Roller skates are dumb
I don’t like roller skates.
Lately, as part of my plan to get in shape or something, I’ve been concentrating on riding my bike, since it’s probably doing more for me than just walking, since it hurts more, and the temptation to just give up and watch TV is significantly lessened when I’m a couple of miles away from my means of transportation. My method so far has been to try to ride near the apartment, cars be damned, feel like I’m about to die about when I hit Windy Hill, go back home, and then take the bike to a more flat trail once I can feel my legs again. I’ve used the Big Creek Greenway in Alpharetta a few times, but today I decided to go to the Silver Comet, which is closer, longer, and somewhat hillier. One of the nice features of the Silver Comet is the dashed yellow line down the middle of the trail, which most people have the sense to interpret as a lane, so no shouting, horn blowing, or violent gesticulation is necessary for a bicycle to easily pass slower pedestrians. And that’s what brings to the people on roller skates.
Perhaps this all goes back to my childhood, to the days at that decaying roller rink in Decatur, when I was just never very good at skating. They really just seem annoying, though. On the trail, while pedestrians don’t usually require much room to get around, people on roller skates manage to take up a portion of the trail significantly larger than the width of the person. Even those who mostly kept their balance and were going in a straight line took up a full half the trail with their wild flailing and zig-zagging paths. Another thing that bugs me is that roller skates just don’t seem very creative. Sure, a bicycle is one of the four simple machines, but at least some thought went into it before it became part of the science books. Skates are just putting wheels on your feet. Everyone’s thought of that. The “inventor” or roller skates was probably just the first person who had the resources to actually build them.