When I first started cycling in new york city, I never locked up my bike. I had locks, but I felt it was too great a risk to leave my bike unattended in this version of the city from 1993. Nowadays I leave my bike locked for a few hours, but never overnight. It is always a risk and so I only lock up my single-speed roughed-up commuter bike. No lock is secure; you are only trying to disrupt the cost-benefit analysis of your local thief. How long will it take to break this lock in a safe amount of time? The common arrangement is the U-lock passes through the seat tube, wheel and an immovable object. I appreciate how bike racks are so much more prevalent in 2023, but frequently feel a surge of annoyance when they are so frequently taken up by delivery e-bikes. So I end up securing my bike to a parking sign. One U-lock and one cable lock. There will be an inescapable rite of passage where you lose your bike lock key. If you are lucky, you have two extra sets at home because when you lose one set you cannot safely carry on with that lock with only one key. This will cause the forces of misfortune to align in the most brutal way. You will lose that last key. It is inevitable. And then you will not only be stranded but face down the possibility of leaving your bicycle somewhere unattended while you seek recourse to this predicament. It is all so much. 

Years ago my bicycle was stolen from outside the local drug store on Main Street in my hometown. I hadn’t locked it up. I think I was carrying a cable lock at the time, but the effort to secure the bicycle seemed monumental. I was cycling around town with a friend. He had the much nicer bicycle, but the thief chose my Schwinn World Sport 10 speed as his target. I remember that moment in time, of watching through the plate glass window of the store. Someone moved in on my bicycle, removed it from its resting place. And it was gone. I revisit that moment on occasion; not so much as an instance of damage, but mostly as bookmark, a placeholder to unearth a dusty souvenir of turbulence, chaos, and the inexplicable loss. I miss that bike. I miss where my life may have gone without its pilfering away into the late afternoon glare. I may have gone on to something else, something with a different uniform. It’s all gone now.

So, nowadays I always use locks. I secure the physical reminder of something else that I will never recover. And nowadays I know that the bicycle is just steel and plastic and rubber. In 1984, however, well, it was something else.