Cruisers, Road-Bikes, and Hermeneutics

Last week my brother and I were talking on the phone about all manner of things--Harry Potter (review pending), my most recent date-night at the Jupiter Hotel (awesome), the military (Biff wants in, sort’a), early-morning exercise routines (gott’a have ‘em), our mutual quasi-hatred of Jonathan Franzen (‘nuff said), self-defense training, dreams, you know, the euj’--when I mentioned that I was becoming something of a cycling-monster, to which my brother responded with the kind of “me too” that tends to ignite the flames of sibling-rivalry like little else.

In my brother and I’s conversation, sibling-rivalry first took the form of us virulently differentiating ourselves from each other, i.e., me saying that my monstrosity is nothing like his, him saying (more or less), “And that’s how I friggin’ like it!” Case in point, my brother has ridden a beach-cruiser for the past year and a half, and (I imagine) looks something like the following while he rides said beach-cruiser:

(Can you see the sh*t-eating grin on the guy’s face? I can...) 
         I, on the other hand, ride a hard-core, super bad-*ss, hill-eating machine of a “cross-bike” (somewhere in between a road-bike and a mountain-bike)--



--and look something like the following while I’m taking Joelle (that’s right, my bike’s got a name, a sexy name) up one of the many steep hills to be found in the Portland-Metro Area:



(I’m the guy in red, duh.)
    Anyways, after my brother and I adequately differentiated ourselves and managed to sequester our own respective senses of superiority (his had to do with being quite happy to take 45 minutes to ride 3 miles to work, mine had to do with being happy to take 15 to ride just under 7, amongst other things), it came up that my brother’d recently had his bike stolen and was looking to get a new one. Enter Max Goins, salesman:



          My initial sales-pitch was, basically/impudently: Cruisers like my brother’s are stupid and road-bikes are awesome, and my brother should try and find himself a good road-bike of the touring/commuter variety (steel frame, slightly thicker tires than a standard roady, wide range of gears, drop-down handle bars). I mostly talked about speed and flexibility and, well, speed, in making my sales-pitch. My brother countered with, “But I like to sit upright while I ride” and “I’ve ridden road-bikes before, Max, and I just don’t like them...” We went back and forth like this for longer than I’d like to admit, each of us getting increasingly frustrated, me eventually saying in an explosively patronizing manner, “I bet you cash-money that if you road a decent road-bike for like three weeks, you’d never go back to a cruiser”, him responding with a kind of damp reproach, “I don’t feel like you respect my right to choose what kind of riding experience I want to have”. We were, I realized, not only having a good, old-fashioned sibling tiff, but also talking apples (road-bikes) and oranges (cruisers). Enter hermeneutics.

Hermeneuteics is a branch of philosophy that deals primarily with questions of interpretation (e.g., textual, such as the bible) and meaning (where does it come from? how is it determined), in which meaning is always what is called “immanent”, i.e. contained within a text or a tradition or a language.

What the hell does the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics have to do with my brother and I’s conversation above? Well, it became apparent to me that my brother and I were talking at each other from within different traditions, so to speak, him from the tradition of leisurely cruiser-riding, me from the tradition of super-awesome/fast road-bike riding. I pointed this out to my brother (after I’d insulted him and he’d reproached me) and said something to the effect of “Hahahahah, there’s actually nothing I can say that will convince you of the truth of what I’m saying because you haven’t ridden a road-bike for long enough to actually know what I’m talking about, but don’t worry, this isn’t like some moral-failure on your part, it’s just hermeneutics: We’re coming at each other from different traditions, or, at least, you think I’m coming at you from a different tradition and I’m failing to articulate myself in a way that you can understand from within yours...” (I paraphrase/edit for the purpose of making myself sound both smart and reasonable, of course.)

My brother heard what I was telling him about what makes road-bikes awesome and concluded that riding a road-bike meant one couldn’t/shouldn’t cruise, that “cruising”--taking ones time, sallying around at a non-break-neck pace, catching the sights and sounds of your surroundings, not sweating profusely, etc.--wasn’t a desirable or respectable way to ride from within the narrow framework of road-bike riders such as yours truly. “Not true”, I told him. “I cruise all the time on my road-bike. However, I can also go at break-neck speeds, should the desire or need present itself, and that’s the limitation of the cruiser: Yes one can cruise, but that’s all one can do”. In hermeneutic-speak, the tradition or practice of road-bike riding actually encompasses/understands the practice of cruiser riding, but the practice of cruiser riding does not encompass/understand that of road-bike riding.

I explained all this to my brother and did my best to couch my explanation in terms that I (like all good salesmen) knew he’d understand. How’d I do this? I talked about it being desirable to be “prepared” (a recent concern of my brother’s that I was aware of and that I was not above exploiting for the purpose of resolving our tiff/making my sale): What if my brother needed to cover 3 miles in 10 minutes instead of 45? Or, god-forbid, a distance longer than 3 miles? What if he wanted to ride his bike for, say, 10 miles? Or 20? 30? 40? “On my bike”, I told him, “not only can I travel under 10 miles really quickly, I can travel around 40 miles in less than 2 hours. And not that you necessarily want to ride 40 miles in less than 2 hours all the time, but it sure is nice to be able to when you want/need to. On a cruiser, both the speed at which you can travel and the comfortable distance are limited and, ergo, you’re unprepared for the possible demands of a change in either your circumstances or your desires”. My brother liked this pitch better than my previous “Crusiers drool, road-bikes rule!”, and, smelling the close, I sweetened the deal, “You know, you could always have two bikes, a cruiser and a road-bike?” A few days ago I received a text from my brother telling me, "I decided to buy a stupid road-bike", and road-bike riders everywhere were happy to welcome yet another into their ranks.