My Story of the Bicycling Fish

by Adam Fletcher

The bicycling fish.

On a fine summer day a happy boy crossed a tree-covered road in the country. He was wearing fine new shoes, and shadows from the Mulberry trees around him flickered the light in front of his eyes. He was so excited that he just started running, but with the sunshine covering and uncovering his eyes over and over again, he couldn't see the creek ahead! Suddenly he tumbled over the rocks on along the side of the water, and he fell towards the rushing waters.
But instead of a splash there was a thud. Then a slap, and then another.

Suddenly, and without any good reason, the boy became a fish. His nose grew long and his body got scaley. His hair disappeared and his scales became oily. Where his arms were, fins grew. Where his feet stood, his tail fins flicked. The boy became a real fish.

He didn't want to stop being a boy, and wrestled a lot with suddenly becoming a fish. The runs up the creek bed didn't seem so inevitable for him, and the winter's ice didn't make him so cold. Instead, he floundered and flopped, dove and rose, splished and splashed all over the place, all of the time. The other fish never really made friends with him, and the the boy/fish played by himself. He was happy enough, until one day when everything changed.

One day a little girl rode her shiny bicycle slowly towards the water's edge. The boy/fish had seen her before, always watching her carefully. But this time she was different: after staring at the water for a little while the girl stood up. Without looking back, without thinking twice, she just ran away! The boy waded there for a minute before noticing the wonderful gift she'd left behind. There against one of the squatty summertime Mulberry trees was her bicycle. After looking at it for a few minutes and waiting for the girl to come back the boy/fish was so excited that all the sudden he just jumped out of the water and onto the bike! He was so excited he just started riding, and to this day the fish in the creek have never seen him again!

However, people say that they have seen him riding around town. So if you have a minute, go down to the creek and sit under those broad Mulberry trees lining the edge, and keep your eye open. You never know when you might see the bicycling fish.

 

- From A. Fletcher, Uncollected Stories ©2008. Landlocked Publishing.

 

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"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

While it seems obvious, this quote did not originally come from U2's Bono, as written in the song "Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World" on the Achtung Baby album.  But that was my inspiration to adopt the moniker.

According to Gloria Steinem herself, she didn't coin the phrase either. In 2001 Steinem wrote to Newsweek magazine with the explanation,

"In your note on my new and happy marital partnership with David Bale, you credit me with the witticism 'A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.' In fact, Irina Dunn, a distinguished Australian educator, journalist and politician, coined the phrase back in 1970 when she was a student at the University of Sydney. She paraphrased the philosopher who said, "Man needs God like fish needs a bicycle." Dunn deserves credit for creating such a popular and durable spoof of the old idea that women need men more than vice versa."

Other people have credited the sayings to Viques, an unknown philosopher.  He supposedly coined the first "fish on a bike" phrase, "Man needs Religion like a fish needs a bicycle." This is all according to the owner of fishonabike.com, who is apparently an expert on the matter of fishes and bicycles.

Regardless, I adopted bicyclingfish as my Hotmail account name in 1997, and set about registering accounts at free email servers around the world shortly thereafter.  I've probably registered with more than 100 now.  I guess I just thought that the moniker was an appropriate metaphor for my relationships with women at that point, and it stuck. You are on my website, www.bicyclingfish.com, and if you look hard enough you can find me other places by this moniker, too!

That's my story about the Bicycling Fish, and I'm going to stick with it.

 

 

Contact

adam@bicyclingfish.com
+1 360-489-9680