I love you, bike

I left the apartment yesterday with no real goals for the day. Rachel’s birthday celebration at Habana Outpost, drinking margaritas and possibly getting dinner in Brooklyn. And then somewhere in the middle of all of that, something wonderful happened.

Skinner: Jeff and I want to ride to Coney Island after we leave here.
Me: I want to go, I wish I had a bike.
Jeff: Target’s 2 blocks away.

We went, we bought (I bought), we rode. I’ve been meaning to get one for a while but it never happened because I didn’t want to spend the money on it (I say that’s because I live in New York and my landlord and the city suck the money from my bank account before I ever see it, but that can’t be the case because I somehow find a way to pay for vacations and clothes and drinks. What I’m getting at is, you probably shouldn’t believe things that I say) and also because I have no place to put it. I still don’t have a place to put it, but that’s not going to change until I move into that 2.1 million dollar brownstone I've had my eye on.

Last summer there was no incentive to buy one because Jeff Allen was out of town for 2 months and I rode his bike for free and didn’t have to carry the damn thing around. It was all going fine until one day in September, riding through Brooklyn with Ryan and Tony. I had a great time that day, but my knee would argue that Jeff Allen's BMX and the sand near the curb sabotaged a nearly injury-free ride. At a stoplight somewhere in Fort Greene, my back tire hit some sand, skidded out from under me and I ate shit in front of 4 or 5 cars stopped at the red light. I think it probably looked cool, though. Plus, I got to ride the rest of the day with a bloody gash on my knee, and I know that looked cool. And then Jeff Allen came back to the city and I was again, bikeless.

Well not anymore. The Schwinn’s first ride was a good one.



The course outlined on this map is completely inaccurate, as I have no idea what streets we took because I have no sense of direction whatsoever and had I been leading, my attempts to navigate around Bed Stuy would have certainly failed and we’d all be dead now, but you get the idea. It’s far. We rode from Fort Greene to Coney Island, ate Nathan’s, rode the Cyclone, had a beer at Beer Island (that’s what it’s called, I didn’t make that up) and made it back to their apartment uninjured. Point me.