Yesterday I biked home in the pouring rain and yeah, it was pretty miserable. My bags got soaked and I got soaked. On the bright side, since mother Nature decided to provide me with a shower I didn't need to take one when I got home. Three cheers for water conservation.

Since my Idiot Epiphany about filling my tires my brakes have been making attractive farting noises when the contact pads hit the tires. In practice it's as effective as having a bell because people definitely notice you when you sound like a horde of bean-eating elephants. The rain did much to silence this unpleasant noise but also made my brakes fairly ineffective, causing me to skid 10 feet past any intended breaking point until I adjusted.

I'm sure my rainy day ride home would have been way, way more awesome if I could do what this kid does at minute 2:45 of this video:


I love my job. from Edward LAforte on Vimeo.

He's like the silver surfer of urban biking. Tres awesome.

Lastly, as long as I'm on the subject of biking, meet my new crush, the 2009 Schwinn Madison. Isn't she pretty? I'm going to Frank's Bike Shop after work to try her out. So. Excited.

Just when I feel I have arrived at a place of knowledge, life has a way of bitch-slapping me in the face. This weekend and today I received some mixed blessing with regards to my budding career as a bike commuter (can a mode of transportation to your job be called a "career"? No, let's not quibble). These past two weeks it seemed as though biking was getting more and more difficult. My legs were dying on the hills and my lungs were working at full capacity. It was miserable. I was pretty sure that either myself or my bike were falling apart.

So this weekend I complained about this seeming entropy to my friend who had come over to watch the debate. Walking over to my bike he took one long and considering look at it and then reached down and squeezed my tire (that sounds suggestive, doesn't it?), condensing it to half its desired width. My tires were flat. Two weeks of long and horrendous effort accounted for by the stupidest oversight on my part.

To further my humiliation, today I took my bike into a repair shop at lunch to have the gears looked at because they kept slipping and the guy took one look at it, tightened a screw, and pronounced it fixed. He didn't even charge me.

I guess I should be grateful that my obstacles could be overcome with so little expense and effort but mostly I just feel embarrassed and silly. Will I always be a dilettante? Perhaps, perhaps.

On the comic front I inked three comics and some random drawings to go on the website yesterday. I think we're still on track to launch in January although I should probably sit down and make a schedule rather then measuring my progress by the thickness of the paper piled on my desk and the volume of used tea bags in my trashcan.

Also, a little pick-me-up for those of you interested in the climate change issue.

For awhile I thought it could only be in my head but recent events have lead me to conclude that it is in fact more dangerous to bike in the bike lane then just to bike on the road.

"Why?" I can hear you asking, because you are dying to taste the fruits of my experience, "What leads you to that strange and ironic deduction?" Well, my intensely interested friends, this is why:

1. Bike lanes are located to the extreme left of roads, which places them dead in the way of drivers making left-hand turns. Which means that several times during my commute every day I have drivers with more lead in their feet then brains turning across the lane in front of me causing me to swerve into traffic to avoid them or screech to a halt. Or they honk at me because I am blocking their turn, which is also charming.

2. Although bikes lanes are called "bike lanes" and have little pictures of stick figures on bikes on them they are also popular locations for double-parked cars, pedicabs, taxis trying to pass slower cars and pedestrians who think they're too good to share the sidewalk with the common folk. Construction crews and cops are also big fans of blocking bike lanes, meaning I spend almost as much time swerving around obstructions as I do actually riding in the lane. People just don't get that bike lanes are for bikes, no matter how loud I scream it at them.

3. Bike lanes seem to encourage stupid behavior by people on bikes. Most notably, biking in the wrong direction. To even the most ignorant biker biking against traffic on an avenue would seem suicidal but the presence of a bike lane seems to make some bikers feel that this is an acceptable practice. Having nearly collided with several of these misguided souls I would like to assure them it is not.

And that's really it. Having suddenly come to this conclusion on my ride home yesterday during rush hour I switched from biking in the bike lane around midtown on 6th avenue to swerving in-between cars in the middle lanes and you know what? I felt safer. Also, it was a lot more fun. Besides, bikes should assert their presence on the roads! We have all the legal rights of cars... only we also get to run red lights. Cheers!

The gridlock today was some of the worse I've ever biked through. Cars were nudging each other's bumpers, horns were honking, cabbies were cutting into turning lanes &c. I spent the forties and fifties weaving in between cars, shifting from the right to the left side of the road and back looking for openings to slip through, ducking under car mirrors and shouting down errant pedestrians.

Somewhere in the midst of all this—between squeezing through two vans so close I had to suck in my breath and shaving front bumpers with my back tire as I cut across lanes—I realized I was having fun. A lot of fun. I wasn't thinking about how much my legs hurt (and they do, all the time), or whether biking was some sort of death wish on my part (probably), I was riding with total concentration and efficiency. I felt like a cowboy steering my mount nimbly among a herd of long-horn cattle, only at the time it wasn't cheesy—it was terribly exciting.

And then on the bridge I passed two other bikers. Which almost never happens, because I am very very slow, though in conversation I like to blame my slowness on my shitty second-hand department-store-brand mountain bike. But I passed two bikers, both female, both on road bikes. One of them was even wearing bike pants, which means extra points for me.

It feels good.

I just realized I didn't have my helmet where I usually keep it behind my desk. Then with dawning horror I remembered I'd put it on the newsstand next to where I lock my bike in the morning. When I ran outside it was still there.

I'm going to go buy a lottery ticket STAT.

A Natural History museum in Basel, Switzerland is having an exhibit of cartoon skeletons. I'm not sure what kind of "science" this is teaching little kids, or what horrible nightmares they're going to have, but I think it's pretty sweet. I like the ones of the Huey, Dewey and Louie the best.

Also, a found another new webcomic, The Everyday. It's by a Britisher (+2 points) and has a nice slice-of-life thing about it that I find very inspiring. That brings my webcomic list up to roughly 25 more-or-less regularly updating comics. Plus about ten that I've bookmarked and either haven't gotten caught up or committed to following regularly. I like to think of these as motivational reading for my own work but in practice it just makes the time pass.

I'm almost done with season 2 of Buffy. After Firefly I decided to take the plunge which has been good for my nerd cred but but bad for my health. I wish I could watch shows in little bit-size pieces instead of marathon sittings. Ah well.

In other news, a bee flew into my mouth today while biking to work. I could feel it buzz against my teeth, and it stung my lip. I spit it out, but it was not a propitious start to the week. You should have seen the bee though. That sucker got schooled.

Why have I started updating again? Hm. I am a mystery to myself.