I see a lot of bikes out there but I don’t really look at very many of them. I look past them, through them, over them, among them, around them. Once in a while I stop and actually take a closer look when a bike gets my attention. A classic steel road bike with its clean lines, gets my attention.
The other day an ‘83 Fuji Del Rey got a double take out of me. As I looked it over my focus paused on the headset reflector mount still rocking the oversized rectangular white reflector that the original owner rolled out of the shop with in 1983. I like to think that the college student riding this bike today got it from his mom, or dad, or uncle, or neighbor.
I’m into well placed reflectors. However the headset reflector bracket is not my style. It reminds me of bikes at BikeWorks, refurbished by volunteers that were too lazy or oblivious to ditch the rusty reflector bracket stacked in the headset and replace it with a simple spacer. Especially when the reflector was broken off long ago leaving just an unsightly remnant of yesteryear.
The magnet collection on my locker grows and changes as I find things on the ground or in my pockets. It moves it adds it subtracts it multiplies and it divides. It speaks to me. The cross of the bicycle jesus chain links are held up with a spoke magnet from an old bike computer. The Gary Fisher top cap with a dab of JB Weld is also riding on an old spoke magnet. That UW magnet is a ground score.
I like bikes. I like magnets. I like bike magnets. I like found objects, junk piles, free shit, ground scores and random doo-hickies taken out of context and put back in line. Plumb bobs fashioned from found objects bring me joy. In situ resource utilization in more ways than one. I like symmetry and putting things in order, not just any order but some order that makes sense to me, today, but maybe not tomorrow.
So I dropped a line, a plumb bob, to rein things in. A baseline to riff off. A punchline to rip off. A tagline to leave off.
My first swing at things was a couple large steel washers I found in...
I met a non-dairy creamer Explicitly laid out like a fruitcake With a wet spot Bigger than a great lake Took me to the new church And baptized me with salt She told me, "liquor" I am a new man
Hot freaks
This one is on the house This one is better than ever
I walked into the house of miraculous recovery And stood before king everything And he asked me to join him in the red wing Took me to pie land Said, "I'm a thigh man" I will be eternally hateful
Hot freaks Hot freaks Hot freaks
This one is on the house This one is better than ever And this one is on the house This one is better than ever This one is on the house This one is better than ever
"Hot Freaks"
Guided by Voices
I’ve been mumbling “Hot Freaks” lyrics all the livelong day since I final-50-fucking-feeted a box of 360 cute little cuppies of Coffee Mate to some office worker working in some office.
Ron Sutphin told us at UBI that Albert Eisentraut said that every good story needs one cubic centimeter of bullshit. This Eisentraut write-up from 1987 is one of my favorites.
The part about busting his ass for $15,000 maybe, rings true. Here's to doing what you want to do.
One day at Elliott Bay, 33 John was dispatching and he sang the opening line of the Gilligan's Island song over and over and over for quite some time cracking himself up, broadcasting to the radios of messengers all over the streets of Seattle.
27 years later the memory still cracks me up and Gilligan’s Island will always evoke 33 John doing what he wanted to do.
A chunk of osmium the size of your phone weighs 20 pounds. The most dense density. Put that in your pocket and sit on it....