you're friggin weird for reading this

Sometimes I wonder if I’m not a little weird. Although sometimes I suspect that those who know me wonder this quite frequently, but for me it really takes something special to give rise to the feeling.

Witness: my ride to work. As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who rides a BMX and not some futuristic 35-speed or something, doesn’t have weird, tight, lycra biking pants, doesn’t wear a helmet, and doesn’t have an annoying array of blinking lights situated about my person. As for the first concern, I’m looking into getting a road bike. They’re not free, though, and for the time being my BMX does just fine moving me from point A to point B in a reasonably timely fashion. As for the biking pants, are these people aware how they look? Everybody else on the trail besides me seems to be wearing a pair, they really can’t plead ignorance. As for the helmet, I have to ride four blocks from my house to the trail, and then about five from the trail to my work. The other 90 or so percent of the ride is spent on a bike trail, at its closest about 250 feet removed from any roadway with any traffic worth considering, and I’ve gone ahead and made the executive decision to jettison any concern over the risk of anything catastrophic happening to me on a completely flat, typically empty, extremely well maintained bike path. The odds of me just suddenly falling over while pedaling in a straight line just doesn’t warrant the investment in a stupid-looking piece of headgear. Ditto for the lights, plus jesus is it annoying to ride into one of those flashing monsters at 7 in the morning. I might buy one just so I can flash back at those jerks.

So anyway this somehow makes me unique, even “weird” perhaps. Personally I’m not buying. I personally think it’s much more odd to be terrified of head injury on a flat, straight bike path. I think it’s odd I’m the only person who might be concerned about the eyes of other oncoming bikers. And those pants. I am not, nor will I ever be, weird for choosing to wear regular slacks, no matter how unpopular a decision it might appear to be on my bike path.

But that’s it. That’s all. This is one of my few moments of doubt, my moments where I wonder if I am somehow beyond the norm, but really, we all see the evidence here, and I think we all know the proper conclusion to make. Those pants are weird, not me.