Undignified Ride

I was walking to the grocery store, and had nearly gotten there. As has become my habit, I had eschewed my mp3 player in favor of allowing myself a few quiet minutes to take in all the sounds of the neighborhood. I do this for fun, because the noises out there cannot be had in my home, and my music can be had in either place. Also though, I  go without music on short walking trips for safety. One never knows what hazard may approach stealthily when music is blaring in the ear.

That very thing happened the other day. Had I not been free to hear it, I would have been caught entirely by surprise. As it was, there was little warning when a man on a bicycle suddenly sped past me on a relatively narrow sidewalk. He must have been awfully confident of slipping by me without incident, or else he didn't care if he did. I've seen this happen to other people, and was heartily sympathetic towards the people who were then in the place I was now. Now being in their shoes, I was most sincerely annoyed.

My feelings were somewhat affected by laying eyes on the man. It was a grown man, or what I took to be one. His bicycle was not that of a man. It looked to me like a little girl's pink bike. It was definitely too short for him to ride properly. I wondered at the pairing of man and bike. Surely he must have felt some shame or embarrassment at his undignified transport. To all the world though, this was not the case. I could detect no sign of awareness on his part.

I was impressed by his ability to surmount the shame and be such a jerk anyway. I would have thought that he would do nothing to draw attention and bring down waves of jeering on himself. Instead, he was unconcerned. I began to ask myself whether I was terribly out of touch with what's cool in bicycles. This was not the first time I had seen a man on a child's bicycle. Is this some kind of trend? Is this an accepted thing? If so, why? I propose a coordinated effort to embarrass adult riders of childrens' bicycles into riding proper adult ones or else concede the wrongness of what they're doing.