The Short Fast Road to Superstition

So, as noted yesterday, my ability to remain agnostic was severely tested yesterday by the more-than-coincidental-seeming coincidence of having my bike tire pop right after I had thought about blogging about the fact that it hadn't popped since Thanksgiving. Well, clearly the fates, or the stars, or who/whatever was not pleased with my trying to make light of the situation in order to remain empirical in philosophical ethic:

The weather in Miami has the ability to turn itself around pretty rapidly. It was stormy and wet until the early evening yesterday, but today finds the skies nearly absent of clouds, the sun heating things until they verge on the 80s, and most of the water already evaporated from the roads (admittedly, since it's a non-teaching day, I didn't get up 'til 11 AM, so the roads had several hours to dry before I got my first look at them). I had a couple of errands to run, so I hopped on my road bike, as it's really the more pleasant of my two bicycles to ride, and I'm generally comfortable enough on its skinny tires and drop-down handlebars now to not feel like I'm putting myself into any more danger than usual when I ride out onto US-1, the highway on which I live.

Of course, I failed to take into account the world of superstition and jinxes which has reentered at least the bicycle-oriented portion of my existence. Today, I had a combination of bike-related mishaps, which, while still anti-climactic as a story, probably add up to at least 1.5 near-death experiences.

As I pulled out of the driveway of my apartment complex, I had the good fortune to immediately catch a walk signal at a crosswalk and cross over to the direction of US-1 that I wanted to go. Since there cars were stopped, I was biking by myself at the edge of the right-most line (the highway is 3 lanes each way with left-turn lanes spread rather consistently every 10 blocks or so). At the very first intersection I came to, the light had been green for some time, but as the cars were stopped a few blocks back at the crosswalk where I crossed over into traffic, several cars going in the opposite direction were making their left-turns into the driveway that is shared by my local Target and US Post Office. It being about as bright as things ever might be at 2 o'clock in the afternoon in February in Miami, I went ahead and gained momentum heading into the intersection, as the cars making their left turns would surely see me. Of course, as I passed through the intersection an SUV being driven by a young female driver went ahead and turned anyway, and headed pretty much straight at me.

This happens occasionally - cars making left turns on the highway are so frantic to have a whole in the traffic to get across that I think the drivers honestly unsee me from their vision. "Surely," they must think to themselves, "that biker will understand our need to turn and stop entirely, letting us pass. Oh wait, never mind, it's gone!" My general defense mechanism is to try and make eye contact with the car that's heading at me. This time, though, my quest for eye contact reveal a driver who was quite probably just learning - there was definitely someone in the passenger seat - and she looked to actually be more afraid than I was. That fear, of course, translated to the driver maintaining her course and speed, rather than, like, slowing down, or, say, turning into a wider arc so as to not hit me. Luckily, I snuck by her, and I'm not sure if I said "Fuck you!" out loud or not, but I certainly thought it.

"Wow!" I thought to myself, as I continued on my way, "That was a close one!" I spent the next 20 blocks or so shouting at all the cars that came even close to me, shaking my head at them and saying "I am here." So of course, at this point it dawned on me that perhaps documenting my possible jinxing with the other bike yesterday was a mistake - clearly I had doomed myself in some way, unless the time traveling jinxes can be stopped - if I could just find some temporally flexible counter-jinx everything would be fine. I went to the bank (one of my errands). At the bank, there was a long line, and one of the bank employees was giving out mini Snickers bars to the people that were stuck waiting. He ran out before he got to me. Aha! A counter-jinx!

Or so I thought. On my way back down towards my apartment, again, approaching an intersection, this time in traffic, my bike experienced about as close to a catastrophic failure as I've ever experienced. I'm not sure what happened first, but my chain jumped from the gears either right before or right after my tire popped (and tore, rather epically) and I did a wobbly kind of skid thing, trying not to fall over and get my head run over by a car. Luckily, the light was red, so the cars were slowing down, and the car that was immediately behind me slowed down enough to where I was able to signal it to stop so I could jump off my bike rather than fall over with it. The rear tire was trashed, and my derailer was bent out of place.

Oh, Pete, you're so naive. Did you really think that not getting a mini Snickers bar would really be enough to counter your scoffing at the awesome power of the poly-temporal jinx? It's generally my policy not to talk out loud to myself, but I must admit, I did some swearing on the sidewalk as I surveyed the damage to my rear wheel. Luckily, though, my tire exploded right around the corner from the local bike shop, so everything was okay - I just had to walk my bike maybe half a mile and I could get it fixed there while I waited. Things were messed up enough on the tire that I had to carry the bike on my shoulder most of the way, since the bike wheel wouldn't spin at all and it was therefore difficult to just walk next to it.

The bike shop wasn't crowded, so they were able to get to work on my bike right away. The wheel was trashed (actually had an impressive amount of the rim ground away from where I skidded on it), as was the tire and the of course the tube. The derailer was fine - it had just gotten torqued out of position. They could fix it right away. My friend Dan called, so I stepped outside to talk to him while they fixed my bike. We talked about the fact that it's Valentine's Day - what he's going to do with his girlfriend, and what I wasn't going to do with my no girlfriend. I sat on the curb, wiped some of the grease from my hands onto my bright blue "Mercy Quality Touch" t-shirt.

After a minute or to of conversation, someone ran out of the bike shop and grabbed my arm. I hung up on Dan. "Someone's got a gun in there!" he said to me. I got up and ran like a little girl until I was out of sight behind a palm tree. There were no immediate signs of gunfire or struggle. The man that had warned me said there was some kind of argument, and that someone had pulled out a gun. He ran off, inside the next store over, assumingly to call the cops.

I called back Dan, to let him know why I had hung up on him, and waited for the cops to show up. I wandered around in little ovals on the sidewalk, trying to look nonchalant. This was Valentine's Day, not April Fool's right? Dan seemed to think that it was a trick so they could steal my bicycle, but that made no sense. Enough time passed with nothing really happening that I started to feel really awkward. Finally a cop showed up and scoped out the seen. I watched her body language - she turned out to be more annoyed than anything. I asked her if everything was cool in the shop, and she said yeah.

When I got back inside, everything seemed normal. My bike was finished. It cost 65 bucks for the new wheel, tire, tube, and the labor. An old man asked me if I rode for a team - that looked like a fast bike. I said no. Then he asked if my tires had air in them. That seemed like a really dumb question. No one said anything about the gun or any sort of altercation. I paid for the repairs and road to campus.

Occasionally, still, here at the program, the notion of writing nonfiction gets brought up to me - that I should write something, or whatever. I continue to stand by the fact that nothing ever really happens to me. Nothing does. That's what's great about this blog - it's the perfect venue for this kind of almost-action that was certainly the most exciting day of bike-riding I've had so far down here (I don't think it's a better story than the one about the time I crashed my bike at CMU though). I suppose if there had been actual gunfire then I would have had a real story to tell, but I think it's just as well that there wasn't.