I love my bike life and wouldn’t trade it for anything. Right now I ride a Batavus city bike, five years old. Black. Not a great bike—the crank has been faulty from the start, but it’s smooth enough, it’s heavy, and the lights are reliable. Brakes are good. Before this one, I rode an old clanker that I bought used for too much money at the train station. I loved those wide, high handle bars, but the rack was rusting off the frame.
But the bike itself, the object, the vehicle, doesn’t much matter. I have also ridden any number of OV fiets, which are tanks with pedals, and the second-string bike in our fleet, an old bike of my wife’s, reserved for guests and contingencies, like flat tires on the other bikes.
That’s because the bike you see me riding is just a temporary physical projection of the bike permanently grafted to my body, which my mind knows is there.
In fact, the motor map of my brain has a bicycle represented there.
I was born part bike, you see, like all humans. But not all people get to experience this, because the bike parts of our psyches are cleaved off, like the evil Mrs. Coulter slices off the daimons of children in His Dark Materials.
