I Fell From Grace

I fell off my bike on Sunday. I didn’t crash it, I didn’t come off it while pulling some mean skids, I fell off it. Or to be more precise, while waiting at the lights of a very busy K road intersection, my bike and I together fell over while practically stationary. If the immediate moments just prior to my falling off were to receive an award, it would be for ‘Situation-Most-Likely-To-Not-End-In-An-Embarrassing-Fall’. And it would come with an enormous trophy, the top of which would be adorned with a tiny little brass figurine of me looking like a complete fuckwit.

It was pretty spectacular.

But to fully appreciate the fuckwittedness of this event, you must first appreciate how ridiculous my bicycle is. I ride a fixie. A fixie has one gear and no freewheel, which means the pedals are fixed to the back wheel. If the wheel is moving, your pedals are moving. If this sounds odd, it’s because it is. But this setup offers a very different riding experience compared to traditional bicycles. You’re much more engaged with the bike, more in control. It’s both hard to explain and ride, but once you get used to it you never want to ride anything else ever again.

I really wish I could tell you that I got my fixie for these same purist reasons that I’ve stated above (and can often be heard spouting to people when they say things like “But aren’t gears important?”) but I didn’t. I got a fixie because they look cool and they’re fucking fashionable.

That’s right, like many other moments in history, young people want to look cool and ride bikes again, and I think it took a gang of 50-year-old men panting and sweating outside Santos with their $5000 carbon-fibre bicycles and their spandex clad junk hanging out while saying things like “Cycling is the new golf” to make young people want to take cycling back. And fair enough too, people shouldn’t have to dress like a senator from Krypton to get on a bike and ride to the shops.

And so, we’re finally seeing the beginnings of an urban bicycle culture in Auckland, one where people are riding to have fun. It’s almost a movement… almost. It could graduate to a movement, but at the moment it’s still a ‘scene’. And the fixie rider is the poster child for this ‘scene’.

Now, I get this. I feel it when I ride my bike. The absence of a jockey wheel on my rear hub makes me feel smug, and when those in the know clock me on my bike, I know that they know that I look cool and have a fashionable bike, and this fills me with confidence.

So you can imagine what a fucking spectacle it was when I came off my bike at the lights last Sunday.

I think I can pretty safely sum up the feelings of every person waiting at the intersection of K road and Symonds street that evening with the phrase ‘What. A. Dick.’

I’m not even really sure how it happened. I was just a guy on a very eye-catching orange and green bicycle at the front of the lights, next thing I know, I’m lying in a small forest of road cones having just fallen on the steel tow bar of a road-workers generator. A poster child I am not. I perhaps could have saved some semblance of coolness had I immediately stood up, smiled and bowed to the waiting traffic. But it was too late for that, I was already grimacing with pain having landed squarely on my right butt cheek. And let me tell you, no one takes pity on you when you hurt your butt cheek. I know this because as I lay there on the corner, half on the road, half on this generator, I could hear my wife on the bike behind me laughing hysterically. It was quite a sound she made. A mixture of pure hilarity and spousal concern, with just a touch of ‘What. A. Dick’

Like I said, It was pretty spectacular. Almost as spectacular as the bruise I now have on my butt. It’s not your standard yellowy-brown bruise, it’s kind of speckled like a far away galaxy, like a cosmos of burst blood vessels and shame. But if there’s one positive I can take from this, it’s that I’ve finally found a reason to post a picture of my butt on the internet.