All of a sudden there's this cop in my rear view mirror — lights, siren, the full rooster — so I pull over, figuring the doughnut shop is burning down or something. But this Barney Fife bozo, some jerkwater badge-flasher with nothing better to do than hassle auto racers, starts writing me out a ticket!

 So I tell him, "Yo, J. Edgar, how about putting that Big Chief tablet of yours somewhere dark and warm? See, I race stock cars on the weekend, and I'm training for this big deal next weekend at the quarter-mile oval outside Pueblo, which means I ain't got time for no stop signs, and I ain't got time for your little creative-writing class here. Why don't you go arrest a stray dog or something?"

 So, anyway, to make a long story short, that's how I got this big dent in my head. Say, what're you in for?

 Stop! In The Name Of Love. There's been a good deal of chin music lately over the ticketing of 40-some-odd cyclists near the People's Republic of Boulder. To hear some leg-shavers tell it, you'd think they'd been nailed up on Golgotha instead of nailed for blowing a stop sign: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

 Well, for starters, He's miffed at you for riding three abreast on two-lane highways, either ignoring or gesticulating at the overcaffeinated yuppies in suburban assault vehicles lined up behind you like elephants at the circus. The queue leading to St. Peter's desk is long enough, thanks just the same, what with AIDS, genocide and overenthusiastic Second Amendment advocates. And nobody wants to spend a few eons waiting behind a smelly dead cyclist to pick up his ticket for the Pearly Gates.

 Now, I don't like junior G-men surreptitiously videotaping and subsequently ticketing cyclists any more than the next guy, especially in a jurisdiction where child-murderers remain at large. But the child-murderers have made themselves hard to catch. The yahoos driving the legendary Psycho Logic rides, on the other hand, strut and preen along the road to Hygiene like roosters unaware of the chopping block. The ax is there for a reason, Foghorn — stick your neck out once too often and it's off with your head.

 Heads Up (No, Not There, Please). Human-powered vehicles are not exempt from traffic laws. The Colorado Driver Handbook doesn't mention that rule we made up stating that once the first two guys in a double-paceline have paused for a stop sign, the other 48 can roll right on through behind them like a Technicolor centipede. And unless you're commuting from work to home and back again, you're not a fuel-saving, smog-fighting alternative mode of transportation — you're just another guy getting his jollies riding a bike.

 If cyclists want to be treated with the rudimentary courtesy granted other vehicles, we need to act like vehicles — which means signaling turns, riding predictably, and stopping for stop signs. Many of us do this. Sadly, many more do just as they please. The last group ride I did in Boulder had me peeing in my chamois at the back of the pack as it played a stupidly aggressive game of tag with yupmobiles, cowboy Cadillacs and gravel trucks on a rural two-laner with less shoulder than Calista Flockhart.

 This whole hoorah reminds me of the scene in "Godfather II" where Fredo is shrieking about wanting respect that he's done nothing to earn. You may remember what happened to Fredo a little later on. It may not happen to you when you roll through a stop light while a dozen pissed-off motorists sit there marinating in monoxide. But it might happen to the next guy: some poor Fred who hasn't acquired the handling skills to dodge the lobbed Olde English quart; a cycling advocate lobbying for the removal of rumble strips along Colorado's rural highways; or a race promoter trying to secure a road course from a city council whose collective ears are still blistered from the irate phone calls about "them damn bikers."

 Remember Those Fabulous Sixties? This whole deal has its roots in the fantasy that Boulder is some Camelot for cyclists, where Knights of the Round Pedal Stroke seek the Holy Water Bottle. The reality is that the Coors Classic is years in the grave, the Morgul-Bismark is just another cookie-cutter suburb, and the thousands of working stiffs who can't afford to live in the People's Republic clog once-bucolic training routes with honking commuter traffic.

 So why not find another training locale, something a little less Hygienic? Follow RockShox's lead and move to Colorado Springs. It's got java joints and microbrew, sushi and tofu, and the riding, on road and off, is excellent. Plus so many Christians have piled into the place that you just know it must be Heaven.

 Sure, there are a few downsides. In Colorado Springs, Rush Limbaugh is considered a limp-wristed liberal. Everything east of Hancock Avenue looks like Stepford country. And the only way you're going to find a parking space downtown is to bring one with you when you come.

 But I saw a paceline down on Fountain Boulevard the other day that ain't nobody gonna mess with: