Instead all I got is a bruised chest, and not even bad enough to hurt when I laugh. It will stick with me for about a week, but that will have to be good enough. It didn’t even come from the car wreck i narrowly avoided, it came from going over the bars on 24th St. It was a sloppy trip down – i got all the hard stuff and was taking drop after drop with skill and technique, but it was ugly. Not fearful or out of control — just prior i rolled The Spine without either much forethought, or grace — just enough off to go from pretty good to pretty ugly pretty quick. The wheel got stuck in a relatively easy spot, i endoed, and the bike came down on my head. The memory and blow to my confidence is worse than the bruised chest.
The ride was going well enough, after another willful effort to get out onto Somo by 3pm. My climbing was tired but effective, and I got all but the very last tiny lift out of the Upper Waterfall. Just when I headed down, I ran into Landon and talked him into joining me for the return trip. It was a hoot following him over jumps I did not know existed on National, and humbling watching him pull away on 24th on his 4inch bike with no armor.
I had a lot on my mind all day.
I had to remove my plate holder on the Acura, which after 3.5 yrs is “suddenly” illegal in AZ because it obscures a portion of my plate. The justification is that the state of origin is potentially undeterminable, due in large part to AZ having about 50 specialty plates. Nice – the state gets their money for your custom plates, and money for it being hard to know where your custom plates are from. Though my default plate design with a frame saying “Acura of Tempe” is ambiguous only if you are retarded. My suspicion is the change is driven by our newly-fascist state’s love-affair with traffic cameras. This has been a subject I have gone back and forth on over the last few weeks. On paper, its a good solution. On paper, people go too fast. And on paper, people have slowed down.
People also clog more, and slam on their brakes for no good reason. And people get flashed as a means of revenue generation, for lawmakers who don’t have the balls to raise taxes but have the cowardice to sign contracts with private companies who have made our local government For Profit. Enforcement is discriminatory, your registration as private\corporate and in-state\out determining if the evidence is useful or if a process server will be hired. Big Brother has gotten bigger. Someone poo-pooed my anger when there is a Patriot Act to rail against, but I wonder if one person losing their habeas corpus is worth the gradual erosion of the freedoms of 5 million of us. Would there even be a Patriot Act if people haven’t come to accept traffic cameras? All politics is local.
The breaking point for me has become that, technically, my bike rack obscures my plate and can now get me pulled. This is not new, but in the current climate is suddenly more damning. While it is not a criminal violation, the idea that I have a big open window of reasonable suspicion to get pulled is very very unsettling. Made more ridiculous by my having (knock on wood) never been pulled in 3.5 years and 44k in the Acura, 10k of it with the bike rack. Clearly I am doing nothing wrong and no one cares, why should it be a illegal?
Several people who work in law enforcement posted on MTBR to the effect that you are extremely unlikely to get pulled by a cop for this unless you are doing something to draw negative attention to yourself, and even more unlikely to be cited unless you are being a jackass to the officer. All of which makes me hate the blanket enforcement of the traffic cameras even more. Most cops have better things to do and proper discretion to do it with.
The effect of all this drama, and my effort to get home from Somo quickly so Beckie could have a night out with her friends, was I was driving with maybe just a small chip on my shoulder, maybe just a bit too aggressively, maybe just a little faded from sitting for 30 minutes after hopping off the mountain and off a crash…I pushed a yellow light to turn left, doing the speed limit but not much slowing down, and someone coming the other way doing about the same. I really never saw him, maybe he sped up to make the light, it really doesn’t matter…i am not letting myself off the hook…he was mostly doing the same too-aggressive move as me. At least we both hit our brakes in time with only minor fishtailing the result.
It didn’t leave me with the crashing wave of adrenaline. I didn’t hug G any longer than normal after I picked her up. Maybe staring down crashes on my bike has helped put it in context. As typical for me, I over-analyzed it, tenacious to extract from it the kernel of wisdom that may next time save my life. Just like my endo, just a little bit off. I’m not making light of this, but I won’t overreact.
Later at the park, G rolled her tricycle down a small incline. She put down her feet, at first I thought out of panic and just when I thought she would spill, she came to a stop. Taught herself how to brake, G did. It was a good lesson for her to teach me, since all I have is this bruise on the chest. I can pretend it came from slamming into the steering wheel.
