The Joys of BB: Part V الحب

A winged angel, my seatpost, seatpost clamp and headset alighted onto my doorstep, and into my heart. A big fat gift from heaven--why'd they have to weigh so much? Seems like these components doubled the weight of my bike.

I started telling my friend John Nelson, the biggest cyclist I know (both literally and the other way), about my Leroi, which I'm trying to get to drop some weight before I ride. John thought I was talking about my LeRoy. This surprised him, since I've indicated that I'm thoroughly heterosexual and married.

Maybe it was my tone of voice. John noticed some personification there, some anthropomorphism. Some autistic aspergers stuff.

Yesterday, in Arabic, we were conjugating the verb الحب which means "to love." I said "I love my bicycles." This, my teacher said, was excessive, that الحب is not something directed toward inanimate objects.

Dr. Bruno Bettelheim chararacterized the ultimate autistic in his piece, "Joey: The Mechanical Boy." Bettelheim, with grand Teutonic objectivity, catalogues Joey's mechanistic world: his drawings of self as plumbing pipes and cogs and gears, his discomfort with touch, and his hatred for all things Thomas Kincade (I hear ya, Joey). Zee parents, Bettelheim said, zey are zee cawz of zees malady. Bettelheim's cure for autism he called parentectomy. That is, autistics were removed from their parents for nine months.

Some have linked autism with maleness. In particular, one study linked autism with high levels of testosterone in the womb. A fellow named Simon Baron-Cohen (perhaps a relative of one Sasha) conducted the study, so one wonders. One wonders if there will be forthcoming studies linking things to Jews and Gypsies from Baron-Cohen, in addition to starring roles in Talladega Nights II and Borat II.

A subspecies of autism is asperger's syndrome, defined by one asperger's father as "a form of autism in which words and academic achievement come easily, but social interactions are virtually impossible."

Unlike Joey, I don't picture myself as a series of pipes and wires. Yet I can't help but feel like sometimes, when I'm on my bike, this piece of machinery feels a part of me as much as my arms or feet. There's something pleasing about this. I wonder if it's how Oscar Pistorius feels on his carbon legs?

A bike is an extension of the self into the world.

H.G. Wells' Martians in War of the Worlds have forsaken their bodies for mechanical improvements. They are mere brains, incapable of surviving outside of their impressive machinery. Over a century ago, Wells predicted humanity's evolutionary direction, our move to the couch and the car, the growing irrelevance of our bodies for all but cosmetic purposes.

We build machines, but only some seem to build us.