This video of a bicycle drag race through Manhattan is how I used to bicycle to work most every day.

I went over the 59th St. bridge and then down south to Greenwich Village and Morton St. via whatever route suited me at the time. A lot of the time I’d use a messenger as a kind of point man and take up a position a few feet behind him letting him have the privilege of being run over by the speeding taxi.

How I miss zooming through traffic! It was what life was all about, man. Being in that zone where you feel the traffic around you and don’t even bother checking to see if that cab is going to turn, you know it won’t, and you make the move to cut between moving cars at 20 mph, end up in the middle of 3rd Ave and then make a hard right through two lanes to get onto 14th St.

Oh yeah…that was great. Nothing like it in Tucson. The best I could do here is speed past an old lady in a Lincoln Town Car and hope that the college kids don’t walk out into traffic while they’re on the phone. That sure is exciting!

Although, I do have to admit that after I saw that video a few days ago I was inspired to bicycle home from Epic Cafe like I used to when I left work at the ad agency at 10 PM to bicycle to my hovel of an apartment in Queens. The fun I had cutting a cop off, running a red light, and zooming close to pedestrians (an inch or so) on University Ave is hard to describe.

Being on a bicycle in those moments is about the only time I’m actually in rhythm with the universe and that is wonderful and exhilarating and I miss it so much right now. Fuck! Why did I have to let myself get poor in this dessicated land? That sure was a bad choice.