Ye olde days..

Just reminiscing after watching all the sloppy 80's countdowns on VH1. Yes, I was born at the turn of the decade and enjoyed the 80's. A notoriously gay decade though, with all the suspicious dress sense, synth-line based music, bad rapping (white rappers).

I was just thinking about my lil' BMX bike from those days. Right now some other kid is probably riding it, maybe it's lying in some landfill. It was this wonderful white and red BMX bike, something which I was real proud of, since I was the only one among my friends to ever own one. The temptation for a kid not to perform stunts on a bike like that, well, is a little too overwhelming. The bike was all about need for speed and X-treme stunts. My favorite was doing a 360 near the grocery store. I'd rev it all up and head to this slightly dusty patch and hit the brakes real hard and stop in the opposite direction. It always got the requisite attention among my peers, the oohs and the aahs and the self-ego-preservation for any red blooded kid who loved showing off.

Somehow most stunts were improvised, none of them done with any kind of safety equipment, I didn't even have a helmet, far from having one I'd never even heard of helmets for riding bikes. That was sissy, only for girls in their little pink cycles with the confetti hanging out. No sir, no safety for me. I had to attempt this slow dive off this sand dune, near a construction/repair site. All was well until I realised with no velocity at the end of the "ramp" all I was gonna do was head straight down. No time for a physics lesson here Newton, I was 11 and I was gonna nail it, until my bike fell down first, since it weighed more , and my scrawny bony body landed on top of the miserable heap of metal. I swear I had some internal concussion , I could'nt move for 5 minutes or so, but I remember my friends dragging me away , with the occassional tsk-tsk's , as if to say : "We told ya so". Yea right, like that ever stopped me from doing crappy stunts for you.
I do remember this kid , who had a bike similar to mine, but had a lot of frills and a plastic cover on the rear tyre instead of spokes like mine did. It was this instinctive animal behavior, when we faced off for the first time. Like the two of us were on fire breathing horses, circling each other, in a very nature red in tooth and claw statement, the first to back down loses. The bluff was'nt called, neither of us blinked and we rode past each other.

I do remember looking at his rear tyre and going : Whoa that has got to be aerodynamic. There is no chance in hell my ride is going faster than his. Never to be outdone my friends egged me on to a race off. We selected a fairly uneven stretch of turf not too far away from home and lined up. The race was short and furious, but the outcome was foregone. I may have lost the race, but I never cursed my bike. Somehow it was sacred to me. And by then she was old, a little rusted here and there, and gave years of performance and cool action even when I got into tight spots. I may have lost that one face-off with the cheap imitator, but I still haven't lost my respect and love for the old BMX'es. Which is why now I still love riding bikes, albeit well-powered, and my brother rides a Ducati.

I see kids these days on their PS2's and Xboxes and I feel I was lucky to ever know what it meant to ride a bike and do stuff. I'd trade all those scraps, bruises and band-aids for your games. I didn't need anybody to tell me to go out and have some fun. I was always there ...