Signs everywhere. They’re not blocking out the scenery, they are the scenery. No longer looking at them, looking through them, over them, around them, taking them for granted, a given, a premise, a baseline riff, on or off, left or right, one way or another.
In situ signs blend in with everything. Especially when moving in traffic at traffic speed. But when a bomb cyclone blew through Seattle in November, this one was torn off its sign post, making it easier to see in a new light, in another context. To get up-close, to get hands-on, to realize how big and reflective and heavy and awkward and over-built traffic signs are.
This sign is 48” x 30” the largest in the collection so far and it needs its own wall space. By the way, I didn’t steal it, I just picked it up off the ground after a 28 day observation period in which I patiently watched it get kicked from here to there propped up, knocked down and moved around. A month is plenty of time to plan for another context.
I’ve been curating a collection of arrows and arrow signs for several years. Ground-scores, thrift stores, gifts and yard sales.
I don’t follow the academic calendar, I just roll around in it. Doing the same routes every day, plus or minus 50,000 students, faculty, staff and what-nots.
Here and now falls in the midst of a break between quarters with lots of open spaces, locked-down empty buildings and a little more down time than usual. Idle hands, as you know, are tools of the devil. But in my hands I hold 400 pages of Rachel Kushner’s latest and greatest book, Creation Lake
When it first came out I read a blurb about it and forgot it. Secret agent “noir” books are not my style. Then a few days ago I picked it up at the library and took a closer look. This is not your average book. I’ve read a couple Kushner books in the past and she’s a real badass.
I’ve read 47% of those 400 pages but I can 100% fully recommend that you read this book.
So I went through the motions of doing my job until 9am and then rolled back to Bulldog for some coffee. When I strolled in the owner was there saying “the espresso bar is closed but we have drip coffee” and I smiled thinking this is my dream coffeeshop:
pilder’s coffee
order anything you want, all those foo-foo, poo-poo, shmoopy-poopy espresso drinks that people drink, with every possible fucked up labor intensive bullshit combination… …we’ll let you spit all that shit out and we’ll charge you for it, but you’ll get a cup of drip coffee, just like everyone else
people love us on yelp
The photo I’ve poached here is Nathaniel, a godfather of coffee and a godfather of the U-district. It’s old and it’s not mine, but I poached it because it speaks to me on several levels. I met Nathaniel 29 years ago when I worked at Kids Co and his kid was in kindergarten. He was an owner of Cafe Allegro. I was an aimless liberal arts grad about to get a messenger job for the summer before grad school. Now his kid has her own kids and he’s retired. But he’s still a pillar in the 98105. Allegro, Bulldog and Big Time are old school U district establishments and I like that, that old school vibe. Sincerely for real. Really. These days I see Nathaniel once in a while on the street or at Big Time and he's a rock star rocking on.
This academic calendar year my coffee-beer continuum has consistently been Bulldog <---> Big Time. Kicking off the day and then wrapping it up on the way back home.
Just the other day I do does did git got get a card from Shaggy. The latest in the C-n-V holiday series of high quality hand built small batch cards from Milwaukee.
Staring off into space in a sleep deprived stupor sometimes reading the New Yorker until I can’t no more. Somewhere between here and there a woman got on the train with her pristine new e-bike and hoisted it on the hook next to my single speed. For about seven seconds I tried to compare and contrast the two and make a mental list of all the variables that could fall out of place to make them each dysfunctional. Then I gave up because I couldn’t keep track of them all.
I ride parsimonious single speeds and Occam’s Razor utility bikes. My tainted biased point of view comes from a consistently constant continuous cost-benefit analysis. I feel fine talking shit about e-bikes. I don’t own one, I just ride one all day, and it’s not just an e-bike, it’s a $15,000 electric ass bathtub that kicks ass. The e-assist is what makes my job possible.
I don’t have to pay for it, or work on it, or call customer service with any questions about it. I just ride it, Mr McFeely like for real, really. While a guy named Alistair builds up the fleet of e-cargo bikes and keeps them all running and repairs all the little shit. All the while I remain blissfully ignorant of the nitty gritty e-bike mechanics, electronics and hydraulics.
As I’m riding in and around the 98195 I’m watching all the chuffers out there on their e-bikes and scooters and skeets wizzing all around me cluelessly. They don’t ride like cyclists. They ride like e-bike ipso facto assholes.
I looked up this WING e-bike and you can too. That integrated light top tube thing made me Van Moof in my mouth. As those in the know know that’s not a good thing and they also know this shit was probably made in the same old Van Moof factory.
My recurring Scattante dreams are going Van Moof.
A mail order e-bike, some assembly required, for $1500… What could possibly go wrong? The feel-good honeymoon lasts about 48 hours or less before things go to shit. Bolts finger tight. Everything half-assed. Then you’re on hold with customer service in China while your local bike shop says “go fuck yourself. Don’t bring that shit in here” and you're sitting on a pile of e-bike shit. Heavy and slow and annoying.
I suggest spending more money on a bike from a shop that will stand behind their product and be able to service it when issues arise. Perhaps you could get a Wombi from Davey Oil.
…the bartender makes a mental note, smirks and ponders the statistical significance, taking into account each patron's date of birth and residential zip code
for thousands of years mathematicians have run the numbers
twenty two divided by seven
for 43 years anthropologists, sociologists, economists, actuaries, scammers, scratch ticket buyers and coin flippers have been calling 867-5309
A book I had as a kid, a book I revisit sometimes, like today when it's 29 outside and I'm wearing fleece-lined action slacks cut off at the knee
these are not the $246 gravel bike shorts you've read about on the Radavist. These are $25 eBay pants. They get the job done. So well in fact I got another pair so I can Mr Rodgers out of my black work cutoffs into my grey home cutoffs.
photo lifted from the Radavist readers' rides division, which is my favorite part of that site. I could care less about all the latest gravel bike shit.
But I'm into bikes like this, bikes that get ridden. Bikes that "look shit enough to be worthless to the untrained eye"
The lyrics tweaked only slightly over the 110 years since it became the official You-Dub fight song
Ye olde school
UW goes back to 1861
“Bow Down” came along in 1915
I’m not a real dawg, I just roll around on a purple & gold bathtub on Jerramy Stevens Way and Okanogan Lane the wrong way all day
You must have me confused with one of the four other 55-year-old bald neurodivergent electric ass Mr. McFeelys rolling around on purple & gold bathtubs…
You must have me confused with someone who gives a shit
You must have me confused with someone who went to work today
found this book in the free library. it found me actually
The gist of if it is: be here now.
We’re all rewinding, replaying, regretting the past, the shoulda-coulda-wouldas and or fretting the future, the what could be, the what might be, the maybe. We’re focusing on what isn’t, missing out on what is. The ISness. The here. The now.
Same old shit, easier said than done. But Hederman simplifies it and describes the same things in a few different ways:
When there’s an entertaining, “I’m not that,” you can experience a pause, a timeless moment in a linear time frame. That’s a pause you can live in. Live AS. It’s not something you can attain. It’s always available.
That pause. That gap. That’s the ticket.
And it’s not about taking another yoga class or following another guru. It’s in you, or it’s all around you. and try not to take yourself too seriously
Charging rechargeable lights again and again and again. I’ve been there, done that. Living at this latitude for 33 winters. But this one feels darker for some reasons that we don’t need to talk about. Sprinkle in lyrics to taste.
Last rainy Friday afternoon I was standing on a very crowded train watching youtube clips of Vision Quest and texting them to Timmy Jimmy when I leaned back to take a halfass load off on the accordion section of the train car near the bike hooks when the soles of my gold stripe Messi Sambas approached a 0.000 coefficient of friction in the puddles of rain water puddling and suddenly I slipped down into an awkward akimbo and said “shit” and when I stood back up upright the security dudes nearby said “you OK?” and I said “yeah, it’s slippery” and they said “very”
just add water
The Tuesday before that I stood on an overly overcrowded train platform watching the sign saying the next southbound train was 25 minutes away. Twenty fucking Five minutes. I thought for a moment or more like stewed in my own anger and then returned to the surface of the earth and started riding my bike home. My 27-pound 43-year-old single speed. Across the U Bridge, then under the freeway to Boylston, past Craig’s old house, Melrose, through Cool Guy, past Six Arms, up to 12th, then all the fucking way up and over and all along Beacon way way down to Othello and Renton Ave South where I rejoined my regular commute route. It seemingly took forever to get home, sweating balls. I was cooked by Capitol Hill and I didn’t even stop for a beer. It reminded me of how much I’ve become a train rider with a bike and not a bike commuter. A heavy old single speed, giant backpack full of books and magazines and random shit, two hoodies layered upon layers, wearing a winter weight wool Double Darn cap under a bucket helmet. None of it designed for a 15 mile bike ride, all of it set up for a train ride between two little bike rides.
sometimes you're the dog
sometimes you’re the hydrant
In other news I was staring off into space this afternoon when Robin Williams entered my brain with the recollection of the time I saw him downtown on 2nd Ave, he was alone waiting to cross the street, I was alone, a disgruntled legal messenger on a bike, and we made eye contact. I gave him a subtle messenger chin tilt what’s up, he gave me a smirk, and in that 0.67 seconds it was clear he knew that I knew that he knew what was up with bikes, cycling, cyclists, bike racing, performance enhancing drugs, Lance, messengers, commuters, sweet steel bikes as well as avoiding looking directly at life in general with whatever distraction happens to be handy.
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.
These brackets also remind me of backyard bike mechanics never too shy to dive into their headsets and chuck those vestigial reflector holders. However when they crank their headset back down, hamfisting the shit out of it they can’t seem to get things the way they should be because they lost their locknut lip clearance and they need a headset spacer in there.
Some front reflector brackets incorporate a barrel-adjusted cable hanger too. These are actually useful and necessary but if the reflector is broken off, the clunky contraption can be replaced with a simple elegant cable hanger.
Here’s to old steel bikes, one inch threaded headsets, locknut lip clearance and ham fisted mechanics.
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 a loading dock tied on a piece of string. But the magnets were very attractive to the washers and they all wanted to play together.
Later I took another swing at things with a stretchy string that I cut off the hood of my rain jacket tied to a rather complicated alloy doo-hickey I found in a machine shop scrap pile. It worked well in a plumb bob sort of way as I lined things up. Please note the stretchy string is secured at the top by a magnetic knob construction hand painted by those guys down at DANK bags. Fuckin A+. The DANK knob sometimes joins the line up and sometimes it performs other tasks. The alloy doo-hickey is way too cool to just be a plumb bob and will end up somewhere sometime doing something else.
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.
The kids down at 1522 Western sent me a care package special like–like a KnR teener all the way to Rainier Beach
lions & tigers & bears
stickers & coozies & T-shirts oh my
The Morton's Salt girl lawbreaker jawbreaker design speaks to me on seven different levels. Spot on. Rock on. And on. I’m wearing it as we speak. Haven’t even washed it yet. One size fits most.
Fuckin A+
on earth
as it is in heaven
When the dust settles, I’d like to draw your attention to the left-side drive side which appears on both SMC t-shirts’ bikes. There’s a reason for that and that too. So roll up your left pant leg. As if. Or not. And how.
they’ll explain it later, those few, proud, real bike messengers still rolling around Seattle… …except for the one or two legal schmeagle messengers that also do UBER eats, grub hub, lyft and Sea-Tac luggage recovery.
When I was your age ABC had 75 legal messengers, toss in a few hundred more from Bucky's, Fleetfoot and Elliott Bay and all the other little companies kicking ass out there…
…and really really good coffee was 50 fucking cents
“There is no past: only a continuous present with a style that shifts to follow every curve in the fluid continuum”
–CGA -talking Joyce
I’m all about the fluid continuum. Day in. Day out. All day. Every day. What day is it? What time is it? Where am I?
Coffee maker. Kegerator. Pour over. Spill over. Bulldog. Big Time. Neither here nor there. Both here and there. All along the Ave. It’s HAPPY hour somewhere. Fresh hop IPA. Cora’s mom’s coffee as black as the midnight sky. All along that fluid continuum.
two 26” wheels walk into a bar. bartender says, “why the long fork?”
buyer’s remorse
what were you thinking?
the price was no object
it seemed like a good idea at the time
one man’s fully custom folly, is another man’s used bike
this bike has been haunting me for a week
Davidson Ti
wait, what?
Recycled Cycles
you know – Boat Street bro
Please take a moment to work some “Dust in the Wind” lyrics into your brain. Keep in mind, they may be behind you.
for a moment I saw Dr 37 Mike on this bike with a proper fork, a different handlebar, full fenders and cable actuated brakes. only for a moment and the moment’s gone.
coworkers have repeatedly shown me that the key to happiness at work (perhaps in life) is to dumb-it-down and not ask too many questions. Feign ignorance, blissful ignorance. That doesn’t really work for me, but I can always take it down a few notches.
As a glorified paperboy on a $12,000 electric ass bathtub I sometimes wonder what I’m doing. But the existential questions come and go in short spurts. Most of the time I appreciate the old school hand delivery via bicycle aspect of my job. And I always appreciate not being tied to a desk or a phone or a monitor.
There’s an old timer on my route that gets the New York Times and Wall Street Journal each morning, hand delivered by me, the electric ass bathtub riding existential paperboy.
Third string backup standing by. Waiting for a chance to show what she can do. Not much day-to-day experience. Coming off recent surgery, she spends most of her time on the sidelines, holding a clipboard, wearing headphones and pretending to be interested in the game. However, like the Dolphins’ QB, she’s only two plays away from getting in the game.
It’s a luxury to have a 3rd string rain bike collecting dust sitting around with old sleds, scrap lumber and a RAGBRAI wind sock.
I’ve had her for 11+ years but she sits around a lot. A lot. She now has new wheels, new tires, a new drivetrain and a new bottom bracket on the way. I agree with Stevil about the dumb tan sidewalls, but choices are limited in the 27” tire department.
I don’t really trust her yet. We haven’t been through much together. She hasn’t been the go-to bike over the years. The day-in-day-out ride. But she’s only two plays away.
My Bike Works donation pile is growing. Many of these blinky blinkys still work. The gray PDW headlight is Ryan Schuetze’s circa 2010 when he left it at my house. Schuetze you can have it back whenever you want. I used it a couple times and it's in great shape. But I will say the technology has come a long way in the 14 years since that backyard beer party. That white one is the Bontrager Alistair found on the ground. The giant square tail light is the type I used 30 years ago working at Casa Que Pasa.
For the past few years I’ve been using that Bontrager headlight that Alistair found on his ride into work. It worked fine until it didn’t and the switch crapped out. In the tail light department I’ve had an ad hoc mish mash of blinky options with rechargeable batteries. Here’s Junior Junior trying out a few, more than a few years ago.
As we move back into 17 hours of darkness per day I’m moving back into lights and reflectors on my morning commute which is already in total darkness. And soon there will be near darkness on my afternoon slog home.
In a side note the morning commute features a total of 457 feet of elevation loss sandwiching a train ride. It’s all downhill from here. Which means it’s all uphill on the way home.
When I moved here 33 years ago I bought my first bike light for my very short bike ride to work. It was a Cateye headlight with two C batteries. As heavy as all get out and about as bright as a tired old votive candle. Basically worthless on rainy Seattle rides to my graveyard shift at the sandwich shop.
A couple weeks ago I stepped out of my cave just long enough to enter the 2024 bike light market. Not seeking gently used, not a ground score, not a Bike Works find, not just new-to-me, actually new. Brand new in the package. I bought this Lezyne light set
These new lights are brighter than bright and easy to recharge. But I know you know I know that drivers still don’t see me.
The other other day right around Big Time time as I fumbled with my U-lock to wrap it around the head tube and secure it to a street sign, the guy smoking and hovering over a gravel bike on the bike rack I often use said “does that orange thing do anything?” and I said “it’s highly reflective, it’s a top tube pad, when I used to lock my bike up 7,000 times per day it did a lot, but now it’s just kind of sentimental.” Then he said “ahwwwww” and I thought, whatever bro I can tell I’ve already shared too much.
I was operating under the assumption that it was his gravel bike. But when he came back in and sat at the bar and continued to cough his smokers cough I realized maybe he was just smoking near that bike and I had mistaken him for a cyclist or someone who knew something about bikes. As you know proximity leads to assumptions.
Later, as I unlocked my bike to head home I noticed the gravel bike was “secured” with a giant U-lock only through the front wheel and I thought maybe that really is that chuffer’s bike.
In my legal messenger days (daze) I often found the bike racks outside the office buildings being used by office workers on their smoke breaks to plant their asses. Break time benches so to speak. So I found street signs and parking meters to lock up to. {Insert an ode to the parking meter here} Basic bike racks are cool. But sign posts work too and often work better than aesthetically pleasing poorly designed bike racks.
Same as it ever was
ode to SIX ARMS, ode to BENSONS, ode to six packs, ode to tall cans, ode to street signs, ode to parking meters, ode to hiding in plain sight, ode to yesteryear, ode to groundhog daying it day in and day out, ode to what day is it? ode to the same as it ever was, ode to the first stage: denial, ode to peter pan syndrome, ode to neo retro whatever bro, ode to retrospect, ode to phantom ass pocket U lock syndrome, ode to Monorail, ode to WA Legal Fridays, ode to Elliott Bay, ode to all y’all.
it’s been a long time since I’ve screened a onesie which brings to mind the time it’s been since I’ve changed a diaper which brings to mind the altered states of sleep deprivation and reorientation upon entry into a parallel universe known as parenthood
I know a guy that became a dad a month or so ago and today I made this onesie for him and his kid so I can hand deliver it via bicycle in the next seven to ten working days
As the higher-ups stand around and pat each other on the back, touting the benefits of becoming another one of Amazon’s Last Mile providers…
…the bike team is out there schlepping that shit the final fifty fucking feet and wondering what the benefits really are.
But at least we’re not stuck in cubicles staring at monitors and answering stupid questions on the phone. We’re rolling around a scenic 700 acre campus. Electric Ass Mr. McFeelys
I used to think 700 acres was pretty big and it made me appreciate the electric assist for sure. But then yesterday I learned a little bit about Berry College in Georgia. Berry sits on a 27,000 acre campus. That’s right, Twenty-Seven Thousand Acres. That’s BIG.
Remember that weekend in Providence when we brought enough clothes for a family of four? We couldn’t even carry it on the bus.
Remember that summer in Flagstaff when all we had was a pair of shorts and a t-shirt?
Everything worked out fine
Would you like to get away and get some rest?
Or do you just want to get away from here because you’re restless?
What are you looking for? Where do you think you’ll find it? Coeur d’ Alene? Cedar Rapids? Copenhagen? Cape Town? Or in that coffee shop on the corner?
Are you traveling in search of something or are you traveling to get away from something?
hide & seek
seeking or hiding
Finding inspiration or reading an instruction manual
A loose suggestion or a rigid recipe
I’ll take a pinch, a dash, a sprinkle, a dollop
You’ll measure out 1¼ teaspoon and a level ¾ cup
You’re the left hand playing a constant predictable base line
I’m the right hand going Thelonious all over the board
I had one small pack traveling light over seas
You had two checked bags envisioning contingencies
It’s amazing what people can accomplish when they don’t have a choice, acting out of necessity, emergency, catastrophe
It’s amazing how people freeze when they’re given choices, weighed down by quantities, accessories, luxuries
I mention passing through casually
You’re carefully retyping the itinerary
###
Throwback Thursday plus or minus 17 years. I wrote that 2007ish, me which means we. Me talking to my other self. As you know there is no "I" in team just as there is no "I" in go fuck yourself. Two sides of the same coin. Two hands on the same keyboard. Bilateral symmetry. In 2007 I did not know I would become a family of four. I did not know alot of things. I did envision a few contingencies but it's been 40+ years since I've worn white shoes before & after Labor Day.
POV angle of incidence invert and multiply what a difference a day makes on a day like this wouldn’t want your job my elevator conversation the smell of freedom same shit different year same shot different t-shirt same shirt different approach it’s all in how you bow down to electric ass bathtubs it’s all in how you look at it.
What are you looking at?
Took two swipes at this shot before going inside to the Ocean Sciences mailroom. In the lobby was a woman sitting at one of the tables staring at her laptop. But I’d like to think she looked up for my window selfie in the Undular Bore window lineup that gives out 4 for the price of one replicating the surface of a wave.
The variable autotransformer. You could call it a Variac. Bench mount model. Perhaps used in organic chemistry labs to control heating mantles. Or for equipment testing and repair. Knob controlled output of electricity flowing from that outlet up front, from 0 volts to around 130 VAC in this model.
This particular variac lived a long life working in the Chemistry department for decades before it began shooting out smoke and sparks when they plugged it in. So they kicked it to the curb, where I admired it for weeks rolling along my habbitrails the wrong way down Okanogan Lane. Finally one day I asked if I could adopt it and offer it a new home free from any electrical applications. Then they said sure whatever.
This thing brings me joy. Heavy and old school. The dial is giant and overbuilt. Analog as all get out. The coil of the cord is epic. The toggle switch is monumental with a satisfying click leaving no doubt about where you stand. It’s ON or It’s OFF. There’s no subtle gray areas or any awkward unspoken unusual situations that may arise. (until it starts smoking and sparking) It's ON or OFF. Like Bob Mould said:
For the past ten years I’ve used a skateboard to schlepp a full keg from point A to point B. Precariously perched with its 165 pounds flexing the thrift store board. It gets the job done.
But the folly trolley says a new era has begun. Talking the talk of a new way, a new platform to get the keg from here to there. A proud promenade across the garage and into the kegerator. There’s no flex in the plywood and those monster casters are ready for much much more… …15,000 pounds or a ½ barrel of IPA, whatever it takes.
P.S.
a few hours later
At the conclusion of the folly trolley’s maiden voyage that old thrift store skateboard said “I told you so” and proceeded to point out all the things that make him a better schlepper in this garage:
–The folly trolley is 9” off the ground
–The skateboard is only 4” tall which makes it easier for an old man to heft a full keg up and on board.
–The folly trolley is 24” wide
–The skateboard is 8”
–At the tail end of the schlepp, there’s a hard right turn through a narrow doorway over a rough patch of uneven cement.
-The skateboard can take this turn easily.
-The folly trolley cannot. Not even close. It’s a chore to get through the doorway.
The folly trolley will sit around and look for a reason to be more than a folly. But that old skateboard will probably continue to be the keg schlepper down here.
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 store front 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 Cork Screws 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 43.5 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 and 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 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, free lance 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.
###
I wrote that 21 years ago and it’s the same as it ever was. Written after I went to UBI in Ashland but before I actually worked in a bike shop.
Yesterday I sent the link to this little ditty to two bike shop owners I know in Fremont: Free Range Cycles Shawna and Dr Chris Mischief Cycles. Anytime I ride over to Fremont I get a little queasy when I roll past the old bakery that housed Mad Fiber and I think of Ric Hjertberg. I would send it to Ric too but he's busy preparing for the MADE show in PDX.
All three of those people and places are points on the timeline of when I finally did quit that messenger shit once and for all, about 13 years ago.
Heavy (heavy) duty (duty) Heavy duty rock and roll Heavy (heavy) duty (duty) Brings out the duty in my soul
--Spinal Tap
I wasn’t in the market for heavy duty casters, they just happened to find me. Open to outcome, but not attached to outcome. Seek and you shall find. Or maybe they’ll find you.
Adjacent to a loading dock I frequently frequent is a large dumpster full of random shit. It’s not a salvage pile, or a scrap metal pile or a surplus pile. It’s a dumpster full of shit and I get a nice view of it from atop the loading dock when I deliver the mail.
One day a large caster caught my eye. Within 17 seconds I located the other matching three. Then a few hours later I returned to the dumpster and fished them all out. Hit for the cycle.
I haven’t been able to locate exact matches for these things online. But similar casters sell for hundreds of dollars each and are rated to thousands of pounds each. Heavy (heavy) Duty (duty). Each of these suckers weighs about 12 pounds. The plates up top are a quarter inch thick steel. Bomb proof. Over the top.
I got them home a few weeks ago (in a car) and they’ve been lined up looking at me since. I had visions of bolting them onto a huge slab of live edge wood, like a 6” cross section of an old growth stump. Visualize the juxtaposition of nature and industry… …an odd couple paired up and working well together.
However that kind of went against my in situ resource utilization. I made a plan to stick to what I happened to have on hand. I looked to my left and noticed this 28” x 24” double stacked plywood panel that I sliced off a table that I built several years ago. For a moment I contemplated slicing it down to bring it closer to the golden ratio. But the cost-benefit analysis quashed that notion. Or maybe it was laziness. I have some beefy lag bolts but they’re too long and I’d need to hack them down to size (labor intensive) So for the time being I’m using pan head screws and big washers that I found on the ground.
The crow cutouts from Bret in ABQ keep coming in handy too.
So far the total cost for this push-me pull-you roly poly folly trolley that’s rated to 15,000 pounds is ZERO dollars. Slapped together with stuff that was sitting around, in situ, in the garage.
I plan to give it a few coats of polyurethane and maybe install a rope handle.
As you begin your back to school shopping, be sure to toss this book in your basket. I believe it should be required reading for all middle school teachers. I’d even call it the book of the month, as I’ve already declared Joy Williams’ book, book of the year.
Postcard of the Week
I’m a big postcard fan and a big big fan of this big postcard created by Bret in ABQ. It speaks to me on several levels and I have a sincere appreciation for the process and the layers of production. Spot on. From the discarded dental pick to the fork in the road to the crow bro.
Beer of the Week
Bodhizafa IPA from Georgetown is pretty much the beer of the week 52 weeks-a-year around here but a slice of setting sun puts a slight variation on the Wheel Fanatyk cup theme.
Nail-on Numbers of the Week
I have a soft spot for numbers in and out of context. These specific pairs speak to me for their history as those in the know know. Corndog 39, Doctor 37 Mike and way way back at Elliott Bay I was 07. Next time I visit that bin of address numbers I’ll be ringing up 867-5309.
got my hands on a pair of new tires today: Kenda Kross 27” tires. I cannot remember the last time I got new, as in full-retail new tires covered in sprues, vent spews, tire nubs, nibs, nippers, spikes, sprouts, hairs, doo hickeys, by-products of injection molding as seen on new tires, not just new-to-me new tires.
As this Shogun slowly transitions out of its test ride phase back into a ride-ride status I’m kinda questioning my decision to neo-retro throw it back to its 27” days. That certain stubborn sequence of events. Each of those Kross tires cost more than I paid for this entire thing 11 years ago at BikeWorks. Just another leading economic indicator glowing red in my fleet of heavy steel non profit bike shop bikes. But I haven’t really ridden it yet.
In other news I’m guessing about the spindle length on that 1987 loose ball square taper bottom bracket that’s still holding on because I’m about to swap it out for something 30 years younger…
that’s the goal, the direction, the drift, that’s the river I’m pushing day to day, day in, day out. It’s hardwired into me. It’s muscle memory. It’s efficiency. I shave with Occam’s Razor a few times per week. I eat cheesy bean burritos seasoned with parsimony. I am the traveling salesman living out the electric ass traveling salesman problem in real time every fucking day illustrated in purple and gold on a scenic 700 acre campus.
If I saw this bike on a bike rack I might doubletake and shake my head asking “what the fuck?” as I walked away. But yesterday I saw this bike on the Big Time bike rack and because I know this guy, and you do too, I just chuckled because we were having a beer (plural)
As simple and elegant perhaps as it can be solving a problem that should not even exist in our world at this time. He invented a solution to a problem that he invented. Creating a mess just to show a way to sweep it under the rug.
wait until you see him riding this thing as if it was meant to be
He may have found himself in a garage with a bunch of bike parts. And he may have said to himself what can I do? Better yet, what can’t I do? That fork on that frame with those wheels.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world. And you may find yourself before a 15” highly polished stainless steel lowercase g. And you may find yourself with a mirror-image Burberry print lowercase g tattooed on your forearm. And you may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong? And you may say to yourself, my god what have I done?
A few & a half Christmases ago I got this bike for Junior. As you may or may not recall She rode it once or twice then it waited patiently in the garage until Junior Junior was ready to ride it. Saturday he was ready. And he’s already ridden it more than she ever did.
Although before he hopped on he said what are these things? I said those are thumb shifters. He said crusty old man shifters. And I said yes, that’s right. Seven speed indexed.
After a brief test ride he asked that I swap out the saddle and he noticed the rear brakes didn’t do much of anything so I put on some fresh brake pads.
That cute little penthouse elevator sign from the Denny Building [as those in the know know it's also known as 2200 6th Ave, a mid-century modern anachronism in Amazon land] made its way into my little free library today, 17 years after it somehow made its way into my pocket.
This is a 1987 Shogun Alpine GT. A steel touring bike frame that’s heavier than the day is long. It cost me $22.50 at BikeWorks in 2013 when it came home with me one day strapped to the CETMA, not because I needed another heavy steel bike but because it was only $22.50.
It’s been through a few iterations from single speed to 3 x 7 with satisfying Suntour thumb shifters on that Ritchey Logic triple. But it’s never been a “go-to” bike for me. Never my first choice.
I’ve found that I can mess around with bikes’ setups, cycling through handlebars, saddles, shifters and tires until one day it all comes together and finally feels like it should feel, the way it was meant to be — for me.
For example, my 91 Rock Hopper has been through several handlebars: flat, riser, super sweep, cruiser until finally I got a full-on full-retail klunker bar and now it feels like it should. Heavy and slow and smooth and smile inducing.
The Shogun is slowly making its way into another iteration. Single-speededly. It’s always been the red headed step child in the bike room. The Bad News Bears kid at the end of the bench. The last player the coach calls up for a full fendered rainy day ride.
Recently I pulled the wheel set including the tires off the Shogun and slapped it on the Allez. Which left the Shogun hobbled, helpless and sad. More sad than usual. That Peter-to-Paul parts swap set off a sequence of events to get the Shogun back on the road rolling wheels it was built for, 27 inch. No not that 27.5 - 650b horseshit marketing 584 bsd. The real deal 27” aka 630 bsd aka old school.
One can half-ass a 27” frame with 700c wheels but the brakes will never feel like they should unless some long-reach adjustments are made. Cost-benefit analysis comes into play on a bike that cost $22.50. My Soma, built for 27” wheels, has been rolling 700c for 25 years and it feels great because of its long-reach dual pivot brakes.
Here & now in July of 2024 this Shogun is starting to roll with a 27 front wheel from BikeWorks laced to an Origin8 hub. And a 27 rear wheel from Recycled Cycles laced to a flip-flop Origin8 hub. I got some used 27” tires from BikeWorks for $0.00 because they’re in sad shape. They’ll get me through this test ride phase and then I’ll need some new tires. That schrader tube I found didn’t work out so I had to actually use a schrader-presta adapter on the rear wheel and put the Alor skull cap back into my memento mori display.
You might think a 41 x 17 sounds a bit small for a single speed. However, tweak your gear inch calculator to 27” wheels on a steel tank with 175mm cranks. Then pretend you’re an old crusty commuter that lives at the top of a lot of hills and walk a mile in my shoes.
digging for old kickstands I found this single speed haiku in issue #16 from 2003 featuring a photo of a Casati track bike that I coaster-braked out on yellow deep Vs.
Then today a few more pieces of this Shogun fell into place including a ⅛ chain on a 3/32 chainring.
The other other night I was digging through a Steelcase file cabinet drawer in a pile of zines and other random shit searching for old issues of kickstand to send to Cat. I discovered very few kickstands. However I did discover Mobile City #5 and I chucked it in my bag to hand off to Alistair. But the next day before I handed it off I actually took the time to read it. Much more time than I devoted to it in 1999. This zine with contributions from messengers from all over the country is a great example of bike messenger talent. Not just a bunch of sweaty alcoholics but a variety of writers, poets, artists, photographers and musicians that may or may not be alcoholics too.
Mobile City was quite literary and chock full of great stuff. One of its editors and big contributors Stephen Gibson went to Tufts undergrad then onto UW for an MFA in creative writing. He’s no slouch
This brings to mind past conversations with Cat about printing the internet. Taking digital content and compiling a book. A book printed on paper. It also brings to mind the Tufts University Jumbos.
Discussing Mobile City with Alistair brought up the concept of digitizing old paper publications and the difficulty of locating lost zines on the internet because they’re not on the internet. No one ever digitized them.
I believe Matt Case is the only human that ever had a complete set of kickstands which I compiled as an alleycat prize and he promptly snagged it for himself because it was his alleycat.
I'm not even done with it yet and it's only the O7 month of the year but it's over, it's the one, no question, sincerely for real, really.
Looking back, six or so years ago bro, we discussed Williams’ 99 Stories of God, which is also a great book. As I page through this new book, I wanted to go back to the old one again. Front to back. Back to back. Side by side. Through and through. However I think I already gave it away or passed it on to a friend.
As I’m working through Concerning the Future of Souls I find myself taking mental notes on new or new-to-me authors, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, Welsh mythology, Egyptian gods, inventors, plants, animals, dunce caps, Pythagorean cups and events that Williams refers to. As well as a list of quirky vocabulary also new-to-me. Inspiring more reading and research and pondering.
Taken in 99 relatively small bites, there’s a lot to chew on. Very short stories distilled down to oh so few words but saying oh so much. This book rocks.
At work I overheard a conversation between a couple coworkers about a blown out Shimano 10-speed shifter. A shifter they made for only one year. A shifter that is not compatible with any other Shimano set up. And I said “I hate that shit. That’s such bullshit”
Then Alistair said, “don’t make Mark put on his Grant Petersen cap and go on a 30-minute rant about friction shifting…” and I smiled and nodded.
In 2012 when Just Ride came out I was a former bike messenger, a sleep-deprived father and a crusty bike commuter commuting somewhere between Mad Fiber and BikeWorks. I read through it quickly and put it on the shelf. For me, a cranky old school steel bike guy, it was like preaching to the choir.
Here and now it’s 2024 and Bicycle Sentences just came out. I read through it a couple times and then I was inspired to go back to Just Ride and read it again. Once more with feeling. I’m still a cranky old school steel bike guy, but now I’m even older and crankier and it speaks to me in new ways, different ways. I’m not just part of the choir, nodding along with the preacher. I’m not just drinking the Kool-Aid. Grant Petersen knows what he’s talking about reguarding the racer-non racer thing and the bike industry.
With Just Ride refreshingly fresh in my mind I saw an old silkscreen in a new way and made a few just RIDE postcards.
Yesterday at Free Range Cycles I bought this handy little item with its very specific purpose. It’s just one part of a sequence of events unfolding in my garage involving a front wheel from BikeWorks, a rear wheel from Recycled Cycles, as well as a bunch of bike parts I’ve had sitting around. It’s been a while since I’ve wrenched on a bike. I’ll tell you all about it someday.
The next day I discovered two brand new valve adapters in a small parts bin in my garage. I also discovered a 700 x 35 schrader tube, which eliminated the need for an adapter and allowed me to utilize one of the skull caps Alor gave me many years ago. There are very few schrader tubes in my wardrobe so I jumped at the chance to use one. The sequence of events continues to slowly unfold
This Charles Taylor book appeared on my porch a couple weeks ago and I still don’t know who sent it to me. But thank you to YOU that did. It’s like a grad school seminar on poetry pent up within its 600 pages. I have not cracked it yet but I plan to slog through it, late July into August sitting in a chair in the LIFE SCIENCES BUILDING sipping iced coffee and pretending that I’m in grad school lost in the wrong part of campus with an electric ass bathtub parked nearby…
…and that one-of-a-kind mug you see, has made it into heavy rotation for my morning coffee. YOU who left it in the little free library, thank you YOU, I appreciate it, in more ways than one.
My summer reading library is getting thick, with Charles Taylor, that new Joy Williams book that 37 reminded me of, the New Yorker, the IOWA Review, FENCE, Poetry, various random free stuff as well as the Elliott Bay Book Store book club books gifted to me by my mom, I need to get to work.
As Junior and Junior Junior were getting restless and poking around the garage yesterday I finally took a swing at the three chunks of wood that have been staring at me for months. With two cats, two dogs and two kids there’s no “perfect time” to bust out a silkscreen project. But a warm Wednesday evening in July seemed like an OK time.
These scraps of 2 x 6 were resting in the garage left over from the construction of a raised garden bed. With some hinges salvaged from an old set of bi-fold doors, I plan to link the three parts together and call it art. Call it a triptych. It’s a work in progress. A bit hasty, a little sloppy, sort of slapdash. It didn’t turn out as amazing as it looked in my mind. But it’s not done yet. Or is it the thought that counts?
The gold paint fades away on plain wood when it’s not catching the light just right. And I like that. The viewer has to make an effort to take it all in. When they’re linked together the viewer may never see all three words simultaneously. They’ll need to manipulate the panels or the light source. Upon first glance this looks like three scraps of wood. Because it is. You’ve seen that gold reflect-effect on the plain cardboard postcards I’ve made recently too.
I’d like to think this is a practice run, a scale model for a much larger triptych made from plywood panels linked with beefy oversized gate hinges and much more complicated colorful designs.
Here’s where I remind you that Lane Kagay should be credited with the ONE LESS CARE phrase. Just like Robert Arzoo is responsible for the COFFEE-BEER CONTINUUM. Just like the Wamsleys get the PILDERFLOSSER. I didn’t make that shit up, I'm just running with it.
word
3 days later I slapped on some hinges. Hinges scrounged from hollow core bi-fold doors that once hid a washer & dryer. These hinges tie it all together in more ways than one. It's personal. It's history. It's in-situ-resource-utilization. It's one less care. It's full-circle round-trip out & back...
...now I can put it to rest on a shelf to collect dust
As a utility cyclist rolling along the coffee-beer continuum I can safely say that I’ve been dehydrated since May 12, 1997.
On a recent trip to Rip City, Steve introduced me to DripDrop. It’s a powdered dehydration relief drink. And it does the trick. With 3x the electrolytes and half the sugar of your average sports drink. As I slug down a pint of this stuff I’m reminded of PDX.
Craig Etheridge introduced me to Nuun. But on my one and only trip to Vegas for Interbike in 2016, all I consumed for 3 days was beer and Nuun and I believe that weekend turned me off of that product.
I have no recollection of the events in question and as usual I am without sufficient information and therefore can neither confirm nor deny any allegations…
…but Fuckin A+++
it’s good to have friends…
…friends that can nonchalantly peel off magnets and hand them off for a second or third or fourth iteration, another life taken out of context and put back in, you know, reimagined in various ways that no one ever imagined magnetically sticking sticky
Back in 1994ish I wrote a letter to the editor of the Bellingham Herald in response to an Op-Ed piece ripping on scofflaw cyclists. I actually lived in the 98225 B-Ham 1993-1995ish and I went through the motions of being on the bicycle advisory committee while working at Casa Que Pasa and the Whatcom Pathology Lab. No JOKE. Really. For real. Ask Dr J Lonner and Robert Arzoo. My letter was published in the Herald and the gist of it was that we’re not all just blowing through red lights, some lights will never change for a cyclist because those inductive loop detectors were not set up to pick up little old bicycles in the early 90’s Whatcom County.
They’re still not sensitive to bikes here and now here and there everywhere. So use your best judgment.
I cut out that published letter and stuck it in a 3-ring binder with my two other greatest achievements. However, here and now I cannot locate said binder. If I could I would gladly photo bro the shit out of it and put it right here.
Just the other day and many many many many many many many days in past I’ve watched sadsack cyclists post up in left turn lanes in the midst of six lane arterials as if they’re law abiding citizens waiting their turn for their turn when in reality they’re risking their lives waiting for a turn that will never come.
Run that light or weasel over onto the curb in the crosswalk and cross like a ped.
I didn’t coin this term, Emily and Mark did. But I’m running with it all the way. All the way way to that future coffee table book co-authored with Dr 37 Mike. It’s not just a dental pick. It’s a dental pick spotted in the wild, where it’s not supposed to be. Chucked down on the ground. On your daily walk, interrupting your train of thought as you move along your habitrails. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them. You cannot untrain your eye to not spot them everywhere all the time.
The other other day as I approached the Big Time bike rack a guy who was waiting outside for his to-go food said “can I ask you a question?” in the half beat pause it took to look toward him my mind scrolled through ten years of messenger work and the limitless possibilities, the unquantifiable number of stupid questions in existence in addition to the imponderable number of questions yet to be posed ::: elevator conversations, tourist directions, Pike Place pointers, theories on exercise and or fresh air, geography, history, street addresses, parking garage queries, legal advice, bike bullshit blather, weather banter, tattoo questions… …and then I said “sure”
He said “how did you come up with the time on your watch tattoo?”
I said “3:33, three threes can’t be wrong. and it’s actually right twice a day”
all the while I was thinking how did you even see my watch? People are strange. Am I on an elevator at Two Union? What year is this?
Then I checked and the actual time was approaching 3:33 and I smiled to myself because it was Big Time time, big time.
It’s not about the big purple electric ass bathtub. It’s about the discarded dental pick. Nothing says UW Sports Medicine like a quick floss & chuck before returning to work or before your appointment. Rehab continues on that blown out ACL after a pile of spicy chicken yakisoba or an especially great caesar salad: floss & chuck.
This Soma Competition is 43 years old and I’ve had it for 25. So many stories, so many iterations. CETMA racks and Wald baskets. From Bike Works, to Counterbalance Bikes, to Bike Smith, to Free Range, to the Velo Store. To UBI. From Montlake to Aaron's to Perfect Wheels. From WA Legal to Seattle Legal to WA Legal and back to Seattle Legal. To Mad Fiber and full circle roundtrip back to Bike Works. That .833 stem has been on there since I got it from Charles at Wright Bros about 24 years ago.
riding the train at 6am just like yesterday, the day before that as well as tomorrow and the next day… …zoned out just trying to read a book after I put my bike on a hook. But the lady across from me was staring at herself through the selfie lens on her phone poking prodding pooching primping plumping lips futzing eyebrows fussing eyelashes. Narcissistically narcissistic like Narcissus she only lowered her phone a few times to check her reflection in the train window. Are you fucking kidding me? I could no longer focus on my book because I wanted to see how long she could keep it up. All the livelong day. All the way from Sea-Tac to Husky Stadium she kept at it until she got off the train.
Here is another book to add to your bike book library. Good stuff presented in a cute package. Flip open to any page and take a bite. A little something to chew on, in agreement, or even if it pisses you off, it's worthwhile. From social media to the bike industry to utility cycling to your choice of footwear.
Yesterday Stevil introduced a lot of us to a dog named Kevin but it didn’t really sink in with me because I was glossing right over it --- however 10 hours later I met a dog named Kevin walking down my block while Cosmo my cat stood his ground and defended the yard and the driveway and the sidewalk as well as the entire block while Kevin just wanted to get a closer look and Kevin’s person kept repeating Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin Kevin tugging his leash and I could not stop thinking about well-suited pet names as of course my brain went to Kevin’s Mom full-on then sidewalk chalk with Cosmo and then and only later then when I revisited Stevil’s Kevin it all came together the way the universe intended it to - to you and to you two too they say don’t judge a song by its cover but if ever one could judge a song by its title this is the song a song Johnny Cash could not cover
But when I say iron oxide, check out this little flowchart I poached from the wiki back in 2011. Hang it on the wall and call it art.
I’m an arrow fan and flowcharts are a good way to use a few. They’re also a good way to cover the last 13.7 billion years just as well as a short bike ride to the corner store.
This particular chart reminds me a lot of David Byrne’s book Arboretum from 2006. It’s full of sketches, diagrams, flowcharts, growth charts and unrelated objects and ideas that become related because he puts them together in new ways. It also reminds me that I like Johnny Cash’s Rusty Cage more than Soundgarden’s original.
I’m an IPA fan, but no thankyou to the grapey grapes. The name however, is pretty cool. Over the past 3 Saturdays en route to the Hugo House, as morning turned to afternoon I’ve had a stool at the bar at 1221 E Pike. You know I know you know where that is. Inside, there are various displays of large menu magnets from multiple beers of the past. I’ve had my eye on this one. On the 4th consecutive Saturday I’m visualizing a way that I can nonchalantly peel it off the wall and into my backpack. If it wasn’t 14” x 5” it would be a little easier.
In another grape ape sort of way I got my hands on these purple doohickies today. Jimmy John pointed out someone's scrap pile on Brooklyn Ave and I paused to peruse. The rest is history yet to be written. Taken out of context and put back in, in another sort-of-way way.
Once upon a time this clampy clamp was supporting blood transfusions at UWMC. Another some way some day it’s sitting in a junk pile on Brooklyn Ave. And then? No and then. And then? No and then. And then — twelve hours later it’s supporting a flower pot full of wildflowers in Rainier Beach. Who knew???
Bow Down to Washington. Mighty are the men who wear the Purple and the Gold…
Not My Bag was a recent exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery by artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria (born in Tacoma, she lives and works in London)
The poster features a still from the film Beast Type Song
The Henry sometimes has free piles and if it says “please take one” I take three.
So I took the three posters and added Dank Bags in silver, gold and black. I also pulled off some postcards, byproducts of the posters. Or perhaps the posters were byproducts of the postcards. Same paint, different surface.
When the paint dried I took all three posters and rolled them up to stuff into a shipping tube for the guys down at DANK. Operating under the assumption that they might not really want posters like this, but they could use them for something else or re-gift them. But the tube was so narrow that the paint started scraping off the poster on the outside of the 3-roll as I tried to stuff them in. So I had to bust up the triptych and only ship two posters down to Rip City. The third found a spot on the wall here at HQ.
There are not now, nor have there ever been any Harrison Butker cards here. A couple Nick Lowery cards, yes. Everybody has their own opinion. whatever. just keep it outta my face. I could talk a lot of shit as I am a real shit talking talker.
If that guy was the commencement speaker at my daughter's graduation, I'd request a refund.
I will say here & now, professional athletes are placed upon a platform from which they can advance causes and "do good" if they choose to. They're role models if they like it or not, no choice.
sitting in a sawed off lawn chair in the garage with the sun poking through. having a beer in a Wheel Fanatyk cup reminding me of Ric. take a photo, fluff it up with a filter and send it to Ric. then he puts it on a postcard and sends it back in the full set full circle round trip return circuit out and back dinger.
In the 80s my mom got Breakfast Club on VHS at the video store, probably more than once. I definitely watched it more than once. With a pen and paper in hand I paused the VCR and rewound it until I had this scene down. In a short while I had it memorized.
To this day you might find me reciting it, once in a while, here or there, when I’m reminded of it, talking to myself, soliloquizing, rolling around the U-district, or grinding up the hill to get home…
Stupid
Worthless
No good
Goddamn
Freeloading
Son of bitch
Retarded
Big mouth
Know it all
Asshole
Jerk
you forgot
Ugly
Lazy and
Disrespectful…
As a kid my grandma would sometimes bust out a poem she memorized in school. A poem she still had stored in her brain, word for word, 50 or 60 years later. She could recite Rudyard Kipling’s
If–
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
It’s a 4 stanza 32 line poem, and I know she had that first stanza down word for word.
I don’t have any classic poems memorized but I have John Bender’s dad scene memorized. Word for word.
for the past couple weeks I was seeing a glove in a doorway of Bagley Hall at 3790 Okanogan Lane Box #351700. Propped up by someone in hopes that its rightful owner would see it and take it home.
Then this week I saw another glove displayed in the Ocean Sciences Building at 1492 Boat Street Box #355355. lost but never found.
Yesterday I decided to grab the Bagley glove and chuck it in the electric ass bathtub. Then a few hours later I rescued the OSB glove. I put them together to take this photo and that's when I learned that one was right and one was left and I created a new pair of gloves. A mismatched chilly spring morning commute pair of gloves.
When you’re a bike messenger, a real bike messenger, not a jimmy john or an uber eats or a panda express… …when you’re a bike messenger there’s a part of your brain that grows to absorb street addresses, numbers, letters, directionals and subtle clues that make a big difference. It all gets whittled down to a shorthand lexicon lingo spoken by those in the know and it fits like a glove or maybe a tea cozy over a 3-D map of the city that exists only in your brain.
you know
I know
you know
Just as the brains of baristas burn new neural pathways to absorb all the nonfat decaf no foam extra hot 3 sweet-n-low vanilla fucking bullshit without blinking an eye, keeping a straight face.
Your messenger brain is trained to visualize, categorize, optimize, epitomize the traveling salesman problem. Working it out in real time and space on two wheels with a satchel over your shoulder cutting through traffic and parked cars and pedestrians and MID ambassadors as well as legal secretaries, security guards, mom & pops, broken elevators and bad dispatchers.
I believe that that there part of my brain was exercised enough as a real messenger so that here & now it continues to kick ass as an electric ass mailman. Which is perhaps one reason why I’m constantly dumbfounded by the stupid little shit my current coworkers cannot seem to wrap their heads around. If you see the same things, the same numbers, the same addresses 10, 20, 50 times a day for years and years, how can it not sink in??? How can you not remember that shit??? Didn’t we talk about the UW Police Station yesterday? And the day before? And last week? And the week before that? 3939 University is not 3939 15th Ave. 3910 15th Ave is not 3910 Montlake Ave. 3751 Stevens is not 3715 Stevens. 4060 Stevens Way is not Box 4060… …and 4000 15th Ave doesn’t mean shit… …and so on and so on and so on
At that big state university on the Montlake Cut, each department is assigned a Box Number. With the combination of street addresses and box #s there's an infinitely variable amount of ways to fuck it up. A sloppy slurry of numbers. Add ignorance and apathy to taste. Sprinkle with dyslexia and serve at room temperature Monday through Friday.
With all the good/evil that is google, they make it very easy to create documents and keep track of them. google.docs beats the shit out of Microsoft's offerings in the same category. google makes it very easy to generate word clouds and look back on things. to sum it up. retrospectively.
If I was technologically proficient I’d be sharing actual word clouds with you, not just screen shots of them. Then you could scroll over them with your cursor and the tally for each word would pop up as well as its percentage of the total word count.
I recently created seven word clouds from this site in the past six years or so. I saved a few of them here, because they’re all so similar, there's no need to save seven. As you know I’m repeatedly repeating the same old shit.
The words in the previous 12 years of this site are not so easy to clump together, to run the numbers. Perhaps I could refer back to the printed pages I have stored in large 3-ring binders from 2011, to tally word counts by hand with a pencil in a small spiral notebook. Or not. I’m pretty sure those 12 year’s word clouds would look a lot like these 6 year’s word clouds. Lather rinse repeat.
In all the clouds like & bike are near the center. Over the years there are fewer legal messengers and more electric asses. More postcards bro. More junior juniors. Todd Beamer comes and goes. Let’s Roll. And there is always plenty of coffee and beer as well as shit fuck fucking fucks. But I was happy to see there wasn’t much rain.
On the slow uphill grind that is my commute home I was rolling slowly up Cowlitz Road to the corner at Lincoln Way yesterday when a guy in a wheelchair approached the crosswalk. I gave him a little nod and when he knew I was going to wait for him, he rolled across Cowlitz, all the while saying “number nine, number nine, number nine” and I thought, whatever, just another U-district wack job. Until I realized he was a Beattles fan and only then did I understand that my new Justin Tucker shirt kicked off his Revolution 9 rant and perhaps he would proceed to repeat “number nine” 101 times over the next eight minutes and twenty-two seconds.
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
I have some strong feelings for stems. Opinions. Dos and Don’ts. The stem deserves some thought. Intention. It’s not a that’ll-do. It’s not a good-enough. It’s not an accident. It’s not a threadless-conversion. It’s not adjustable.
it is or it is not.
it’s right or it’s wrong.
it’s on or it’s off.
it’s yes or it’s no.
it’s hot or it’s cold.
Refurbishing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bikes at BikeWorks reinforced my feelings for stems. A great bike build includes a great stem. A shitty stem can take a lot away from a bike’s vitality, its chi.
I enjoy looking at great photos of great stems.
The photos below however, bother me.
Sometimes the bike is great, but the stem is all wrong.
Visualize a beautiful Italian steel road bike with a threadless stem converter and a clunky alloy 31.8 stem. Fuckin A. Horrible.
Visualize a Fat Chance mountain bike with an adjustable stem maxed out to its highest setting. Get that thing away from me.
Visualize a keirin track bike all NJS except the carbon fiber Nashbar stem. Shit.
A great stem completes the package, tops it off.
While a poor stem choice is like the clock on your VCR blinking 12:00 you can ignore it and probably get used to it. But it’s annoying. Nagging like a pebble in my shoe.
today somebody stole my water bottle with my ABC gum stuck in the nozzle. It was on the electric ass bathtub parked outside the Life Sciences Building at 3747 W Stevens Way. I wish I could have seen the person because I would have just laughed in disbelief watching to see what they’d do with the wad of gum.
My kids think it’s disgusting when I save my gum for later if I step inside for a coffee or grab a snack. If the gum has some mileage left, I’ll save it on my water bottle. Which is the best place for it. I’ve set it on my headset top cap in the past. But often, I forget it’s there and it ends up stuck to my shorts.
I grabbed the bottle off my personal bike to finish the day and stage the photo reenactment above.
In the photo below you’ll see my ABC gum in situ on The AVE at Big Time time.
I’m guessing the thief needs that water bottle more than I do. It could be worse. It could always be worse. They could have stolen my favorite coffee cup from the other bottle cage. Fortunately I was holding it inside the building drinking some overpriced coffee. They could have stolen my snot streaked gloves or the $1000.00 electric ass battery.
When I was a messenger nobody ever stole my crusty old water bottles. I did get a half-empty bottle of ginger ale stolen from my bike once when it was locked outside a podunk law office in Pioneer Square. That’s not a euphemism, it was actually ginger ale and I guess the thief saw it as half-full.
Catching a glimpse of clarity. Seeing things in a new light. Peeling back the layers of haze, if only for a moment. So when you go back to what you’ve grown used to over the years you smirk silently to yourself because you know what’s out there, what’s possible. You’ve seen it with clear eyes.
Like taking a squeegee to the Salad bar sneeze guard, schmutzing off all of the all-you-can-eat buffet residual build-up that’s built up for years.
Like extracting cataracts from both eyes.
Like fingering WASH ME into the road grime on the side panel of a FedEx truck in February. What you thought was white is actually really fucking dirty.
Here I am thanking you for this fine copy of Jack Spicer’s posthumous “One Night Stand and Other Poems” (Grey Fox Press, 1980), introductions by Donald Allen and Robert Duncan.
It’s such a rare little bird, I was careful to purify my hands before sliding it out of its clear Mylar sleeve.
I was careful, too, when I turned the pages, but when Jesus began making out his will and Alice in Wonderland went missing from the chessboard, the book had to be restrained from taking flight and flapping its many wings against a window pane.
So now, the front cover is bent back a little like a clam with its shell slightly ajar the way Spicer’s mouth could look sometimes when we would see him at Gino and Carlo or in the park by the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, where he would often sit cross-legged under a shade tree.
There on hot summer afternoons he would suffer the company of young poets if they observed the courtesy of arriving with cold quart bottles of Rainier Ale, as green as the sports section of the paper.
It was a practice that my friend Tom and I and his friend A. B. Cole followed religiously. Spicer even called us “The Jesuits” for he knew where we had gone to school.
To be imperfectly truthful, I was intimidated by his reality— a lonely homosexual adult who dressed funnily in summery shirts and baggy pants, belt buckle to the side, his sad moon-face pocked as the moon itself, and with a name like a medieval vender’s.
He would talk about poetics, of which we knew nothing, and about the other Berkeley poets, but we poetry juniors felt more at home when he talked about Willie McCovey and we would be on to another still cold quart.
Then a forceful wind came off the Bay and blew Jack Spicer away, found a year later at 40 on the floor of an elevator going neither up nor down.
Later still, Tom would be blown over a golden bridge, his soft inner arm full of holes, and I sadly lost track of the sardonic Andy Cole.
And here I still remain, more than twice Spicer’s final age, rolling through the pages of his little book,
listening to his bewildering birds, and watching Beauty walk, not like a lake but among the coffee cups and soup tureens,
causing me to open my hands and allow this green aeronaut of paper to lift off and fly around my yellow house and beat its wings against glass as the thrilling sky continues to change slowly from blue to black then, miraculously, back to blue once more.
put a fresh key leash into rotation today because Stevil brought it to my attention this morning. Check out how crisp & clean & pristine it is.
I’ve used more than a few of these for so long that the cute little AHTBM dog tag gets beaten beyond belief. Like the rabies tag on a chocolate lab's collar. Locking and unlocking the cafe lock on the electric ass bathtub countless times per day — Monday through Friday.
A touch of heat-shrink tubing does wonders for the durability and longevity. I know you know I know.
Sitting around Kozmo base in the heart of Capitol Hill in 1999, watching DVDs for hours and hours and eating day-old Cougar Mountain cookies or loitering in the parking lot watching coworkers bring bike polo back… …the rest is history, and industry.
As seen in the Museum of History and Industry MOHAI I did a brief stint at Kozmo.com between tours at WA Legal. It didn’t last long because I got tired of sitting around doing nothing. I can confidently say I played bike polo once for about 3 minutes and that was more than enough for me.
Yesterday Junior Junior took me to the museum and I stumbled upon this little cube of history containing a mallet and a ball and that photo of Messenger and Mobius. Later I found Irving and Bryce taken out of context. I find it comical to see these cataloged as historic artifacts in such a stale-sterile-academic way.
On the way home I pointed out to Junior Junior that not one of the buildings on Fairview Avenue North existed when I was a bike messenger. That whole zipcode is now a new fangled mishmash of tech bros and shiny tall buildings.
In the late 90s Elliott Bay Messenger Company was at 411 Fairview North, inside a shitty old warehouse in a neighborhood full of shitty old warehouses. A few years later the CMWC came to town and fit right in.
Junior Junior didn’t really care about my phantom nostalgia episode.
taking in the big picture, take a closer look and break it down into the individual elements painstakingly cut by hand and fastened on with little nails, piece by piece, one at a time, one of a kind.
Smells like six days into a 9-day weekend. Looks like Captain Junior Junior on the bow of a boat washed up on the Chehalis River just this side of where the Wishkah spits out and chimes in. I’d like to think it’s the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. It’s close, close enough. Not very close to Point No Point, but I like the name and the chance to use it in a sentence. It reminds me of the band from Tacoma more than the Kitsap Peninsula.
is that pudgy balding guy with a mustache sitting on the bench over there looking at art history books might have to put his helmet on and trot out onto the field to win the game.
hey Steve, check out Herrera's rookie card with the Cowboys...
same deal. conspiracy... inside job...
this 1979 Terry Beeson might confirm my hypothesis
got my hands on this postcard yesterday. Or perhaps I should say this postcard made its way into my hands yesterday after traveling through the old school campus mail system all the way from the Medicinal Herb Garden and back to the MotherShip via electric ass bathtub.
A postcard can make your day, so they say. A postcard reaches corners of your brain that an email or a text message cannot. I like this card for several reasons. The other side features some Kenneth Patchen words and a bird. This side has some fine words too. But my favorite feature is the bicycle with wheels made from an old postmark and canceled stamp.
got my hands on this postcard today. Or perhaps I should say this postcard made its way into my hands today after traveling through the old school USPS system all the way from Bellingham to Rainier Beach. This postcard brings me joy as it’s 100% original artwork front and back from an artist I know and you might know him too.
Sunday morning I paid a visit to a thrift store and stumbled upon a slim pleather portfolio in pristine condition. It caught my eye only because it said INTERBIKE 1993 on the cover. Inside was an untouched pad of lined paper and this neatly typed symposium agenda taking place in boring Ballroom A of the Las Vegas Hilton on the Tuesday before the real action started Wednesday or the Tuesday after everyone left town hungover. I have no use for a pleather portfolio but I snapped a photo of the agenda to take a closer look later.
Today I learned that Interbike moved to Vegas in 1993 from its usual spot in Anaheim. I believe if anyone we know was there in Vegas in 93, it’s Mr. Ric Hjertberg. Perhaps he even attended this symposium. I plan to ask him.
Looking back through my mental W-2 archives to 9/21/93... ...I was living in Bellingham and commuting to work at Casa Que Pasa on a GT Continuum, with absolutely no knowledge of or interest in the bike industry. Oblivious. Unaware that my bike was rolling 700D tires. Unaware of the difference between 700C and 700D. Unaware of the strategy behind the decision to mass produce a bike with 700D wheels in 1991. 700D with a 583 bsd never caught on. While 650B with a 584 bsd gained some popularity as well as some 27.5" marketing horseshit.
Looking at this agenda. The only thing I’d be interested in is Thomas Albers of TREK bicycles talking “A view of the bicycle market in the year 2000” It makes me smile to imagine looking forward 7 years in the bike industry while looking back at 30 years in the bike industry. After a 90 minute lunch break I’d have a very short attention span for stale talk of China… NAFTA… and Canada. I’d probably be in the Hilton Bar instead of Ballroom A until the reception started at 5.
Six stale peanut butter sandwich cracker stacks lined up so so on the LSB loading dock railing bro. The crow snatched one and headed for the nearest puddle to soak it just a bit before she ate it.
This has been the latest installment of parallel lines on a slow decline… … …We now join your regular routine already in progress.
This is not the handlebar I happened to have sitting around. This is a klunker bar. A belated Christmas present. At MSRP it’s about twice as much as I paid for the complete RockHopper at BikeWorks when Obama was in the whitehouse.
This bike has been built up like this for years with 3 or 4 or 5 different handlebars. None of them felt quite right. Kinda halfass with what happened to be sitting around. The klunker bar pulls it all together. It just feels right. Heavier than all get out. A metric shit ton of steel. It's a 1991 RockHopper bro.
I’d like to draw your attention to the $5 price scrawled by Andy Voight on the best brake levers in the world.
Not that I’ve ridden it much. But a brief Saturday morning spin in the rain was enough to feel that feel. The just-right-feeling feel. So anxious to get out and ride it, my left grip slipped off when I dropped the curb. A true test ride rookie mistake. I didn’t crash but it kinda woke me up. I will get the grips to grip before I really ride the shit out of it.
I shimmed out the 25.4 clamp diameter into a SUL Salsa stem with a strip of aluminum cut from a Warchild can. Why Warchild you ask. Because that’s the beer I was drinking at the moment so I sliced up a shim with a fresh IPA residue on it leaving just a hint of a millimeter peeking out so I know that you know that I know that you know I shimmed it out with a beer can.
It takes a lot to get me to wrench on a bike these days. It takes something special to get me to scrape up enough giveashits on a Friday night after a week of commuting to work in the winter and working in the vicinity of bicycles for 40 hours to want to wrench on my bike. But I dove into this klunker last night wearing my new Free Range shirt.
The other day I was digging around in a drawer looking for a Jason Hanson rookie card when I pulled out this little mini pocket notebook from 2004. It traveled in my messenger bag when I was working at Seattle Legal 20 years ago. Perhaps I could write it down. Wrote it down. Writing it down. Writing it down again. Same shit, different decade.
Yesterday I was walking down the street when I saw a guy that got a t-shirt from me seven or eight years ago. But when he washed it, the paint washed out. So I made him another one. Same thing happened. I was dumbfounded. Making hundreds of t-shirts over the years, I never had that problem. It took me quite a while to figure out that the fixer I was using expired and wasn’t fixing anything I screened onto shirts. The fixer additive has a well-defined shelf life and then it becomes worthless. However, you can heat-set the paints into the shirts in the absence of a fixing agent, which is much more labor intensive, but it does the trick. I sort of explained the gist of it to this guy and asked what size shirt he wears, but I remembered he wanted the fish needs bicycle. Last night I made him another t-shirt and today I will be heat-setting the shit out of it and then hand-delivering it in a Tyvek® envelope. Third time's a charm.
one day some way somewhere along the final fifty fucking feet of 2022 I got my hands on a Sprüth Magers holiday card featuring an Anne Imhof image Sprüth Magers doesn’t fuck around or half-ass things. This is an 8” x 11” harder than hard cardstock high quality piece of recycling and I’ve had it on hold in a pile of scraps to upcycle until the other other day when I slapped a gold cow on it. I’d like to mail it to someone as a giant postcard while weighing the pros and cons of $7 in stamps and waiting in a long line. In the meantime, I took a picture to make it last longer.
Jason Hanson went to Mead High School in Spokane where he was voted All-City as both place kicker and punter. He went on to WSU and kicked ass for 4 years punting and kicking. Then he was drafted in 1992 in the second round by the Lions. He played 21 seasons, 327 games for Detroit (both NFL records) and he scored 2150 points. If the Lions didn’t suck for all those years, all those games, he’d be the all-time leading scorer in NFL history. He’s #4, which fits him well. word
BSA cranked out tens of thousands of these paratrooper bikes from 1940-45 . British soldiers hopped out of airplanes toting them. You’ll find plenty of enthusiasm for them on the internet.
In Ireland about the same time, Flan O’Brien wrote The Third Policeman but couldn’t find a publisher. So it sat around until he died in 1966 and was finally published in 1967.
A few moons ago Keith suggested I read The Third Policeman. And now I’ve finally gotten into it. I’m about 66.6% through the book and I will not ruin the story for you but I recommend it. I also recommend you learn more about Flan O'Brien, just one of the pen names Brian O’Nolan used. Read his wiki page but don’t read the Third Policeman page, it gives up the whole book.
This bone shaker piece is worth reading and will not destroy your potential book experience.
That $3 painting from Ye Olde Surplus Shoppe found a spot on the wall at Big Time and today I got a photo to prove I was there. But we all know happy hour is just a point of view that’s neither here nor there, it’s marketing in the eye of the pint holder transitioning seamlessly.
These photos remind me of Bret, because it is Bret and he took them. But they also remind me of those guys down at DANK bags who made the top tube pads some years ago with fabric that was silk screened at pw HQ. Bret has the ability to keep old stuff looking good. That batch of top tube pads went out mostly to messengers and got trashed within months.