Riding down sunny and bustling Valencia Street on my new bike behind my new boyfriend, I have plenty of reasons to be distracted. Before I know it, I’m heading face-first toward the asphalt, backed up by a soundtrack of clanking metal and the empathetic exclamations of bystanders. Bloody knees, torn pants and a busted rear tire on my boyfriend’s bike all take a back seat to the image in my brain—my mother. She would have a fit if she knew what just happened, and saw that I wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Sometimes it seems that no one in San Francisco wears a helmet. The perfectly imperfect locks of the young, and, for the most part, attractive bike-riding masses are in full view day and night. As they bound, two-wheeled, between hole-in-the-wall art shows and dank barrooms, there seems to be a perfectly simple explanation behind why these folks choose not to cover up.

“Helmets are dorky,” says Elizabeth Razmuin, a local bike-riding cutie who has never even owned a helmet.

I don’t disagree. I pouted and dragged my feet the whole two blocks to the bike shop immediately following my intimate encounter with the roadway that afternoon. My sweet (and helmeted) boyfriend wondered what was wrong with me. Was I hurt worse than I let on? More embarrassing than donning the white dunce cap that I purchased that day was admitting that I felt dorky doing so. Had I time-warped back to seventh grade?

Yet the kids at the cool lunch table openly mock helmets with a practiced sneer, perfected 15 years back when the tight-roll went out of style. Fatal head injury statistics be damned. We don’t need no stinkin’ helmets.

Speaking of statistics:

Each year 580,000 bicyclists end up in the emergency room.

An average of 900 bicyclists are killed every year.

Eighty percent of bicycle-related deaths are due to head injuries.

So I wear a helmet. Even when I’ve spent 30 minutes perfecting the angle that my bangs fall across my eyes or the pouf beneath my adorable pigtails, because I really don’t want to hear what my mother would have to say if I didn’t.