Pinchie's Coming to San Francisco, help!

So, the last time I was in the 415, I did it right and rented a bike. But that was like a decade ago, and now I'm ashamed to say I have no idea where I should go to find a nice steel commuter -- maybe even a fat-tire ride -- that'll get me from Union Square to Marin and back. In style, with a few bucks left over in my pocket for a tall mug of Anchor Steam.

Any ideas, loyal readers? Please! In the comments...

Shave Your Legs For God!

Yesterday, we gave the Devil his due, so today it's the Man in White -- the Big Guy Upstairs. The Chief Operating Officer. The Silent But Deadly One. Gawd.



Well, not so much God as his Book. Seems this hail and hearty preacher from California is riding his bike coast-to-coast (yes, rev up your wallets for the new season of charitable cross-country spins -- this year they'll be like a plague of locusts, mark my words) to raise awareness and funds for the International Bible Society. The IBS was founded in 1809 and makes a special mission out of providing bibles in as many languages as possible. (Sure, they have a Klingon bible. But do they have a TOMMY GUN bible? Very few people speak TOMMY GUN, and they are all godless, so far as I can tell).

Thing is, I'm thinking Rev. Randy Gardner will likely be staying in hotels and motels along the way, and if he just takes the time to check his desk drawer or his night stand, there among the complimentary stationary and pens, he might notice that the Gideons -- a younger and more aggressive organization with roughly the same mission -- has already been there doing that thing.


I'm no blasphemer, but I had come to rather the opposite conclusion of Rev. Gardner: that there were actually a few too many Bibles already in circulation, and that when you've got too much of anything in circulation, its value goes down. Rather like the U.S. dollar.

But make no mistake. The Bible truly is a ripping good read.

The Devil's Way Too Into the Details

It always brings a smile to my face and a spring to my step to see good old Didi still doing the cha-cha in his red fagbag and horns, but I'm a bit worried. He seems to be moving in the direction of Krautrock -- painful, minimalist, silly -- with his not-round, not-pneumatic tires.

Follow your bliss, I guess. I 'spect to see Baba O'Reilly out at the River Bottoms with one of those triangular wheels rigged up on his pink rigid singlespeed this year. Never enough pain for some folks.

Stories inspired by bike: Apartment Charles, part 2-4

So that handbill was fixed firmly in my mind, and bombing down Olaf Avenue, I stood on the pedals and did not set my tender, saddle-sore ass down on the seat anymore than was absolutely necessary, gently mushing Edgar on the flats. From the East on Greenspan, Hoke on his Stingray wearing a totally gay knit tie. Boyle, his grizzled old Labrador, strained in the traces, as Hoke yelled, “Haw! Haw!” From the West on Volckes, Jenny Hinton on an old Japanese motorized scooter running on homemade biodiesel. She favored gabardine, and was allergic to pulldogs. We each gave the others a conspiratorial look, a nod, fell in line, yo-yoing with Jenny on her scooter as she observed all complete stops being on a motor vehicle with a special endorsement on her license, Hoke and Boyle and me and Edgar shooting right through in a cloud of blueblack two-stroke exhaust like daredevils. “Gee! Gee!” We yelled in unison when we got to Division, Jenny Hinton coming up the rear on her burner with the blinker on.

Inside the apartment there were beds and divans and sofas and ottomans (ottomen?) and a kind of yellow brown and orange carpet in the front rooms, then a brilliant white kitchen where the door was, and behind that, the biggest room, a master bedroom that ran the length of the building, but its walls were covered with some sort of interlocking cladding, tough vinyl. The others were somewhere else in the apartment, Charles with Hoke and Jenny, running through the legends and history and the expectations, the heresay and the facts, while I found an opening in the cladding, and behind it, pure sweet daylight, and stacked boxes with old clothes, climbing harnesses, shoes, terry cloth towels, spiral notepads with just a few pages left, covered with lists of things in ink and pencil, notes, doodles, the wire spiral itself clogged with the spines of torn out pages. Edgar and Boyle barked outside, along with some other pulldogs. Suddenly the place was quiet, completely quiet. A door opened somewhere. Charles went rushing past, his rushing-past sound was unmistakeable, unique, flat-footed but surprisingly agile.

I heard the residents. Strange voices, boisterous. I heard Charles greet them, trying to sound casual, an odd ass-covering note in his ass-covering words. They were coming down the hall to the Master Bedroom. “Someone has been in here fooling around,” said the voice of one of the residents. A young voice with an unkind edge. “Uh, I was looking for my camping mattress,” said the voice of Charles. “Didn’t you guys have that?” There was a skeptical silence, and then I heard a switch go tick and then some machinery moving deep inside the building somewhere, and the cladding began to fold and retract, some places it went into the recesses of the ceiling, in other places it went into the floor, in other places it just disappeared into itself, the heavy blue and white vinyl panels. I had no good place to hide. The boxes of old clothes and climbing gear were shelved on big modular shelving made out of chrome wire. I could just fit under the bottom shelf, but it offered me no cover. I curled into a fetal ball with just my face showing, my face with its black goggles and the red lenses, and I tried not to move at all. It reminded me of the time I hid under the bathroom sink and I could see through the latticework of the door, and I watched my sister go pee and tried desperately not to laugh or even breath, she would have killed me, and for the next three decades every time I went to my parents house I was amazed I had ever been (1) small enough to fit in there but (2) big enough to find it funny to secretly watch my sister go pee. Snickers, our cat, sat there looking at me though. Snickers knew I was in there. Snickers wanted to play, to have me catch the light of the sun on the crystal of my watch, and make a little spot of light wiggle on the floor, on the wall. But there is no sunshine in a cupboard under a sink.

I could see the residents now. Three of them. And the Master Bedroom was beautiful with the strange vinyl cladding gone. It was filled with natural daylight, the floors immaculate, the walls a little cobwebby but nothing you couldn’t tidy up with a feather duster or a long-reach canister vacuum cleaner. I stayed there, curled up, holding perfectly still, and no one saw me there hiding in plain sight, and they were just about to leave when one of them, a small white-skinned woman with straight black hair and a precise pant suit, walked directly over to me. “You aren’t fooling anyone,” she said. She turned and walked out and the rest of them were gone.

***

“How did you do it, Charles?” I asked.
“I told them the landlord had kicked us out. All of us. I even moved out with them. Put everything in liquor store boxes.”
“Do you feel guilty about it?” said Jenny Hinton.
“No. They were jerks. Middle management. Always looking out for themselves.”
“Didn’t they try to call the landlord to confirm?” I asked.
The number was written on a laminated sheet of mylar by the telephone. Over time, Charles had changed the number, one digit at a time. By the end, it was a number for a prepaid cellphone that he kept in his sock drawer. As expected, each of the former residents called and received a pre-recorded message that indicated the call had been directed to Gild Property Management, and then put them through an automated phone tree that yielded the info that their former lease had been discontinued for “unspecified violations” and that the premises was to be vacated by the first of the following month. Charles had gone through a lot of trouble to get us into the place. Ingenious.

It was six months of crazy group-living bliss, the windows thrown open to let the spring breezes run through the place like a friendly ghost, late nights out on the fire escape drinking Green Bottle beer. Charles was in fine form, what really turned out to be a sort of peak for him, given the decline that followed. There are images from that period. He might be stoned or drunk but he looks beatific, a sort of Roman senator, a local legislator in a bathrobe, Edgar and Boyle at his right hand and his left hand, even the pulldogs sort of acknowledging him to be the pack leader.

And a funny thing happened too, Jenny Hinton who took loads of anti-histamines to fight off the dog dander seemed to suddenly be cured of her allergy, and though she continued to drive her biodiesel scooter around – wasn’t comfortable with a pulldog setup, and still had her Special Variance and her methanol barrels and lye down in storage – she became a great lover of dogs, Boyle and Edgar in particular. One night we were stting together on a floral couch that Charles and Hoke had picked up somewhere, working together on repairs to the dogs’ little cordura booties, and I was lacing a seam with heavy floss, and I ran the needle right through the pad of my thumb. It didn’t hurt all that much – we’d been drinking Green Bottle – but Jenny Hinton grabbed my hand and pulled the needle all the way through, so the floss ran under the pad of my thumb, and then she put the whole thing in her mouth, my thumb, the trailing floss, the dangling booty hanging out of her thumb-plugged mouth, and the needle on the other end, hanging right between her small breasts, and it was like a dam had burst, and we were in like a race to get out of our clothes and making love with Boyle and Edgar circling on the carpet, lying down, pointedly and disgustedly looking away, yawn-curled tongues. We flailed and bucked and rocked for an hour, like animals, and after it was over, the needle was still there, stuck flat against her sternum, between those breasts that were shaped like champagne glasses. The floss and the bootie were gone. My thumb ached a little.

Hoke and Charles didn’t seem to mind that we’d paired up and moved in together into the Master Bedroom, and anyway it didn’t last much longer than that, because the landlord really did terminate the lease in actual fact by the time the leaves changed and the sun had channeled down to its equinox. The actual man came, not some Gild Property Management flunkie. We were surprised as hell. He turned out to be a guy we all recognized who worked in the marketing department, one of those evil dudes who were constantly holding our feet to the fire about shipping dates, selling software that was months away from being written and debugged and QA’ed, when games like Brothel Fire IV: Baghdad were barely even storyboarded yet. We hated them the way an army hates its advance scouts, hates depending on the people who don’t actually do any of the trench fighting, we know we’re all on the same team, sure, but why are these guys – not honestly the sharpest knife in the drawer most of the time – the ones who set our dates, and sell them, running around with their expense accounts, and then raise holy hell if anyone along the whole line loses a day or two, and the shipping date for Textile Factory Fire II: TriBeCa gets pushed? Anyway, our landlord was also named Charles. Ever afterward we distinguished between Apartment Charles and Marketing Charles, not Landlord Charles because Marketing Charles foreclosed on the Best Apartment in the City, it was going back to the bank, and the bank had no interest in property management, so it was out the door with all current leasees or sub-leasees. “It’s no longer mine,” said Marketing Charles, his palms out and standing in the doorway in a tee shirt that said “Hard.”

“So I could give a shit if you wanted to trash the place.” It seemed like he wanted us to trash it, and he stood there like he almost wanted to ask us for the keys so he could trash it, but it turned out the locks had already been changed while we were asleep drooling on our pillows, no one heard the dogs barking, and anyway we weren’t going to stand around and watch while our former landlord trashed the place using our stuff, maybe especially because he was in marketing, and the distrust was institutional, even if Marketing Charles did seem like a nice guy who was merely in over his head, and seemed to have a self-destructive impulse to swim to the bottom rather than to the top.

So I was rolling up the carpet, a cheapo facsimile of a Persian rug that Apartment Charles said he “found” that probably came from the former Rumpus Room at Hard Software, and I had to keep shooing Edgar and Boyle off of it, they just moved a few feet closer to the end and laid down again, tired as they were from the hauling we’d already done, shoving into our Burley trailers the suitcases and shoe boxes and then finally just a lot of loose stuff, wadded up clothes, pointless ATM receipts, a random volume of the Encylopedia Britannica, Hoke’s mint-condition Hungry Hungry Hippos. There was a knock on the door. I opened it, and the goth chick, former resident was standing there with a form of triplicate in her hand.

“Where’s Charles?” she said.
I wasn’t a turnip just fallen off the truck. “Charles?” I said. “The guy who used to live here?”
“You know damn well…” she said, leaving off the thought, and barging right in. Now I recognized her. She was from HR. Human resources. Only I think they recently changed their name to TM. Talent management. “Talent” was more disingenuously complimentary. “Management” was more pragmatically realistic. Now Edgar and Boyle and even Jenny's cat, George, started to growl at the goth chick in the black pant suit. No way she rode a bike here.
“You’re the fucker who was hiding in my room. My room,” she said. “Keep your animals away from me. I need to talk to that Motherfucker Charles.”
“He didn’t leave a forwarding—“
“SHUT UP. You’re in a shitheap of trouble too, my friend. Of the legal variety. Fraud. I advise you to shut your freaking piehole. ”
It was a word I hadn’t heard since my great granddad. Piehole. It made me giggle.
“Funny, huh?” said Goth Chick. “You’re in programming and you think you’re untouchable? You know how many kids could write Flash and Ajax around you so fast you wouldn’t know whether to wind your ass or scratch your watch? Any idea at all how many resumes and sample subroutines I look at every freaking day?” Now she was looking through the rooms. “If I ran Hard Software, you’d be parting out ThinkPads on the swingshift. Dork.”
Dork? I kept my trap shut. Goth Chick sputtered out and left like a hurricane.

What followed then should have been a mess of legal filings and counterfilings. It should have pitted different factions of the Hard Software legal department against each other. It should have amplified the hostilities between management and labor. It should have ended in front of a black-robed judge who would look down sadly and sagely at the entire courtroom, and say something like, “Is this what’s it’s come down to? Petty legal torts over a broken down old apartment in foreclosure?” And there should have been the usual bromides about how business was good for the community, that the jobs were great, and the tax base was sound, but then yes, you had to take some of the bad with the good, like pressure on the local housing inventory, interruption of some services now and again, longer lines at the Safeway, upward trajectories on the price of commodities from distant origins like bananas. That is what should have followed, but instead Goth Chick waited in her automobile parked out on Division, per the police reports, and when Charles came back and knocked on the window at the fireescape due to the locks being changed, there was a loud pop at the front door, and a cylinder of light crossed the room from where the lock had been, and then the knob turns and there’s the Goth Chick with some sort of a pistol with a tongue of blueblack smoke, and there’s a smell of cordite, again per the subsequent police reports. She sees Charles there, and the dogs too suprirsed and exhausted they just stare at her, and she lifts the pistol to aim it at him, and Charles hurdles the couch and sprints across the living room, strides over the rolled up carpet, and really just fucking tackles the Goth Chick hard, like holding nothing back, takes her out with his shoulder in her chest, and I see the porcelain skin of her neck as her black-haired head snaps back and Ka-Pow! The pistol goes off again and it’s freaking loud and even though its deafening I can hear almost a whipping sound or a ripping sound, but nothing seems to have happened and Charles has Goth Chick now by the throat on the kitchen floor and she’s trying to say something, and her beautiful white skin is turning bright red and Charles is making a telephone motion with his free hand as he sits squarely on her chest, like get me the phone, or you get the phone, or somebody call 911.

And then I turn and see that George, Jenny’s miniature cat that always had stayed the size of a big kitten, has been shot, right through the little barrel of his chest. He looks, seriously, like he’s just sleeping, but there is a clean black hole in the center of him, and a little puddle of ruby red blood under him, and his eyes are open, but it must have been instant. Is that the kind of person you want in Human Resources/Talent Management? A person who would shoot a harmless, sweet, friendly cat who actually did her business outside, needed no litterbox, was a joy to anyone who ever encountered her, even admitted cat-haters with serious allergic reactions, a cat without any obvious defects or deformities except being on the small side?

So after the police came and put the cuffs on the Goth Chick, making lots of jokes about medieval implements of torture and count Dracula and fear of the sun and garlic and so on, and she was fuming and Apartment Charles was frankly exhausted, crashed on the couch, and Edgar sat vigil over the tiny body of George with the clean hole through her little trout-colored chest, we couldn’t bear to tell Jenny Hinton, she was working a double shift on Watertower Paint Crew which was shipping in August, did not know how to break it to her, and I was digging in one of the closets for an old shoebox, I was certain that I’d seen one somewhere in there from when Charles had bought a pair of sandals last summer for our tubing trip down the Cannon River, the whole Watertower development team, minus sales, and then it had been a place where you put small change that was weighing down your pockets, and it seemed just about the size of George, if we carefully and gently curled her on herself, and it was just so heartbreaking that I went to the shelf by the phone and found one of Jenny’s scissors – they were “Shears,” she said, and for fabric only—for I intended to cut a small hank of George’s trout-colored hair as a sort of gesture or a remembrance, I don’t know, and when I knelt over George and reached out to snip some fur, the cat suddenly jumped up and chased a moth or a large fly, churning the air in front of her nose, and chasing it like a dominating pugilist right out the door to the balcony overlooking main street, and she jumped up on the banister and walked the length of it, the way she always loved to do it, and I could see a bright spot of blue sky through George’s chest, you could see through the cat where the bullet of the gun of the Goth Chick had gone. I wondered wherein the magic inhered: If we were, in fact, seeing evidence of a cat’s multiple lives – although to be fair, I personally had thought the old cliché was a metaphor for a cat’s uncanny ability to land on its feet, to repulse larger and more formidable foes, and that sort of thing. But now it was manifestly apparent that George the cat, our cat, Jenny Hinton’s cat, had survived a mortal wound, a gunshot, and we were seeing light through the thing. Or, on the other hand, maybe the bullet had been magic or charmed or whatever, and if the Goth Chick had succeeded in shooting Charles, it would have passed through him and left a similar non-life-threatening cylinder of light in his chest, and he like George would jump up and chase a moth or a firefly or what have you, and maybe balance on the railing of the balcony with his arms spread out, lightly stepping toe to toe.

After we were kicked out of the apartment, things began to fall apart. Charles took a job with a cut-rate competitor in Des Moines, Hoke got sent to the Austin branch to project manage some hush-hush new initiative. Jenny and I found a smaller place closer to campus, a nondescript little studio apartment in a building with Mansard gables and b&w bricks, hooks in the garage to hang up bikes and spare rims, studs in the summer, she got a tattoo of a threaded needle on her sternum, a very painful place for a tattoo I am given to understand. Hard Software plateaued, management said we’d “matured.” We didn’t see each other that much. Charles emailed us once in a while. He had a weirdly distorted idea of justice these days.
“I’m giving up coding,” he wrote. “Do you realize that there are people all over the city who falsify their addresses so that they can send their kids to better schools?” This incensed Charles, and he was going to become an investigator for the Des Moines school district. I emailed back. I remember the moment I hit send, because just then I saw George’s shadow move across the wallboard in a pool of window light. And in the middle of her shadow was a spot of light, her cylinder.
I typed: “Do you get to carry a gun?”
I was kidding.
We never heard back.

Stories inspired by bike: Apartment Charles, part 1

Editor's note: Because of the overwhelmingly negative response I got to my monstrous 7-part Chequamegon "race report" (which was more like a status update on my longstanding bout with pre-, post- and mid-race irritable bowel syndrome, not clinically true, but metaphorically true ha ha), and because I'm a marginally masochistic citizen racer, I thought it would be especially off-putting to post a story from a dream inspired by a real incident obfuscated by a semi-apocalyptic vision of the near future in which cars are replaced by dog-pulled bikes. Also, I had another odd dream about my dear departed friend, the Egg Man, and it felt like a sign.



One year a man in a school tie and a velvet jacket stood out on the fire escape, looking like a visitor or possibly even the mysterious absentee landlord. Word spread. And then he threw up down onto the sidewalk, a long ribbon of vodka and orange juice, and everyone was relieved, knew he was an insider, drunk, wearing some sort of rakish outfit, and if you looked close you could see a flip to his hairdo, an unruly cowlick where his oiled hair was parted, and then you could see the costume fez down on the sidewalk sprinkled with puke. Word spread in our little town, everyone had heard about it within a few hours. He turned out to be a brother of some guy in shipping. He’d been drinking screwdrivers and canned beer all afternoon at the downstairs bar.

Naturally people assumed the Tibetan monk in a saffron robe was an early arrival to a costume party – or do Tibetan monks have relatives?-- but it turned out to be the beginning of a short era of actual Tibetan monk occupation, which only lasted for a year, owing (everyone thought afterward) to the constant interruption of friendly agnostics, Jews, Christians, lapsed Catholics and New Agers perhaps even the occasional Hindu making his way up the stairs and knocking on the doors drunkenly looking for a party after bar time, or (some speculated) the mysterious absentee landlord found it to be a failed experiment, that even though they were quiet and chaste and sober, Tibetan monks were also real sticklers about minor plumbing issues, broken counterweights in the window jambs, creaky floorboards. They were a bad match for a low-cost western apartment: demanding and physically inept, utterly unmechanical, and this led to a constant stream of calls from the property management firm authorizing various expenses and procedures.

It was the best apartment in the city, and groups of people formed to occupy it. Strangers ran around trying to cultivate relationships with other strangers, trying to insert themselves into a friendship with someone in the group that already lived there. It went on like that for generations. Until we got there.

Charles was our most gregarious friend, and within a few days of our group’s formation, Charles had targeted the best apartment in the city, before many of us even knew the direction to the food court or human resources or where to buy a drink. Charles had a nose for these things. He connected with people. They laughed at his strange self-deprecating jokes, his googly eyes, his early onset male pattern baldness, they trusted him, then they regretted trusting him, but they kept laughing, nervously. Charles knew where to get and how to use various stupefying agents, which he shared generously, saying things like “I am the Egg Man,” and somehow seeming profoundly correct when he said things like that, bulging his eyes out and puffing out his cheeks, and even after he threw a shoe and broke my bust of Schiller, we were all under his thrall.

So it seemed that the inevitable played out, and by Q2, Charles had insinuated himself with the current occupants and he’d replaced one of their group. He moved in. We knew he wouldn’t abandon us. When the rest of the current residents moved out, we’d move in, and our group would live together in the best apartment in the city, with its blistered glass and its catinlevered balcony overlooking Main Street, it’s garish iron fire escape, the cupola with curved glass like a huge cylinder or a lighthouse. When you looked at the building coming up Division, it looked like a proscenium stage. Just below the brick battlements, it said The Balto Building, and the year of its erection anno domini 1880.

I got the call like the other two. “They’re all gone,” said Charles. “Hurry.” I got into my jumpsuit and goggles, wheeled my singlespeed out of the garage, hooked up Edgar, and bombed down Olaf Avenue, almost faster than Edgar could run. Each telephone pole was still plastered, I noticed, with a handbill for a Stinky Toots show. I noticed this peripherally for an excellent reason. Two nights ago, I’d gone to the show. It was at a VFW on the outskirts of town. It had taken me two hours on my singlespeed to get there, since I’d given Edgar the night off. I’d left early, carefully selected an ensemble that accentuated my physical virtues and distracted from the blemishes. Edgar, his puppy ears all velvet, gave me a broken-hearted look. Oh, I’d pedaled. I did not want to be late. The Stinky Toots! Would I get in? The bikes and pulldogs leashed out front, even Charles doing his Egg Man dance, sneaking off somewhere with his lysergic agents. When I got to the address, I wished I’d written it down. There was no VFW at that place. It was a strip mall. The number on the door was correct, but it was a Vietnamese noodle shop. I rode my singlespeed around the neighborhood looking for one of those posters, but now I couldn’t find one. I went back to the noodle shop and cupped my eyes against the dirty glass door, and an old Vietnamese crone waved and smiled and then gave me the finger like a crazy person. I noticed some sort of gunk on the windows, the ghosted residue of an arc of letters that you could still make out if you focused at an intermediate focal length: VFW Post 950. When I got back to town and found one of the old playbills, I was still confused. I had the night and the address right. Finally it clicked in my brain: It had been exactly one year ago. No wonder Charles hadn’t mentioned it.

Tomorrow: The exciting conclusion!

Best. Craigs. List. Bike. Listing. Ever. Plus one.

A couple of fully awesome Craig's List postings forwarded by my beloved bro, down in No Carolina:

Bike for sale

What kind of bike? I don't know, I'm not a bike scientist. What I am though is a manly guy looking to sell his bike. This bike is made out of metal and kick ass spokes. The back reflector was taken off, but if you think that deters me from riding at night, you're way wrong. I practiced ninja training in Japan's mount Fuji for 5 years and the first rule they teach about ninja biking is that back reflectors let the enemy know where you are. Not having a rear reflector is like saying "FUCK YOU CAR, JUST TRY AND FIND ME". The bike says Giant on the side because it's referring to my junk, but rest assured even if you have tiny junk that Giant advertisement is going to remain right where it is. I bought this bike for 300 dollars from a retired mercenary that fought in both World War 1 and World War 2 and had his right arm bitten off by a shark in the Phillipines while stationed there as a shark handler. When he sold it to me I had to arm wrestle him for the honor to buy it. I broke his arm in 7 places when I did. He was so impressed with me he offered me to be his son but I thought that was sissy shit so I said no way. The bike has some rusted screws, but that just shows how much of a bad ass you are. Everyone knows rusted screws on a bike means that you probably drove it underwater and that's bad ass in itself. Those screws can be replaced with shiny new ones, but if you're going to go to that trouble why not just punch yourself in the balls since you're probably a dickless lizard who doesn't like to look intimidating. The bike is for men because the seat is flat or some shit and not shaped like a dildo. If you like flat seated bikes you're going to love this thing because it doesn't try to penetrate your ass or anything. I've topped out at 75 miles per hour on this uphill but if you're just a regular man you'll probably top it out at 10 miles per hour. This thing is listed as a street bike which is man-code for bike tank.

The bike has 7 speeds in total:
Gear 1 - Sissy Gear
Gear 2 - Less Sissy Gear
Gear 3 - Least Sissy Gear
Gear 4 - Boy Gear
Gear 5 - Pre-teen Boy Gear
Gear 6 - Manly Gear
Gear 7 - Big Muscles Gear

I only like gear 6 and 7 to be honest.

Additionally, this tool of all immense men comes with a gigantic lock to keep it secure. The lock is the size of a bull's testicles and tells people you don't fuck around with locking up your bike tank. It tells would-be-thieves "Hey asshole, touch this bike and I'll appear from the bushes ready to club you with a two-by-four". Bike is for 150 OBO (and don't give me no panzy prices)

And number two (not necessarily SFW):




Thanks, Charlie! And happy shopping to y'all...

A break from our regularly scheduled logorrhea

We've been negotiating this massive contract with Marvel Comics to provide a 500,000 word manuscript based on the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival, and watching as our readership plummets from around 10 readers to maybe .5 readers per day, so in the interest of providing a burnt offering on the altar of our televisual, hypersexualized/infantilized Aye Dee Dee culture, we provide for you a classic cycling clip that in no way refers to the Chinese Fire Drill antics of a certain presidential campaign...(Oh shit, I did it again. Sorry Doc, our defacto token house Republican, recently decamped!)

Hannah Montana out of the saddle!

OK, you have no idea who Miley Cyrus is, and you couldn't care less. (And if you knew she was the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, the guy with the supermullet who sang "Achy Breaky," you might wretch little bit.) But any child under the age of 10 can tell you she's bigger than Jesus and has more money than God, even though she's only 16.



So when she's seen clumsily pedaling an Electra around Hollywood, you can bet it launches 100,000 credit cards from the pockets of clueless dads from coast-to-coast.

I also like how this item was picked up by ecorazzi.com, a site that peddles "green gossip." Good grief, now anytime a celebrity throws a leg over a bike, it's apparently going to be interpreted as a selfless act of planet-saving heroism? Oh! That Miley Cyrus is so talented AND selfless!

You know, if she were truly selfless, she'd be on the hair shirt of bikes, the Cannondale Scalpel.

Burning down the... barriers

Here's a video of David Byrne, discussing his participation in NYC's bike rack competition and his own entries thereof. There's a a moment when he's talking about powdercoating and he takes a long pause... and my heart sank, thinking he was going to go into the whole "it's what the kids are doing with their fixies and their deep-Vees." But good old DB pulled me back from the brink of cynicism. "It's what they paint.... file cabinets with." Awesome!

Taking a break from the ladies -- and the low-brow commercial endorsements at least for a day

Maybe he's, um, tired of tired of being tired. (That's what, a triple negative?) After appearing on almost every web site on the entire internet in this ad...



...the Big Texan will finally be making good on his promise to ride the Leadville 100 this coming weekend. Presumably, a certain little Amish fellow will not be riding this year. That way we can all rest assured that nobody in the famous high altitude race is abusing, uh, Jack Daniels. Or Nacho Flavored Doritos.

In case you didn't know whom to vote for...

Let me be the first of about 2,000 of your friends to point you in the direction of barackobamaisyournewfixie.com.

Not particularly clever, but then neither is the wheel, the screw or the Zippo -- simple machines upon which all others rely.








Somehow, the picture is still unclear for me. I mean, which Obama is actually going to take office, if elected? Fixie hipster Obama? Urban free-riding Obama? Cross-country racer Obama?
Shaved Obama in plum-smugglers, or hairy-legged Obama in baggies?

Fun with journalistic standards & practices

I had to laugh when I saw that VeloNews and Cycling News both obviously had tape recorders in front of David Millar's nose at the same time. It's common practice to clean up transcripts so that the written word and the spoken word meet in the middle, at a point where you hope you've captured the speakers intentions. I rather prefer the uncensored version, because it tells you... well, it tells you how fucking pissed David Millar is. (I took the liberty of spelling out what Cycling News sort of lamely bleeped out with their silly typ0graphic fig leaves.)

VeloNews: “The unfortunate thing is when things look like they’re too good to be true, they are too good to be true. He did look pretty good,” said David Millar of Garmin-Chipotle. “It’s just amazing that he’s that irresponsible and doesn’t have any love or respect for the sport.”

CyclingNews: "It is bullshit... I think it's unfortunate that when things look too good to be true, generally they are too good to be true - and he did look pretty fucking good," Millar told Cyclingnews. "It is just amazing that he is that irresponsible and doesn't have any love or care for the sport. What a cunt!*"

And just to be clear: Journalists--myself included--edit quotes all the time to clarify the intent of the speaker and to generally lessen the risk of making them look like stuttering idiots. Tape yourself speaking sometime, and then write a verbatim transcript. You'll immediately understand what I'm talking about.

*Also, I made up that last sentence and added it to the Cycling News quote. You know, to clarify intent, and to be funny.

Meanwhile, somewhere in America

I'm not sure if every support vehicle in the entire world is in France this week -- you'd think so from the size of the caravan and the number of motos on the course -- but Team Astana is certainly going overboard to prove that they're on the right side of the law.


Look here: Chris Horner gives Billy Demong a buck at the Cascade Classic!







Tip o' the lid to Mr. Beato, thanks fella. How are things in San Francisco?

Missing facial hair of the TDF, episode no. 2

I forgot to mention yesterday -- it being unofficial facial hair day and all -- that one dude in the greater peloton looks hella awesome in a 'stache, and that's our man Hurl.




It's a shame this photo doesn't scroll down to his vintage wool jersey, which looks like this:

60 smiles per hour

Here's another sweet video in the developing cute-girl-riding-a-basket-bike genre. This one features the Latina singer Andrea Echeverri, and she has a pair of killer arm warmers that are worthy of Mario Cipollini.

Memo to Michael Ball: the next time you switch up the Rock Racing kit, two words-- Sleeveless turtlenecks.

Didi's red tights are Castellis! Who knew?!

We mentioned a few months ago that Didi Senft -- the German dude who dresses up like the Devil for every major European tour -- had built a gigantic bicycle shaped like an electric guitar. Here's moving pictures of Didi rolling. (Sweet Adidas Minretts, too, Didi!)

I can't think Didi will have much trouble with his application to be recognized as the "world's largest mobile guitar." I just can't think of that many other mobile guitars, without taking the whole "phallic metaphor" approach.

Notes on the state of my "pro cycling journalism"

OK, so we're back. I covered the Nature Valley Grand Prix again this year for VeloNews, and it was -- as ever -- a hoot. Those athletes are something to see, and one of the pleasures of covering it with a MEDIA laminate hanging on my neck, is that it gives me an opportunity to run around talking to as many of them as I can. Being a shy and introverted person who makes a lot of bold and brash statements from behind my little screen and keyboard (we used to call this "cocking off" in the dark days before the Interwebs) this poses some interesting challenges. And it provokes a couple of interesting thoughts.

• Isn't it strange that Kristin Armstrong is completely unrelated to Lance, and yet dominates the pro women's field as much -- or even more -- than her male predecessor? Isn't that kind of a strange coincidence?

• CyclingNews.com's Kristin Robbins is a former pro bike racer turned journalist who cranks out the copy and gets the story straight, often from the mouths of the racers themselves. She knows which breaks were key, she gets inside strategy, and basically can spin a perfect yarn around any given race. That's what happens when you have her connections and history, and when you practice your craft 50-weeks out of the year. I think she's likely the best workaday journalist covering the domestic pro calendar, and I know that all the riders read her pretty closely.

• Robbins is also connected with Colavita/Sutter Home, one of the big pro teams on both the men's and women's side, where she has worked PR and media relations. In trad journalistic circles, that would be seen as working both the dark side and the legit side, but I can't see how that's much of a problem. Maybe if she had something ticklish to write about, some kind of major scandal within the ranks of her employers (The chamois butter is Canola-based! OMFG!) , then she'd be in a pickle. But frankly I think her longterm association with pro cycling is aces, and it's not like the domestic pro peloton is festering with secrets and intrigue. And if it is, it's probably just those goofy Aussies who wreck every after-party with their drunken derbying.

• I myself felt a little compromised in a couple of ways. First, it's great to cover this race year to year, but I'm at a significant disadvantage to folks like Kristin, Amy Smolens, and Kent Gordis (more about them in a second). Without regularly following the pro schedule in person, I don't have instant mental access to the general trends -- who's riding strong right now, who's injured, what happened at the Reading Classic last weekend, where is the peloton headed to next. True, I could stay on top of that stuff, but you know how it is. How much of your free time do you spend reading books that will help you do your part-time job better? (Part time as in about 20 hours per year.) But more than all that publicly available data, it's the inside information that would really help: the team directors personal cell numbers, the hard-working promoters, the USCF officials. I could get my sweaty mits on all that stuff, if I were more tenacious and anal and generally type-A.

• Another way that I was compromised in a more obvious way, relative to being an "objective journalist," was that I'd agreed to help out with the NVGP this year on the volunteer side-- I stood in to provide "race radio," which means riding in one of the officials cars and relating all available and relevant information about the race back to the team cars: You announce breaks, you call up cars to provide support to their riders, you give warnings about situations on the road-- loose gravel, railroad tracks, hard turns, the time gaps and the numbers of the riders in them, and so on. This is an ideal position to be in to try to reconstruct a race, incidentally, and by far the best place in the world to be. (One of the motos at the head of the peloton would be a slightly more advantageous place, but it would be hell to take notes. Truly at well-covered events like the Tour De France, television viewers have by far the best seat in the house. Those moto-guys with their cameras are amazing athletes in their own right.) I'm a terrible note taker, but I have an awesome memory for details-- what the course looked and felt like, how the peloton is behaving, what their mood appears to be, and so on. But I have almost no memory whatsoever about anything numerical or mathematical. Sometimes I think I'm a little dyslexic. Or maybe just an idiot savant, without the savant part. So it can be a significant challenge to take good legible notes about what happens during a race. The best way, in the end, is to make sure you get the numbers of the riders, the time gaps, and the portion of the course. No need to worry about teams or individuals until afterward, when you can reconstruct the race like a baseball box score. (You really can tell the story of a ball game, at least in broad strokes, from reading a box score, if you know what you're doing.) The officials I rode with in the Mankato Stage were brilliantly talented at remembering numbers, instantly editing them in order to read them back and confirm in ascending order-- meanwhile, I'm not sure I got about a third of those numbers even right. Luckily, the officials have a very redundant system of reading and confirming the numbers of any riders making a move or needing help or what ever.

• So anyway, I wondered: Working for the race and covering it would not pass the smell test of traditional journalism. But I didn't get paid, and it was actually a way of doing my job "out loud" and in service of the peloton and their support. Plus I only did it for one stage: The official kicked me out of the car in Canon Falls (I'd arranged to have someone else do radio tour that day because of the "smell test" issue.) If you want to see the difference between covering a race from inside an officials car versus covering it from the lawn at the finish line, you can read the Canon Falls report and compare it to Mankato.

• I'm not sure who, incidentally, really cares about the fine details of every little attack and every little 5 second gap, but maybe a lot of people are interested. Surely the riders and their sponsors would love to get every mention they can-- that's the business side of pro cycling, the pro part of pro cycling. Press coverage is PR. It's the reason companies like Colavita and Jelly Belly support cycling the way they do (though it very often has to do with a particularly enthusiastic cycling fan or amateur athlete high in the ranks of those companies marketing departments).

• If Kristin Robbins is the best "print" journalist working the domestic pro cycling scene, then Amy Smolens and Kent Gordis are surely the best on the broadcast side-- and more purely "journalists" in the traditional sense. Both self-employed, they cover many of the world's biggest cycling events from the Olympics to World Championships to the Tour de France to-- well, to the Nature Valley Grand Prix. It's a real honor to be chasing those two around and hoping just a tiny bit of their knowledge and expertise rubs off on a pretender like me. I envy them their expertise, but I definitely don't envy them their travel schedule. They live in hotels and airports and in rental cars, and probably have zip for a social life, and probably don't get to see their families very much. I don't think I could handle that trade-off very well, so there you go. That's the moral of the story: trade-offs.

• Finally -- for now anyway -- I hope that my work this year conveyed one thing most of all: What an astonishing athlete Kristin Armstrong really is. She's one of those athletes that establish whole eras. You know, before Kristin Armstrong and (inevitably) after Kristin Armstrong. And in many ways she personifies why pro cycling is really fun to cover as a journalist. She may be the best female cyclist in history -- the XX-chromosome Eddy Merckx (the Eddy Merckx with two X's, ha ha), and that's no exaggeration. Naturally, she's a cannibal on the road in every stage of every race, a take-no-prisoners kind of competitor. And yet she's so modest and approachable off the bike, taking extra care with media parasites like myself, almost looking for children and begging to meet them and sign autographs. She recognizes fans and makes friends with them. She wins the most competitive domestic races virtually alone, with no team, putting minutes into a field that is otherwise separated by seconds. She is head, shoulders, hips and thighs above any of her nearest competitors -- and yet you could never hope to meet someone more down to earth. If you never have the pleasure of seeing her race, you are missing a historical opportunity. An historical opportunity.
  

• Pinch Flat News is about bike culture. Less and less, maybe, as I just don't find the time to devote to it that I should or did. Several people approached me during the race to tell me how much they enjoyed the cyclocross coverage last fall, and I had to admit that I had "burned a lot of matches" on that coverage. Maybe I'll hit my stride again this fall, I don't know. Mainly, I just don't get a lot of feedback or ROI for goofing off here as I do, and I realize that's all a get-what-you-give deal, but you know. See "trade-offs" above. I get a lot of return for hanging with my amazing kids, making my Thursday night dirt ride, and occasionally, you know, showing up for the dayjob.

• Is pro cycling a part of bike culture? Definitely. It's a bit removed from the world of advocacy and spoke cards and mess bags full of PBR and clownish couch bikes, and there are elements of it that seem incredibly decadent and wasteful. The carbon footprint of any given race is gigantic, with all the huge vehicles chugging around the country just to put on a show of a couple hundred hardbodies in funny skinsuits. Decadent indeed. I was super bummed to see how the peloton threw water bottles this year during the extra hot Mankato stage, littering every little farmyard with plastic, stopping in front of a little ranch house to have a group nature break and whipping it out in full view of a little ranch house with a picture window -- when 100 meters up the road there was 5 miles of uninterrupted cornfields. Whatever. I just mention it because bike racing is still pretty exotic in rural America. To see the looks on the faces of these humble and generous people standing in their years to watch the show, and then to have their children literally pelted with litter, and their lawns urinated on by about 100 men-- well, I was embarrassed. I really was. Call me a puss. I know a lot of the guys could give a crap -- they're animals during a race, and that's fine. I'm just saying. There is actually a rule in place in Minnesota that riders are supposed to be fined for throwing their bottles. It's actually a matter of life-and-death-and-taxes, because livestock that eat plastic bottles can and do die. Any idea what a head of beef costs a farmer? Let's just say it's worth more than a handful of those fancy carbon bikes with Dura-Ace and Zippy wheelsets, and when they autopsy that Black Angus and find the shard of plastic that pierced the animal's intestines, and it has the words "Team Bissell Pro Bike Racing," what do you think their view is? Don't kid yourself: one head of beef is every bit as important to a farmers' livelihood as three or four bikes are to Team Health Net presented by Maxxis. I was chagrined that the officials made no effort to enforce this rule, although I announced it several times to the caravan on race radio. Maybe it's unrealistic, I don't know. And maybe the worst that will happen is that a few angry farmers will refuse to honor the road closures (which would not necessarily be all that harmless, come to think of it), or they'll just pull their shades. Whatever. I just know -- having grown up riding my bike around Mankato and knowing how little sympathy and understanding there is out there in that beautiful rolling and windy country -- that the last thing everyday cyclists need is less sympathy for our sport.
  

The biking over-under on Barack Obama

Sen. Barack Obama went for a bike ride yesterday, and a number of PFN operatives asked us to comment. We'll go with the tried-and-true plus/minus system that works so well in professional hockey.

1. Bike helmet: +1
2. Trek bike: 0
3. Seat too low/frame too small: -1
4. Underinflated tires: -1
5. Adams trail-a-bike with superlame seatpost coupling. -2
6. Implicit pro-bike advocacy and all that implies: +2
7. Riding a rigid hardtail in granny gear: +1
8. Schrader valves (Blue Collar, yo!) : +1
9. Pulling an entire nation's head out of its collective ass: +9

Score: A perfect 10

Variations on a cliche: "Bicycle Race" naked!

RE: Queen's "Bicycle Race"


Remember how we used to stroll over to YouTube and see which video had been watched more often -- Monty Python's "Bicycle Repairman" or Queen's legendary (and much overplayed) viddy?

We sorta gave that gag a rest for awhile, but I noticed today that some thoughtful young man has posted the uncensored version of the original music video. I didn't even know there were uncensored music videos in the Paleolithic age, but there you go.

Still can't believe Freddy Mercury wore that weird Brooks Brothers shirt, sort of the opposite of seeing your grandma in a knit tube-top. Course, maybe it was the undue influence of the Bay City Rollers.

Que pasa? Lowriding across enemy lines

Lots of cyclists -- especially those who don't regularly commute and therefore have funny ideas about entitlement -- help stir up the pot of vehicular aggression by just generally acting like self-righteous assholes on the highways and biways and bike paths of America.




And, you know, I'm pointing four fingers back at myself here. I've done it too. Once while I was standing at the corner of 50th and Minnehaha waiting my turn and losing my patience, a carload of punk kids poured a Big Gulp of Sprite over my head. I caught them at the next stop light, and -- I'm ashamed to admit -- went a bit Medieval on their car with the empty soda bottle. They had to pull out of line, blow the light and squeal their tires to get away from the crazy red-faced middle-aged guy screaming every word in the book. That week, I gave myself a break from intervals, and y'know tried to reexamine my priorities.



Anyway, there is one particular subulcha in America that actually celebrates cars and bicycles at the same time and in the same way, together, and that's the nifty Latino tradition of lowriders and chopped out bikes. Yesterday in Phoenix, for example, the Dia de Guadalupe and Lowrider Car Show featured significant contributions from the kids and their superpimp Stingrays.