I have to ask a simple, yet burning question: why do young adults hate bike riders so, and myself in particular? Granted that’s a bit of a generalization, but I have my reasons for making this generalization.

The Other night, while retrieving my bike from the Point Pleasant Beach train station I had at least two SUV’s full of young punks in training honking horns and yelling obscenities out their window at me, which I bet made them feel great inside. Too bad shooting past at 35 miles an hour tends to garble speech to the point of sounding like an irritating mosquito buzzing by. That’s something that I’ve just come to accept as karmic payback for when I used to do the same thing. For some reason when you’re at that age it just seems like a cool thing to do.

But then I reached Brick, where it seems some punks have elevated this game to new levels. While in my own housing development I was almost taken out by some asshole who through the stop sign he was at was the equivalent of a drag strip starting line. I was barley inches away from passing his front bumper when he floored it and nearly took out my back wheel. A ton and a half of car versus a considerable lower mass of flesh and bike is no contest. Now I’m a peaceful man by nature, but if I ever do manage to spot this same asshole again it will take all of my self restraint to keep from personally fracturing every bone in his body.

And it doesn’t stop there. Some young punks driving in the family SUV that they borrowed from mommy tried to plunk me in the head with an empty water bottle while on my afternoon constitutional ride. I at least was able to give them the finger, thought that was more for me than them because they were flying by at about 50 or so.

Where’s the love for the bike rider? I mean, can’t we all just get along?

Tags: Personal

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003 at 12:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.