I continue here with Part 2 of my series of sarcasm. In Part 1, I talked about the value of excuses. Now I feature some recommendations for ensuring your dominance in the cycling community.
The first I’ll share is the ego-boosting technique of talking big. Actually, talking big does more than just boost your ego, it skyrockets your social stock. The important prerequisite for big talk is to make sure you know the size of the water before you open your mouth. When in a small pond, with the smaller fish, unleash confident and bully-like speech. Feel free to back it up with a little throw down on some rides, but only if you know it is a school of smaller fish. Common techniques to assert your dominion include tall tales, talking down others’ accomplishments, spouting unfounded tech or training knowledge, and needlessly using lots of curse words in your speech.
But, when you come up against alpha dog you roll over with legs splayed. You know your order in the social stratification, so you must cower to their authority. However, make sure the smaller dogs don’t see you on your back. You can resume your bigness when you’re back amongst the smaller fish. Feel free to even talk the big dog down when they’re not around. Above all, never question them to their face. This is a very difficult juggling act, but it can be done.
Another important technique is to make sure most social interactions happen on your own turf. You will have the homefield advantage because your opponents won’t be as comfortable. Plus, when they visit your turf it is like they have requested and entrance into your royal court and you have graciously granted the visit.
And perhaps the best approach is “the snub.” Practice this by never showing up to local events because you’re too good for that. This is similar to “the turtle” but differs because you can do this in good or bad form and still have the same result. Your status skyrockets once again when you publicly display that you’re too good to participate in lowly local events. After all, it’s obvious that you have better things to do. Everyone knows that you are riding your bike regularly, but that’s irrelevant, because this event intrudes on your precious time. Scheduling the event as one of your workouts is out of the question. The effect you are going for is to clearly demonstrate that your time is better than the participants’ and organizers’ time. It is once again irrelevant that the organizers’ put in way more of their time to host the event and all you have to do is show up and do it and then go home. The problem is that if you show up, you’ll have to spend more of your precious (and superior) time bad mouthing the event and how it was organized. Clearly your best option is to not show and, in turn, improve social status. It is even permissible to go out and ride the same day, but at a different time or different place because you need to get in some harder training. Just make sure you aren’t seeing doing this because that would be outright disrespectful.
And finally, there is the ultimate technique of retroactively scoring a significant big-dog effort back in the day. This gives you a superiority card that lasts a lifetime. You can always refer back to the special racing accomplishment as if everything henceforth is unnecessary. Feel free to embellish the story too, because no one will be able to challenge it because they weren’t there (e.g. the fish was this big!). With this card, you can even venture out to some races and ride them as a pseudo-celebrity, but make sure you have some good excuses ready.
There is, in fact, a flaw in these techniques for dominance. That is, everyone’s social status remains somewhat ambiguous because at no given time is everyone riding together for a true test of performance. A better alternative would be for everyone to just put a colored dot on their head so we would clearly know everyone’s status. But, I doubt we could get everyone to buy into a caste system because some would feel the are too good put a dot on their head. In the end, ambiguity must persist and the aforementioned approaches to social domination are the best I can recommend.
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