Join up with a Critical Mass

Honestly, are you really going to move away without having taken part in the original free-form expression of a collective bike-centric consciousness? I didn't think so. Joining up is one step to making sure that bicycle-hating Republican warbots don't descend from the heavens and eat your children.



(What an asshole!)

Anyway, go out back, dust off that 30-pound bruiser that you bought off the junkie outside 16th Street BART and then quickly forgot about, and haul it to Justin Herman Plaza before 6PM on the last Friday of any month. You'll know you're in the right place when you see about eight hundred other people lolling about on two wheels, waiting for the unspoken signal to get rolling and take back the streets (for a few hours) from soon-to-be-outraged (but normally dangerously oblivious) motorists.


Don't forget your heaviest U-lock, handy for securing your bike outside a Tenderloin liquor store after you run out of Tecate or throwing through the windshield of an irate soccer mom's minivan.


Critical Mass is just plain cool. It happens on the last Friday of every month and follows no particular route. Feel free to lament the fact that you missed out on the oft-proposed "taking of the [Golden Gate] Bridge", but know that It Could Happen To You. And despite jokes to the contrary, don't be an asshole and provoke soccer moms into pointless confrontations just because they happened to inch forward when you were self-righteously blocking an intersection; remember that the maternal instinct to get back to Lafayette as fast as possible in order to microwave frozen TV dinners for the kids is biologically ingrained to a sometimes murderous extent. Don't mess with the soccer moms, you fixie-riding schmuck. PS - Even Google likes bikes.