Meth moms and shameless self-promotion

I’m guessing you’re more interested in the “meth moms” part of the post than the shameless self-promotion, so I’m going to get the self-promotion part out of the way first. That way I’m sure you read it.

Shameless self-promotion item #1: If you haven’t already, please donate to the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. 100% of what you donate goes to fight cancer, as the overhead and staff salaries of the foundation are paid by Mr. Huntsman. I was sort of ambivalent on fundraising and even doing Lotoja this year until I went for a ride with Matt Bradley the day before he went in for a pretty nasty surgery to treat his cancer. During the ride, Matt’s brother, Seth, asked if I was racing Lotoja. I gave him my ambivalent answer. Seth asked where he could go to donate to Huntsman. How could I not be 100% committed after that? Thanks, Seth. And thanks to everyone who has contributed.

Shameless self-promotion item #2: My lovely wife, Rachel, has opened a bakery. No retail operation, she’s just supplying coffee shops, or rather a coffee shop (for the time being), with an eye to supplying others, as well as catering business meetings. So, if you want to sample the delicious pastries, head over to Bad Ass Coffee Co. (3530 S. State in SLC) and ask for a Kona muffin or a caramel brownie or some Irish cream cheesecake. Or better yet, all three. If you’ve got a meeting or event that would be enhanced by some delicious pastries, drop her a note to see about placing an order.

Now, on to the meth moms.

I mentioned last year that down the hill from us on the Alpine/Highland side, one is likely to encounter stripper moms. Which would leave one to wonder whether down the hill from us on the Draper side such a phenomenon would also occur. Turns out the geographic separation has resulted in the evolution of a similar but not identical species (this is believed to be an example of divergence, as the two are believed to derive from a common ancestor).

Draper has a variety of mom (certainly not all of them) far more frightening* than the stripper moms: the meth moms.

*Not that the stripper moms are frightening. Indeed, as dug mentioned, there are worse things.

What, you may wonder, is a meth mom, and how did I become acquainted with them? As it happens, I like to ride my bike. And not just for leisure. Occasionally, I actually use my bike for transportation, riding it all the way from my house to my office or from my office to my house. And when I ride from my office to my house, I ride through Draper at approximately the same time a vast fleet of Escalades and Navigators is busy ferrying adolescents from one round of overprogramming to another.

These moms in Escalades seem to think that the gutter offers all the space I could possibly need to ride my bike safely. And that indeed, this allotment of the gutter is a gross allotment, and that the side view mirrors of luxury SUVs are exempt from any need to stay clear of the gutter and the vertical space directly above it.

The burning question, though, is whether this negligence is based on apathy or ignorance. Do these moms really not care about me, and would they just as soon see me wrapped around their axle as able to go to work and provide for three young children? I want to doubt this is the case (though I can’t rule it out completely).

Which leaves ignorance. How can they not notice a man dressed in brightly colored spandex? How can they not realize that he might need just a little bit of road space in order to be safe? One look in their eyes reveals the answer: stimulants are the only reason they’re able to maintain anything even resembling a wakeful state. And awake is a relative term that’s less distinct than you may realize from the comatose state they will undoubtedly enter when the chemicals leave their systems.

Hence the name meth moms. I’d wager that at least one of the three women who forced me into the gutter and in one instance the curb in a single two-block stretch of 123rd South was only awake because the meth was keeping her that way. And when you consider the pressure she’s under, you begin to see why she turned to such drastic measures rather than just lying down and taking a nap.

Draper moms’ reasons for meth use:

• When she got married at age 19, she was a size 2. And though it didn’t take much work to maintain at that age, at 39 and after having had four kids, it requires getting up at 4:30 a.m. to spend 60 minutes with a personal trainer in addition to the 60 minutes of cardio she’ll do on her own.
• Meth not only helps you stay awake (per the above), it also makes you less interested in food. So when two of the four kids are starving because they went straight from school to violin to volleyball practice, and the only place to eat en route is McDonald’s, meth helps you avoid the McNugget McTemptation.
• Increased libido. The downside of the fitness regimen is that the husband is not just interested in his summer intern, he’s still interested in his wife. And even though she’s sleep-deprived and starving all the time to stay fit while he, um, isn’t, the meth helps her feel somewhat interested in him.
• Meth makes you feel invincible. And while this can be a bad thing if you’re standing at the top of a 100 meter cliff, when you have four kids, all of whom have an overblown sense of entitlement, starting the day feeling invincible may be the only way to make it through to the end.

The big problem with all this, aside from how bad meth is (OK, so it’s probably not meth, maybe just lots and lots of diet coke), is that as invincible as a meth mom might feel in her 3,000 kilo Escalade, that’s how not invincible I am riding around in little more than my underwear at a speed almost as fast as you’re going in your car with no protection whatever offered by my 7 kilo bike. So do me a favor and give me some space as you come by, even if it means slowing down and getting your kid to swim team 30 seconds later.