Errosion of Happiness
This is a repost from my Yahoo! 360 blog. There is a picture for this entry. Follow the link to see it.
Wednesday January 18, 2006
A few months ago I saw a bike locked up to a signpost in my neighborhood. This bike stood out from most bikes – It was bright and pink and it had beads hanging all over a big basket attached to the front. Overall it was a little girly for my taste, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the magnificence. Somebody must have been very happy to get a new toy like that. As soon as I saw the bike, a particular friend of mine popped into my head. I knew that it was imperative that I show it to her because she would love to see it and, as a fellow bike rider, would appreciate the significance that such a bike would have in its owner’s life. Just to explain it to all the non bikers – a new bike can make any day of the year feel like Christmas (the gift/Santa part anyway) even if you’re a dedicated Buddhist with no legs. Now combine the normal new-bike-happiness with the happiness added by the fact that this bike was obviously customized and/or picked out specifically to fit the tastes and personality of the owner, and you have one happy biker. In this day and age there is much talk about jealousy and “haters” (I haven’t seen much evidence that this is as widespread a problem as Puffy says it is, but that’s another post), but I decided to put my “hater” ways aside and be happy for the faceless stranger who had gained the happiness of a new bike.
Now fast forward. Every time my friend happened to be in the area, the bike would slip my mind until the next time that I saw it while she wasn’t around. I brushed it off because I figured that eventually I would get to show it to her, I was in no rush. I should’ve been. One day I noticed that the front wheel was gone. Fast forward. The back wheel was gone. After that, every time I passed the bike, instead of sharing in a stranger’s happiness, I would think about what a shame it is that it’s so hard for someone to keep something nice. Yesterday I got a new camera and the first thing I did after getting home was go out to get a picture of that bike. I guess the cake needed a little icing. Last night I found that the handle bars were gone along with the attached basket and the beads that had been hanging from it were in a pile on the sidewalk. I never got to show my friend the bike. (Never put off until tomorrow what . . .)
Now, so far I’ve been writing with a pretty facetious tone, but damn! I watched this bike get transformed from what must have been someone’s dream bike to a frame and a pile of beads – piece by piece. I wish I had a before picture so I could convey how dramatic the transformation was. And the worst thing about it is that if I had paused to think about it, I would have seen this coming the first time I set eyes on the bike. That’s the worst thing about this because it’s not an isolated set of incidents. New things exposed to the public just don’t last. It’s not because of normal wear and tear, it’s because people purposely break them, steal them, or otherwise misuse and mistreat them. I like to think that people are generally good, but what use does that do when it’s the deviants from the average whose actions affect us the most?
