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.