This little ditty goes out to Catarina. You know Cat. As I was in the midst of a text conversation with Cat about printing the internet. I was hopping on a bike to drop a couple postcards into a mailbox. Which in my zipcode means riding a mile or two or five to find a blue box. As an electric ass mailman my hands are in and out of mailboxes all day long, but I'm not at work this Tuesday afternoon.
When I dropped off the postcards and found myself looking at Chuck’s hop shop what could I do except have a beer, a Cloudburst beer
Then I thought what if, what if I was writing in a notebook and then I took a photo of it and put it on the internet only to print it out later on paper in black & white to 3-hole punch it and file it away in a binder??? Spinning circles of futility. Circles too big to send in a text message.
It’s not that I like this song. It’s that it really is Tuesday Afternoon so it fits in a sad sack, wet blanket, debbie downer way so much so it’s comical.
My ride home from the Chuck’s mailbox was covered in a Charlie Brown cloud raining down real rain. Soaking soaked soak my socks kind of rain. But it’s ok, it's Tuesday afternoon, I'm just beginning to see, now I'm on my way...
What if you wanted to look at some bullshit blog but that meant you had to submit a request in writing to your local librarian and then wait patiently while she schlepped out a hefty 3-ring binder or two for you to thumb through
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.
is a book you need to read. a book I've referred to so many times over the years, that google fed me back my own photos when I was looking for the cover shot. a book I return to again and again every once in a while, as I did today on today's bicycle and yesterday on yesterday's bicycle too.
The spring quarter shall begin on the second Monday after the close of winter quarter and end on the eleventh Friday thereafter. The June commencement for UW Seattle shall be the Saturday immediately following the last day of spring quarter.
move aside, and let the man go through. let the man go through.
March 21, 2024
A postcard can make your day, especially if it’s hand delivered by an electric ass mailman on a cargo bike. If it arrives during the spring break cherry blossom fiesta, even better.
Nothing says spring break cherry blossom electric ass mailman shit show like Super Bon Bon. The song is from 1996 but it’s as if the lyrics came to me in a dream-like daze rolling around campus on the first day of spring 2024…
What would you do if you were digging around in the garage and you pulled out a 14T ACS Claw from a ziploc freezer bag full of cogs and lock rings and bottom bracket cups and other assorted bike shit from yesteryear?
you may ask yourself how did I get here? and you may ask yourself how can I incorporate this sweet 14T single speed freewheel into my life? and you may say to yourself, my god what have I done? with 130 BCD cranks or even 110 this thing is crazy. After a minute on the gear-inch chart trying to do up a drive train with a chainring small enough to fall within the parameters of tired and old. No can do.
But what you can do, is mount that shit on a telephone pole outside and call it art… …stacked in a stack of big fat AGB washers so that those in the know know they can still reach up and give it a spin and get the satisfying sound of an ACS claw freewheeling from a telephone pole in a parking strip on the edge of Skyway. Add biopace to taste.
got that green Fuji at BikeWorks for $10 frame & fork, back when Daniel Boxer was working there.
20+ years ago as those in the know know.
Built up on 27 inch steel rims with a coaster brake. The front wheel was radially laced to a beefy BMX hub. Green glitter grips on a hacked down riser bar topped off with a Ritchey Force stem.
That bike was fun. Even Travis Keene said it was “clean”
I sold it 13 years ago to another guy named Travis.
This photo brings me joy in 2024 because I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own digital camera outside the Hopvine in 2008 during the Volunteer Park Crit. They say you can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning. That day I drank all day.
87 Catarina? Is that kinda like a 71 Monte Carlo? Kinda not really.
87 is Litrell aka Justin. Catarina is Cat. And Face is Face, you know Matt.
That Chris Murray PW arrow on the Ford pickup canopy directs the eye to 87 and then to Cat and then back to Face for the trifecta
I don’t see much of those three these days but recently I’ve reached out to all 3. ONEWAYor another. Or maybe they’ve reached out to me… …it’s a small world afterall, it’s a small small world.
That green Fuji there on the bike rack brought me joy but that's another story
Whatever works, works. This bike got my attention, interrupting my staring off into space on my coffee break, enough for me to send Litrell a photo, talking shit about the 0.33 cm of travel in that crusty elastomer. My eye went to the what’s wrong with this picture but he replied with a what about those PAUL brakes and that THOMPSON seat binder… being all half-full of joy to my half-empty shit talk. His attention to detail refined and laser focused in a bike guy way.
I am not just a shit talker. I just talk a lot of shit. I do have a sincere appreciation for people that ride their bikes. Whatever their bikes may be. And this guy obviously rides his bike. I’d like to draw your attention to that Darigold Milk Crate from Eugene and say that my brain in 0.07 seconds went with a made-up story to tie it all together… …this guy was Biology major at Oregon back in the day then he moved to Seattle for a Masters degree in Aquatic and Fishery Science at UW schlepping this milk crate full of LPs as well as a garbage bag full of VHS tapes and a box full of text books in the back seat of his old roommate's car who happened to be moving to Bellingham.
Masters degree lingered around long enough to pivot to a PhD in Applied Physics and now he’s still lingering around today tenured down on Boat Street for a cup of coffee, sitting around sitting back sitting pretty while the money rolls in from the Defense Department and other classified sources.
Man that’s an old bike you must be hardcore. Said the guy on the train.
No. Nope. Not even close. 7 gears see, there’s a few to choose from. I said.
All the while thinking, “if I was hardcore, I wouldn’t be on this fucking train, I’d be pedaling my ass 15 miles all the way home, uphill both ways in the rain all the way to Skyway bro”
You know there’s only 3 other places with hills like Seattle, he says::: :::San Francisco, some town in Louisiana, and Pittsburgh.
“you don’t say” I don’t say, but I’m thinking it as I smile and nod.
then as I’m getting off the train he says, go home and eat a good meal.
I smile again and wave as I exit.
Depending on the workload and the weather conditions and the bike I happen to be riding, there are days when I need to paperboy up the last Cooper Street hill on my way home. Single speed or 1 x 7 or full-on Ritchey Logic touring triple, sometimes I’m so cooked I need to paperboy up the last kick on Adams Lane to the Burke-Gilman at the very beginning of my epic uphill commute home, just a hint of what’s to come. Sometimes I’m so cooked I just get off and walk that shit.
When I do paperboy, it never ceases to remind me of Jonny Sundt, straight outta Okanogan County. I hear his voice talking shit in my ear, in a cocky road racer bike messenger voice saying “dig deeper” “is that the best you can do?” “paperboy that shit” and I laugh a little and grind up the hill.
paperboy
[pay-per-boi]
noun
a youth or man who sells newspapers on the street or delivers them to homes; newsboy.
verb
to criss-cross or zig-zag or snake or side-to-side up a steep hill on your bike, decreasing the gradient like a paperboy riding his BMX with an overstuffed bag full of newspapers to deliver before dawn
Recently I was visualizing a frame that posts up postcards where they’re visible — viewable from both sides.
I thought about rigging up a Calder-mobile and stringing them up. But that thought lasted less time than it took you to read this sentence. My kid had one of those things over her changing table and she liked it. But I’m not going there again.
Two panes of glass came to mind. Like a sandwich. A panini. A window you could peek into or out of. ONEWAY or another. Rotating on a lazy susan base, or something like that. Then laziness took over. Or was it inertia?
Because I like postcards and his postcards kick ass, I briefly mentioned my vague concept to Stevil on the back of a postcard that I sent him the other other day… …puting it out into the universe. Then I left it at that.
Fast forward a few days when and where I found myself in a thrift store and a picture frame jumped out at me. Someone somewhere decided to frame a Sports Illustrated cover featuring Michael Jordan from July 23, 1984.
39 years later it’s sitting in a pile of stuff and I buy it because it’s between two panes of glass sandwiched between a frame within a frame.
It holds onto postcards well, like a window. I’m not sure if I’ll hang it on the wall or just prop it up somewhere. It’s evolving…
All the clock adjustment mumbo jumbo doesn’t do it for me but the signpost benchmark calendar date to commemorate does.
The idea of it. The smell of it. The look & feel of it.
At this latitude daylight makes a difference.
There’s an 8 hour difference between the long summer days and the short short short winter days of daylight around here.
It’s not psychosomatic, it’s sad. (seasonal affective disorder)
Dark morning commute. Gray day at work. Dark commute home.
But now things are starting to look up. People start to say they’d want my job on a day like this.
Take a puff, it’s springtime.
And so on.
Spring forwarding.
Springing forward.
Looking back:
black tea steeped in the cup steeped in tradition set apart to fit in brand names change trend cycles a uniform to put on each morning to take the train into the city to play the game to play along to do it all again the next day shortest days of the year strung together to make one long week 40 hours the hard way wouldn’t last 5 days at your job Yo-Yo Ma yo mamma layers seem to work best two sweaters and a vest second-day socks pushed to new limits the smell never goes away
