The one time I put anything metal together I put a freestyle bike together, part by part. My father allowed me to use one side of the garage to arrange the parts on the floor, while over the course of a couple of years I used my allowance, birthday money, and Christmas money to purchase the parts I would need to finish it. The fluorescent-colored parts were all about showing off for some good old-fashioned attention, not unlike the way certain animals show off during mating season to attract a mate. I was all about standing out. Could I have been trying to pull of the trick of letting everything be the way it is, while honoring the emotional diversity of belief and feeling, drifting down Main Street in my mind at the time? Absolutely. But like anything, things get old and make way for new things. So, when mountain bikes flooded the market, I had no problem letting go of my purple-spoked spiritual statement for a big-wheeled behemoth with 18 speeds and some toe clips I thought would make it easy to ride straight up the side of boulders at the speed of chartreuse. When I bent my rims while trying to ride full speed straight up the state house steps to stick out, I quickly learned that while ideas can be invincible for a while, the touchable things reflected in those ideas are always bound to take a dump. Now I just try to walk to work or to the store without straining a broken Achilles or popping a knee, and the colorful ideas I had for how to live an exciting and stand out kind of life have been replaced by a slower and perhaps less vibrant existence, marked by how smoothly I turn left while walking on a curb, if the turn looked almost like a pirouetting part of a movie or not, or as graceful as a brown snail imperceivably making a left turn on a leaf in the garden, which to me, seems just about as athletic and stylish as anything I can think of doing and not doing.