Some Days

You’re on every vehicle.

Car, boat, bus, plane, elevator. Those days are for watching other people and imagining why they’re doing what they’re doing. One guy had a full helmet but no motorcycle. He got to star in a story.

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VROOM, VROOM

When Alexander strolled out into the weekend morning he wore a motorcycle helmet even though he owned no motorcycle. He never had. He had owned a bicycle. He had been a kid, so that only stood to reason. He had ridden from his house to the playground, sometimes to school, though that had started to feel like a commute and stopped as soon as the implications truly sank in. Now he was older — he had been a kid, so that only stood to reason — and he had an actual commute, to a medium-size tower in the city where he served as a senior account manager for a medium-size insurance firm, and that meant that on weekends he needed wheels. On the other hand, he remained terrified of nearly everything: bees, snakes, heights, closed spaces, open spaces, clowns, needles, vomiting, blood. His girlfriend Penny was a specialist in rational counters, but her logic only let in enough air to propel him from the house to work, at which point the cracks began once again to seal. He got home to Penny in decent shape but she saw right through him. She turned up the radio too loud and turned away from him in bed, which he found cruel, as she was wearing his favorite t-shirt, the one with the small blue waves that reminded him of a regular and reliable sea. When he ran his hands along her back, he could see the muscles tighten protectively. “Penny,” he said. She let a single word dribble out in response: “True.” The message was clear if not loud. He needed to get himself harder. That was what led him to buy the motorcycle helmet for the daily trip down the street to pick up coffee and a granola bar. He could have kept them in the house, but he had seen a bug once, and could not be sure that any coffee he made at home would not contain a piece of it, or that a bar would not, upon being opened, be seen to writhe and wriggle. “Small coffee, black,” he said, visor up. He had cultivated some stubble that Penny said made him look more rugged, and the lingering gaze of the girl at the counter seemed to confirm that. He waited, took the cup of coffee, set it on the counter to cool, flipped the visor down, and went outside to swing his leg over what he assumed the girl assumed was his hog. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]