I imagine it carving through the half-night, a beautiful re-assertion of Newtonian mechanics.
Sweeping along the street, sinusoidal, in centrifugal elegance, I should master its course with the delicate movements of the gifted beginner. I've never been here before, but I have the knack of balancing the forces, and am unlikely to come to any grievous harm.
In reality, my work colleagues put a stop to it before I'd ever taken my first tentative step onto the frame of the promised unicycle, and I wearily conclude it's just as well. I'd had visions all weekend of uprooting my own teeth from the concrete where they'd jammed, and grimly decided that what would be would be.
I remind myself of the parental lie which was used to shield me from a difficult truth as a child (I've mentioned this before, but it's worth reprising.) I was told the reason I was unable to ride a bicycle was because I'd been born with a weak left eye. That affects your balance, son. Small wonder you can't ride! In reality, I now realise, my only defect was that I gave up too easily, or was too lazy.
Instead of parental lies, the concern of others now presents me with a ready-made excuse to avoid doing something. I've been judged - correctly - incapable of travelling an infinitesimal distance without maiming myself, and the point merits no further discussion.
What interests me most is the sense of resentment I feel. It is present; it is significant enough to sharpen the words I use whenever the subject arises. It is nothing to do with unicycles - it is to do with the ease which I discarded an idea. It is to do with paucity of ambition.
I no longer even have the will to repudiate the assertion that I'm an incompetent - before (in between the child giving up the bike as a bad job, and today), I'd at least have forced myself to prove incompetence. How, therefore, can anything else ever be accomplished? There is nothing left when the wisdom of the crowd (no matter how accurate) holds sway over the will of one who is under absolutely no obligation to listen to it.
The non-event of the unicycle proves that I have been reduced, once and for all, to bovine complicity. Disgusted, I realise that the next 60 years will be like this, too. I am the tragic story of existence for the sake of existence, and I lack the power of self-intervention to bring that existence to a halt.
