what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

This time it’s for real. The letters are not just microsoft paint’d on there  They’re silk screened onto the wood next to the crow, who is spray painted. Junior and Junior Junior haven’t noticed yet. But they will. When they do, they’ll ask “why dad?”

Because it brings me joy. And it’s facing the garage so 99 out of 100 passers by will not even see it there on the south side of Little Free Library charter #100780

The medium via which literature travels is part of the meaning that occurs. A book beholds you, is very patient and really there with you on a hill or under a blanket or in the tub. The book itself is not trying to absorb and reflect and grab you. 

–Jason Zuzga, FENCE

read a book

read a book 

read a motherfuckin book 

--Bomani Armah

rainbow photo bro

birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, reunions, traffic back ups, lake washington shit shows, drunk pirates, environmental impact statements, canned beverages on ice, unlimited hydroplanes, dead baby bikes, blue angels, souvenir water bottles 

I don't know

I wasn't there  

Visualize a room full of cocky PhDs, smug engineers and self-important designers with multiple decades of combined experience, gathering  around a conference room table to take another whack at imitating something that has existed in nature since the beginning of time. 

Toothaker photo

Found a moment today in my hectic schedule to meet Toothaker at Recycled Cycles for a coffee break when it occurred to me,  that if you ride a bike, you can’t swing a stick at Recycled without hitting someone you used to know, someone you used to work with or someone you still work with. 

Look over there (where?)

There, there's a lady that I used to know

She's married now, or engaged, or something, so I am told

We’re all within 1.5 degrees of Adam Smith, the guy that corrected me when I put out that dickstank featuring Justin Moe and Tyler Goldsmith, both PM legal vets. 

Adam said, “it’s more like 2 degrees of PM Legal” 

Please note J. Moe’s Recycled jersey. 

same as it ever was   ± 23 years  

a quality of life issue

taken out of context

and

put back in

again

one more time 

around

SPECIAL

Today Only!

entropy smoothies    FREE!

(one per customer)

you’ll pay for it later

forget about it

cover up

built up

stacked up

pancake makeup

structural spackle

slathered on with a paddle

you might know

one of Shawn Kemp’s cousins

but we’re not talking Reign Man

we’re talking Rain Man

one minute to Wapner

get off his line

pedestrians perambulate

pedantic persnickety perfectionists

pettifogging petty little shits

he’s the one

telling you

how it is

I’m walking here!

same actor different movie

coo coo ca choo

 Mrs Robinson

Is it safe? 

Is it safe? 

Slapped this bike together six or seven years ago while working at a small nonprofit bike shop where I had my hands in a never ending stream of incoming bike donations. It was to be my next-next RAGBRAI bike. 

The giant traveling circus known as RAGBRAI is making its way from West to East across Iowa as we speak. Last time I did it, in 2017, I shipped this bike out to Jimbo’s house. At the end of the ride I put the bike on Mr. Mader’s bus, unsure of when or if I’d see it again.  Then I hopped in a car with Watson to get a ride to Chicago and then O’hare. 

Jimbo used to let me leave my bike in his attic and it saved me tons of money on shipping a bike back and forth to Iowa. If I ever do RAGBRAI again, in the name of participant observation, it’ll be mostly observation. I’ll be on a barstool or under a tree in the shade with a beer.  Maybe I’ll rent a skeet. Although I already have 4 bikes here, there are a few reasons I want that bike back. 

A couple years ago I was planning to return to Iowa for a college reunion and I asked Jimbo if he could grab the bike from Mader’s garage and schlepp it back to Grinnell so I could ride it around town. Then I planned to drop it at Bikes 2 You and ship it back to Seattle. However, a little global pandemic set in and shut all that shit down until further notice. 

Several weeks ago I emailed Jimbo and Chris Murray, two of the best logistics and supply chain experts I know, and asked them how I could get in touch with Mr. Mader so I could try to get that bike back to Seattle somehow. There was no response from Chris and Jimbo said “I thought you sold that bike” and I kind of lost hope. 

AND THEN on Saturday, the eve of RAGBRAI Chris texted me “does this look familiar?” 

He cooked up an elaborate rescue mission to extricate the bike from Iowa and get it back to Portland with the help of Mader and a woman named Andrea. I don’t really know the details yet,  but I do know that PDX is a lot closer than a garage in the middle of Iowa. And I said “sweeeeet” thumbs up emoji. 

A few days later Chris texted to ask if Colorado Chris could ride the bike and finish RAGBRAI because his bike had some serious mechanical issues. And I said “YES” hell yes. 

He changed the tires, put on his clipless pedals and rode on across Iowa.  Here’s Colorado Chris and the bike with RAGBRAI Director of Operations Matt Phippen.

The bike is nothing really crazy special,  but I like it. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. It’s done one RAGBRAI and now it’s dusted off and working on RAGBRAI #2.  

if you're not sure

whether something is bullshit

it's bullshit

-Rolf Dobelli

One of the only resources you have control over is your focus, where you choose to direct your attention.

instagram, fashion trends, electric scooters, local news, interest rates, weather forecasts, the rat race, gravel bikes, trade deadlines, bullshit blogs about bullshit.

Like Sturgeon said 90% of it all, is crap. 

what are you looking at? 

same shit    different year

2008   2016   2024?

sitting down I feel like stopping

that’s the sound of tall cans popping

the economy, it’s not slowing

that disparity          is growing

I cannot bust out cheesy rhyming couplets like this without evoking the psychedelic paddle boat trip through the tunnel where Willy Wonka loses his shit and the kids are trying to keep it together for an everlasting gobstopper…

There's no earthly way of knowing

Which direction we are going

There's no knowing where we're rowing

Or which way the river's flowing

Is it raining, is it snowing

Is a hurricane a–blowing

Not a speck of light is showing

So the danger must be growing

Are the fires of Hell a–glowing

Is the grisly reaper mowing

Yes, the danger must be growing

For the rowers keep on rowing

And they're certainly not showing

Any signs that they are slowing.

–Roald Dahl

Dahl wrote some crazy stuff that was not for kids. And some of his stuff for kids was not really for kids. 

“the snozberries taste like snozberries”

“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter”

“You got peanut butter on my chocolate”

Way way back a week or so ago, I was aware of Rachel Kushner in a Flame Throwers way, as well as some of her short stories. and I was aware of William Eggleston in a Memphis tricycle way. But reading this New Yorker fiction was a peanut-butter-cup-combo for me.

I see an old picture frame and I want to paint it black. Tearing this page out of the New Yorker is as close as I’ll ever get to an Eggleston. 

Kushner ties in the photo in more ways than one.  She talks about the story too, bringing a few more layers to it. 

"still life with tall can"

light - shadow - overspray

I see the girls walk by

dressed in their summer clothes

I have to turn my head

until my darkness goes

I see some plywood and I want to paint it black

I see a cute little plywood rectangle with a perfect donut hole perched just so in the College of Built Environment’s scrap pile

I see it fits neatly into my back pocket

I see that it would look better black

I see some overspray on the OSB as a commentary on negative space

I see the afternoon sun shining just so - so black hole sun

I see it all in the side of a tall can as I sit in a sawed-off lawn chair sweating the day away

I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down on a table, even when they are not cold, they won’t stay flat. They’ve got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can’t imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn’t the whole thing with gloves or with anything else. 

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it’s getting to be something of a high-miler, an old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different. 

I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends. This one, despite the murderous treatment it got at the hands of those alleged mechanics, seems to have recovered and has been requiring fewer and fewer repairs as time goes on. 

-Robert Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Ass are as thick as

a kid’s brown full love

kill off light

red clouds

dead heavy

blue-berryly

to my secret trunk

up a tree     in flower

on fresh yard

only water path

for hot condition

weed pot stem

rain     explode

like plant sprout

will shine

then protect yellow hole

are moss song ground

see soil stroll

color is thrive

vegetable this do green 

rustle fall 

work in shade

bug burst firm

him relax

spring summer winter never

out  roll  eat  breathe

plot   come from leave

morning night between 

      --Junior Junior 7/17/22

Yesterday Junior Junior sat down on a skateboard and wrote a little ditty on the fridge in magnetic words. He was deep in focus, really into it, until he wasn’t.  Then he was all done and he read it to me. 

I’ve edited a bit to get it closer to the way he said it and it took three or four tries to transcribe it all. 

word

we now join our regular route

already in progress

retrospective   recollection

reflecting on the reflection

rose tinted photochromic lenses

the-good-old-days   is  so  2019

it fits neatly in the narrative

repeat after me

authenticity for real            really 

saw it on instagram

missed the wedding/graduation/funeral

watching it unfold through a camera lens

call it   off the glass

call it what you will

nomenclature   taxonomy

is a rose a rose?

I don’t know

you tell me 

it’s not about the bike

you do the hokey pokey

you turn yourself around

that’s what it’s all about

whatever the question

the answer is 

ask more questions

carrier—

leave 

if no response 

single-handedly

slowing the economy

one tall can at a time

take another look at the

environmental impact statement

the price of gas in Canada

over promising

under delivering

talk-the-talk talking

the story 

you’re telling yourself

to deal with not dealing

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. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the cold beer zone.