Friday after work, Red Mouth Ghost invited me to Critical Mass, and let me borrow his Swedish Army Bike for the ride. If you're not already kickin' combustion-engine ass in Critical Mass, it's a nationwide act of... well, not civil disobedience so much as political pranksterism. The idea is that one day out of the month, bikes will no longer be victims on the downtown streets. It's legal to ride in the street on a bike, right? What about 400 bikes?

The folks who showed up at the Daley Plaza were there for reasons as diverse as the crowd itself. Many were bike messengers, who obviously just wanted to let out some aggression against the beasts that hunt them the other 29 days of the month. The core group was the Critical Mass activists, wearing shirts that read ONE LESS CAR and sporting bikes that looked like they lived on them. Two kids with backpacks shaped like half-cans of Red Bull handed out free cans of that sweet, sweet nectar. Some grizzled old guy gave me an anti-nuke fax already filled out to be copied and faxed to Dubya. But the main motivation seemed to be to see who was the nerdiest bike-geek in town. There were recumbent bikes and a coupla velocipedes. One guy even had a bike where he laid right off the ground between the wheels, like this: 0*\___/0 where * represents the pedals. The crowd was pretty crunchy, and thus one guy had a drum and others were hacky-sacking.

They began to circle the plaza, bells ringing. Suddenly, the crowd plunged into rush-hour traffic, surrounding cars and bringing them to a halt! The best part was when traffic stopped and we caught up with the cars, flowing between them in an unstoppable wave, ignoring all traffic laws, 200 of us dominating the streets. The cars would start to honk and we'd start to ring our little bells in response. The cops harassed us a couple of times, tried to instruct us to ride in the right lane and keep the left lane free for cars, but they gave up eventually.

As they swarmed into an intersection, crazy riders would go and park themselves in front of each car. They'd remain there until the pack had passed, and make their way back up to the front. We handed out flyers to pedestrians and stuck invitations on every bike we saw. It was a blast.

I can't wait until the next one. I'm gonna have to get me a bike like one of these guys's.