Tip 79: Veer into a parked car

Cycling affords a tremendous way to see your city and it would be a shame not to stop and smell the roses.
If you peer off into the distance long enough, however, you will cease to hold your line.  Perfectly stationary objects will jump out at you, and you will find the end of your handlebar has become irredeemably tangled with a parked car.

BONUS TIP: Hold your head high, as though mortifying embarrassment is as preposterous a concept as Scientology, put the car's wing mirror back in place and ride on.

Tip 66: Feel abnormal

You've just emerged from a big meeting and stand by the road shaking hands with important men in very fine suits. They stand on the side of the road looking for taxis. 
Your bike is right there, but you suddenly feel an absence of pride in it, the presence of a sort of weirdness.  Is this shame? 
Do you take the four steps to where your bike is locked and mount it, or wait til they have gone? What will people think?

BONUS TIP: Revel in bike-shame while it lasts. Way things are going, it's something the fixie-buyers of today will never experience.

Tip 59: Have your bike stolen

If your love is taken from you too soon - in the phase where you lock up both wheels and fall asleep with it in your arms- when you return to the lamp post and find your D-lock in twain you are likely to fill a page with florid despairing verse and fling yourself from the roof of a Ray's Bikes outlet.
Later, you pass full days without even thinking about the machine you swore devotion to. At this stage, if the shadow-dwelling hacksaw man absconds with your ride, you won't be half way through the cab trip home before thinking about what you'll replace it with.

BONUS TIP: Tell yourself you'll buy a cheap commuter you can afford to have taken. Once in the bike shop, you'll wonder if you can afford not to get a SRAM red set up.

Tip 11: Leave your bike

There's something totally charming about leaving your bike in a public place, say, outside work, and seeing it there each time you go past.
It's there when you go out for coffee, marking that patch of pavement as yours.  It's there when you head to your afternoon meeting. 
It's there when you walk in from the train station the next day and it's there for the rest of the week until this "awful weather" passes. You're like a tomcat who has marked the territory, and you can hold your tail high.
You don't need to worry about bike theft as much as you think.  They call it passive surveillance - the way a bike parked in a busy street won't be molested, for the most surprisingly long time, except by spiders.

BONUS TIP:  That story about the guy who had a nest of white tails in his seat, and they crawled into his bib shorts on a long descent and he got flesh-eating necrosis of the balls? True story. Happened to my cousin's friend. He's OK now but says always use mortein on your saddle before a ride.