I’m an Environmental Health Specialist from a very rural California County…a funny title given my nihilistic tendencies. I mean, in that humbling regard, I feel a title as such thoroughly synonymous with Hospice Worker!

Change is good. Unless of course it results in your annihilation…accept it already, would you?

I’m also a writer, doodler, cyclist, motorist, motorcyclist, and meditator who’s, among other things, trying to get to the heart of the conflict between cyclists and motorists in America’s streets…and at least within this sphere of the here-and-now I am wholly optimistic and hopeful for a solution.

But, in all my pondering, introspection, and thought experiments (should I peel back layers enough) an age-old and inherent human selfishness seems to almost always rear its knapped-flint and bloody spear when I get too close; an aboriginal man, arms-deep in a freshly killed beast, eyeing the hillside for predators larger than he. Survival…the animal within us all.

Meat tastes better marinated in Cortisol and adrenaline. 

Millions of years hell-bent on just surviving from day-to-day only to be plopped down in just a relative blink into the world we know today. We’ve adapted sure, but we haven’t evolved. We pretend to be civil, to be enlightened with our granite counter-tops, soufflé, and silken undergarments but it’s still there underneath…keep it hidden, keep it hidden.

Our shit still stinks.

I believe that despite all our planning and infrastructure on the outside, bike lanes to smart traffic lights, we cannot get to a lasting solution here without first taming the chaotic intersection of Symbolism and Biology within. Where these two roads meet, we’ll find the root of Bike v. Auto and practically every other conflict involving people. We must begin there. Our own personal mental infrastructure must be torn down and rebuilt before meaningful, lasting change can be laid down on American roads.

Is that even possible?

And so we battle, my morning prologue…an eclectic mix spilling like coffee onto the keyboard…sometimes it’s Kopi Luwak, sometimes it’s just crap. Enjoy!