And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. – Revelation 13:1

There’s little doubt that we live in dark times. The vexing question, the one that drives us mad and cleaves us apart, is from whence the darkness comes, and by what is it manifested.

For some, the darkness is ancient prophecy, encroaching on all sides as a nebulous and disembodied Other. For others, the avatar of darkness bursts from within—persistent, ageless, built by our own hands and made flesh by our own closest friends and neighbors.

Each of these ideas is wrong.

The darkness is here, and it’s that God Damned Party Bike.

The God Damned Party Bike

Those of my readers who spend any time in New Haven will likely be familiar with the God Damned Party Bike. It’s something like an open air bus with a long bar down the middle. Its passengers sit facing inward. At each of its dozen or so seats, a set of bicycle wheels.

They pedal. From bar to bar, they pedal, inching at a glacial pace down public roads, shouting and honking their shrill horn. This horn, it sounds like the horn a baby would honk on its plastic toy ambulator, but louder, and operated by grown adults who should know better.

Regular people, those not on some God Damned Party Bike, get agitated at the God Damned Party Bike, and the God Damned Party Cyclists take their agitation, consistently, somehow, to be some kind of approving co-revelry. It’s not. It never is.

Why is this horseshit allowed on our streets?

Enough of This Farce

I am officially and desperately asking, openly, anyone with the power to do so—ban this God Damned Party Bike.

Mayor Harp, your reelection is coming up. Which demographic is bigger, in your reckoning? People on party bikes, or those who want to be rid of them?

Governor Malloy, you’re already a lame duck. Why not ban the God Damned Party Bike with what little political capital you have left?

God. Dear God. Please.

Ban that God Damned Party Bike this instant.

Image Credit: La Bête de la Mer, by Kimon Berlin, user:Gribeco (Unknown) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons