31st May 2007

Four wheels good, two wheels unmentionable.


You might think that having half the number of wheels would permit you at least half status… but I think that round here you get probationary humanity instead.   You made a mistake in life and perhaps one day, with hard work and by following the example of all the normal humans around you, you might redeem yourself.   

I'm told that the Americans have great faith in redemption, in general.   In the local newspaper the other day, I discovered a weekly column of church reviews.   Now, a review of a restaurant or bar I could understand - that's the sort of place that you might visit once or twice, more often if they have a entertaining waiters and non-poisonous food.   But are people really going to choose the brand of their heaven and hell based on whether the church mice are well-behaved, what the after-service coffee is like and how many gratuitous lightening strikes there were during the sermon?   Perhaps they do.   I wouldn't know.     Anyway, in at least some of the local churches round here they are probably praying for my motoring soul.  Or perhaps sacrificing some French fries into the ketchup of eternity, depending on the denomination.  

Even the traffic lights don't consider cyclists to be real.    We have to wait until a real human wants to go in the same direction before the lights will change.   When inanimate objects start discriminating against you on the basis of whether you are real, it's probably time to start worrying.     The hills feel real to me though.   I'm pretty sure that the topology round here is non-conservative (for the non-mathematicians out there, that statement does not imply that every hillock actively  beseeches all passers-by to live by the Little Red Book and the Stalinist manifesto, just that I cycle up far more hills than I cycle down).       And everyone knows that American cars are huge, but I haven't seen a single hatchback… not even anything as small as a VW polo.   They all complain about the price of "gas" without connecting it to the fact that you only consume fuel when you go somewhere.   Cars are not like pets that need feeding all the time, whether you're at home with them or not.     Methinks those French fries gods need to get some causality into the worship they demand.   Although perhaps I just don't appreciate cars and if this were in the UK, there'd be a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cars who would be busily writing leaflets designed to educate me in how to be humane.    

Insidious attempts at evangelism seem to be everywhere.   The local shops don't really exist - there are just miles and miles of warehouse-sized stores separated by ocean-sized parking lots.    Getting to these places without a car takes tenacity and quadriceps, in about equal measure (invariably, these shops are on the other side of a hill or three).     Public transport is a nice theory, about on a par with that theory about the washing up being done by blue cats and unicorns when you weren't looking.    There is no pub within a five mile radius - you have to drive if you want to go out for a drink, which is a nice conundrum.   People assume that a ten mile journey is trivial - and the whole culture is based on that being the case.       Take that away and California would be back in the stone age in no time.     Local subsistence communities would band together in small villages, trading food and other resources.   Peace would come to the West Coast for the first time since the flower-power years.     And then someone would rediscover the bicycle and life would begin again.   Everyone would depend on their bicycle.      The Age of Two Wheels is coming, hallelujah.   We should throw away all the cars now in preparation for the coming of the new not-for-Prophet dawn.      I might have to write a sermon and start evangelising.    I can't wait until someone writes the first review…