My_take

In the magazines we read, in the interviews we see, riders are portraying that most great riders are vegans or vegetarians(a vegan is just a strict vegetarian).If the rider is a vegetarian, they fill up the interview with bull shit about eating meat being inhuman and savage. Lat time I checked, HUMANITY was fucking OMNIVEROUS! This means that we are all born to eat meat and veggies alike! Since when did people forget about their roots and start following some crazy buddah dude who says that you are a bad person if you eat meat?
             In a recent Ride interview with the Gonz, he started going off about how meat is bad and all. I respect the gonz for his riding, how he takes street to the next level, and he's a funny guy too. But this just pissed me off:

   "What's your take on vegetarianism?"
      "I think vegetarianism is definately a proper path to take, and I do condone it highly. I think that a lot of the violence in today's society stems from childhood. You're brought up eating hamburgers that are basically dead cows, so you're brought up believing it's alright to kill things. So when you grow up it's like no big deal- when you're eating chicken you're eating dead animals. I think that's where a lot of violence in today's society stems from. You're eating all this dead stuff, so you're like, 'all right, I can kill stuff.' It's like in the back of you're mind..."
           I'm sorry but I have to interrupt this bull shit. Am I the only one who sees through this crap?! I think this guy really is crazy. He's saying that eating hamburgers makes him want to go out and start murdering people! Maybe it's better that he doesn't eat meat; one less killer on the streets. All these animal rights pussies are saying that we shouldn't eat meat because they think that animals are people too. These people should get a room with these animals if they think they're so human and we normal fucking carnivorous people are beneath the beef that we're eating! And in the very same issue of Ride, Aaron Benkh, another vegeterian said that he wanted to spend a day with this one band because he wanted to kill them. That's nice. It just pisses me off so much. I'm gonna go out to Wendy's now and lower my human standards.

In any interview with a rider that rides for a small company, the rider always chooses to go on about how big companies like GT, Haro, and Mongoose are sold out and are bad for no real reason. Then rumors are started about those company's frames being made like crap, just because they're made overseas by some kids working for table scraps. It's kind of the same with bands, like blink 182. They aren't the greatest band but I can rock my head to some of their music without getting heckled... at least their old stuff, before they sold out. It wasn't their choice at all to have all the little 8 year old hermaphrodites singing their hit songs, buying their cd's and not even bothering to listen to the other tracks on the cd that didn't show up on MTV.
   The three companies mentioned above didn't ask for the bad rap. Just because availability of their products is high and they can price frames and bikes for a fraction of the self proclaimed "underground" companies' products. Their parts are made equally as well as the smaller companies too.
   Through out my 6 years of riding, I have owned 2 Huffys, a Mongoose, a Standard, and a Specialized (GT). I certainly liked the Standard better than the rest for a few reasons. 1) It was stronger than the rest (I don't know about that, it was just something about their reputation for being ridden by the kids around my town that were good.) 2) When I got it, I felt a small sense of more respect and a little bit of superiority. When I rode, it felt like everything was better than before eventhough it was all the same. It sounds wierd now but this is how I felt when I got it. But looking back I realize that me and my group were acting like nothing more than a bunch of high school girls, when I was getting that bike I thought "They'll really respect me when I get this bike". But that kind of respect comes from within.
   Alright, I'll admit I still will place underground over corporate bike companies even if standard has fingerbikes and such. Some people might even call Standard Bykes sellouts if it wasn't for their deep roots in BMX. I doubt I'm alone when I would buy a Standard Tshirt over a Huffy, GT, or Mongoose. And guess what? My next bike is a Standard R model. Go figure, I'm just telling it from my perspective.