Best Day

an anticapitalist note featuring bikes and a poem

Left the house like Obama
Hit the road like a runner (Runner, road runner)
Hit the road like Road Runner (Road)
I'm biking, I'm biking, I'm biking.

~ Frank Ocean, Biking (Solo)

Hello Team,

How we feeling today, champs? On a scale of 1-10, how dead do we think Mitch is? We believing that picture?

Anyways, that’s not actually what I want to write about today, and I’ll leave the other eulogies to the brave LGBTQ+ sex-workers who tirelessly serve the GOP. I want to write about my bike.

Meet the Poetry is Politics Pink Steed (Pipps).

The Poetry is Politics Pink Steed

Ain’t she a beaut?

On my first serious adventure with Pipps, I hit the Eastworks parking lot, leaned into the handlebars, and said out loud to myself, This is the best day of my life. And then I laughed at the sheer enormity of that statement. Especially when I’ve watched babies be born, and married the coolest person I’ve ever met, and performed at Wakarusa, and backpacked in Yellowstone.

Nearly a year ago, I lost my ability to drive after a civil war era ghost with a penance for revenge moved into my right foot. (That’s what the experts say anyway). For a while, I had believed this to be a temporary haunting, even as the months dragged on. Recently, I’ve been working to accept it as a more permanent fact of my life. There are ways to adapt a car so that I might be able to drive again, like installing hand controls. This is, of course, a lengthy and expensive process because disability is costly and time consuming. While I hope to do this in the future, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the whole process, which include things like retaking a driving test. Your pal failed her first driving test back in the 00s. I do fancy myself a safe driver, but that skill did not come naturally or with any sort of ease.

As I started to research adaptive driving, I realized I was still staring down months of asking for rides. For a year, I haven’t left the house by myself. In another life, I loved grabbing a coffee and a pre-roll out in the world before I settled in to write. All my myself. I loved choosing the fifteen-minute soundtrack for the mission. I loved having the time in the car before meeting the terrifying blank page to contemplate how I might approach it this time. I loved the glimpses into the real messy world before I retreated back to my curated cave.

It’s not that I haven’t been in the world since I stopped driving. As mentioned, I’m lucky enough to have married my best friend. Ryan aids in my requested missions and brings me along for enrichment rides even when my body hurts too much to walk into the stores. Plus, there are a handful of women who I would have lost my mind without this year, who never make me feel in debt for my need. I’ve been in the world, but it has been on the schedule of others. It has required I ask for anything I may want or need. It’s required I be social even when I feel like being a little poet ghost in a hoodie and headphones lurking in the produce section.

I had to shift my thinking from what I’m unable to do to what I am able to do. I’m unable to bear weight on my toes, but I am able to peg leg like a motherfucker on my heel. It suddenly occurred to me a few weeks ago, I might be able to ride an electric bike. Enter Pipps.

I can indeed peddle a bike on my heel, especially with that sweet, sweet electricity.

The first day I went for a test ride in the neighborhood to see what hills felt like. I also scoped out the local public pool with hopes that I might be able to get a swim in this summer.

Then the next day, I packed a backpack with my crutches, water bottle, various bike tools, inhaler, wallet, and phone, snapped on my very cool watermelon helmet, and then reclaimed a little bit of my independence. Homies, I rode that bike right to the dispensary and then my favorite local vegan joint! I didn’t have to ask anyone anything. I didn’t need help. I was in charge of my destiny.

It seems so simple, but it’s not. It’s everything. The autonomy I felt in that moment was unmatched. I was using my own body to move through the world. I was in charge of the speed, the route, the destinations.

I wrongly repeat this line from the Declaration of Independence often, but it bears the repetition. All people are born equal and have the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All people are endowed with free will. To pray or not pray how they wish. To read what they like, and listen to what they like, and consume what they like. To adorn their bodies how they like. To feel a rainbow of complex and contradicting emotions. To make mistakes. To thrive.

But not all people have equal access to these joys of free will. Under capitalism, each person is assigned a worth based on how much they can produce that is saleable with caps on who has access to production. I don’t think this a true way to rank value. Why we out here ranking the value of humans anyway? It’s a false system meant to devalue the vast majority of us.

The fact that I’m not a great ambulator does not define my worth or value, and should not affect my ability to live a rich, fulfilling life.

Samesies: my gender, class, race, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, beauty, education, employment, housing, religion. So on and so forth. Insert your name above.

Have y’all ever sat down and thought about how much cool art we’re missing from marginalized people? How much further we’d be into research about curing things like ALS if we offered equal education to all the children? How much would violent crime plummet if everyone’s needs were met?

What if Lindsey Graham championed queer rights instead of devoting his life to war mongering?

Imagine.

Dream it. I do.

Here’s a poem featuring a bicycle that makes me feel like a human again inspired by the song I quoted from to start this letter.

Bikin’ I’m Bikin’

by Shira Erlichman (After F.O.)

Oh no, I didn’t mean to believe in
the infinite. Now I’m gripping the hand
-lebars like shoulder blades. I’m fucked. The trees,
an unfortunate Thanksgiving table
packed with hot-headed aunts. I’m already
drunk, the wind flossing my tears. What if I
never had another thought? Just flew through
the hours & months? Don’t let the sky be
misunderstood. Rain pulses my eardrums,
I’m swim-biking. All chimneys are champagne
flutes. The gravel roars like a gym teacher
yelling in a cigarette whisper. Fog
for bones I ride in soft halos. Is death
the last forgiveness? Breath, the last witness?

---

From a sweet day at Sundershow 2026

My next Pipps mission is to the grocery store. Yeah, I’m a baddie. Thanks.

Anyway, go out there and remember no matter what the podcasts say no one is an NPC. We’re all important here.

I love you,

EBG