This Is Getting To Be a Habit

Plot is flying down to The City That Used to Be Mannywood for two more days' work on Perfect Pitch, and he's feeling pretty good that he appears basically un-marred after yesterday's bike incident.

This makes three crashes in the last three or four years, after none for the first dozen years riding around up here. There is a trend and Plotnik doesn't like it.

Here's how it went down yesterday. Ducknik was at class. Plot got hungry at lunchtime and there was less than nothing in the house. The other day he printed out groupons for this Cajun place in the Mission, and for some reason he accessed that place on Google, only to find notices of a Gumbo Lunch Truck, with rave reviews, that is always parked on the corner of 19th and Dolores near Dolores Park.

Aha! said Plottie, gumbo for lunch! He threw on his helmet, thank the Lord, and the Peruvian thick alpaca sweater that has become his bike-in-chilly-weather overshirt, thank the Lord, and down 26th of October Street he took off.

He got through the traffic light at 30th and Dolores, but there was a big SUV parked so far out into the street that Plottie could not fit between him and the trolley tracks. Probably what happened is he wasn't careful enough to cross those tracks at a complete perpendicular, and he was probably going too fast, and his front tire got caught in the track. In a split second, the bike spun hard right as he wrestled it out of the track, and then smashed hard into the side of that SUV. He remembers how loud that was, and that louder still was the sound of him being thrown off his bike onto the pavement right on top of his head -- which is why we say Amen, again, children, for that helmet.

It was loud, and scary. He got up off the street, grabbed his bike, that had the front wheel mangled, and got up to the sidewalk, where somebody called from across the street: "You OK?" and Plotnik answered "Yeah, I think so, but I don't know why."

He saw some blood on his sweater and it was an abrasion on his arm where he must have fended off the side view mirror, but to his surprise he seemed able to walk without anything really hurting.

So he walked the bike back home and up the hill, soaked his arm in some astringent and hydrogen peroxide, took a couple Advils and waited for the other stuff to present itself.

Sure enough, this morning his right knee is pretty sore, so he must have banged or wrenched that too, and he didn't sleep too well because he kept seeing and hearing himself smashing into that car, but as these things can sometimes go -- little damage.

He remembers Dance-Nik asking him how many times he was going to do this before he stopped riding in the streets, and that was one or two accidents ago.

He knows traffic had little to do with this, but on the other hand what if the J-Church had been coming down those tracks too? He knows he was stupid when he crashed coming down the hill at home that time, and he knows he was REALLY stupid when he tried to change directions IN TRAFFIC on Lenox Avenue in Harlem earlier this year, and he is coming to the conclusion that he might have been stupid yesterday too, going too fast maybe, not looking at the track carefully enough maybe.

We get older, don't we. Our reactions are not what they were. Fortunately, our bodies appear to be resilient still, but how long does this last?