As you know it’s Bike to Work to Bike at Work All Day Day (BTWTBAWADD)
However, I took the day off, so I might ride a bike today but I won’t be riding a bike to work to ride a bike at work.
Bike to Work Day has always been unofficially subtitled “honey can you pick me up after work? I’m too tired to ride that fucking bike home.”
Clo'e Floirat SPOT The New Yorker 5-16-22
Aside from Junior riding a stationary bike, a highlight from our trip to the thrift store was seeing Carole King’s Tapestry perched front and center on the pile of vinyl near the books, dvds and vhs tapes. It was as if another shopper placed it up front to make sure someone like me would see. Somewhere in the haze of my memory I have sounds and visions from the 70s of my sister playing tracks off various albums, including Tapestry. She was the DJ, I was the audience. I never paid much attention to the album cover until now.
Holding the album, I mentioned to Junior that I recently read a poem about the cat on the cover and she could not have cared less but it made me smile as I tried to remember where I read that poem. Today I remembered, it was in The Threepenny Review #168 on page 26.
The Cat on the Cover of
Carole King’s Tapestry is Dead
The photographer who took the picture is dead, too. For nine years now. He died in his seventies. But the cat – his name was Telemachus – has been dead longer. Just look at that cranky face. He’s been staring out at us for fifty years now, each day wanting us gone, wanting his mother all to himself while they wait for brave Ulysses to return home from battle. All he wants is to be left alone on his pillow throne there in the window beside her bare feet, soaking up the sun while she knits her gatefold tapestry. Only once the moon rises over Laurel Canyon will she unravel her progress, to fool us into thinking she’ll soon choose one of us.
They say you’re supposed to change the tap line in your kegerator once in a while. Not just clean it, but replace the entire thing. I bought a new hose a few months ago and I planned to swap it out between kegs. After watching a couple youtube videos I thought I could just loosen the nut behind the tap with a cone wrench or an adjustable wrench or whatever happened to be hanging around in the garage. But when I popped the top off the tap tower I realized there’s a reason they make special wrenches for this setup. It’s no cone wrench and an adjustable wrench won’t even come close. So I put it off, tapped another keg and bought the right tool for the job and now it’s hanging up, waiting for the keg to blow…
"The KOMOS tower wrench is specifically designed to tighten the nut on the back of a faucet shank. It is double offset for clearance inside of coffin boxes and larger round towers and to move the handle away from the insulation or other nearby objects. Also super handy when tightening shanks inside a cold box when space is at a premium and it is hard to fit a traditional wrench. Pubs have historically made their own, now you can get one the easy way."
When I open my bike shop this wrench will be hanging with the tools somewhere not too far from the Campy corkscrews.
When I finally quit this messenger shit, once and for all, I’m going to open a bike shop. A big bright historic space with huge storefront windows and high ceilings and wood floors. With passive solar heating in the winter, and well placed shade in the summer. I’m going to work there all the time, six or seven days a week. The shop will be beautiful, stocked with every bike tool ever invented. French, Italian, Japanese, you name it, I will have it, hung neatly on the shop walls. Everything in its place. A place for everything. I will have two Campagnolo corkscrews with cherry handles. I will have seven different kinds of bike tool bottle openers. I will have four brands of headset presses. The 3000 square foot work space will have work stands and tools for 5 full-time mechanics, so I can work on 5 of my bikes all at once. Two air compressors enclosed in sound proof cases. Truing stands bolted down to work benches 42.5 inches off the ground. I will have two Phil Wood spoke cutters/threaders. There will be cement floors and drains built in so I can hose it all down when the kegs overflow or the chainlube explodes or the cat pukes or the shit hits the fan. I will have shop dogs and shop cats. The bike book library will be monumental. The furniture will be well designed, attractive, comfortable and functional. There will be no non-dairy creamer. The coffee will be good. The beer will be cold. There will be wholesale accounts with everyone for everyone. Paul, Phil, Chris, Grant, Brooks, Mavic, Moots, Sachs, Sidi, Swobo. For me and my friends of course.
I will be at work all the time. I’ll show up at 5:30am, or 3:00pm, or not at all. I’ll spend the night. I’ll stay for two weeks straight. Or take a week off if I feel like it. However, the shop will not be open to the public. The sign on the door will say “closed”, and if you flip it over it‘ll say “closed”. I’ll also have a large neon CLOSED sign, and it’ll be on all the time, like a beacon of freedom constantly sending its message, at all hours of the day and night. I’ll be in there working hard on my own bikes. Or on poetry, freelance writing, silk-screening, carpentry, cooking breakfast, pondering or drinking beer and pondering. The shop hours will not be posted. The phone will not be connected, so people cannot call and ask about the shop hours. And there will not be any employees because I won’t need any. This will eliminate any potential human relations issues, staff meetings, communication failures, personality problems, scheduling conflicts, and all the junior-high shit that goes along with trying to run a business with employees. Fuck that.
I will be in the shop but I won‘t be selling anything. Retail bullshit will not enter my sphere of existence. The windows will have incredible displays of bicycle art and elegant simple functional bikes because I like window displays. And I’ll spend hours creating them for my own enjoyment, not to attract customers. I‘ll be in the shop, reading the NY Times, listening to Miles Davis, or the White Stripes, or the Minute Men, or Bob Mould, or Guided by Voices, or Modest Mouse, or Guns n Roses or NPR and drinking coffee and beer and beer and coffee. Customers with stupid questions or flat tires or sheepskin seat covers or cracked carbon fiber forks can knock on the door all day long and I might even notice them between Hüsker Dü songs playing on the Bose Wave Radio, but probably not, and if I do, I’ll give them a half smile then get back to my work. My work as a sole proprietor and my work drinking beer and pondering.
The back door will be unlocked and open whenever I am in the shop and friends can stop by and bring their dogs and work on their bikes and add or subtract to the cold beer in the double wide Sub-Zero fridge or hit the bottomless pot of black coffee. The shop will include a beautiful stainless steel commercial sized kitchen. And a sleeping loft and an amazing bathroom with more magazines than a news stand, and I will not have to worry about customers fucking it up, because there will not be any customers. ###
as I sit here in 2022 with wet socks, swamp ass and cold hands, wearing a winter coat and reading about how this could be the shittiest May 12th on record...
These days when you say Bagley, I say chemistry as I visualize the metric shit-ton of Amazon packages delivered there each week, schlepped electric-assist bathtub style those final fifty fucking feet.
Bagley Hall, home of the Chemistry Department, is named after Reverend Daniel Bagley who was kind of a big deal back in the 1850s when Seattle was a little village and UW was just an idea.
But some days, when you say Bagley, it reminds me of another guy
well here I am... sitting on a chair staring at the clouds mowing on a clif bar thinking of not drinking more coffee right around 2pm toting a book of haiku flipping to any random page pondering the vision three short lines can bring inviting my crow friend to take part riffing on Kerouac shedding 5-7-5 constraints realizing he wants no part of it he wants the fucking food
A few feet to the right of the crow-eats-peanut-off-campus-map-show there’s a handiramp outside the Atmospheric Sciences Geophysics building spitting distance from a blind corner obscured by shrubbery. Right around 8:29 am Monday through Friday, one dude freewheels down it and across Okanogan Lane to store his bike, while another dude rolls up it to enter the ATG building. From my vantage point muttering to myself or talking with crows and schlepping packages I can hear each dude’s freewheel singing, approaching from different directions and without looking at my watch I know it’s nearly 8:30. Although my watch always says 3:33 so it wouldn’t matter.
Just yesterday morning… …both dudes hit the handiramp at the same time and dude #2 says “watch it!” then dude #1 gives a long angry but silent questioning why-don’t-you-fucking-watch-it look over his shoulder as he keeps rolling.
I continued muttering to myself and wondering how this could not be the first time these two dudes, who work in the same building, 50 fucking feet from each other, have had a close call. How could these two dudes not know each other? How can this be the first time this “almost” almost happened? Have they not talked about bikes before? Have they not discussed the merits of single speeds or the hype of Cannondales in the late 80’s? Have they not run into each other before? How can this be?
Fast forward 23 hours, 59 minutes and 45 seconds to this morning in the midst of feeding my crow bro peanuts, I hear dude #1’s freewheel and watch him for a moment to see where he stores his bike when half a moment later dude #2 hits the handiramp.
I smile and momentarily ponder the worn out old story problem and the variation I drafted 12 years ago about two commuters meeting at the same spot plus or minus 10 seconds each weekday morning and the infinite number of variables that have to fall into place for these two seemingly unrelated sequences of events to coincide. Insert here some math textbook references, asterisks and footnotes citing the Burke Gilman Effect which I also coined sometime in the last 27 years. But I’ve been there - done that and today’s story problem pondering didn’t last too long
because of a unique package delivery, there was a subtle difference in the routing of my route this morning, but my crow bro caught on and seamlessly transitioned, joining the route already in progress. He actually got a little touchy, some might say aggressive and followed me to Chemical Engineering. Flying low he slapped me on my left shoulder with a wing after I only offered up one peanut. We had a little chat and then I gave him a few more peanuts over at Atmospheric Sciences.
Around about that same time Bret in ABQ was emailing me a digital copy of this Raven sign bounce passing it off a satellite orbiting earth and hitting my phone perfectly on the fly. The words it strings together speak to me on several levels and once again everything is coming together.
