ChiWhoBike #54
This is my bike, this is Bessy, I call her and she’s old as could be. It’s an old bike, very heavy. This was a bike that I was given many years ago, it was only 50 bucks. And that was sort of one of the joys of it, was that it was given by a friend to me, made a quick deal, bought it, yanked it out of a basement, fixed it up a little bit and it’s a bit of an eyesore. I get a lot of agita from friends about it being a sort of an ugly bike. But that’s a thing I like, no one will screw with your bike if it’s a little ugly. So that’s always a good thing. And then also there’s something to be said about something that’s functional. Form over function, you know, but this one is all function, and it gets me where I need to be.
I use my bike to get to shows, sometimes I’ll use it to get to work. It’s getting places like her, on a weekend. In the summertime, I work as a nature specialist at a day camp, so I ride my bike up to the Metra stop and then I take the Metra up to camp. But it’s got a professional purpose, getting from A to B, but then it also has a leisurely purpose, getting to Welles Park, where we are, but it also makes the ride more exciting and worth it almost.
I think that one of the biggest challenges is the culture around bikes. I feel like it’s always very surprising that I love bikes, deeply so, but it’s always been strange to me how deeply people can dislike it. It seems to have a negative effect on some people, where they’ve had some sort of negative experience with biking. But then when you start to talk to people about the philosophy of it, I hope that it starts to eek into their brain a little bit that, you know, there’s nothing evil or wrong about it. It’s ridiculous even, it’s hard to even articulate that to you. It’s like how people, you run into people either from their cars that yell at you, honk at you, things like that. It’s a very strange thing. So that’s I think the thing that, it’s not that I dislike it, it’s the thing that I hope changes, I suppose, is that people can calm it down a little bit with their regards for bicyclists.
