The Future

ince

Weaving through the gridlocked streets or dodging in and out of sidewalks clogged with people is an instinct. It is a three-dimensional awareness of space and situation and in a second projecting it all forward into the future. Air traffic controllers called it having the flick. A van pulls out of a blind alley. A taxi changes lanes suddenly. City buses scream past. Pedestrians stroll. Red light. Green light. Stop, go.

When you first start riding, it’s slow. You pick your way through the cars and crowds carefully like a cautious old man. Then you start to extend your line. You don’t see yourself where you are, but where you will be in 5 seconds. Then 10 seconds. 20. The longer you spend on the bike, the further down the line you project yourself. As I speed down the footpaths and streets of Namba and Shinsaibashi, my vision becomes a narrowed, unending striation of the way ahead, threading the tangles of people and traffic. As long as I follow the delineation, I glide through the city. I don’t deviate off my line, and it is a golden path pulling me inexorably forward.

“So what the hell does that have to do with the sun going red,” Kenji asked. And here is what I had difficulty explaining.

“Bike messengers see the way ahead as a line and project themselves down that line. Lines are one-dimensional extents that are without depth or breadth, extending infinitely. And I can see infinitely down its entire length. When I ride, I see the future.”

from The Bicycle Messenger by Johnny Smith

I liked it

DonDaddyD

Love it!

biondino

Riding a bike in one dimension would be no fun.

Kieran_Burns

biondino wrote:

Riding a bike in one dimension would be no fun.

It would have a point though,



(see what I did there?)

biondino

Kieran_Burns wrote:

biondino wrote:

Riding a bike in one dimension would be no fun.

It would have a point though,

(see what I did there?)

Are you here all week?

MonkeyMonster

biondino wrote:

Kieran_Burns wrote:

biondino wrote:

Riding a bike in one dimension would be no fun.

It would have a point though,

(see what I did there?)

Are you here all week?

He already got his coat.

Citizen Smith

MonkeyMonster wrote:

He already got his cape.

ftfy

Headhuunter

Is that a quote from a book? THe writer mentions Namba and Shinsaibashi. They're districts of Osaka! I have spent many an night out on the town in those places - drinking, eating sushi, okonomiyaki, yaki soba etc. Ah the memories!

ince

Yep taken from a free short, first part of five stories. I was just looking for random stuff when I came across it.

Nice little observation I thought I would share here. 8)

Headhuunter

ince wrote:

Yep taken from a free short, first part of five stories. I was just looking for random stuff when I came across it.

Nice little observation I thought I would share here. 8)

The 1st company I worked for in Japan had its head office in Namba on Midosuji and I lived in a flat about 20 mins walk away in Nippombashi.... There was a long covered arcade shopping centre (Shoutengai in Japanese) in Shinsaibashi. It was quintessentially Japanese - lots of noise, flashing lights, commercialism, pachinko, yakuza, school girls in sailors uniforms with Chanel handbags, rent boys with bleached hair, drunken salary men falling over their slip on shoes... A real slice of Japanese life shoving and bustling its way through town

emotionless_softcore

ince wrote:

Weaving through the gridlocked streets or dodging in and out of sidewalks clogged with people is an instinct. It is a three-dimensional awareness of space and situation and in a second projecting it all forward into the future. Air traffic controllers called it having the flick. A van pulls out of a blind alley. A taxi changes lanes suddenly. City buses scream past. Pedestrians stroll. Red light. Green light. Stop, go.

When you first start riding, it’s slow. You pick your way through the cars and crowds carefully like a cautious old man. Then you start to extend your line. You don’t see yourself where you are, but where you will be in 5 seconds. Then 10 seconds. 20. The longer you spend on the bike, the further down the line you project yourself. As I speed down the footpaths and streets of Namba and Shinsaibashi, my vision becomes a narrowed, unending striation of the way ahead, threading the tangles of people and traffic. As long as I follow the delineation, I glide through the city. I don’t deviate off my line, and it is a golden path pulling me inexorably forward.

“So what the hell does that have to do with the sun going red,” Kenji asked. And here is what I had difficulty explaining.

“Bike messengers see the way ahead as a line and project themselves down that line. Lines are one-dimensional extents that are without depth or breadth, extending infinitely. And I can see infinitely down its entire length. When I ride, I see the future.”

from The Bicycle Messenger by Johnny Smith

I liked it

I liked it too, thanks for posting. Similar resonance to this, in a way.

Will Self wrote:

Back pedalling to the future

Saturday, 27 May 2006
[...]
Cycling through heavy traffic with no means of arresting your onward rush save your own legs, must introduce a peculiarly Zen cast of mind. The fixed-wheel cyclist has to be constantly attuned to the myriad, random possibilities of the urban thoroughfare, while at the same time feeling his translation through space as a constant muscular phenomenon. This 1:1 ratio, means that fixed-wheel cycling is the closest you can get to being a robot while still being sentient. The bicycle itself is stripped down to its most basic elements - wheel, frame, chain - while the rider's mind is empty of all save the marvel of its own inertia.

My conversations with ex-fixed-wheel cyclists have tended to confirm my suppositions. They give it up, they say, because it's impossible to pay any attention to their surroundings while straddling such a nerve-wracking vehicle. I can't verify this by talking to people who are still doing it, because they're virtually incapable of communication at all, but lost in a trance in which they apprehend the traffic flows outside of space and time. Perhaps they can actually "see" the truck before it lurches out of the side street, or the arc of the cab before it performs an extempore three-point-turn? What else could explain their willingness to pit Lycra against steel?

It all puts me in mind of a short story I once wrote called Waiting, in which a secret cabal of London motorcycle couriers are in thrall to a seer called Carlos. Carlos can do what I think the fixed-wheel cyclists ought to be capable of. Simply by observing the traffic flow on one road, he can extrapolate an entire mental picture of the road system of London, complete with all its jams, queues and chance contretemps. The followers of Carlos become privy to this arcane method, and so never have to wait for anything.

It's the curse of the speculative writer to see his fictional creations cancelled out by the prosaic march of time. The global positioning satellite systems - which now sucker on to even the most battered and lowly of cars - are the plastic form the mystic cabal has taken. Why it is that the authorities haven't proscribed devices which encourage drivers to stare fixedly at a tiny screen featuring a schematic representation of where they are, rather than looking at the real world, is beyond me. Or rather, I understand the commercial realities only too well: just as with the mobile phone, until there is total market saturation, there will be no check placed on the use of GPS in cars.

By then, far from having created a population of lean ascetics, whose total orientation confirms their state of oneness with the world, we will have spawned an entire generation of obese fuck-wits, who won't have the slightest idea where they are, once de-coupled from their navigation systems, and levered from their warm leatherette. Where they are - or even, what they should do. At least the old-fashioned road map placed the onus of arrival on our own cognitive abilities; now we are beginning to abrogate all responsibility. Paradoxically, the long and tortuous drive away from mass transit systems and towards the "freedom" of the private car, turns out to have been a circular tour. With GPS and on-board computers soon to be "doing" the driving, everyone on the road will be in possession of what is effectively there own rail system. A mono-carriage train, running on a track lain for that journey alone.

We are tug boats gone crazy, with no idea even if we are in a safe harbour, or churning up the soil! We are dragging the rusting hulks of the past into the shiny future! We are speedboats that have quit the water to describe loop-the-loops in a dark sky near to the end of history! The seagulls - those fixed-wheel cyclists of the sky - are ripped away from their thermals by our crazy jigging, and stare at us, at once terrified and contemptuous.