biking on the brooklyn bridge

Biking over the bike lane of the Brooklyn Bridge is ridiculously therapeutic. There is a line that divides the bridge into a pedestrian lane and a bike lane. This wouldn't matter much except that pedestrians frequently wander into the bike lane, which is great, because a person wrongfully crossing a line is like the original wrong. It's a metaphorical bonanza; it's a line in the sand; it's a wall of toys in a ferociously divided childhood bedroom. It arms you with an uncommon and pretty insane feeling of righteousness. It's the province of fanatics, of people who kill people, of people dangerously alive. It also feels fantastic. I feel that manic, glorious certitude when pedestrians cross the line.

When I started biking over the bridge I'd say "excuse me, sorry" when I came up behind pedestrians. It was no good; it was too long; it failed to express how bovine they are. I tripped over the awkward down-up transition from the "eh" to the "kskew" sound. I eventually settled on barking "heads up!" until one day this guy shot past me on toward a crowd of line-crossers squawking WWAAAYYYY DOOOO WWWWAYYY DOOO like a tropical bird car alarm, and he was so right. Words neuter animal passion. 

None of this would work if I wasn't moving quickly, too quickly for people to catch up. Squawking like a tropical bird car alarm in and of itself is embarrassing. Stopping to berate tourists adorably happy to take photos (in which I fantasize about getting my blurred screaming hawk face) on the Brooklyn Bridge for their obliviousness would be evil, but when you're blowing past they're too slow-moving, dopey, and faceless to be anything other than a potential collision.

You're your own river on the bike on the bridge; it's all that Siddartha "everything changes everything is the same everything is one" shit when you blaze past. The freedom corresponds to the transience. I used to think and hate that there was no place no one could hear me scream in New York, and there isn't. But on the bike you kind of can. The air is always fresh when you make your own wind.