Farewell, faithful steed.
My bike was stolen out of our block’s bike-shed yesterday afternoon. I’m pretty furious about it, because unless you have both an access tag *and* a copy of the utility key, the only way you can break a bike out of there is if some oblivious fuckstick just forgets to shut the damned gate behind themselves when they leave… and while I’m very fond of my apartment and my block and my neighbourhood, all three of them are regrettably very long on oblivious fucksticks.
Still, I had the thing for over three years, which for a town like Malmö—where bike theft probably counts as a minor religion—is pretty good going, I guess. I bought it (second-hand, reconditioned) because I figured that my old Felt cruiser would not be the ideal ride for someone recovering from a broken talus—which was an uncharacteristically wise decision on my part.
(I still have the old Felt, and it’s perfectly rideable, two decades after I bought it on Portsmouth City Council’s cycle-to-work scheme… but after three years of riding a comfortable bike designed for urban utility, a return to BMX geometry—even scaled for 24″ wheels—is not particularly appealing. I really am too old for this shit.)
Ah, well—time to pop down to Issam’s bike shop and get a replacement. Couple thousand kronor should see me right, just like last time.
It’s all grist for the mill, I suppose. Over the last week I’ve been using my morning pages to hack out first notes and later chunks of first draft toward an essay for a forthcoming issue of Vector with the theme of “community”. Somewhat serendipitously, also I’ve been reading John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In for a book-club discussion, and that novel throws a stark and frosty light on Sweden as a nation.
As Benedict Anderson showed us so clearly, a national identity needn’t necessarily have much to do with ethnicity or genetic heritage. I recall a couple of years ago a discussion with one of my neighbours, a second-generation Slovenian Malmöite, when our block was having new gates installed. I observed that I thought (as I still do) that the gates were overkill, given the many other ways a genuinely determined and thoughtful intruder could get into the grounds; the money would have been better spent on less performative and more functional security systems, and more effort spent on strategies such as, oh, I don’t know, reminding people to actually shut the gates we already had.
“We need these gates, though,” said my neighbour. “Crime rate round here is crazy.”
“Oh, really?” I replied.
“Fuck, yes,” he said. “Bloody immigrants everywhere, no respect for anything.”
I sometimes think that the first words for “us” and “them” must have emerged before the first words for “me” and “you”.
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