la bicyclette from William Riley on Vimeo.
Dead Baby Downhill
When a friend first told me about this race my initial thought was "what a creatively insensitive title for a pro-choice rally" luckily for me I was wrong, goodness gracious was I wrong. The event was actually a critical mass styled bike race. The mayhem commenced on Capitol Hill with a finish line waiting in Georgetown. The six mile downhill tour was my exhilarating, chaotic, empowering and heart pounding first race experience. Mutant bikes, fixies, tall bikes, BMX, and every other conceivable label bike were present and huddled together outside the Canterbury Tavern for the 7 o'clock starting bullet. The bike extravagances; toys and paraphernalia were only surpassed by the owner's garb and athleticism.
Bikers of every political and cultural persuasion waited with expectation; Hip cats, Hipsters, Gutter Punks, Rockabillys, Ray Band Punks, Plaid Flannel-Wearing Side Backpack Bikers, Scenester Punks and countless sects of chic-indi-grunge twenty somethings. Tattooed, pierced and yoga limber, they gathered outside the Canterbury Tavern in their biking best. Each Seattle subversive pop culture well represented.
As we went flying through red lights while screaming back at honking cars, we felt genuine pity for the white collared stiffs behind their steering wheels. We were entirely self righteous, in our prime, and euphoric. We were a giant self propelled unit representing nothing and everything.
If you were on the streets today and powered by petrol instead of your own taut muscle, than you are the enemy. You are a gear in the evil mechanism. You are the bourgeois who wears alligator skin boots and drinks unicorn blood, and (although we drove our beat up Volvos to get to the race) you will be defeated by a mob of spinning wheels and mindless grins. We are an energy vortex, gorgeous and in bloom. With our ripe tense bodies pushing forward, we are one pulsing, churning entity. We are alive.
Before, during and after the race, we all share a vicarious pleasure. It seeps into our blood and pumps through our furiously surging hearts. We share a mutual understanding. Although we will never know for certain if our demonstration will make any impact, and although we are each just one person individually, this doesn't matter in the least. We are trying, we gathered today, and we biked there.
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