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.