This one by the OP is pretty good. You simply must read the penultimate post-before the thread is locked. Talk about bizzare.

Parallel Parking

That's exactly it. A few good centuries in various conditions should give one a decent awareness of and connection to the bike.

Weirdness begets weirdness.

Well, it sounded to me more or less like a perfect description of Ali Khamenei, albeit a weirdly worded one.

I never said it took me any longer than that, if that.

Sorry, just couldn't resist the line about it being like riding a bicycle.

OMG, Spot on. What’s next, vehicle left turn lanes?

Shouldn't this be in the veloperversions sub-forum?

My first ride on my IF was a century. Learned everything I needed to know.

Happens with cars, too. My personal cars were mostly manual transmissions and when I drove automatic customer cars at work I would reach for the clutch pedal when coming to a stop.

Cars and bicycles and motorcycles are just mechanical tools, things to be used. Or just kept and not used. Or admired as art objects. I never assign human attributes or emotion to them.

Yep.

I drove the same pickup truck for 20 years. One morning, I asked my wife to get in her car and follow me. I drove to the salvage yard, asked what they'd give me for the old truck, and turned over the keys. Got in my wife's car and went home feeling $450 richer.

I bought a pick up when I was 19. Sold it when I was 38 mostly because my then wife didn't like it. Might have been the best car I ever had and a lot of great memories were made. Had another car for 18 years and no matter how I neglected the thing it just kept going. The last few years I even stopped changing the oil. Sold it with 300K miles to a guy who saw it sitting in the yard after I bought another one.

I've given away some of my bikes and sold others cheap. When I sold my CAAD5 after 6 years one of my friends said something like "how can you sell it after all you've been through with it?" Meh. I don't want it anymore.

I sold my touring bike cheap in 2021 after I had it for almost 30 years. A friend of a friend wanted a bike to rehab with after a stroke or something. I hadn't used it in years plus I have another bike with rack eyelets if I ever want to tour again. I never met the guy but I hear he was very happy to get the bike.

So you're saying that you never enjoyed Tom and Jerry or the Pink Panther as a child? What was your childhood like? If you could just lie down on this couch for me...

Probably should have seen a shrink long ago.

New around here?

I don't know if I'm a bike philanderer, if I have bicycle intimacy issues, a fear of bike commitment or if I'm in an open biking relationship.

for me, 3 works. right now, I have 4 so 1 must go

I’ve never even named a car or a bike. The most I’ll do, and only on occasion, is tell my touring bike “Good job!” at the end of a week or two tour. And it had nothing to do with a feeling of intimacy.

You are more nurturing to your bikes than I am then. The closest I've come to talking to a bike or car is cursing at it.

Talking about establishing intimate relations with a bicycle or any other inanimate object is ... well ... simply odd, if not downright psychotic.

At least a tree, for example, is -- arguably -- an animate organism of some sort, which one could imagine might welcome human intimacy in some possible world ... or not.

Sometimes, when I'm really desperate, I open the hinge of one of my folding bikes and spread the two halves of the frame apart...

Looks like you missed the second sentence. Happens.

I must be a pimp because I farm mine out to the LBS.

We need a thread: " Do you give human names or nicknames to your bikes ? "

That'd just be too crazy - even for Bike Forums!