This piece was supposed to be part of the Pickles and Bicycles story, but sort of spun off into a life of its own. [1935 words]
I have a confession to make, and I need you to hear it. I need someone to hear it. I’m not a good person. I’m not really any kind of person. The point is, I lead a shitty existence, and I apologize. To you, the universe, and everybody.
You might be thinking I deserved this. You might be thinking I’m a racist sexist asshole that ate a cursed pickle and got turned into a bike because I did a bunch of coke and fucked two hookers in a Motel 6 on the eve of my wedding and then rationalized it because, hey, it’s my bachelor party, right? Well, all of that is true, but that’s beside the point. Maybe I think this curse is unnecessarily vengeful. Maybe I think it exceeds any karmic comeuppance I might have had in store for me. But you’d be right. I did deserve this. After years of shitting on everyone around me, the cosmos finally got me back.
If you ever have the chance to be reincarnated, and you have a choice of what to be, don’t choose to be a thing. Nobody considers the life of an inanimate object. Nobody considers the feelings of a bicycle. No one says, Hey, maybe I should wash my groin before sticking the crack of my ass on the saddle. Maybe I should swipe some antiperspirant down there so when I ride around my balls don’t get all sweaty and smelly. No. No one ever thinks that. When you’re a thing, you’re just a thing, just something for others to use, sort of how I viewed everyone around me. Now I know how they must have felt.
I guess my confession is this: that I used people a lot, and then I cast them aside. Well, the same thing then happened to me. Only literally. In my early days a bike, I got ridden hard: a bent rim, a broken derailer. My first owner was a Puerto Rican named Saul who needed a new bike to deliver food from his father’s bodega to the local customers. And, like an answer to his indecipherable Spanish prayers, there I was on my side on the sidewalk. It took me a while for me to realize I was even a bike. I mean, how do you go from eating a pickle to being a bike? It’s not something that you ever imagine happening to yourself. It’s not like you wake up and say, Well, of all the shitty things that could happen to me on my wedding day, hope I don’t turn into a BIKE. And to think of all that planning, all that money, all that nitpicking to get every detail just right, and I miss the ceremony because now I’m welded steel or some shit. And what’s worse, I don’t get picked up by a nice white suburban kid. No, it has to be some second class brown-skinned kid from the part of town that smells weird. I guess that’s what I get for going across the tracks for one last eight ball to get me through the reception.
One thing I don’t get, though—one thing I never understood—is this idea of Hell. How can one night of indiscretion be equal to an eternity of suffering? How can bad choices during the brief instant that is your lifetime be equal to punishment for all time? The calculus makes no sense. One final swing through bachelorhood does not equal months and months and MONTHS of forced slogging to and from a shitty bodega, carrying shitty food that, no matter how tasty the aroma, is probably the meat of a stray dog. Sure, you might grow accustomed to your new life, the strange languages, the customs, the backward way people choose to live, and perhaps even recognize something resembling—dare I say—beauty in that culture. You might even grow fond of the way the matriarch makes you laugh, humbling the macho men, commanding them around. You might even grow accustomed to the nights chained beside the dumpster in the alley, but you never get accustomed to is the headlong dashes the wrong way down one-way streets or the weaving through rush hour traffic. One thing you never get used to is being struck by a car. Even as a bicycle, without nerve endings, it still hurts. You’re still aware that your personal space has been violated by a ton of fucking steel.
I was never asked if I built for the delivery business; no bike is ever asked what job it would like to have. No one ever asks a bike, Hey, would you be more happy spending summer evenings cruising up and down the boardwalk as the chariot of a nubile underage girl who wears the whitest of panties? Would you be happier lovingly stowed away in an uncluttered, dust-free garage? No, they don’t ask that. They don’t even think about it, not after you’re hit by a car, and you’re all dented and fucked. Especially not after your owner is carted off in a meat wagon because he was too stupid and backward to obey traffic laws or wear a helmet. The night after you get hit by a car, instead of chaining you up next to the dumpster, they put you in the dumpster where you have to wait amid the dog carcasses to be rescued my some hobo-looking hipster anarchist.
So maybe this hipster fixes me up because he’s all about being “eco”, and “green”, and “fucking The Man”. And when I say “fucking The Man”, I mean it literally, if you know what I mean. After getting me fixed up, he presented me as a present to his, um, “male companion.” It’s funny. Whenever I referred to some commie hipster faggot, I usually didn’t mean that I thought the commie hipster was an actual faggot.
My first thought at this revelation was, Great. Super-fucking-duper. Sure they fixed me up, and all, but what good is it to be in perfect shape if you’re possibly exposed to disease, when the only thing between you and some queer’s sweaty anus is a thin scrap of worn out denim.
But it wasn’t as bad as all that, really. In fact, these two guys were great owners. They were stewards. They kept me in tip top shape with daily rides and routine maintenance. They treated me like I was an actual prized possession, saying things like, “I can’t believe this thing was in the dumpster.” And, “Who would throw out a perfectly good bike?” And also, “We’ve gotten so much good use out of this bike.” I was starting to feel like part of the family, and I was beginning to overlook the gay thing. So I was sort of sad when one of them got sick, and they sold me for medicine. My next owner was a real douche nozzle who was more into the idea of owning a bike than he was into actually owning a bike.
So this part of the story is the part that sucked the worst. This part of the story is the part where circumstance, plot, epiphany, whatever you want to call it, forced me, as the protagonist, to realize change. This is the part of the story where I was forced to be changed. And it’s not super easy to tell you about because really all I did was sit in a garage for untold months.
So here’s the irony of my dilemma: it’s a lose-lose situation; either you got some fat fuck shifting your gears all wrong, kicking you around, leaving you unattended outside the Orange Street Grocery Outlet. Or you’re stored away in a shed-like oubliette lonely and forgotten. Bereft. Hell is other people, yes. But hell is also no one. Hell is also nothing nowhere isolation.
At times I would wonder if it would be better to be recycled, melted down into scrap metal, or perhaps, had I never been saved from the garbage by the hipster, to be buried in a landfill somewhere. It was during this long purgatory that I began thinking about the meaning of existence as a bike, why this twist of fate brought me to this precise moment, which was kind of weird because I never bothered to think about what kind of person I had been, especially not as an actual person.
But it was the burden of time that was the real punishment.
Imagine if every regret, every transgression had a weight, no matter how miniscule, imagine how it would accumulate over time, how it would add up. The Earth itself gains a billion tons of weight a year in this way. Debris arrives here from deep in space, and the extra weight is enough to slow down the spin of the planet imperceptibly. It’s enough to make the length of a year just a tiny bit longer. It’s enough to alter an insignificant being’s perception of time. You never consider the weight of a particle of dust that comes with disuse, or how that weight feels as it accrues over time. You never think about entropy’s decay or the ache of rust. You never think of how humiliating it is to be forced to wear cobwebs. This next part of my life was just a giant block of time spent in the back of some sort of storage locker or garage or something, crammed in between the drum kit and the sewing machine.
With my purgatory in the garage, I was cursed with unlimited time. I thought of all my procrastinated chores, all the things I meant to do but didn’t. I tired to remember all the vague postponements that resulted in preemptive failure, the kind of failure that doomed me before I started. I thought of how I couldn’t be bothered to get around to doing what I should have done, to fixing myself, to making myself a better person, to making myself into someone who gives a fuck about the world around me. Too busy to be bothered. Every person has ginormous piles of these failings as humans, all hidden away and ignored like so much junk in the attic, and with limited time on Earth it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that all you really have to offer is yourself.
I confess: I really had nothing to offer. I admit: my selfishness caused the worth of my life’s balance to be in the red.
So, yes, I finally came to the conclusion that I was a jerk. I finally realized that I was a racist, sexist, homophobic asshole. Finally I accepted that maybe I deserved what I got. But it didn’t all happen all at once. There were stages, sort of like the stages of bereavement. Denial: I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. Anger: there certainly was a lot of that. A whole lot. There was something and something else, more emotional turmoil, until we finally get to the important part, the Acceptance part.
After the Acceptance part, after I repented for my sins, after I finally said, Okay, I guess I’m a bicycle now, the bad parts of me began to go away, which is to say, pretty much all of me, until I was just a bike. Time passed differently. Days and nights slid by simultaneously. Perception of surroundings ebbed until it was nothing but my tires on the pavement. After Acceptance, existence was one blank moment. All there was was the hope that I might again step into the world in a state of Grace.
I have a confession to make, and I need you to hear it. I need someone to hear it. I’m not a good person. I’m not really any kind of person. The point is, I lead a shitty existence, and I apologize. To you, the universe, and everybody.
You might be thinking I deserved this. You might be thinking I’m a racist sexist asshole that ate a cursed pickle and got turned into a bike because I did a bunch of coke and fucked two hookers in a Motel 6 on the eve of my wedding and then rationalized it because, hey, it’s my bachelor party, right? Well, all of that is true, but that’s beside the point. Maybe I think this curse is unnecessarily vengeful. Maybe I think it exceeds any karmic comeuppance I might have had in store for me. But you’d be right. I did deserve this. After years of shitting on everyone around me, the cosmos finally got me back.
If you ever have the chance to be reincarnated, and you have a choice of what to be, don’t choose to be a thing. Nobody considers the life of an inanimate object. Nobody considers the feelings of a bicycle. No one says, Hey, maybe I should wash my groin before sticking the crack of my ass on the saddle. Maybe I should swipe some antiperspirant down there so when I ride around my balls don’t get all sweaty and smelly. No. No one ever thinks that. When you’re a thing, you’re just a thing, just something for others to use, sort of how I viewed everyone around me. Now I know how they must have felt.
I guess my confession is this: that I used people a lot, and then I cast them aside. Well, the same thing then happened to me. Only literally. In my early days a bike, I got ridden hard: a bent rim, a broken derailer. My first owner was a Puerto Rican named Saul who needed a new bike to deliver food from his father’s bodega to the local customers. And, like an answer to his indecipherable Spanish prayers, there I was on my side on the sidewalk. It took me a while for me to realize I was even a bike. I mean, how do you go from eating a pickle to being a bike? It’s not something that you ever imagine happening to yourself. It’s not like you wake up and say, Well, of all the shitty things that could happen to me on my wedding day, hope I don’t turn into a BIKE. And to think of all that planning, all that money, all that nitpicking to get every detail just right, and I miss the ceremony because now I’m welded steel or some shit. And what’s worse, I don’t get picked up by a nice white suburban kid. No, it has to be some second class brown-skinned kid from the part of town that smells weird. I guess that’s what I get for going across the tracks for one last eight ball to get me through the reception.
One thing I don’t get, though—one thing I never understood—is this idea of Hell. How can one night of indiscretion be equal to an eternity of suffering? How can bad choices during the brief instant that is your lifetime be equal to punishment for all time? The calculus makes no sense. One final swing through bachelorhood does not equal months and months and MONTHS of forced slogging to and from a shitty bodega, carrying shitty food that, no matter how tasty the aroma, is probably the meat of a stray dog. Sure, you might grow accustomed to your new life, the strange languages, the customs, the backward way people choose to live, and perhaps even recognize something resembling—dare I say—beauty in that culture. You might even grow fond of the way the matriarch makes you laugh, humbling the macho men, commanding them around. You might even grow accustomed to the nights chained beside the dumpster in the alley, but you never get accustomed to is the headlong dashes the wrong way down one-way streets or the weaving through rush hour traffic. One thing you never get used to is being struck by a car. Even as a bicycle, without nerve endings, it still hurts. You’re still aware that your personal space has been violated by a ton of fucking steel.
I was never asked if I built for the delivery business; no bike is ever asked what job it would like to have. No one ever asks a bike, Hey, would you be more happy spending summer evenings cruising up and down the boardwalk as the chariot of a nubile underage girl who wears the whitest of panties? Would you be happier lovingly stowed away in an uncluttered, dust-free garage? No, they don’t ask that. They don’t even think about it, not after you’re hit by a car, and you’re all dented and fucked. Especially not after your owner is carted off in a meat wagon because he was too stupid and backward to obey traffic laws or wear a helmet. The night after you get hit by a car, instead of chaining you up next to the dumpster, they put you in the dumpster where you have to wait amid the dog carcasses to be rescued my some hobo-looking hipster anarchist.
So maybe this hipster fixes me up because he’s all about being “eco”, and “green”, and “fucking The Man”. And when I say “fucking The Man”, I mean it literally, if you know what I mean. After getting me fixed up, he presented me as a present to his, um, “male companion.” It’s funny. Whenever I referred to some commie hipster faggot, I usually didn’t mean that I thought the commie hipster was an actual faggot.
My first thought at this revelation was, Great. Super-fucking-duper. Sure they fixed me up, and all, but what good is it to be in perfect shape if you’re possibly exposed to disease, when the only thing between you and some queer’s sweaty anus is a thin scrap of worn out denim.
But it wasn’t as bad as all that, really. In fact, these two guys were great owners. They were stewards. They kept me in tip top shape with daily rides and routine maintenance. They treated me like I was an actual prized possession, saying things like, “I can’t believe this thing was in the dumpster.” And, “Who would throw out a perfectly good bike?” And also, “We’ve gotten so much good use out of this bike.” I was starting to feel like part of the family, and I was beginning to overlook the gay thing. So I was sort of sad when one of them got sick, and they sold me for medicine. My next owner was a real douche nozzle who was more into the idea of owning a bike than he was into actually owning a bike.
So this part of the story is the part that sucked the worst. This part of the story is the part where circumstance, plot, epiphany, whatever you want to call it, forced me, as the protagonist, to realize change. This is the part of the story where I was forced to be changed. And it’s not super easy to tell you about because really all I did was sit in a garage for untold months.
So here’s the irony of my dilemma: it’s a lose-lose situation; either you got some fat fuck shifting your gears all wrong, kicking you around, leaving you unattended outside the Orange Street Grocery Outlet. Or you’re stored away in a shed-like oubliette lonely and forgotten. Bereft. Hell is other people, yes. But hell is also no one. Hell is also nothing nowhere isolation.
At times I would wonder if it would be better to be recycled, melted down into scrap metal, or perhaps, had I never been saved from the garbage by the hipster, to be buried in a landfill somewhere. It was during this long purgatory that I began thinking about the meaning of existence as a bike, why this twist of fate brought me to this precise moment, which was kind of weird because I never bothered to think about what kind of person I had been, especially not as an actual person.
But it was the burden of time that was the real punishment.
Imagine if every regret, every transgression had a weight, no matter how miniscule, imagine how it would accumulate over time, how it would add up. The Earth itself gains a billion tons of weight a year in this way. Debris arrives here from deep in space, and the extra weight is enough to slow down the spin of the planet imperceptibly. It’s enough to make the length of a year just a tiny bit longer. It’s enough to alter an insignificant being’s perception of time. You never consider the weight of a particle of dust that comes with disuse, or how that weight feels as it accrues over time. You never think about entropy’s decay or the ache of rust. You never think of how humiliating it is to be forced to wear cobwebs. This next part of my life was just a giant block of time spent in the back of some sort of storage locker or garage or something, crammed in between the drum kit and the sewing machine.
With my purgatory in the garage, I was cursed with unlimited time. I thought of all my procrastinated chores, all the things I meant to do but didn’t. I tired to remember all the vague postponements that resulted in preemptive failure, the kind of failure that doomed me before I started. I thought of how I couldn’t be bothered to get around to doing what I should have done, to fixing myself, to making myself a better person, to making myself into someone who gives a fuck about the world around me. Too busy to be bothered. Every person has ginormous piles of these failings as humans, all hidden away and ignored like so much junk in the attic, and with limited time on Earth it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that all you really have to offer is yourself.
I confess: I really had nothing to offer. I admit: my selfishness caused the worth of my life’s balance to be in the red.
So, yes, I finally came to the conclusion that I was a jerk. I finally realized that I was a racist, sexist, homophobic asshole. Finally I accepted that maybe I deserved what I got. But it didn’t all happen all at once. There were stages, sort of like the stages of bereavement. Denial: I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. Anger: there certainly was a lot of that. A whole lot. There was something and something else, more emotional turmoil, until we finally get to the important part, the Acceptance part.
After the Acceptance part, after I repented for my sins, after I finally said, Okay, I guess I’m a bicycle now, the bad parts of me began to go away, which is to say, pretty much all of me, until I was just a bike. Time passed differently. Days and nights slid by simultaneously. Perception of surroundings ebbed until it was nothing but my tires on the pavement. After Acceptance, existence was one blank moment. All there was was the hope that I might again step into the world in a state of Grace.
