A Bike’s First Gear

I ride my bike almost everytime to school. To go buy groceries at the nearest market. To pay bills at the nearest convenient store. To banks. To post office. Everywhere.

But I never use my bike’s first gear. I mean, why anyone would want to look like a fool, pedalling like crazy just to get a speed slightly better than the slowest Malaysian government worker? That is something that a hyperactive girl with hair under her nose would do. She’s so hyperactive; her hormones were jumping around like a kid who got a new trampoline for birthday. Well, that arrogance can only be applied when the pavement is not thick with snow. Very thick snow.

Now it’s snowing like crazy outside and it would be exhaustingly impossible to ride a bike with a gear higher than 2. If anyone would ride his/her bike using the highest gear (6 maybe 7) for 30 minutes everyday for a month, that stupid bastard would probably get paralysed from the waist below; or get really muscled-up legs, he/she could enter the special Olympics (because obviously he/she is retarded), and won a silver medal or two.

It’s very important to use low gear because the road is very slippery and the resistance of raw snow is HUGE. Well, maybe not as bad as riding a bike in a sand desert but it’s still huge anyways.

Talking about bicycles, I like the one that I own now. I know it’s not a top notch, titanium steel bike with absorbers and custom made seat and handles plus all that useless but expensive accessories – kind of a bike; and I can’t pick up girls with it ‘coz it doesn’t have awesome surround sound speakers with a centralized subwoofer system and a little bling2 here and there, maybe a couple of LCDs thrown in just to make you look like a rich idiot bastard because everybody knows you can’t watch that while you’re driving you dumb fuck – kind of a bike. I know it’s not even above average; but it’s a sturdy one and gets the job done. It has a basket in front; so very awesome.

I like to think my bike as a 45 years old girlfriend that I don’t have: looks old, doesn’t have a body as tight as a fox, and not very pretty; but strong, sturdy and reliable. The most high-tech feature that my bike has is the photo-sensitive head lights: it turns on automatically when it’s dark, kicking start the kinetic energy to heat energy – mechanism to produce light. That’s ancient tech right there. Note: you will get arrested if you don’t turn your lights on when riding a bike at night here in Japan.

While writing this, I have thought about writing my bike a poem, and it goes like this:

Me and my bike,

We always go tight,

Even during the night,

And I don’t give a shite,

If someone would laugh at me because I ride such a shitty bike.