night light bright

In the past two weekends I’ve had two headlights stolen. Or taken, maybe I should say. I mean, it’s hardly stealing, really. It’s about as petty a theft as you can come by. These lights aren’t worth anything, really, maybe a couple bucks on the black market (ebay). Or maybe they’re just being used on bikes around town here. Hopefully they’re at least going to be used on a bike somewhere. Taking a light off someone’s bike is pretty petty, though. And both times it was at night. How can you take someone’s light at night? You must be a bicyclist, right? You must know why that light is there? It’s there so I can get home safely. And sure, it was an easy steal, I mean all you had to do was unclip it – 5 seconds, tops. And yes, I could unclip it and put it in my pocket every time I park my bike somewhere in the world – every day! But jeez, what a chore. Luckily, for me, I was able to find an easy replacement in the garage – being essentially free, having bought it years ago, that money forgotten. I think I ended up using that replacement light three times before it was taken. Then, luckily for me, again, there was one more super old light in the garage that magically still worked. So now it’s on there and will hopefully stay on there for at least a few months. In the process of riding home in the dark for a couple of nights a realized that I don’t have a front or rear reflector anymore, having just been relying on lights, it’s been fine. But while rummaging through the bicycle junk box in the garage to find old lights I came across a bunch of reflectors, too. It used to be, when we were kids, that it was really uncool to ride with reflectors on your bike. It somehow meant that you hadn’t bothered, yet, to customize your bike and it was all about custom. And, we never really rode around at night much back then anyway so it didn’t much matter. That mindset stuck with me for a while, and unintentionally persists on my bikes today. Now, decades later, I’m starting to think that maybe reflectors are pretty cool. Which, necessarily, proves that they’re still really uncool, but now that I can’t be bothered to keep up with and/or care about running with the cool kids, I’ve got options. And, more importantly, I’m pretty damn sure that no one is going to steal reflectors off my bike. So I loaded up the Mule with reflectors every-which way I could imagine.

Am I becoming that crazy old reflector man?