Greetings from The Bicycling Guitarist

[The Bicycling Guitarist]

Hello everyone.
I am known for riding a ten-speed bicycle while simultaneously playing guitar. I've gone about twenty-five thousand miles doing this the past thirty years on the same bicycle, the past twenty years with the same guitar. For me, it is a meditation in motion.

I was born in 1960, and early on realized that others around me seemed to not experience life the way I do. Back then Asperger's was not recognized in the USA, so I was misdiagnosed and misunderstood. In the late 1990s I self-diagnosed after a counselor told me about Asperger's syndrome. Since then I have been officially diagnosed three times. This past year I was finally set up with the Developmental Disabilities group of the local public health department. They are coordinating resources to help me get through this existence with perhaps less pain and hassle than I've experienced my first fifty years of life.

My official web site is The Bicycling Guitarist, My YouTube channel is BicyclingGuitarist. I have written hundreds of original songs, most of which have not yet been recorded. I play guitar and especially sing much better now than anything yet recorded or posted on the internet. I hope to be recorded and filmed more this next year while I am at the top of my form. namaste

 

[superboyian]

Welcome aboard to Aspies Central "The Bicycling Guitaist" I would actually class that as a real talent and I was definitely amazed to actually see that you can actually play the guitar and ride at the same time and that's just simply amazing.

How long have you been able to do that?

 

[. . .]

Hey there,

I recognize you from PF and SV. Glad to have your here.

 

[The Bicycling Guitarist]

How long have you been able to do that?

Thanks for the welcome! Creation of The Bicycling Guitarist gives some details of how I got started doing this, but I will add some more in this post to answer superboyian's question.

When I was a boy I rode my first bikes in tight circles for hours on the back patio of my family's home. That may be where I got my sense of balance. I rode ten-speeds (without a guitar) on long day trips throughout my teenage years. I didn't start playing guitar until December 20, 1978, but not on a bicycle then. I played guitar ten or twelve hours a day most days the first few years I was playing.

Sometime in my early twenties I discovered I could combine these two activities. Btw, I don't think of this as doing two things at once; I think of it as one thing: bicycle guitaring. Sometimes I say I am "riding the guitar while playing the bicycle," and in some ways that is true. Actually it is more than two things, infinitely more if you count stuff such as existing, breathing, pumping blood, digesting food, adjusting blood chemistry, orbiting the sun, etc. Besides riding the guitar and playing the bicycle, I am getting exercise, transportation, music practice, enjoying the scenery, and getting publicity.

Many thousands of people, quite possibly even hundreds of thousands of people, have seen me doing this over the past thirty years. For some reason though, I am relatively unknown. I have been featured in local newspapers wherever I have lived since starting this, but I have never been on local or national TV news yet that I know of. OTOH, many times I have been filmed and photographed by tourists in addition to locals, and who knows but that I may have been shown on their local stations as examples of how crazy people are from California!

I live in Oregon now, and even though there aren't as many days per year of weather here favorable for bicycle guitaring as in Northern California where I grew up, the people of my new home town have taken me to heart. i have never been so well received anywhere else I have lived. I still don't have any friends though even though I've lived here four years. That doesn't surprise me. i went to college and university more than twenty years and never had any friends even though I was around thousands of people every day, and of course, earlier than that, as a child, and in kindergarten, elementary, middle and high schools, I never had any friends. In my younger days at school I was made fun of a lot for the way I walked, the way I talked, and my obsessive interests. "Encyclopedia" or "Dictionary" were two of the nicer names I was called.

It is refreshing to find communities of people online who, while we are all still individuals and are unique, still share some of the same ways I experience life. I didn't know about Asperger's until the late 1990s and for all that time thought I had "Chris Watson disease." In some ways though it is depressing that so many others have some of the same problems I deal with. I don't necessarily agree with "misery loves company." It seems anything can be thought of as good or bad, when actually it is both and neither at the same time. Logic does not apply to life most of the time.

 

[Firnafth]

Welcome, and good to have you here!