Large Fella On A Bike

There is a blog I’ve been reading called large fella on a bike which sometimes stirs up my emotions. The blog’s “plot” is that just over three years ago Scott weighed 500 pounds, and at that point he and his wife made some radical changes to their lifestyles, including diet and full-time bicycle transportation, and are much healthier and happier, sub-200 pound, people today. At least that’s the surface story.

He rides his bike everywhere and never drives (but he also doesn’t have a job and hasn’t for years). He home-schools his 9 year old daughter (depriving her of peer society, but maintaining his stay-at-home value). They’re vegans (who complain about how penniless they are but buy their organic meals from the coop). There is no shortage of self-righteousness at their house.

Now Scott is undoubtedly an inspiration to many people who would love to follow in his footsteps. His story of waking up one day and living his life differently is the dream that sells a million TV products and inconveniences everyone at the gym each January. Scott is a very sarcastic and outspokenly critical person though –but that’s ok, lots of cool people are, right? He writes and punctuates well, he’s clever, he’s funny, and he can be warm and personal, but he is also very entitled and egotistical – he is a living breathing pillar of inspiration and model of alternative lifestyle and he damn well knows it.

That last part is what kills him. He’ll write a sarcastic and critical and humorous post and then have to defend himself by saying that people just don’t get his sense of humor. - It’s hard to know when to laugh though - when the post before is re-telling his dead-serious proactively-aggressive or hipper-than-thou interactions with motorists, or pondering whether it’s true that a statue of him is being built somewhere in Minnesota. He claims bicycle-society celebrity status, demands it; writes blog posts about how he contacts companies asking for free gear because of “who he is” in the bicycle world, and then turns around and writes furious, scathing posts about how a local frame-builder had the nerve to charge him to install a headset after all of the free press he gave him on his blog. -As one commenter said “almost as if he worked on bikes for a living”.

His writing can be so self-serving, so childishly self-centered and egotistical, that sometimes strangers on the street, recognizing him on his bike, tell him exactly where to go and how to get there.

Now in Portland, but without steady employment (Amy, his wife that is), they are feeling the economic pinch and write consistently about how poor they are and how things aren’t working out for them like they planned (or didn’t plan as the case may be). The personal criticism has gotten to the point where he has recently stopped blogging and his wife has begun, begging for those who don’t have anything nice to say to say nothing. I guess if you can dish the hummus out…

Probably most sadly telling to me is: he writes stories to and about bicycle friends in Minneapolis – friends that I don’t see reciprocating or even commenting, friends that seem to be keeping him at arms length across the burned bridges?

Even though all of this, I still want to like him, I want him to succeed. I think he’s just still riding on the crest of this wave of positive success and happiness and confidence and physical fitness - that you might expect after years of feeling bad. I think he’ll come back down to reality at some point, I hope so. You go Large Fella, you jerk!