They think they’re so clever, in their air conditioned helmets and shiny shades. They think they’re so sexy, in their thin black click-click shoes and ridiculous spandex. They think they’ve figured it all out, clogging up lanes during the morning commute in their cacophonous colors and five thousand dollar graphite twenty-speed racers, looking down their sunblocked white noses at those good people who still have the gall to drive cars to work. They think they’ve earned special rights, with their pack mentality, collectively flipping their leather-gloved middle fingers and flipping out in rage when anyone tries to get around them, when anyone honks their horns at them, when anything with four wheels gets within an inch of their nylon-sheathed sacks of irrelevance. They think they’ve bought the influence and power needed to change the rules of the road to suit their leisure, to suit their pleasures, to suit their personal successes, to suit their delusions that they alone are saving the planet we all inhabit; the planet they suddenly call their mother; the planet they raped in order to gain those successes; the planet they spent their youths plundering and pillaging like ravenous raiders.
But look deep into their garages and you’ll find their hidden Escalades and Range Rovers dripping oil on the concrete, engines still warm from their latest trip to Restoration Hardware. Look deep into their eyes when there’s a tangle over a space at the Whole Foods parking lot and you’ll find a savage with manicured claws sharpened and ready for battle. Look deep into their souls and you’ll hear the adrenalized “I Me Mine I Me Mine I Me Mine” chants driven into their voracious hearts by their personal hot yoga trainers each morning before they start their ride.
And you may ask Why? Why do I rage when they’re just trying to stay healthy? Why do I rage when they’re advocating pedal power over fossil fuels. Why do I rage when they’re simply reaping the reward of their hard work? Why?
Because they co-opted the narrow and bumpy roads of my adventurous youth, then straightened and sold them for a profit to the highest bidders, that’s why. Because they appropriated the sleepy festering coffeehouses I used to haunt and replaced them with buttoned up business models, uniform funky-esque versions of what was already there, that’s why. Because they filched the dodgy blocks and skanky streets I used to stomp and struggle in and turned them into sanitized facades, the moneyed developers and their marketers and their bankers and their physicians and their lawyers; cleaned of all original innocent sin and cleverly repackaged and sold back to moneyed young lemmings as Hoods with a capital H and Dive Bars with capital D’s and B’s and Burger Joints with capital capital capital. That is why! I was there first. I was there before they figured it out. I was there before them. I was there.
Where sidewalks on Main Street south of Ocean Park were broken, battered and quiet before the cranes and concrete churning trucks came to steamroll away the skank, I was there.
Where rude and rickety bars stayed open and served drunks from ten on a Wednesday morning till past two on a Thursday, before being roped off in purple velvet and painted to look like dolled up and doormanned versions of their original selves, I was there.
Where ramshackle all-night diners kept raging poets and raving punks fed and out of the rain during long lost nights of exploration, before being rudely razed and replaced by non-traditional office space for high tech brats chewing their Ritalin-infused gum and sitting in their un-cube-like cubes to create more and more diversionary games to market and inflict on the ever-increasing sleepwalking electorate, I was there too.
I have seen the greatest neighborhoods of my generation taken over by babies of war heroes who grew up with silver spoons up their noses; taken over by boomers whose rage hit a national nerve, then got paid by their oppressors to create and sell nerve numbing antidotes to that very rage; taken over by irony and cynicism of the bike riders, sold to the bike riders, for the benefit of the bike riders.