The Slow Lane

 It rained all night and all day. The front yard was like a kitchen sponge that just couldn't take in any more water as little lakes formed in the low areas. I could have taken the car to First Saturday Mass. But what's a little rain?

I opened up the garage door and stepped out of the rain into my little space; when we moved into this house nine years ago I had laid vinyl flooring, painted the walls a pale yellow, hung free-cycled cabinets on the studs. It was a nice little room that served no purpose; no one was going to be living in the garage but I did it anyway. Just like the shed two years ago, with the caving in roof and oil stained plywood floor and the world ending and everything. Bought jelly rolls of fiberglass insulation and stacks of 4x8 birch paneling and gave it a Trading Spaces worthy makeover. Installed solar panels, a sink, composting toilet in the framed out back room, counters and futon. My wife refuses to go back there--"The rat bird," she says, that lives in between the walls. I built this for you. Didn't I? For me? I don't know. It doesn't matter. All is vanity. 

My thirties were so...busy. The kids were pop-pop-popping and spaces felt outgrown. I was always pimping out my time. Craigslist runs to Jersey. Lunch-hour writing side hustles. Building this or that thing. Trying to make everything work. Trying to be a good provider. We had good memories--walks with the stroller after dinner in our old 'hood. Drives to the beach when the babies never stopped crying. Thai food at the gun shop. Skin to skin.

I still have a lot of bikes, too many for one person. I can't help myself I suppose. Everybody has a thing. The trendy grey-wood vinyl laminate is curling up now at the edge of the garage where it gets wet underneath, cracking and tearing in some areas. Not as pliable as it used to be. The cabinets and wall paintings are gone. The only thing that remains is an oval portrait of my great grandmother because well why not--she deserves to be remembered, somewhere somehow. It's something, a home among the bikes. 

I was doom-scrolling at the office yesterday and Jordan Peterson was ranting about the 'war on cars' in Toronto: "the bloody bike lanes everywhere and what are you going to do when it's negative twenty degrees out and you're a seventy year old lady with her groceries--its utterly preposterous. The only people who bike from November to March are deluded twenty four year old men who think they've saving the planet with their goddamned bicycles..." And I'm nodding "yaas, yas" he's right, and he is. I didn't buy a car until a year before I got married; once when I was a twenty-four year old man I biked down Kelly Drive to pick up a drafting table at a Staples in Center City and hoisted it on my back, and biked the ten miles back up to Manayunk carrying it while riding one handed on a single-speed up an 8% incline. Normal people don't do such things. I didn't care about saving the planet so much as I liked riding my bike. But I don't want my seventy-six year old mother having to.

And I still do, strangely. I've got a whole cadre of bitties living here in my garage to choose from--a couple of e-bikes, which are great and practical; a sleek drop bar racing bike, a single speed track bike, a mountain bike, and my simple seven-speed cruiser replete with fenders and mustache bars which is my ride of choice this morning. 

It would be easier to drive to Mass, but I need a reason to live during these dark days of winter and so I get my raingear together--a lightweight jacket with a form-fitting hood I sewed years ago, rainpants, mitts, waterpoof shoes (all my shoes are waterproof). Seems like a lot of hassle but it's really just like dressing up your morning oatmeal with salt and dates and butter. And we've dodged a lot of snow the past few years so I'm able to ride almost all year round it feels like. 

When I biked two hundred miles to the hermitage in New York state this past Fall to go on retreat, it was more advantageous to extend the range on my battery to slow it down. Upright bikes are not especially aerodynamic, and racing bikes only marginally more so, so above fifteen miles per hour you expend a disproportionate amount of energy just to overcome wind resistance. So, on an e-bike, it's a matter of economy: you can cover fifty miles on a full charge, with pedaling, at 15 miles per hour, or half of that distance at 20 miles per hour. But since you're body is an engine too, it "pays" to go slower on a regular pedal bike like I was doing this morning. 

And I like how I can work on them, fix anything that goes wrong, myself. It's cheap to maintain--a couple hundred bucks a year, tops. It's something to have that kind of empowerment. There's theoretically nothing to keep me from going from here to there except myself.  

Part of why I wanted to bike in the pissing rain is the same reason I take cold showers. My wife took one before her night-shift this evening to shock herself out of sleep, and said "I don't know how you do this every morning." The truth is, I don't know either. But everything is a choice really. I can choose to go back to bed, or turn the showerhandle to H. But I don't. Some days I drive to where I need to be, but today I wanted to kill myself a little so I made a different choice. 

When I rolled out my cruiser with the mustache bars out the driveway in the pelting rain, I gave myself plenty of time to cover the ten miles to church. On an ebike it's easier to dress because you're not working your body as hard--the battery and motor does it for you. Less work=no sweat. But I wanted to work this morning to give me something to live for, and that means with rain gear the danger of getting sweaty. A good way to do that is to slow down and just take your time. And that's a nice thing about the bike over the car anyway--slowing down. It's crazy when I look at a map seeing some of the routes I've traveled over the years on two wheels, crazy distances. But it's just mile by mile, stroke by stroke. They fall by the wayside like the years, like the cherry petals that will soon fall along Kelly Drive.

I'll be forty-four next week. I've spent a lot of time on the living room couch the past couple months by the big bay window. I don't read. I don't do much of anything; Not 'optimizing'. Anti-hustle. Naps and staring at the ceiling. When I slip into the confessional this morning I confess to sloth, laziness, acedia. But is it? What if I'm just slowing down, riding in the slow lane and realizing all is vanity and chasing after wind? I've heard it said that King Solomon wrote Song of Songs in his youth, Proverbs in his middle years, and Ecclesiastes near the end of his life. This makes sense. Song of Songs is passionate, poetic, erotic, full of youth and vigor. Proverbs is a solid compilation of practical wisdom concerned with the nuts and bolts of living. And Ecclesiastes is the legacy capstone of the wisest man who ever lived and has experienced everything life has to offer and realizes in the end that it is all completely meaningless.

I'm not trying to save the planet by riding by bike. This world is going to burn whether I ride a bike or drive a car or lie on the couch or make an extra grand or play with my kids or spend time in the garage monkeying around with my mistresses. Nobody's saving anything. We're spending our time and years in the fast lane fooling ourselves we're doing something noble, burning the engine fighting the wind. It's a slow burn at twilight. 

The funny thing about the ride to church--once I was wet, I couldn't get much wetter. So you just kind of lean into and accept it. Like stepping into the shower stall when you want to die and turning the handle to straight "C" and then stepping out a man awake, alive. Because I had fenders and some fitting clothing, I wasn't miserable, and because I was taking my time, I wasn't sweating. It was, dare I say, pleasant. No one else was out on a bike, of course--because it's an utterly preposterous thing to do. And yet there I was. Stroke by stroke, mile by slow mile.