It’s true! Check out the abfab, brand-spanking new, state of the art bike shed at the East Falls Church Metro Station, where high tech elegance and environmental correctness blend in perfect harmony, offering safe and secure storage for a hundred bikes, at a cost of, well, $20,000 a bike. Sure, when I visited the shed yesterday there were only two bikes actually in storage, which would push the price up a bit, to, well, $1 million per bike, but who’s going to quibble when we’re talking, you know, Mother Nature! Do you love your mom or don’t you? Huh?
I grew up in Falls Church, back in the old millennium, and I like to hike around the place a couple of times a year. Well, this time I had my eye out for bikes, because, thanks to the whole COVID-19 thing, the fact that only two bikes were actually parked in the shed isn’t really conclusive, you know? A year from now, the place could be packed.
But judging from the lack of bikers I saw on the streets, I have to wonder. I only saw two adult bikers sans kids, and not that many more kids, with or without parents. In fact, enjoying a cocoanut curry salmon on Broad Street, the main drag in FC, I saw (and heard) at least as many bad-ass muscle cars and muscle trucks as I saw bikers throughout the city, and that’s counting kids.
The biker lanes that blot mar waste space decorate many of Washington, DC’s streets show a similar lack of use. According to the no doubt senile if not actually Alzheimer’s ridden workings of my aged brain, bikes are a way for aging late-twenties, early thirty-somethings to pretend that they’re still young. Well, wake up, aging late-twenties, early thirty-somethings! You’re not young! You’re old, and getting older! And stop wasting my goddamned, hard-earned tax money on fancy schmancy bike shit you never use!
Afterwords
“Word” can recognize “schmancy” as a word. I wonder how many other “schm” “words” it will let by. Well, I guess you can try that yourself. I’m getting tired.
