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.