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This essay was originally published in Salon on February 22, 2020. We're revisiting Salon's Best Life Stories of 2020 now through the end of the year. Read more Best of 2020 here.
I learned what the word "paranoid" meant from my grandfather. "Yes, I'm paranoid," he would quip in a very grandfatherly way, in that he was always forgetting that he'd told us this joke many times before. "But am I paranoid enough?"
The answer to that question, when it comes to bicycle security, is probably a resounding "no."
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Years of living in cities like San Francisco and New York had taught me that there was no such thing as being too paranoid when it came to bike safety. Still, despite my precautions, I tried to train myself to see my bicycles as ephemeral. "You never own a bike; you merely rent it from the bike theft gods," I told myself.