Today I Drank THREE Glasses of Water

My apologies, by the way, for not updating this blog more often, and then suddenly posting a veritable barrage of entries. Part of the problem is that I live alone and work more or less alone and most of my friends and relatives live far away (boo hoo) and I’m scared to tell stories about people who work in nearby cubicles for fear of losing my job (though if I do lose it, I know exactly what I’ll do instead, and if I were less fearful, I would lose it right this minute on purpose).

Anyway: few daily anecdotes, and it can take several weeks for a dramatic arc to become evident, like, “Wow! I’ve been to the dentist TEN TIMES in the past six weeks. I’ll have to put that in my blog!”

I did today get my daily phone call from the woman with the loud, annoying voice who has news of “high importance” about my credit card account, or sometimes it’s a call about my debt, of which I have none, or my car, ditto; I also got a call from a smart and artistic acquaintance here in S.F. Her message was cut off at one minute, because that’s what my machine does.

There is a way to make it record up to a five-minute message, but when I put the instructions in my outgoing message, certain parties complain that it’s too complicated; plus, if a power outage causes me to have to redo my announcement, then I have to go look up the instructions myself, because that is the kind of thing I absolutely can't remember, and then the whole thing gets to be a lot of work.

I thought I might call my acquaintance back, but then I thought maybe I’d make a note about my answering machine, since that is exactly the kind of exciting news I like to include in my blog, and so now I’m doing this instead of calling S. back, and that’s another reason my life is somewhat free of anecdotes. Also, I’ve sworn off screaming at motorists, causing yet another reduction in little stories.

Oh, well, here’s a story. I was going to say that, now that I take the lane, I have very few near misses—very few occasions of motorists passing me too closely—and so there’s not really much to yell about, but the other day, a lady (?) in the passenger seat of a van yelled, as they passed me, in a voice that would peel paint off a wall, and at the top of her lungs, “Hey! The road isn’t just for you! It’s not just for bicycles!” It was rather jarring.

Then they had to stop right away at a red light, and since they were now in front of me, I stopped behind them, like the polite user of the public roadways that I am, and she craned her neck to look at me from her window, perhaps wondering, “Why does that cyclist still exist? Didn’t she hear me?” But she said nothing further.

Then I came inside and ate a whole bag of Ruffles, but I might have done that anyway, as I find that is a pleasant thing to do after a day in the cubicle. (A cartoon in the latest New Yorker shows a bank of cubicles and their dwellers. A lone man is sitting on the ground at some remove, and his colleagues are saying, “We’ve got to try to coax him back into his enclosure.” The cartoon is by “Gotham” or “Flotsam” or “Floxam” or “Jetson.” Can’t quite make it out.)

Now, why did I not scream at that yelling van woman? For one thing, she seemed so enraged that she might have hopped out and punched me if I’d given her a piece of my mind or attempted to “educate” her. But mainly, there wasn’t really anything to yell about, as I still had all my parts and fluids in their customary relation to one another.

I had taken the lane, ergo the driver of the van had seen me and gone around, ergo I was safe and sound. Also ergo there was some yelling, but that really is very unusual. Possibly, in fact, this woman had just arrived from some city where she does not see a cyclist every two seconds, as she will here, many of whom will be smack in the center of the lane, which is where a cyclist should be if the lane is less than 14 feet wide, excluding parked cars.

Most workday evenings, I make my way to Fifth and Market, and there I pull in front of the cars waiting at the red light westbound on Market, which I’ve decided is the best of the various alternatives—certainly better than what I used to do until David C. heard about it and gave me a stern lecture. I was actually doing many wrong and unsafe things, of which that was the worst. David C. cured me of that one, and the bike safety skills class cured me of nearly all the rest.

So I customarily pull in front of the cars and, like magic, within seconds, another cyclist joins me, and another, and another, and when the light turns green, we all go together. After the van lady sees something like this a hundred times, which in San Francisco will take about two days, maybe she’ll get the idea, or maybe not. But as long as she goes around cyclists rather than over them, that’s probably good enough.