You May Be Able to Get There From Here

I suppose this post is a confession.

My discontent as a city biker bubbled into an act of violence today.

On my bike ride home this evening, a man nearly hit me on a calm two-lane street while yelling “Fuck you, Faggot.”

This sort of thing often happens. On occasions like this, I’ll often catch an irate driver at an upcoming stop light. This was not the case this evening: I almost caught the man at the next light, but he was a little too fast.

(Not that I would do anything to him at the stop, except give him a look of indignation or maybe an explicit gesture. One time I did scare the shit out of an old lady who had wronged me by knocking on her drivers-side window. At that time, I really like the idea that she had honked and almost run me over with the notion that I was just a biker, an unreal fragment on the road. I’d like to believe that my act of startling her made her think about the real world.)

This evening I did not catch the abuser, but I did see the bar/restaurant that he turned into. (The bar, by the way, is a faux Japanese restaurant, which gives me umbrage apart from the situation.

In a large, tight parking lot at dusk, I knew it would be hard for me to be seen. I waited, parked my bike at an establishment across the street, and then walked over to the guy’s car and slit one of his tires. I also left a note, “please be nice to bikers.” The tone of my note is influenced by my habitually reading of passiveaggresivenotes.com.

I’m normally not one for violence, but I do like exacting karma-tic justice. I hope, though, that I can suppress the joy that I receive from performing this act, because it a joy reaped by violence.

The perfect woman: a mute nymphomaniac whose father owns a brewery.

I just found a really inspiring break down of some productivity applications for Ubuntu at anywired.com.

Win or lose, whatever happens next, Barack Obama is now established as one of those rare, courageous teachers who leads the country onto new ground. He has given us a way to talk about race and our other differences with the clarity and honesty that politics does not normally tolerate. Whether this hurts or helps his presidential prospects is not yet clear, but he has done this for us and it will change the country, whatever the costs to him.

His words should discourage the media frenzy of fear-driven gotcha. His speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday may also make the Clintons re-think their unsubtle exploitation of racial tension. But nobody knows the depth or strength of the commonplace fears streaming through the underground of public feelings. No one can be sure of what people will hear in Obama’s confident embrace, beckoning Americans in all their differences, leaving out no one, to a better understanding of themselves.