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I had my worst bike accident in the five years I’ve been riding in the City on Thursday night—actually, at about 12:30 in the morning on the Fourth of July. I wish I could describe it, but I have no memory of the incident. The last thing I remember is riding off the Brooklyn end of the Williamsburg Bridge, and then I have a hazy recollection of talking to two other bikers about halfway up South Fifth Place, the short block between South Fourth and South Fifth Streets where bikers come off the bridge. I don’t remember giving them my phone, but they called Chi, twice, and she showed up after a bit to take me to the emergency room. They told her they’d found me crumpled against a parked car, and that I’d been saying the same things over and over again. When I became a bit more coherent, I know I said that there was no evidence I’d been hit by a car. I’d had some beers, and who knew, perhaps I could have done this to myself somehow. There was a lot of loose gravel on the road, which is part of the reason my face looks as bad as it does, and maybe I’d lost control and gone over the handlebars. The guys were sure I’d been hit—the back fork of my frame was bent badly enough that the wheel had locked, suggesting direct impact. (The bike is history.) They must have been right. The next day when Chi and I went to retrieve my bike, we found a pair of skid marks that began right beside a scattering of blue plastic fragments from my helmet, so the driver must have slammed the brakes after hitting me. Which means there is someone driving around the City wondering whether they killed someone on Thursday night. On the other hand, there’s the comfort of the city’s fraternity of bicycle riders. Thank you, Jimmy and Andre, for finding me, calling my girlfriend, and staying with me until she arrived.

We took a cab to an emergency room in South Williamsburg, which was, predictably, pointless. The main reason for going, in my mind, was to make sure I didn’t have a concussion—after all, I’d taken the fall off my head and face and been knocked unconscious. In two hours there, the only medical attention I received was being given a hospital bracelet and having an attendant dab my face for about five seconds with a dry pad. The orderly who processed me told me it looked real bad, and that he could “see flesh” (well, presumably, since I’m made of it). The doctor, who finally arrived sometime after three, was also dire, telling me that I had a lot of injuries and was going to have to have a blood test, a chest X-ray, and a battery of other procedures in addition to a CT scan. Stupidly, I haven’t continued COBRA from my last job and health insurance from my new one hasn’t begun yet, so I was concerned about how much everything was going to cost. The doctor informed me that she was a physician, not an accountant. Thanks. Chi went around the hospital and got similar responses. Time passed. It was getting very late. Finally, the attendant came back with a padded X-ray vest. After he walked out, Chi asked if I wanted to leave, and I said yes. I felt like I was in a bad TV hospital drama stomping through the miserable fluorescent corridors, shirt unbuttoned, face looking like raw hamburger, Chi and my brother Philip (who’d met us there) trailing behind, passing the doctor in her white coat as she rose from a little glassed-in workstation to ask indignantly, “What’s going on here!?”

I haven’t had any headaches or vision problems or cognitive issues, just a little neck stiffness, which isn’t really out of the ordinary for me, so I think I’m all right. I only started wearing a helmet about six months ago (after being hit a previous time), and I’m glad I did. Like the bike, it’s a loss, but I suspect it’s the reason I’m basically all right. I’ll never ride in the city without one again. The other obvious lesson, one I’ve always been bad about following, is to ride with extreme caution if you’ve been drinking at all (or don’t ride at all), especially if you’re riding at a time when there’s a greater chance the people in cars have been drinking too. I’ll wait for wounds to heal before I replace the bike, but I’ll go back to riding as soon as I can. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

At first, I was amused by the massive jerking of knees which greeted Ralph Nader’s announcement that he would run for president in 2008. It was almost as if all the Hillary and Barack fans out there had been preprogrammed to start noisily “hating Nader” the moment he decided to get into the fray, and seeing all these human windup dolls simultaneously go into motion, acting out their identical episodes of righteous indignation, struck me as a comic case of much ado about nothing. Didn’t we just do this in ‘04, and wasn’t Nader a complete non-factor? I don’t care what Zogby and Nader’s campaign say, I don’t think he’ll get on the ballot in all 50 states, and I have a very difficult time believing his candidacy is going to have any impact on this election. And if anyone has earned the right to keep mounting quixotic bids for the White House every four years, it’s Ralph Nader—John McCain may be a war hero, but Nader has done more for you and me than anyone else running. Besides, he’s been tilting at windmills his entire career. What do you expect? It’s all he knows how to do.

After a few weeks went by though, I started to feel a little bit depressed. See, I voted for Nader in 2000, something I’ll never be ashamed of having done (though I do always take care to mention that I voted in a safe state, California, which Gore was sure to win). I did so for two reasons: 1) I went to a Nader rally at a high school gymnasium in San Francisco, and it was the one and only time I’ve ever heard an American presidential candidate outline a set of policy positions that actually represented how I think and what I believe is important; and 2) I really believed—and still do, regardless of the atrocities committed by the Bush administration—that the two-party system was bad for our democracy, and I wanted Nader to get that 5% so the Green Party could get federal matching funds. Thinking back on my enthusiasm then—spawned not by any illusion that Nader could win, or that he would even make a great President, but only that he might help change the way politics works in America—it’s disheartening to see him transformed into a political pariah. And this, I think, is where you actually can take issue with Nader’s choice to run again: he’s become the face of third-party candidacies in this country, and it’s a face of failure, of irrelevance. If there’s a reason to hate Nader, it isn’t for the impact he might have on Hillary or Barack—it’s for the threat he poses to our chances of ever seeing an election map not colored in exclusively with red and blue.

On Monday afternoon, the bloggers at New York mused about what headline the Post would splash across its cover the next day to describe the Spitzer prostitution scandal—”Screwed” and “Nailed” were a few of the obvious guesses. The Post wound up surprising them by going goofy with the brilliantly concise “Ho No!” (While the Daily News went with the more verbose “Pay for Luv Guv.”) What I’m wondering is why no one has trotted out “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” It’s obviously too wordy and pretentious for the tabloids, but it describes the situation on so many levels! Maybe it’ll be the title of the tell-all book? Or the movie?

When did the idea of the ironic T-shirt as an existing phenomenon enter our language and culture, and where did the idea that it was the province of hipsters come from? The Wikipedia entry on T-shirts claims that they started to become ironic in this decade, while the popular “Hipster Olympics” video (which was posted last summer, but made jokes that went stale at least five years ago) suggests that they are one of the prevailing preoccupations of the hipster lifestyle. When I think of T-shirts with ironic messaging, I think of Naomi Campbell wearing a T-shirt reading “Models Suck” in Girl 6 (1996, by the way), or some suburban douchebag on Ludlow Street on a Friday night wearing a T-shirt inscribed with “The Man, The Legend,” with an up arrow and a down arrow to identify which was which. Ironic, perhaps, but not especially hipsterish.

Now, I’ve been accused of hipsterishness, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in an ironic T-shirt, or really, any T-shirt with any kind of messaging at all (I suppose I telegraph my hipsterishness by preferring solid-colored V-necks). The only ironic T-shirt I can remember having worn was one that read “I’m a Stanford Mom,” when I was 17 and also liked to wear sailor pants and had a shoulder-length bob. I don’t think I was hip then by anyone’s standards. A friend of mine achieved considerable success making T-shirts with messages like “Emotionally Unavailable” and “I’ve got some coke left let’s go back to your place” and “Butt sex is itchy” on them, but they definitely weren’t for hipsters—though I guess you could say it was hipsters coming up with the lines. In general, however, I think so-called hipsters are too hipsterish for irony, especially printed on a T-shirt. If you have to advertise your hipsterishness that way, you’re probably not really that hip.

Still, the meme persists. I noticed it recently in a New York Times article suggesting that Staten Island is the new Williamsburg (“Others have packed up their guitars, their ironic T-shirts, their dark, square-rimmed glasses and their porkpie hats”). Other recent Times articles reference the “distressed jeans and ironic T-shirt crowd” at Art Basel and the look of the “posteverything generation” (apparently, “skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic T-shirt and oversize retro headphones”). Googling the phrase “ironic T-shirt,” I found an “ironic” archive on a blog called Tcritic.com (shirt of the day: “I’m Fucking Matt Damon,” of course), which clued me in to the fact that there’s a whole world of T-shirt bloggers posting madly away in their odd corner of the online universe. I wonder if this is a phenomenon with an expiration date, or if it’s with us to stay. It seems tailor-made for a New York Times Magazine feature. They could run one of their ill-advised fashion spreads, and have William Safire and Rob Walker collaborate on a column to accompany it—”Consumed by Language,” maybe?