First drop

On my way to go buy a new hel­met this morn­ing, Mur­phy’s law set in. Maybe I was being over­cau­tious because of the com­bi­na­tion of the rain and an untrust­ed spare hel­met, or maybe it was unavoid­able, but as I pulled up to a stop­light, the bike went out from under me and hit the pave­ment on its right side.

I’m com­plete­ly unhurt. My bike seems com­plete­ly undam­aged, with only some bare­ly-vis­i­ble scratch­es on the mir­ror, rear turn sig­nal, and right-hand peg. The rear brake lever and peg gave me a bit of a scare by being bent com­plete­ly side­ways, but they popped right back into place, appar­ent­ly mount­ed on the same sort of hinge that the pegs are in case of just this sort of sit­u­a­tion. My biggest prob­lem (and I’m very thank­ful that it’s my biggest prob­lem) is going to be clean­ing up the bits of yel­low cross­walk paint that seem­ing­ly splashed onto the bike.

So yes, cross­walks are slip­pery places, aren’t they?

Three things of note: First, I had my first acci­dent four blocks from home.

Sec­ond, that it hap­pened imme­di­ate­ly after my hel­met was stolen. I did­n’t actu­al­ly hit the ground, but still, if it weren’t for good judg­ment and the fact that I bor­rowed a hel­met weeks ago on the off-chance that I might get to give a girl a ride on my bike some­day, I might have tried to sneak by the mile to the hel­met store with­out a hel­met, think­ing I could explain my way out of a tick­et by being on the way to the store to replace my hel­met. This was a good reminder of what a bad idea that would have been.

Third, sev­er­al four-wheeled motorists stopped as I was pick­ing up the bike to make sure I was OK. One even stayed around with her haz­ards on, not just after I’d picked the bike back up, but after I’d walked it to the side­walk and then back to her car to explain that I real­ly was all right, that I was com­plete­ly unin­jured. I should­n’t let that lull me into a false sense of secu­ri­ty, but it’s good to see that some of the peo­ple in my city care. Maybe I should stop call­ing them all cagers.