Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I ate pepper steak while I waited for a new wheel to be placed on my bicycle to replace the one I spent three hours truing Thursday night. I decided to calculate how much I pay per mile to ride.

I'd say I've put $1,000 into the bike (it cost $450 new, plus two new wheels, tubes, replaced the drive train and gearing, new brake pads, etc.) The only original parts remaining are the handlebars and front fork.

I probably rode 1/4 to 1/3 of the days in the last four years, plus weekend rides and so forth. I started riding around September 2006. I know this because on the first day I rode to work I lost a pedal, went to the bikeshop, and met a journalist who wanted to use me as the thruline of his story, even though I kept trying to introduce him to real cyclists. It's interesting to read that and realize that I was just starting to get serious about weight loss, in 2006. It took more than two years after that to really jump down the throat of the problem. Just to edge up to it.

365 days × 3 = 1,095 days × 1/4 = ~250 days riding.

My typical ride to work and back is right around 8 miles.

~250 days × ~8 miles a ride = 2,000 miles; in the past six months I've put about 400-600 miles on top of that.

So ~$1,000/2,400 miles = $0.417/mile. Let's go with $0.50/mile.

The subway (without discounts), works out to $0.56/mile getting me to and from work, but of course if I bought an Unlimited card and took as many rides on the train as I do with the bike the rate would go drastically down. In a very rough back-of-the-envelope way it's just about as cost-effective to take the bike as it is to take the train. Of course it's the combination that's the best. Nothing is better than knowing that when my wheel explodes out by the Rockaways I can be home on the train in an hour. I can't imagine riding any other way. You'd need to carry a spare bike.

I could walk to work. It would take about 90 minutes each way. It would require about $0.50 in calories, perhaps. I bet I could get it down to $0.10/mile on a gruel, as long as you don't include shoe costs and clothing wear. Hard to get much cheaper than that.

In the Chinese restaurant there are loud teen girls. "Let's play who would you date," says one. The only name I overhear is that of Zac Ephron. I've never seen him but I've heard that name. His merits are discussed. Other men are discussed. I read Archaeology magazine.

Two men sit down to my right with a boy. The boy wears headphones.

One of the men is big, maybe 380 or 420. The other is normal-sized. The waitress comes over; the large man knows her and says hello. He orders a pupu platter and a wonton soup with extra scallions--repeating that twice--and a chicken with broccoli.

"And, um, I'd like a menu," says his friend.

She brings a menu.

"Excuse me, sir," says the large man to me. He has a gentle voice. "What do you have there?"

"It's, uh..." Finally I remember: "Pepper steak."

"It looks delicious," he says.

"I haven't tasted it yet," I say. "It seems promising."

The waitress returns. He changes his order from chicken and broccoli to pepper steak. The men's conversation is mostly about weight loss and Atkins. The boy keeps listening to his headphones. A woman they know is getting bigger.

"You know. They see my progress," says the big man, "they want to know about it." So perhaps he is on his way down. He may be doing everything right. I don't know enough to judge him. He probably shouldn't be in this restaurant, ordering without a menu, but I definitely shouldn't be there, and here I am, and here is the restaurant.

The waitress passes by and the man orders a second soup. The counter in my head starts to spin. It's none of my business but I can't help it. I have developed a fine memory for food eaten. I've become a gluttonist, an observer of gluttony; even more so a forensic gluttonist. Even though I didn't care to log it last night I can tell you what I ate last night at the office Christmas party: three glasses of bourbon with soda, two beers (both Brooklyn Lager), one pig in a blanket, shrimp and avacado on endive, gouda, half-ounce chunks of two other kinds of cheese not known to me, three sandwich cookies, three cookies with chocolate toppings, two marzipan cookies, one piece of baklava, twelve nuts, one veggie straw, one bite of pita with hummus, roast beef on bread, two 3/4-oz chunks of chicken with a peanut sauce, four cigarettes, and no olives. The next party I go to I will sit away from the table. The combination of drinking and a table of salty food is disaster. The compulsion I believe myself to have wrestled to submission is instead in full bloom.

On walking out I almost forgot to tip.