When Bikes Attack.

If you think that's bad, you should see the road!

This is what happens when you bump into another rider and go down in a heap in the rain. For some perspective, that's my left upper thigh in the hip region, which took the brunt of a collision with someone known only as "Joey the Hat" for reasons too long to explain here.

Thinking we could outrun lightning (a thought that last goes back to Ben Franklin) we took off for home at the first sign.

The rain pelted us like a last call hooker and two of us (one of them me) touched shoulders and one of us (me) went down on the asphalt, hip first, then elbow, then shoulder and finally a snapping head (mine), whose helmet-covered orb smacked the road with more force than a Mike Tyson left hand. Thinking I was seeing my final day, I felt the impact and quickly got up, retrieved the bike (behind me by 5 feet) and scurried to the relative safety of the shoulder of the road.

Then, I waited for what I thought would be a dizzying feeling followed by a whirr and some mild panic, but it never happened. I rode the 3 miles home and wondered why a beer cooler could keep my head from cracking after a 6-foot fall at 18 miles per hour onto solid asphalt. Those SNELL specs are the shit.

So, let that be a lesson to those of you who choose to ride sans helmet. They're called accidents for a reason. Otherwise, they'd be called purposefulls or something else, because when you don't expect something to happen, it does. That's where the helmet comes in handy.

As much as I'd like to ride without one, I know that I can't trust either my fellow cyclists or the auto drivers to cooperate with my best wishes for a safe return.

Now, I'm left with the Crab Nebula on my left thigh and I'm limited to sleeping on my right side for a few days.

I only posted the photo to further gross you out and enhance the spirit of the story that ends with a new helmet and a fresh set of circumstances.

Yes, it hurts.