver is without fault, it's still the car insurance that must pay. This is one of the government's creative ways of punishing car drivers for not riding a bike instead. In communist Denmark, cars are not well seen, because they symbolise the rich. Rich people - or anyone earning an average income or more - are not well seen in Denmark, because they ought to share all their wealth with the poor.]


Labels: pensées, silly shit, writing
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