My wife Bernie doesn’t like it when I yell, honk, or otherwise engage cyclists, when our daughter Isa is in the car. The subsequent mass flipping off and indignant screams of “fuck you!” are completely predictable and, in Bernie’s opinion, easily avoidable.
That’s why I don’t yell at cyclists when Isa is in the car…unless Bernie is out of the car. Once I followed a cyclist all the way down Topanga to the ocean, it must have been three miles. He wouldn’t let me pass. He’s a vehicle. When the road expanded to two lanes, I easily passed him. But then, at PCH, he illegally swerved back in front of me from the right, on a red light, to block me and make the left turn onto the highway ahead of me. “Are you a vehicle, or are you not a vehicle?!” I yelled, fed up with the hypocrisy. He casually flipped me off and rode away. “That one was a little complicated,” Isa observed.
Jack Silbert, curator