Yesterday I rode home from my day job, exhausted from my first week as a bike messenger, and eagerly changed clothes (and bikes) for the evening's festivities. As
you may or may not know, my preferred method of transportation is a triple-high tallbike, pictures of which can be seen at

http://www.biketraffic.org./biketraffic/BT1003/

This bike's name is Janeane Gartallfalo. While to the untrained eye it may seem much more dangerous to ride such a tall vehicle, perhaps it is not the case. For one thing, my feet are really only about four feet off the ground- not as far to fall as it seems. For another, the bike draws a lot of attention and is difficult (tho as you shall see, not impossible) to miss. And thirdly, we must not forget that statistically I am at a much, much lower risk of dying in a traffic accident than anyone who spends any time
at all in a car. Cars are, politics aside, steel coffins- hundreds of horses worth of power surrounded by steel and piloted by (as Carlin is fond of saying) dumbasses (if they are going slower than you) or assholes (if they are going faster than you). Seeing as I live in a big city where (automobile) traffic rarely goes faster than a crawl, car-on-cyclist deaths are relatively rare. Whereas we all know several people
who have died in car accidents, sadly, and often there wasn't even another vehicle involved- the device is designed to accelerate you to dangerous speeds and
safety is only a concern because of decades of effort by activists.

At any rate, one such asshole (I say this partly because of his speed, and partly because of his reaction) managed not to see me despite the fact that
my bike was three bike frames tall, bright yellow, and I was on top of it screaming at him. He performed a "California Stop" through a stop sign (which is to say
he did not stop, but went slightly less fast for a brief moment, the same sort of nod to an ancient tradition that touching your hat brim is to doffing your cap and bowing low). His car was one of these blooby jelly-bean shaped things, like a mini-minivan
with a distinct trunk.

As he came from the right, I veered left, and his front left bumper collided with my bike's front fork. This caused the entire length of my bike to slap upside the car like some sort of vehicular castanet. My leg got bruised right above the ankle where it hit
the corner of the car roof, and over the bike I went, doing a barrel roll and landing on my back, splayed out, on the top of the car.

His momentum continued to carry him forward, but my foot was still tangled in the bike frame. So he dragged me, and I dragged the bike, for about three
feet. The bike served as an anchor to drag me down off the top of the car, but when my feet went off the back the bike frame dropped off and I came to rest
with my butt on the trunk, my back on the back windshield, and my head on the roof, staring upwards with my arms flung out to the side.

At this point the driver realized what had happened (he ran a stop sign and hit a cyclist and probably didn't have insurance and was probably drunk and he
was definitely in deep shit), so he stepped on the gas.

I remember looking up at the cloudy, dark sky, my vision framed by trees whipping past, as I traveled down the block on top of a speeding car. Pretty soon
the acceleration sucked me off the back (have you *tried* to ride on top of a car, Teen Wolf style? It's hard to stay on!) and I landed on my feet, looking back at the crowd of five or so stunned Mexicans who have, for the last ten years, parked a
van at that corner and sold fruits and vegetables.

My first response when I fall off a bike is to lay on the ground and mentally check all of my parts to see if they're still there, so I dropped. The last thing this guy would have seen would be me laying in the street like I was dead, so for all he knows he took a life that night. Once I realized I was okay, I turned around to see his taillights disappearing around a curve.

I jumped to my feet. "I'm okay! I'M OKAY!" I screamed to the stunned gueros. I actually did a little dance of joy right there. "Holy sheet mayn, that guy heet you!" one of the dudes said, "He ran the stoplight and heet you!"

Now, the first thing out of any bike freak's mouth when he or she wrecks is, "How's the bike?" I checked it out. The front fork was dinged over to the left,
but I could still use the bike to limp to my destination. Something's messed up in the crank and it clicks every time it comes around. Definitely salvageable, but it will take work.

I never even saw the driver. Coulda been a kid, a granny, a woman or a man. The witnesses didn't get a plate number, but what's the point anyway? As we well
know from our many friends who've been hit by idiot drivers, the law requires you to actually identify the driver, not just the car, that hit you if you wish to prosecute a hit-and-run. Besides, I had a party or three to go to.