I remember when I got my first bicycle. Jet black Mongoose, 18 gears, sweet neon lighting bolts attached to my spokes. When I felt like making a racket, I even stuck a holographic Charizard Pokémon card near my back tire. I was so excited when I pulled up to that first day of senior year in high school.

I was pelted with rocks and laughed at for still having Pokémon cards. Ah, the good ol’ days.

Bicycles are a cornerstone of nearly everybody’s childhood. Or in my case, post-pubescent period. I love feeling the rush of wind in my hair, shrieking like a banshee as I crest a tall hill, and the rush to the bottom.

So when I want to relive those exhilarating days five years past, where the hell are those bright pink Bike Share bicycles?

Oh, look at that picture. That’s where they are — the bottom of Beer Lake.

Besides being towed up from lakebeds covered in algae, our beloved bicycles have been popping up in Pontiac and Rochester, smashed and tattered on the side of Walton Boulevard, the chains trashed and smattered on the hill beside the parking garage. Recent Hubble telescope photographs show one on the moon.

From the 200 new bicycles brought on campus at the start of the last Fall semester, there has been a 60 percent mortality rate.

The bicycles have a high mortality rate, not the cyclists using them. So far, nobody has been reported deceased from riding the bikes.

These bikes came in mass quantities. They aren’t practical to ride long distances, like home to Waterford.

The Bike Share program is a great and generous idea, but you can’t expect expensive mountain bikes with 24 gears and handbrakes here when the purpose is to take you a quarter mile to another campus locale.

You’re not going to see Lance Armstrong touting the faded pink reverse-pedal brake bicycle on the Tour De France this year. By the way it’s going, you’re more likely to see an ESPN2 special featuring the tandems in a destruction derby.

The campus goof-offs like to treat the equipment like toys, rip the chains off and abandon the poor bikes all over campus and ghost-ride them off cliffs.

Use these bicycles with care. We aren’t going to get any replicas to replace the destroyed models mashed up and tangled in the bushes near Oakland’s main entrance.

Imagine your life without the bikes — you will have no choice but to walk everywhere. Oh, the horror.