As a kid growing up in a Vancouver suburb in the 70′s I had a pretty laid back lifestyle. I stayed out after school as musch as I wanted, played tennis and swam in the pool and played in the park. This morning though I have been thinking about bumper riding.

When I was 9 or 10 I discovered the joys of bumber riding. The snow in Vancouvber is very wet and slippery and happens only a coule of times in the Winter. When the snow falls in Vancouver it really comes down and it slows traffic and the roads turn into a skating rink.

So with a slippery road and slow cars what is a kid to do? Bumper Riding!

Here is the scoop, the best way to bumper ride. You ahve to find a good long road in a residential neighborhood. The road has to be long so that a car can get a bit of speed up down the street. You wait until the snow is coming down really hard so you can’t be seen and you hide behind a bush….wait….wait as soon as a car comes around the corner you crouch out behind it, put your mittened fingers underneath the back bumper and pull your body in while still crouching down and hang on for the ride. When the ride was over you just let go and let yourself slide on the icy snow until you stopped.

The freedom of bumber riding is great there is an element of fear, there is the dull sounds in the area from the sound relfecting off of the snow and the darkness means that you go from light to shade from streetlights really quickly. A rush that it takes years to forget.

There are really important strategies to remember when you are bumper riding though. You need perfect road conditions that are slippery and before and gravel trucks come by. You need to have a bit of traffic because it gets cold waiting for cars. And of course the more people that tried to hop on made the car heavier and a chance that the driver would figure out that you were on. I always found 7-9 PM was a good time, especially once VCRs first started to get popular and people would go out to get a video.

There was always and element of danger in Bumper Riding. one alternative was to hold the back tire wheelwell, this way you could get a better hold then the bumper but risked falling under a wheel. No one cared about the danger and this is part of the great memory, kids are not afraid.

There was a certain camaraderie between the bumper riders, waiting for the next car, deciding if there were too many people who would get the next car, the stories of long rides and wipouts.

I don’t know if bumper riding still exists, I hope it does. If I get a chance this weekend or this winter I hope I can sneak out and by 9 years old again, rediscover joys of bumper riding and see if I can share the excitement with others.

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.

Freegans even in their webspace do not waste. The Freegan web site is a cheap .info domain and they don’t bother with the www in front of the address.

I was talking to my wife Sunday morning. Actually I was talking at her, I think people can only hear so many words from someone else before they tune out and I hit that limit years agho with my incessant talking. Anyway, I always talk about a nomadic lifestyle where I could just move from country to contry and travel around working odd jobs and not being attached to one small lot of land. I asked Michelle if that was a normal thought and she seemed to think that anyone would want to do that. So I am going to devote this week in this blog to writing about that lifestyle and how to pull it off. I know that I hinted at this a few weeks ago but I am right now in a rut in the evenings of reality TV and the only way to break it is to change my reality myself

So here is goes….

I ride a bicycle almost every day to get to work and today after a long commute across the city in a car I am thankful that I live close to work and ride a bike instead of driving the car.

Can the Bicycle Save Civilization? – Raise the Hammer

The ablove article has lots of stuff on biking including info on “Critical Mass” an annual ride that takes place in cities across the US to celebrate bike riding as a form of transportation

The Best Time to Buy Everything

Planning is a must if you wan t to be able to drop out successfully.

Here is a first thought and article by the great Steve Pavlina on reasons to never get a job.

Obviously many of the ideas that I will be throwing forward in the coming days and weeks are going to seem crazy and non conformist but I, as a conformist in most ways, am hoping that I can challenge more people than just myself to looking at life in a different way and find true life freedom.

On the weekend Spencer Tunick was working again this time in Caracas Venezuela taking pics of 1500 nude people in as I can only imagine from his past work, various positions and with a lot of flair.

Oh and it’s alright to look at these picks at work as it is art not just nudity.