Caution: Wide Load!

Okay, so I met up for lunch today with my friend, Gabe. It was a little rainy, but I thought I'd take a chance and ride my bike anyway, 'cause I haven't been on it in a good two and a half weeks. If you must know, I had a recurrence of that horrible, horrible vulva infection I got last year, so I was in a lot of pain for a few days, and treating it with hot baths and compresses over the course of about a week and a half. Then I started my period, of course, and it's been rainy on top of that, so, yeah, getting onto my bike again felt really good. I sweated and huffed and puffed more than usual today while riding home--it's amazing how my stamina decreases when I haven't been riding. My only other exercise, really, is walking, but since it's been wet out--and since Nat and I have had the use of nephew Zach's car--I haven't even been doing much of that.

Anyway, I'm riding home, and I get to the intersection of Church and 16th. As I approach, the light turns red, so I ride over toward the side of the lane and rest for a moment with one foot on the curb. A car comes up next to me. A guy is driving, and there's a woman sitting shotgun and a woman in the back seat. The light turns green, and I pull out in front of the car, to get around the parked ones on the other side of the intersection. It takes me a while to get some momentum before I'm riding smoothly again, so the car has to wait for me to get through the intersection so they can move around me. It's a pretty normal dynamic when dealing with car traffic, but this woman sitting shotgun, apparently, is irritated with how slow I'm going, so she yells out the window,

"FAT-ASS!"

I mean, I don't need that shit, so as I'm riding behind them, my first impulse is to flip her off. I'm sure she doesn't see it, and, frankly, I don't feel ameliorated enough just from a remote hand gesture. The car has to stop at the next intersection, so I catch up to it on my bike and, as I'm passing on their right, I say to them, "That's really nice of you, thanks!" but I still don't feel vindicated. My heart is pumping madly and I'm a little shaky, but I have to do better by myself and all fat girls who ride bikes. So by the next light, I catch up to them again, riding right up alongside them. And as she rolls up her window to protect herself (from what, a fat girl?), I say, my tone of voice incredulous,

"Seriously--are you always such an asshole to people you don't know?"

As they pass me again, I hear her say, "Bitch!" through the window.

I'm normally not the type of person to want to start shit with people. Being that I'm always trying to be mindful of how I can put positive energy into the world and all, it makes me feel really compromised and uncomfortable with myself when I feel moved to follow through with hostile impulses. But for some reason, I couldn't be silent in that moment. I couldn't just let them have a good chuckle about tearing into a fat girl who was moving a bit too slow on her bike. If someone else had been the target, I think I'd have said something, too. It's not uncommon of me to say something in traffic if someone has cut me off--often I'll just say, "Thanks," sarcastically, or I'll call someone on it if they weren't paying attention and got too close to me. You have to educate car drivers sometimes, because they really don't think about bikers. But, obviously, I'd never, ever make a personal insult out of it. Anyway, it was one of those moments that reminds me that no matter how much of a pacifist I claim I am, I'm always subject to a normal human outburst of aggression now and again. Sometimes, our anger is so close to the surface that we have to let it explode. If I had it to do over again, I'd wish for more articulate expression to have come quicker to my lips. Maybe I could have said, "I feel sorry for the fat people in your life. Do they know you hate them this much?" But really, I don't know how I could have felt better about that incident. If I'd stayed silent, and not tried to school this woman on social etiquette, my own anger would probably have dispersed just fine on its own, maybe even quicker than it did after I'd told her off and risked escalating the conflict. I dunno.

previous - next