Good deed again fails to go unpunished

I like to think I was always a considerate driver when it came to sharing the road with cyclists.  In any case, after becoming a bicycle commuter myself and surviving a ridiculous number of truly scary brushes with cars, I certainly am a careful and generous road sharer these days.

So I was more than a little surprised to find myself the target of a cyclist's wrath this morning.

The guy in question cycles past my house to the post office every day at about 10 and a little while later, rides back on the same street with a front basket full of mail.  I've always assumed he's picking up mail for a nearby business.

"There," I thought.  "What a good motorist am I.  I can hardly wait for Karma to bring me some wonderful cycling fortune in return for this act of... Wait.  Did the dude just yell at me?"

As I was about to pull away from the curb this morning, I saw the mailbike guyin the rear view mirror and didn't pull away until he was well past so I wouldn't interfere with him in the least.  Then, because there was no need to drive faster than he was cycling on the residential street, I stayed behind him and let him have as much of the lane as he wanted.  I even gave him an extra cushion so he wouldn't have that menacing feeling of a car breathing down his neck. 

When the road widened, I pulled into the OTHER LANE and passed him as though he were a car.  I'd estimate there were a good nine feet between my fender and his bike.

"There," I thought.  "What a good motorist am I.  I can hardly wait for Karma to bring me some wonderful cycling fortune in return for this act of... Wait.  Did the dude just yell at me?"

He did.  It was indecipherable, but it was pretty clearly not, "Thanks!"  It was an angry outburst, much like the ones I send after motorists who graze my panniers at 50 mph.  My wife and I looked at each other, puzzled.

"You gave him a TON of room," my wife said.

"Yeah, I did," I said, still confused. 

When we came to a stop sign -- that he blew right through -- he unveiled Chapter Two of his soliloquoy, complete with the international sign for "look how tall my finger is!"

It took me a few minutes to quit trying to make sense of the episode and conclude that this guy was merely the two-wheeled version of a very hardy species in this neck of the woods... the methed-out, four-toothed whack job.

So, what did I learn from this?  Well, here's a partial list.

• The guy who rides past my house each day is a psycho.  This is not comforting.
• Motor vehicles are not the only conveyance used by genuine a-holes.
• After months of consuming a steady diet of "cars are bad" blog posts, I'd forgotten how infuriating a jerk cyclist can be.
• My Karmic reward is probably going to be doubled now, since my kindness was met with scorn... I hope Karma gives me a Brooks B17 Special for my Corsaro bike.