I was riding my folding bike home from prison last Tuesday at dusk. The ride was pretty routine – cool and cloudy Seattle weather, no headwind to speak of, rapidly diminishing light, and those unidentifiable early-summer bugs hovering above the trail as it follows the river.
(aside) Those bugs turn the automatic acts of inhaling and exhaling into a very conscious, and carefully controlled, process. Inhale through my mouth at the wrong time, and one of the flying fiends will get caught in the vacuum and shoot all the way into a lung. Then, I cough throughout the night while Monica, in her wonderfully-concerned, but hypochondriachal way, worriedly insists that I have tuberculosis. Inhale through my nose when I’m riding through an insect cloud, and one gets lodged in a sinus. For the rest of the ride, I draw stares from strolling couples with my loud loogie-hocking snorts. Eventually, I’ll be able to bring the hard little carcass (or carcasses) into my mouth where, if I’m lucky, I can spit it out. More often, I swallow it.
So, I was riding with my breath held, my eyes closed most of the time. I stood up to leverage for more speed because I can’t be passed without a challenge. As the two hard-bodied, lycra-clad assholes pulled away, I hit a bump and heard a distinct, metallic rattle. I looked down, doubly annoyed.
“Piece of shit bike,” I thought. “”Fenders must be coming loose.”
Then I sat down. I put my sitz bones on the padded back end of my seat and let my scrotum and balls rest on the rocket-shaped front end – perfect positioning. I started to relax, to allow more of my weight to rest on by butt.
Click! The back end of the seat lowered ever so slightly, while the front end pushed up.
Click! Click! Click! Back of the seat: down, nose of the seat: up. Suddenly, my weight had shifted from my sitz bones forward, toward my nutsack.
“Fuck! My perineum!” I thought, before I could even debate the accuracy of that word in my head. Do men have perineum? perineums? perinea?
I couldn’t ride the remaining few miles this way. For one, I’ve seen a real scientific study debunking the urban myth about bicycle seats causing impotence. However, constant pressure on the perineum can really, honestly damage some of the pipes down there that are responsible for carrying healthy sperm where it needs to go.
Secondly, I know what it’s like to stand up on a bike for miles at a time – (aside #2) I did it once in Toronto on a rented bike with a seat that felt like a cannonball impacting my ass at close range every time I hit a bump. With miles to go to return the bike, and my quads and calves refusing to allow me to stand any longer, I reached my hotel, stuffed a pair of underwear down the back of my underwear, gingerly continued riding to the rental place, returned the bike, and waddled away looking like I had just dropped a load in my pants.
Unfortunately, padding couldn’t help in my present, pressure-on-the-perineum situation. Over the next few miles, I learned something about myself. I can correctly position, and hold in place, a loose, rattling bicycle seat with my butt cheeks. It’s not easy, and it takes careful manipulation of leg and abdominal muscles as well, but I can do it if pressed. Obviously, this is very valuable information.
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