Because we refuse to accept the carbon mask we ride breathing your exhaust and we fall in love with you, you in the red Corollas. Your children sweat and whine out for a drive on the first Spring Sunday.
Your wife in the passenger seat, certain that you’ll be idling for half and hour, sports a sidewalk sale and debarks into the bike lane, where she is spared by my razor nerves and helicopter-responsiveness.
You parked idlers, packed-in passive car-goes, make way for the intrepid cyclist, denizen of Future Culture, who flies by on the inside grinning smugly while declaiming a logical Manifesto which is rigorous and definitive:
1. To introduce intelligence to the car question WE allot to bicycles the term “auto- mobile.” Physical culture reclaims its right to the prized adjectives of language, which has been rear-ended to prop up death-suckers. WE are under OUR power, arcing stealthily from light to light, humours on the rise. Abdominals defined and contrasted to the flab of car culture. To debase language further than the euphemism “automobile” would seem impossible….
2. Mercury dodges luminously, past volkswagen on the SR5, a skylarking thunderbird without atmosphere jetting and bouncing like a porsche bronco. We saab in memory of wagoneers riding pintos through Cherokee country under the aegis of Pontiac and WE all cry in accord: preclude to the infiniti MR2 gas-evaporation of the car culture!
3. A manifesto of concrete alternative which announces three bicycle lanes and one lane for buses, vans and trucks. The worst offenders against stoicism and bicycle safety will no longer exist. Police cars and taxis will be banned just because they ARE cares. The MTPD has lobbied us to accept prototype solar cruisers, delightful to sabotage with an umbrella. WE reject this proposal because it would supplant the sport of kinder, gentler BiCop-racing destined to become fashionable AND affordable under our regime.
4. Bicycles built for two or three will ensure healthy romance among young and old alike, alleviating the devastation of sperm counts caused by toxic car emissions. Maria’s back is sweaty and relaxed, without a helmet comes the daredevil wind-perfumed hair, her haunches drive me forward, pedaling to no avail, but WE move at last through space and time in unison.
5. On an average Toronto street, an average car produces 4,956.8 cubic decibels of enviro-persistent noise pollution. Those who do not relish the thought of compulsory walkmans declare war on the disquieting car and its fatty, dirty consumer cult. WE steal by, unencumbered, proclaiming and projecting the future of self-powered humanity!
6. In keeping with their pigfucker natures, drivers demand that not only WE tolerate their smog and noise, but also their dictatorial monopoly of prime urban space. As unoriginal imbeciles they can not even conceive of the choice between lush tree-lined boulevards and accessible parking. These automatons demand even more space to get in and out of their goal, their everything, their “to go” remaining imperiously unaware of progress in the form of a bicycle barrelling down the bike lane. Because they are irredeemable criminals, incapable of reformation, it is pointless to educate them except by the harshest measures. By striking at that which they hold most dear, WE shall incite them to open warfare in which victory for the quicker stronger, logical forces of auto-mobility is assured.
7. All-weather, day/night heli-bikes leave cars in the dust of their own barbaric smog and racket. Blocks ahead now in heavy traffic, chest heaving with chemicals, pulse speeding pleasantly, the auto-mobile supermen slop by as fish through rapids and car jams, Lungs-in- Freedom Forcefully proclaim; WE are modern! WE are logical! No more misnomers! No more mystique!