Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Brooklyn, when you bike it, looks like old pictures of Manhattan. Dark under the elevated, crowded, people eating on the sidewalk. Especially around Broadway.

A few miles away, outside a church in Park Slope near 7th Avenue, a group of middle-aged men were playing stickball, throwing back to their neighborhood little-hood boyhoods. They blocked off a street to play, but hadn't taken any measures towards traffic abatement so the cars kept coming up on the game and sneaking by. This was the mens' fault--you can own a street in Brooklyn for an hour with a single car parked across the street and a well-placed trash can; with caution tape you can hold a wedding (as [Wife] and I did). But no such measures were taken; and there were so many cars that the game was frequently interrupted and the players were angry.

"You're playing it again," said one man.

"Yeah," responded another. "Last year someone called the cops on us."

Meanwhile another minivan edged through the game, a nervous mother with her children (Max [girl] and Tarragon [boy]) strapped into their carseats, on her way to get coffee before a trip to Puppet Zone.

Cars in the city make everything into a measurement. They are the Roman Army of modern life. Huge and shielded and oppressive. They invade, ravage the countryside, build enormous roads, use everything up, and require constant tribute in the form of road maintenance and gasoline, etc. You spend hours trying to keep your children away from them. And then they force everything to become regulated and standardized. They strip the fun out of stickball. Even if they wait patiently for you to pass, you feel them waiting patiently and become anxious.

Of course if those playing men were to come across a stickball game while they were in their own cars trying to get somewhere, you can imagine them being annoyed. Perhaps if I start driving again I'll feel the same way. In fact I'm sure I would.

I say this to cars several times a day: "Really? That's the best you can come up with?" Usually as someone flips a bitch in the bike lane. Driving is just pure fun-ruining.

Weight: 319 lbs