OK, maybe it wasn't stolen, I "lent" it to a stranger. Most likely I didn't lock it because I didn't expect to leave it overnight. If I had locked it, no one would have taken it.
Oh, that's NT$700 – about US$20 at the time I bought it. Over the three months I had it, I kept track of roughly how much money it was saving me in bus and MRT fare, and it easily paid for itself.
I'm hardly upset that someone took the piece of shit, except now I have to deal with the minor inconvenience of not having a bike, which is almost offset by the inconvenience I don't have of having the bike.
You know, whenever I got on my bike in the U.S., I often acknowledged the possibility of not getting home safely that day. San Francisco was better than New York, and New York was better than New Jersey. Riding in Taipei was a completely different dimension of insanity. In New Jersey, drivers were just stupid, like they'd never seen a bike before on a road. In Taipei, they don't care.
In Taipei, the heightened possibility of getting hit on my bike often made me wonder if I would get on my bike that day if I knew I'd get hit. Of course not. And of course the reason why I always do get on my bike is because I don't know whether I'll get hit or not. Ooh, now there's a deep thought.
If you knew that you were going to do something today and were going to die in the process, would you still do it? Of course not. Right? So we absolutely can't go about our days thinking that what we do will end in our demise. Which is weird considering the focus of my personal life exploration is all about my demise.
Often when I hear about someone dying in unfortunate circumstances, I think about how they woke up that morning without a glimmer of thought that they might die that day. They go about their daily business as usual. And then they die. What would they have done different if they knew about it? And if they knew about it and changed something, what does that change about the meaning of our daily living?
I don't know why I think this is weird. Anyway, good riddance to the bike I dubbed the "P.O.S. Enterprise". The chances of my getting hit on my bike just dropped to zero, and my chances of getting hit as a pedestrian just went up.
 |
| 5:54 p.m. - the re-colorization of Da'an Park footbridge continues |
