How to deal with fancy schmancy bikers

Edg takes it to the edge (yet again).

He’s a 67-year-old, retired entrepeneur and he’s got a story to tell. Edg Duveyoung, currently of Madison, Wisconsin, has been trikking since 2003. He created his website’s homage to trikking in “the early days, when I was gonzo nutzoid, but I’ve settled down now.” We’ll let you be the judge of that.

My strategy as a Pon-e rider — knowing that your typical biker out there via gearing can easily do a speed of 25 mph for at least a mile or two — is to LAY IN WAIT!

I have a street that has a long, long uphill segment that all the bikers ride — that is, “ride” as in, “if the weather is good enough to appear in public in the emperor’s new body stocking.”

I love seeing my first biker of spring. Having been out there any dry day all winter, it’s nice to have a fellow wheeler finally come along, but they sure do miss the wonders of a ribbon of dry surface between two six-foot-high, plow-heaped ridges of snow.

But nary a special-spoker would deign to give me the time of day when I nod across the street to them in a “hail fellow traveler, well-met” delusional moment to which I am prone. And I don’t like snubs, so excuuuuuuuse me if I plot my petty revenges

So, I wait, and when I see a goodly gob of gearers coming UPHILL towards me, I enter that street about a block ahead of them, and max toque my throttle and muscle-blast my way uphill, too.

Go ahead and laugh when I say this, but I’M A CYBORG. I meld souls with the machine. Identificationally speaking, it’s pure ME going up that hill; the aluminum struts of the beast are my bones.

And heh, these bikers are almost all sold-out to ego attachment, (but not I, no, no, not I,). And it just won’t do to have a wobbly trikker ahead of them, leaving them in his wake. They can go faster than me on the flats, but they just can’t on hills, and for a few blocks, they have to see themselves dropping behind. By the time they get to the top, I’m WAY, WAY WAAAAAAAAAY ahead of them, and so they have to catch up to me, ya see?

Well, the leaders of the bikers are thusly affronted. You can see them whipping out their BP-spill-sized cans of Red Bull and directly injecting the go-juice into their jugular veins, then bending into their handlebars like they’re grinding into a hurricane on a mission from God.

May I admit that, in such moments, I involuntarily emit a growl of pure bwahahahahahaa? Just askin’!

After about a mile of gear-boys grunting like galley slaves, just when these bikers get about a block behind me and are full of themselves for finally catching this three-wheeled demon, I pull a u-turn and come back at them and, just like I always do, nod to each one.

Nodding is the equivalent of coals heaped upon their heads, ya see?

Oh, ’tis sweet as any barbarian thrill, and I swear I hear lamentations of the bikers in my wake.

And may the bodies of the dragonfly, the moth, and the three gnats drying out on my teeth be proof of my happiness. Truth be told, my smile of satisfaction was even big enough to have a Philippine Giant Fruit Bat splat on my grill.

Am I a bad person?