Helmets

Another totally awesome helmet.

Living two miles away from campus, I wind up riding my bike to class just about every day. This is a great thing and I’m really happy to be doing it – it gives me a chance to get more use out of my awesome bike, the commute is incredibly cyclist friendly what with this being Eugene, and the fact that I manage to get a four mile bike ride most days helps me to justify my eating habits, which, while healthier than some, go to shit as soon as there’s a good deal on tacos or I become aware of a Philly Cheesesteak available somewhere in my general vicinity.

Only in Denmark have I seen people as enthusiastic about the bike commute as at the University of Oregon. The bike lanes, while never quite congested, are always well trafficked by legions of professors on tricked out mountain bikes, students on hand-me-down beaters, douchebags on fixed gears, and talkative, insufferable engineers on recumbent bikes.*

*One of the biggest fuckwits I knew in high school, and arguably one of the biggest of all time, rode a recumbent bike for a while. So adamant was he about the superiority of its design that he refused to refer to it as a ‘bike’ but a ‘recumbent’, and instead of saying ‘I biked over there’ would say ‘I recumbed over there,’ a sentence which has no business being spoken outside of a porno shoot.

Riding a bike in Eugene feels right and natural, like eating something deep fried on a stick at a state fair. However, in typical Truman Capps fashion, I still manage to stand out from the crowd in a way that makes me look like a dork: I wear a helmet.

Helmets aren’t cool, because they are one of the few fashion accessories to say, “I have so little confidence in my ability to ride this thing that I’m willing to wear this ugly hat on the off chance that I fuck up.”

Essentially none of the other student bicyclists on campus wear helmets – professors, on the other hand, go full bore, wearing helmets with built in rear view mirrors and taillights, along with a reflective jacket and presumably a bulletproof vest on the off chance they ride through a bad neighborhood.

In an attempt to try and make my safety-motivated decision look cooler, I try to refer to my helmet as a ‘crash helmet’ in conversation whenever possible – because the only time helmets are cool is when you couple them with a slick adjective or noun to create terms like ‘football helmet’ or ‘Army helmet’. Other good words to add to ‘helmet’: “Viking,” “Skydiving,” “Sex.”

As much as I want to cast throw caution to the wind and join the other students in their easygoing, helmet free commute, I pretty much can’t, recognizing full well that this fashion choice means I probably won’t be in the market for a sex helmet anytime soon.

You see, as I’ve mentioned before, I come from an insurance family. Some families all wind up being cops or firemen drug dealers, but not mine – we’re insurance people. My father has worked in insurance for well over 20 years, my mother for 10, along with most of their friends. Throughout my childhood, virtually every adult I spent any amount of time with was more than capable of identifying every potential disaster within a 10 mile radius.

And so they passed the power to say, “Oh, that’s going to end badly,” on to me, which I do, whether I want to or not, at pretty much all times. And let me tell you, riding a bike – even in Eugene – is one big catastrophe waiting to happen.

Eugene’s streets are in terrible condition, so bad that drivers actively complain about them, and they’re not the ones whose balls are smacking against a hard leather seat every time they go over a pothole, nor are they in quite the same precarious balance situation.

Add onto that the fact that it rains a lot here, making these already treacherous streets slick.

Add onto that the fact that the University and its surrounding neighborhoods are populated by an uncommonly high number of young people from California, who while in cars have no regard for human life or traffic laws and while out of their cars see nothing wrong with blindly stepping off a curb into a bike lane and assuming that the laws of physics will work in their favor.

To me, these aren’t chances – these are facts of life. Were I to venture out on my bike without my helmet and have an unwanted encounter with pavement, a car, or a texting blonde anorexic with zero spatial awareness, I know that there would be sympathy for me at home, but underneath it there would be an undercurrent of, “Told you so!” from my family and all of their friends.

I imagine it’s the same response I would get if I’d tried to climb Mt. Everest wearing only my underwear. If there’s one thing my parents have beaten into me, it’s that you’ve got to take the proper precautions, no matter how quickly it shunts you into the friend zone with every woman who sees you.

But let’s not focus on how stupid I look wearing a helmet – let’s focus on how great it is that I’m willing to contend with all these factors while wearing only a helmet and not the Iron Man suit.

Truman Capps would totally just use the Iron Man suit to fly to class.