Rich Mintz  

As you’ve noticed if you follow me on Twitter, after seeing one on the street and arranging to test-ride one around the block, I ordered a FlyKly electric bike, and it arrived last week.

What it is, in essence, is an electric scooter, with a top speed under 25mph and a claimed range of 40 miles, that you can recharge in the house off normal electrical current. (The battery is removable.) It weighs only about 100 pounds (less than half what a gas-powered scooter weighs). While that’s too heavy to carry it up the stairs, it’s light enough that you can easily maneuver it through hallways and in and out of elevators to keep it in, say, an apartment building’s bike room, and (since there’s nothing to drip or leak) there’s no reason not to park it in the living room.

The FlyKly does have functional pedals, like a bicycle, and in fact under federal law it’s classified as a consumer product (like a bicycle), rather than a motor vehicle. In fact, the relevant statute states that electric bikes must be treated by states as consumer products rather than motor vehicles. New York State, however, has ignored this, and all electric bicycles are illegal here and subject to confiscation as unregistered motor vehicles. (You may have noticed the 20,000 electric bicycles on the streets of NYC, piloted by deliverymen and hobbyists; yes, under NYS law they are all illegal to operate, and subject to a $500 fine and impoundment.) However, NYS DMV will not register them. So you may legally buy and own them, but not actually use them.

This is, of course, legal nonsense, and it will be straightened out eventually. (It seems to me that what is needed is the proper kind of plaintiff to sue NYS in federal court — someone who has the time and flexibility to put up with the timetable of litigation, the sense to make the right arguments, and the maturity to present well in front of a judge. If I get a $500 citation that isn’t dismissed, I’ll see whether I have the stomach for it.)

In the meantime, what seems to happen in NYC is that if you are riding responsibly, the police ignore you. When you are at speed, you look like just another Vespa (which are legal if registered), and when you aren’t moving, nobody cares anyway. I had one encounter with a parks cop (who treated me as though I were a Vespa rider, and simply said pleasantly that I had to walk the bike in a crowded pedestrian area), but I don’t think I’ve been noticed otherwise. Last night I (cautiously) rode through the pedestrian shortcut alongside police headquarters (connecting from Madison and St. James through to Frankfort and Gold, under the Brooklyn Bridge), past three NYPD guardhouses, and nobody cared.

I was careful, though, to walk the bike whenever I was passing through an area I might expect to be hassled for riding through on a normal bicycle. And without exception I’ve stopped at every red light, and stayed in traffic in congested areas rather than trying to find a way around. This means that for trips of more than a block or two, traveling by FlyKly is actually marginally slower than riding a normal bicycle in the typical amount of city traffic.

But who cares? In nice weather it’s so much fun to get out and just ride. I’ve been all up and down the lower half of the island, and tomorrow have a couple of errands on the Upper West Side, so I’ll have a chance for a longer ride.

The handling is fine; the 25mph governor is not a problem in the city. (I rarely find myself wanting to go any faster than that.) The bike seems well designed and I keep finding things I like about it. There’s a bag loop, so you can carry one bag of groceries, along with whatever is on your back. (There’s an optional cargo box, but to install it you have to remove the rear rail, and I use that rail to lift the bike when I’m flipping the kickstand, so I’m reluctant.)

The only problem was that I tripped the electric fuse on one of my first rides, and had to let the battery cool down before I could reset it and it would “stick.” (It actually wasn’t a clean test, because during the cooldown I had the bike plugged in, so I’m not absolutely sure that overheating was the issue.)

I investigated motorcycle licensing in NYS, because it seems prudent to have evidence of training in the event that a police officer claims I am “riding unsafely.” It’s actually pretty easy — you pass a written test and get a permit, and then if you take a 3-day riding course, you waive out of the driver’s test. So expect to hear about that in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, zoom zoom! Bike porn below.

I was last in San Diego in June (for the Americans for the Arts meeting) and you’ll recall that I really enjoyed it. I’m back again, and again thinking “why don’t I just move here?”

There is, of course, the fact that as a native Angeleno I’m supposed to think of San Diego as either mildly amusing or beneath notice, and that as an adoptive New Yorker I’m supposed to see a place like this as frivolous and its relaxed, happy people as dangerously un-vigilant re: whatever slop life’s bucket is about to dump on them.

All of that is true. And yet, more than most other places I’ve visited in the past few years, I look around San Diego and I think, “This would be a nice change.”

I think, “I could have a little house, or a nice big loft apartment in a perfect location, for 40% less than I’m paying now.” I think, “Here nobody gives a shit what you’re wearing, ever,” and I think “Is it 64 degrees and sunny every single day of the year here?” (yeah, pretty much, except when it’s 70), and I think “Oh, so that’s what a tortilla is supposed to taste like.”

San Diego isn’t London, or New York, or even Los Angeles. But nobody here cares. They’re fine with it. Why wouldn’t they be (see “64 degrees,” above)? And anyway, it’s big enough (hello! 3 million people). And did I mention nobody ever cares what you’re wearing? And the buses all have bike racks on the front?

Admittedly, sometimes it’s nice to look nice, and I’m annoyed by the inland West (which is where 75% of the tourists around here are obviously from), and bla bla bla. But. 64 degrees and sunny! A house! Tortillas!

…that it’s starting to look good.

It’s now falling into my eyes (I can see some of it right now!) — I wouldn’t exactly say I’m Adrian Grenier or anything, but hey, I look loose and free.

I’ve been letting my hair grow out for, I dunno, 3 months? just to see what would happen. For most of my adult life I’ve been trying to keep it “under control,” but the fact is I have a big head (I know I do, it’s right there in front of my face, there’s no use pretending otherwise), and big head + really short hair usually = “ridiculous.”

I had a complex about having “big hair” for years because when I was a teenager I always wished I had that thick, heavy, straight dark hair that all the cool kids had. (In high school and then again in college, “Q-Tip Head” was a nickname that was occasionally heard in the hallways.) But what I didn’t reckon on is that that thick, heavy dark hair I envied usually starts falling out by your late 20s and what’s left is usually totally grey by 35. My hair, on the other hand, looks and acts more or less the same now as it did when I was 20 — there’s a bit less pigment in it and some of the follicles are going coarse, but it’s still thick and ample.

There were times when I let it grow out but styled it like a Nazi — I don’t mean that I styled it to look like the hair of a Nazi, I just mean that I applied the determination and precision of a Nazi to the task of taming it. There was the crunchy “mousse” period of the early 90s, followed by the slick “gel” period of the mid-90s. And I have a dozen more recent tubes and cans of pomade and spritz and thickener gathering dust in the bathroom at home.

In LA in 1989 I wanted that pouffy side part the cool kids had; in Atlanta in 1999 I wanted the “midtown flip” (think Tintin). In 2009, if I were younger, I would have wanted that funny mound in the middle that was trendy for about 5 minutes. But none of that stuff really works on me. My hair wants to be free!

I’m still a bit uncomfortable about having “big hair” in a professional context, but then again I am a gigantic bulky person with a loud voice and, er, a clearly evident personality, and when I walk into a room people have more to focus on than my hair.

So I think I’ll keep growing it out for a while more and see what happens. (I do need a cleanup, I know this, and was hoping there would be a salon open here in San Diego on Sunday, but no such luck.)

When I pulled out of my panel at the American Association of Museums conference in Minneapolis this weekend, it didn’t occur to me that I had a Following (note that capital F), but Twitter reminds me that I do. (Note to self: if you tweet from one place when the Internet says you’re scheduled to be in another place, Explain Yourself.)

I scheduled myself too tightly — Ottawa, DC, Minneapolis and San Diego all in a row — and felt myself starting to get sick by the middle of last week. It’s just a cold, but at my advanced age (cue the tiny violins) I can’t just go about my business. Plus there’s that whole “sneezing viruses all over the entire American museum professional community” thing.

So I sent my regrets to James Leventhal, the panel organizer, spent a lazy Saturday morning at home in New York drinking fluids, and am passing a sleepy Sunday afternoon here in San Diego, catching up on email in my hotel lobby.

To those I’m missing at AAM, my apologies — I’ll see you at another event soon. And fortunately my able and charming colleague Will Begeny is on another AAM panel today, so you can get a bit of that Blue State Digital magic.

It’s hit me three times this week already:

(1) In an office discussion about nonprofit organizations, it occurred to me that I have barely 3 1/2 years until I’m eligible for AARP membership.

(2) Today I saw a ridiculous old man walking down the street in orange sneakers, looking ragged and rough, and thought “You’re a ridiculous old man” — then realized he was probably a year or two younger than me, and I was wearing red sneakers.

(3) Finally, and most portentously, the Harvard Class of 1987 25th Anniversary Report arrived in the mail, a two-pound brick chronicling everyone’s perfect marriage, beautiful children, and dream career. I know it won’t really be like that — by now there are plenty of people who have seen ill fortunate — but it’s still hard to open. I think I’ll steel myself with a gin and tonic first.

Just got caught in a sudden storm while riding my bike near Times Square at night, and was soaked through my clothes in about 60 seconds. The last time I got this wet was during the Great Yeovil Downpour of 1987. I was backpack-hosteling around England and had to get from Yeovil to (some adjacent town, probably Exeter), and I went to wait for a bus that never came, because (as I later realized) it was Sunday. I asked around, and learned that to reach my destination that day I would have to walk a number of miles to an intervening town and catch a different bus.

So I walked and walked, and the road got hilly, and I saw no one, and it started to rain, and it rained and rained, and I put on my poncho, and I still got soaked, and my shoes squeaked and got stuck in mud, and I got wetter and wetter and madder and madder and listened to my Walkman with the one mixtape over and over, the one that was mostly U2 and James Taylor.

But I made it to Exeter. And that is the story of the Great Yeovil Downpour of 1987.

I’ve written before about my Amazon addiction, and now I have two more: a moderate Woot addiction and a much more serious Fab addiction.

Woot is a closeout service that brings you five specific deals each day, some of which are really good. The ad copy suggests that the target audience is people about 20 years younger than me, but that hasn’t prevented me from buying things, like a NeatDesk scanner, which I’m using (along with Evernote) to finally start moving myself toward paperlessness.

Fab brings you selections of products from a dozen or so small independent retailers every day. It’s typically design-oriented, artsy, hipster stuff, sometimes closeouts, sometimes one-of-a-kind or few-of-a-kind objects. They do a pretty good job of making it a social experience, by encouraging you to recruit your friends and giving you significant cash-money discounts when you succeed.

I’ve bought the following from Fab in six months, for a grand total of almost $1200: travel mugs, coffee cups, iPhone handsets, Fancy Hands, luggage, T-shirts, a mozzarella cheese making kit (!), 2 wallets, kitchenware, a bicycle, 2 messenger bags, notebooks.

Add these to my Amazon spending (short description: thanks to Amazon Prime, I check Amazon first whenever I decide to buy anything, from toothpaste to kitchenware to aluminum foil to electronics), and I’m now buying almost everything online except for groceries. I’m spending a bit more, because I’m buying a bit more than I otherwise might be. But I’m happy, finding things I enjoy and can afford and having them brought to my door by a cheery man in a brown uniform.

This is the time of year when I take my car out of storage, inevitably to find (as I did today) that the battery is dead, but because it’s a Volkswagen, just give it a little boost and it’s off to the races.

By “storage” I mean “untouched for months in a parking lot 10 minutes’ bike ride away,” but it might as well be locked in a vault: they keep it up on one of those car elevators, so getting it out is a production.

Today when I picked it up to drive it around (to charge up the battery and get it washed I took it to get it washed), I had a fee notice on the steering wheel — they’re increasing my monthly parking fee to $250. By NYC standards, this is not a bad deal, and I like the staff at this lot and find it secure; but insurance and parking and registration on this car I own free and clear now amounts to around $450 a month, regardless of whether I use it at all. Maintenance, even in a good year, ends up being around another $100 a month, so I’m paying a hefty price tag for a car I almost never use.

I think last year I probably took the car out a dozen times, mostly in the summer months, of which maybe four were long-distance trips and the rest were day use. That means that if you generously peg the rental value of day-use days at $120 (the cost of 6 hours of Zipcar) and call the long-distance trips $300 each, that means I spent almost $7,000 last year for $2,000 worth of car use. I’m not sure this makes sense anymore.

If I’m going to sell it, this is the time; it’s a good summer car and the weather is nice. So should I?

Because people who work with me and for me regularly do it, and I’m not a precious flower, I decided on the spur of the moment today to take the BoltBus to DC rather than Amtrak. I figured why not save a bit more than a hundred dollars, since it takes only about an hour longer when traveling in the middle of the day when traffic is relatively light.

So here I am on the New Jersey Turnpike speeding along in the left lane at a bit more than 70 miles per hour.

A few observations:

We left 15 minutes late but were through the Lincoln Tunnel in five minutes, are making excellent time and I suspect will arrive ahead of schedule. The bus is direct – board near Penn Station and ride to Union Station, with no intervening stops.

The boarding experience on a sidewalk near Penn Station is not elegant, but (given the context, which is a man in an orange vest yelling at a motley crowd while traffic streams by) is orderly and tolerable.

I booked my ticket 90 minutes before departure and paid $16, which, seriously, is a ridiculously small amount of money.

The bus itself is fine. Seats are newish and comfortable, there’s wifi (not as fast as my AT&T 4G, so I’m not using it). They’re a couple inches too close together, but it won’t kill me. The driver is professional and obviously competent. Air conditioning is operating,

They filled every last seat with standby passengers. I’m near the back, so the air is a little urinous (rookie mistake), but I’ll live.

The crowd is way less low-rent than your typical bus customer was 30 years ago — the vast majority being what I would consider “normal people,” albeit not necessarily wealthy or trendy. I will say that I am one of only two or three people on board who is dressed in business attire (by chance I’m sitting beside one of the others), but nowadays that’s often true on airliners, too.

Bus etiquette is different from train etiquette — people are in conversation, some people are watching a movie together audibly across the aisle — but put on your headphones and it’s fine.

Would I do this again? Sure, anytime my exact arrival time is somewhat flexible.

It’s hard to believe that as of two or three years ago I hadn’t ridden a bicycle in ages and ages. Oh, I owned one — when I moved to Atlanta in 1999, I bought a new one with grand plans — but I almost never rode it anywhere, had no riding stamina, and certainly wouldn’t have taken it out in the rain. (What, me get wet?)

All that, as you know, has changed. Not only am I now a cyclist, willing to ride in bad weather and eager to get back on a bike when I’ve been away for a few days; I am also a Cyclist, someone whom my friends and colleagues look to for bike advice, with whom they share bike jokes and videos, of whom they’re a little afraid lest I show up at an important meeting or, say, a wedding in a funny outfit riding my latest two-wheeled acquisition.

This is all a bit baffling, not least to me, because I think of myself as, number one, a completely unathletic person, and number two, not an insider or a joiner at all. Yet I’m now, number one, on a bicycle almost every day for somewhere between two and ten miles, and, number two, incontrovertibly, a member of the NYC cycling “community,” a group that has no membership test or dues or requirements but that nonetheless obviously does exist, in the eyes both of those who are in it and of those who are outside it shaking their fists at it for taking away their precious parking spaces or whatever.

How did this happen?

As with most fortuitous yet unplanned things that happen to us, my taking up of bicycling was the outcome of a virtuous cycle. Approaching my mid-forties, I found my doctor yelling at me for sitting on my ass all day. I felt the need to lose some weight. (That didn’t happen, but my weight distribution got much healthier and my stamina increased markedly, so I don’t care.) I discovered that I didn’t hate being on a bicycle. I learned that I enjoyed the sense of freedom and mastery of the city that it bestowed. I learned that being on a bicycle could be stylish and playful and colorful, instead of serious and dudish and douchey, while still conferring all the same health benefits.

At the end of the day, though, what happened is that I got off my ass and onto a bike, I liked it, and I got back onto it again the next day. I repeated this about 30 times, enough to realize that there were things I could do to make the riding experience better (get proper lights, a messenger bag, adjust my wardrobe), and I did them. This made me more inclined to get on the bike again, and I did it about fifty more times.

At this point, since I was on the bike so much I started paying attention to other people’s bikes, and this led me to do research, and this led me to buy a better bike, which led me to buy another better bike (and so on), which in turn led me to ride more.

Once I’d gotten on the bike another fifty times or so, I started noticing that not only was I participating in bike-related conversations (including #bikenyc on Twitter), but other people in those conversations were acting like I had the right and the standing to be in them.

Fast forward about another year, and nobody disputes that I’m a Cyclist, not even me. But, I repeat, the single most important thing I did to become the expert, the aficionado, the frequent rider that I am was to just get on the bike, and then get on again. After a certain point you just stop giving a shit whether the “insiders” think you’re one of them, because you know as much as they do and certainly have enough experience to act like one.

It was exciting when I first realized that I was riding fast enough that I overtook a lot of perfectly competent-looking cyclists in the course of my ordinary ride to work. But the real turning point for me, probably, was the moment when I realized that I would rather ride to work in the left lane up Church Street and Sixth Avenue, even with all the traffic, than go out of my way to take one of the separated bike paths. I’d reached the point where I was a competent street rider, not particularly anxious about traffic, capable of taking the lane, not afraid of the occasional honk. I had arrived.

All this was easier for me, I grant, because I have nothing to prove. I literally do not give a crap how some 23-year-old with an 11-pound fixie and a 20-pound bike chain around his waist thinks I look on my upright BMX with the big basket in front. I don’t even care what he thinks as he swerves around me (into oncoming traffic, without looking) as I stop for a red light. I don’t care if I’m the fastest, I don’t care if I’m the coolest-looking (and with that blinking red light on my helmet, I certainly am not). I just have fun, and (knock wood) try not to get hit by a car while doing it.