Like an angel, the bicycle is born with an innate choreography, which it cannot fail to understand.
-Paul Fattaruso
Just yesterday morning I got my hands on these microshift bar-end shifters at Recycled Cycles, you know 1007 NE Boat Street. They were just sitting there waiting for me, like it was meant to be, like innate choreography at half the MSRP.
A few hours later I ditched the bar-end set up and put them on the Poprad as downtube shifters. All frictioned-out to control my shiny new 2 x 7 drivetrain. Like Steve always said, shifting is overrated. I'm keeping it simple, shaving with Occam's razor.
Going to the downtube allows me to ditch a country mile of cable housing that would normally travel from the thumb shifters down to the el diablos. This set up also makes the Sim Works handlebar oh so elegantly clean and simple.
It's a luxury to have days & weeks to refurbish a new-to-me used bike. It's my bike. Not a nosy neighbor's. Not a shop customer's. Not an annoying coworker's.
I don’t remember the last time I saw Sally before I saw him yesterday at Flying Lion. We picked up just about right where we left off. What would Sally do? I think he’d have a beer. We talked about delivering mail, Toyota Land Cruisers and what not. We talked about stuff & things, kinda like Raymond Carver’s classic short “What We Talk About When We Talk About Single Speed Cyclocross”
But Sally knows not to talk too much of that shit with me, as I’m a spectator at most, a drunk spectator at best. It’s not about the words spoken, it's about the space left in and around what’s said. It's about what's not said. As Hemmingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” comes to mind. Plenty of space there left open to interpretation. Spin it as you will. Spin it in your favor.
Check your calendar:
Single Speed CX Worlds Bellingham 10/2/26
Woodland Park Hodala Last Hurrah 11/22/26
I once saw Tess Gallagher speak at Village Books in Bellingham in the early 90’s in a full circle Raymond Carver recollection retrospection 98225 - 2026 single speed cyclocross projection.
With only 6 colors to choose from, I installed both Friday and Saturday with purple bears, in a ROYGB-V-V way in this little plastic pill popper weekly calendar.
Then Junior advised me that Saturday and Sunday should both have red counting bears. Her eye is intrinsically trained to size-up patterns and asymmetry and imbalance and then offer symmetric solutions.
It’s been about 11.67 years since I got myself a new-to-me used bike. Yesterday I adopted this Poprad at BikeWorks with a super bro deal thanks to Steve G.
Within 5 minutes of arriving home I chucked the carbon seatpost and the saddle and replaced the crap seatpost collar with an investment cast lost wax steel collar. I thought of Steve Gluckman a la old school Novara and I smiled a quality old school steel bike part smile. That collar has been hanging on the wall in the garage for years, waiting for its chance to get back out into the world. Now it's on my new used Poprad.
A work in progress. After a couple hours tinkering with parts I had sitting around the garage. Including the Schwalbe 700 x 38 marathons and the SimWorks handlebar that cost me more than this entire bike. I will be investing in a new steel fork, a new old stock 7-speed cassette and a brand-spanking-new chain. I’ll get back to you with before and after photos when I’m actually riding this thing. There will be no Bucky's training day. There will be no electric assist. There will be no carbon fiber....
Every once in a while I wear a Grinnell College hoodie. Sometimes someone will chat me up about their friend that went there. I took Junior to the airport recently and I was wearing this hoodie… …but got not a word from anyone about the finest liberal arts school in the country. If I was wearing it at O’Hare, I’d get high fives and backslaps and free beers all around, as Grinnell, Iowa is just a western suburb in the greater Chicago-Land area and there are way more Grinnell alumni in Chicago than there are in the entire Pacific Time Zone.
