Fixed gear bicycles

White Melburnians will put shiny rims on their bikes while sneering at anybody who puts shiny rims on their cars. Fixed gear bicycles (fixies) are popular with White Melburnians because of all the bike-friendly streets in Northside such as Lygon, Nicholson and Sydney road! The popularity of fixies is facilitated by the generally flat topography in the northern suburbs. One exception is Northcote, where the most direct route is via a steep hill up Queens parade and High street. But that is just the earth's way of telling us Northcote is not worth the trouble!

Melbourne white people obsess over fixies in the hope it distracts them from noticing how their lifestyles are based around cars and long-haul flights. The irregularity of services on the Upfield and Epping lines, the lack of train stations in Carlton North and Brunswick East, plus twin obsessions with New York and Berlin mean that White Melburnians are heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

But Melbourne white people are smart enough to know even a short domestic flight will send their ecological footprints soaring past two and a half earths. It doesn't matter how many times we ride our bikes and refrain from eating meat and dairy. We are going to have to plant a proxy Amazon stretching from Ipswich to Monkey Mia to have any chance of sequestering all that carbon. Hence the need for distraction.

Now please excuse me, Dan Murphy's is closing and I need to drive down there and get some Sapporo. I've been hooked on it ever since that Halloween party in Tokyo last year.