Superhuman

Sometimes I’m pretty sure I am a superhuman.  Last night, for example, I managed to unlock the outer gate and the front door to my apartment, carry my bike up the stairs, walk into the kitchen without knocking anything over, and assemble and consume three medium sized burritos (each with a flawless chicken:guac:slaw:salsa ratio).  I accomplished all of this with a blood alcohol level of whatever results from chugging five 5% beers while running 2,000 meters plus two 8% celebration beers.  

I deserved a trophy.  Made of carbs.  The fact that I got last place in the Beer Mile was overshadowed by the olympic execution of this complex series of tasks.  The last and most challenging event of the Frontal Lobe Decathlon was to make an online reservation.  I needed to reserve a Getaround car (like Zipcar but better) for 7:15 the following morning.  It needed to be under $7/hour, automatic transmission, within a mile of my house, and big enough to fit my bike.  Processing this amount of information with so few available brain cells would not be easy, but I was in a herculean mood.  Using mostly my index fingers and one squinted eye, I clicked and scrolled and entered my correct password (on the third try) like a champion.  

The day’s work done, I slept the sleep of a sweaty baby on a merry-go-round but, thanks to satellites that remember daylight savings, my cell phone alarm did not fail to punctually end the restless night.   I “awoke” (if you can call it that) feeling just enough head pain to make me feel alive.  I stood and faced the world outside my window and inhaled all the momentum my lungs could hold.  By 7:30, I was heading out the door with my helmet, goggles, swim cap, running shoes and registration number for the Redwood City Triathlon.  How did my dehydrated raisin brain remember to assemble all of these things? I marveled.   

But alas, at the height of my invincibility, the universe saw fit to remind me of my mortality.   Right before I left, I went to loosen the anti-theft pin on the front fork of my bike so that I could easily remove the wheel when I got to the car.  If you’ve never seen one of these, they look like this:

I twisted and heaved until my palms were purple — the pin would not budge.  My pajamaed roommate leaned against her doorframe, watching with lips pushed to one side of her face.  I stood up and looked at her.  

“I’m going to the streets to find a man.”  

She gave an earnest nod.  “Good luck.”

There is only one type of man to be found on the streets of SoMa in the early morning hours on a Sunday.   He is not known for chivalry.  There was a pack of four of them on the corner of 8th and Howard and I rolled towards them at an uncertain angle, like a grandma’s bowling ball toward a cluster of four pins.  When I was close enough to realize they were all simultaneously spitting profanities at each other, I rolled straight on past without a word.  Gutter ball.  The bike shop was closed and so was the liquor store.  Sleepy weekend dawns in The City are normally one of my favorite things.  Most Sunday mornings, I love nothing more than riding through the still urban streets, quiet as the apocalypse.  But on this particular morning, I was just annoyed by the astounding lack of non-drug addicted humans within a mile radius of my house.  I stared up into the windows of the new gleaming high rises — come on hipsters!  I know you’re in there!  Don’t you want brunch already?!  

Fortunately, right as I was passing the gas station, a cop car pulled in to the coin vacuum.   I silently apologized for cursing the San Francisco police just one day earlier after getting pulled over on my bike and I gave the officer my brightest debutant smile as he stepped out of his car.   He was obliged to rescue my distressed damsel self, even when I muttered something about “yeah well I loosened it” when he unscrewed the pin on his first attempt. 

I checked my watch — 7:48, plenty of time.  Everything was back on track… until I got to the parking lot and the car was not there.  I called Getaround and was informed that I had made the reservation for 7:15 PM.   Wait a minute.  What does that mean about my perceived success of everything else that happened at home last night?  The stealth entrance, the perfectly ratioed burritos??  (Suddenly I saw a grizzly flashback of a clanking bicycle, scattered tupperware lids, guacamole plopping to the floor.  Nooo!!)  God bless Josh, the phone support guy at Getaround, who immediately booked me another car—a Prius, automatic, $7/hour, big enough for my bike—only two blocks away.  

This post has been brought to you by Getaround — official sponsor of the Peace As In 

✌ blog and the best invention since Craigslist. 
(I’m kidding about the sponsorship, but serious about the rest.)

As someone who hasn’t owned a car for almost a year and hasn’t consistently driven at all in the past three years, I have a question for the automotive world: when did keys and ignitions go out of style?  To an outside observer, I must have looked like a chimpanzee in a science experiment trying to start the Prius — turning and flipping the fob, lifting it to my eyes to stare at it from every angle, smelling it for clues as to where the actual key might be.  When I finally deduced the right combination of levers and switches to pull a tiny key out of the fob, I couldn’t find anywhere to insert it.  

I spent about ten minutes triggering windshield wipers, clicking the emergency lights, activating the brake and turning on the radio before finally resorting to a YouTube tutorial.  My IQ pride was slightly comforted by the fact that I only needed to type “How to start a P” for Google to know what I needed on the second guess.  Apparently there are almost as many dumb drivers as people who want to start a photography business, so at least I’m not alone.  

But nothing restores healthy ego like a bunch of white people giving you high fives for swimming, biking and running all in a row — especially when they assume that your lack of wetsuit is not an act of stinginess, but an intentional act of bravery.  I am not cheap, I am daring!  Icy cold water be damned!   You amuse me with your attempt to freeze me to death!  By 11:00 AM—less than 17 hours after I was clutching my knees to hold back Budweiser vomit on the track—I was strolling the strut of a king out of the triathlon finish area, bike in one hand, bagel and a banana in the other (did I mention I think I may have superpowers?).  

Back at the car I realized that the Prius is actually big enough to fit my entire bike without having to remove the front wheel so… I’ll know for next time to skip the charade with the street men and the cop.  Somehow it took another ten minutes of monkey detective work to put the damn car in reverse (seriously Toyota, what is with that shifter?), but when I was finally driving out of the parking lot with the windows down, sun on my forearm, Bay salt in my hair and crumbs of peanut butter bagel all over my face, I was a winner.