I’ve been riding Bike 2.0 around a lot – partly to break it in, and partly because of an ear infection that’s keeping me out of the pool until after Thanksgiving.

Since I ride on the Pacific Coast Highway and through Westwood Village quite a bit, I see a lot of really stupid driver behavior when it comes to dealing with bicyclists.

Mostly it’s obvious stuff like failing to check a frakkin’ bike lane for oncoming bikes before opening car doors into them, or weaving all over the place when there are a) bikers everywhere and b) tons of “SHARE THE ROAD” signs indicating that even if you don’t see them now, there are lots of bikers who use this road.

Once in a while, something will stand out as particularly stupid. Monday, I thought it was going to be the woman who looked me straight in the eye as she opened her car door right into my path. But no, I found a much, much greater stupidity.

I was coming up PCH right around here, headed back towards the Santa Monica pier to go home. There was a homeless guy pushing about four shopping carts up the shoulder. He was walking against traffic, which basically meant right at me.

The shoulder at this point is not wide enough to accommodate parked cars, me on my bike, and a homeless guy pushing four shopping carts, so I looked over my shoulder to see oncoming traffic in the lane I would have to briefly pull into. There was one car, but after that, my lane was clear.

I made a hand signal as I approached the homeless guy, pulled very slightly into the lane, and then WHOOSH. A mid ’90s beater of a Ford Taurus that had apparently been in the other lane comes flying by me, missing me by about a foot.

That’s pretty damn stupid on its own, but here’s the really stupid part: This car’s passenger door swings WIDE open. If it had come open about a second earlier, it would easily have knocked me off my bike and probably injured me fairly seriously.

The door just swung there in the breeze for about ten seconds, an empty garbage bag fluttering in the breeze from the passenger seat, and then a hand from the passenger seat nonchalantly reached over and pulled it shut as the car zipped along at 50mph, like this shit happens all the time.

I really couldn’t think of anything to do but just shout at the car, “ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!” at the top of my lungs, and then start laughing.

I mean really, if the door had hit me the chances that a) they would have even stopped or b) they would have had insurance if they had stopped were pretty  low. If you can’t even get your car fixed so your door doesn’t swing open when you change lanes, odds are you’re too broke to buy insurance.

And the only reason I was anywhere near that door was that some homeless dude decided it’d be a grand idea to push a bunch of shopping carts several miles up from the nearest store that actually HAS shopping carts.

The odds of those two bits of stupidity happening to converge at one specific point in time are minuscule, and I’m lucky that the even more minuscule chance that it would have wound up with my ass splattered all over the pavement (again) didn’t wind up happening.

But sometimes, you just have to laugh at how incredibly, dangerously, hilariously stupid people are.

July 29th, I bought a new bike. It took three months minus one day for it to get stolen.

I got home last night around 10pm, and as I have for the last three months (minus one day), I locked my bike to my roommate’s flat-tired, rusted-out bike, which is (well, was) locked to a giant concrete pillar.

This afternoon around 2 when I went to ride up to the pool, I walked into the garage to get my bike, and both bikes were gone. No clipped lock on the ground, just gone, like they’d never even been there.

I thought for a minute the landlord’s people, who have been on a “let’s clear unused things out!” spree lately might have gotten a little overly aggressive, but the landlord denied it and the handyman who happened to be at the building mentioned that he’d seen the garage door next to mine had been left open for an indeterminate amount of time when he came back from lunch.

Thanks, neighbors! How nice of you to allow thieves to come in and steal my three month old bike!

My lock was a crazy Kryptonite U-Lock, but that security fell apart a bit with my roommate’s combination lock with a wire that apparently was entirely vulnerable to bolt cutters. The thieves apparently decided they’d rather deal with the U-Lock back at their den*, and just took both bikes.

I’m pissed, but I’m not HULK SMASH pissed, like I thought I’d be when I plunked down a good chunk of change for the bike and wondered how I’d feel if it got stolen. My thoughts run more along the lines of, “Goddamn it bike thieves, I had better shit to do with my weekend” pissed.

I filed a police report, I called my renter’s insurance company and found that I am covered minus a fairly reasonable deductible, and then I thought, well, I guess I still ought to go work out. And I got on with my unexpectedly bus-intensive day.

If the bike had been a bit less associated with injury, I’d probably be angrier. This is the same bike I crashed a month after I got it, and one of the gears up and bit me on the leg a couple days ago as I was riding to the pool – I’m going to have a couple little gear-tooth-shaped holes in my leg for a while as a nice souvenir.

And I suppose that having owned bikes pretty much since I left for college in 1999, having this be the first time I’ve had one stolen is something of a minor miracle.

All in all, I’m irritated, but it could have been a lot worse. It’s not like the time tweakers broke the window on my car right after I moved into my old place, where the financial loss was a lot lower, but cleaning up the mess was WAY more of a pain in the ass.

The bike is just gone, along with a chunk of money for my deductible and a new lock. But life goes on.

* – UPDATE 10/30 – Actually, as my roommate discovered as she was walking to the bus to go to work Friday, they took both bikes to a nearby alley, tore her bike to shreds to get mine off of it, and still ran off with mine. No sign of the remnants of my lock, which means it’s apparently a pretty good lock if it stayed on while an entire bike was disassembled around it.

Also, my renter’s insurance company is awesome and has already initiated a direct deposit for the reimbursement, which means I went out and bought a new bike yesterday, which is exactly the same as my old bike except that for now, it remains unstolen. Hooray!

Sunday afternoon, I finished all my homework early. I wanted to have a nice long workout, and I debated going for a bike ride or going for a swim. It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a bike ride.

I should have gone for a swim.

About 32 miles into my ride, I was coming back towards the Marina near LAX, when a pair of tourists decided that they should cross the bike path in order to get down to the beach.

Bikers have the right of way on this path, but it’s not terribly well-marked so you get a lot of idiots meandering across it and causing all sorts of problems.

I saw them going at a speed that would cause me to run into them, so I rang my bell at them and then shouted when that didn’t seem to budge them. They sped up imperceptibly, causing me to have to swerve around them.

I swerved right onto what turned out to be more sand than I thought, and I lost traction completely. I was probably going about 15-16 miles an hour, and I ate it hard right onto the concrete bike path.

I was down for a few seconds after it happened, and several bystanders rushed over to ask if I was all right. I was definitely a little dazed, but I also definitely noticed that the idiot/asshole tourists just kept on walking towards the beach, not even caring that they made me crash.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it now with significantly more vehemence: Fucking tourists.

I was very, very glad I was wearing a helmet – my brain would have been splattered on the concrete if I hadn’t been. All in all, I’m pretty lucky – I could have done much more serious damage to my head and could have really fucked up my shoulder if I’d landed a little differently.

I’m still pretty banged up. Almost all my weight came down on my left arm and my left leg, causing some really awesome road rash on the former and since I carry my phone in my left front pocket, shattering my phone and leaving the biggest, nastiest bruise I’ve ever had (more on that later).

I wasn’t anywhere near a place where someone could come pick me up easily, and my bike was too jacked up to ride, so I started walking with the bike towards the Marina.

As I did, I figured out that although the screen was shattered and the LCD was shot, I could make phone calls using the voice command feature on my phone, and about 1/10 of the time manage to swipe frantically enough at the shattered glass to answer incoming calls.

After lots and lots of phone calls and about three miles of walking, I walked into an ER in Marina del Rey, where I was promptly informed there was a 6-8 hour wait.

Luckily, my friend Jessica, who is my new hero, called me back right then and after I was miraculously able to answer the phone, she offered to come rescue me and my bike, which was pretty much the best timing ever.

We took my bike home, making a pit stop at Carl’s Jr. on the way since I was ravenously hungry. I’d basically biked off about 2500 calories before I crashed, then walked for an hour after the crash.

We then went to UCLA medical center, where the wait was only 2.5 hours, which seemed so much more civilized. Gotta love the ER theory of relativity.

The ER docs determined that since I didn’t have a headache and that eating a Western Bacon Cheeseburger made me feel better and not worse, I didn’t need a CAT scan, and gave me a metric ton of antibiotic ointment for all my road rash.

Jessica dropped me off around 11:30, and I noticed just before I went to bed that where my phone had hit, the bruise hadn’t formed yet, but there was a big swollen lump about the size of a baseball. “That’s going to get ugly,” I thought.

It’s now a bruise the size of an appetizer plate, and about 15 different shades of purple. I do not bruise easily – a spot on my right leg where it’d hit the pedal hard enough to leave an outline of where it hit is barely discolored – so for me to have a bruise this gnarly is something of an accomplishment.

The bruise is still warm to the touch, which I suspect means it’s still not done forming. I put the over/under on how long it’s going to take to dissipate at 2 months, and so far, anyone who’s seen it in person has taken the over.

I managed to get the phone fixed for about $150 and was back up and running on Monday. If you’re in LA and you bust your iPhone, the guy at LAiPhoneRepair.com is the man.

The bike’s still at the shop – I was due for a warranty tune-up so that will probably take at least some of the sting out of it, but they’re going to have to clean about four tons of sand out of the chain, gears, and brakes, not to mention all the damage done to same by the actual crash. I’ll be stunned if I get out of that for under $200.

Plus my $100 ER copay plus whatever else UCLAMC decides to ding me for (I’m sure that big pile of what’s essentially Neosporin will wind up costing me about $45), plus having to buy a new helmet because they’re really only designed for one good hit, and the total cost of crashing my bike will come in somewhere between $300-500, probably.

I’m extremely glad this was more of a fiscal misadventure than a medical one, but still: Fucking tourists.

—–

Addendum: This is apparently Bad Bike week for everyone I know. I had two friends have bikes stolen (one off a second floor balcony, apparently by Spider-Man), I crashed, Lindsay crashed – Seriously, if you know me, lock your bike up tight and then stay the hell away from it.

I am (surprise!) really exhausted and overworked, but I wanted to say something more about Prop. 8 and the ongoing legal and PR battle over gay marriage in California.

The thing that offends me the most, absolutely the most, about the reaction to legal challenges to the validity of Proposition 8, is the reaction I heard from one member of the “Protect Marriage” group.

She argued on the news that the voters have spoken, and that the gays should respect “the will of the people.”

I just wanted to reach through the screen and give this woman a long lecture about the Tyranny of the Majority. And the Federalist papers. And the desire so clearly expressed by the founders of this country to bequeath to the generations a system that prevented a simple majority from abusing its power against a minority.

I wish I were rational enough about this to give an eloquent argument like that.

But all I truly want to say to her, reaching through the screen, is fuck you. FUCK. YOU. if you think just because a majority of people wish to strip me of my rights, I’m going to stop fighting for them. Fuck you if you think that’s what this country is about.

I’ll admit, I’ve never been sure that marriage is the most pressing right on the ever-vilified “Gay Agenda” for my people to hang their hat on at this very moment, particularly given that in many states you can still be fired or kicked out of housing for being gay, with absolutely no legal repercussions.

But to see a right, any right, stripped away is a nauseating, deeply angering feeling. To shake me out of my deeply ingrained aversion to and ambivalence towards politics that grew from 18 years of watching the same old shit get shoveled around in D.C., you really, truly have to piss me off.

And lady, you and your complete ignorance of the spirit of the American system have REALLY fucking pissed me off.

Update, Tuesday Noon: The LA Times has an article up on exactly the sort of folks like woman who made me so angry, although it does contain one truly awesome quote from somone who supports the No-On-8 protesters:

“To be honest, I don’t really understand the issue. If you’re a man and don’t believe in gay marriage, you shouldn’t marry a man.”

Right on.

Last night was like the end of a marathon. The elation and ecstatic reaction after Obama finally won the Presidency was surreal, like crossing the finish line first when you barely thought you had a chance.

And then, watching Prop 8 pass was like having someone walk up to that same theoretical marathoner and punching them in the face.

Really, California? One of the most liberal states in America can have idiot right-wingers get you so pants-pissingly scared that Teh Gayz r after ur Childrens! that we fucking passed a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to ban gay marriage?

I am still very, very happy about Obama. What I told people at work last night when 8 was looking iffy still stands: We had one chance, and one chance only, to elect Obama, and in terms of the good of the overall nation, that was more important.

It keeps the Supreme Court from going completely to the batshit crazies, it makes the world hate us less, and it gives people some fucking hope that for once, they have voted for a candidate who’s not simply the lesser of two evils.

That 8 passed sucks, there’s no dobut. But we, and by we I mean the Gays and everyone who thinks people deserve equal rights, are going re-fight this discriminatory horseshit at every fucking turn until it is OUT of the CA constitution.

Until then, I’m going to the gym to go take out my anger on an elliptical machine instead of the drywall in my apartment which I sorely, sorely want to put my fist through.

I had several people ask me why, instead of the pegleg, I didn’t just get a scooter.

These assholes are a big part of why not. The other part is I don’t think I could get one of those things up the stairs.

I see this idiot’s Hummer every day on the Fox Lot, and I got sorely tempted to post some pictures here but wasn’t sure whether that’d violate some sort of lot rule.

Thank you, Defamer, for posting that picture so I don’t have to.

Now I can focus on noting that this tool has that delightful slogan on the Yosemite Fund special plate. I can’t tell if he’s trying to be ironic or if he’s just that stupid.

This Onion article is hilarious from beginning to end, even more so because I just finally got rid of my Treo and got almost the exact same model of Blackberry mentioned:

New Mobile-Device Purchase Makes Asshole More Versatile

NEW YORK—The new BlackBerry 8703c has allowed total shithead Robert McClain to assign more work to his assistants while he is gambling in Atlantic City.

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For the record, I got the 8703e.