what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

pilderwasser unlimited T-shirts  pilder what? kickstand P know knew spew snap shots autoBIKEography RAGBRAI  slide shows phot-o-rama stationary-a-gogo 1/2 x 3/32 links

roundtrip

May 7, 2024

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.


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3747 W Stevens Way

May 5, 2024

do you know bro?


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do you know crow?

May 5, 2024

 

Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know. 

 

--Gertrude Stein


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what about you?

May 4, 2024

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. 

 

Word

 


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historical metaphorical

May 4, 2024

autobiographical

irreconcilable

 

irreversible

immaterial

 

Seattle

Legal

 

skeptical

quizzical

 

historical

metaphorical

 

biblical

infinitesimal

 

intellectual

contextual

 

proximal

distal

 

medial

lateral

 

bilateral

symmetrical

 

eternal

ephemeral 

 

environmental

existential

 

whimsical 

practical

 

financial

farcical

 

variable

predictable

 

indelible

washable

 

sequential

accidental

 

digital 

scribble

 

comical

sensible

 

reasonable

logical

 

expendable

essential

 

nonessential

peripheral

 

incremental

exponential

 

statistical

anal

 

habitual

oral

 

insatiable

full

 

multiple

serial

 

single

available

 

tangible

visible

 

technical

spiritual

 

residual

bountiful

 

dreadful

beautiful

 

artificial

biological

 

ancestral

orchestral

 

probable

actuarial

 

mathematical

numerical

 

alphabetical

allegorical

 

superficial

susceptible

 

sexual

perpetual

 

perennial

annual

 

arboreal

terrestrial 

 

industrial

commercial

 

residential

cubical

 

hypothetical

factual

 

electrical

manual

 

anthropomorhical 

phantasmagorical

 

quadrupedal

vestigial 

 

coincidental

conspiratorial

 

 

let’s roll


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937 Boat Street

May 3, 2024

"if you don't like the weather

wait 5 minutes"

 

 


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zombie crossing

May 2, 2024

morality lessons

April 30, 2024

Fable

 

I’m tired of meaning, says the tortoise

to the hare, who agrees. The lions

 

and crows don’t disagree, and the snake

chimes in: It would be better if we didn’t 

 

have to moonlight as morality lessons. 

Exactly, says the chicken. I’d like to let

 

loose once in a while, I’d like to

stretch my wings, she says. Yes, 

 

says the fox. You should get out

of your pen more, says the fox. You

 

should let me help, says the fox,

opening the latch to the evening. 

 

It was a fine evening and a fine

conclusion they were coming to,

 

thought the fox, helping 

the chicken out of her feathers. 

 

 

 

—Andrea Cohen

 

Poetry May 2024 

Volume 224, #2, page 105

reprinted here

without permission 

 


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create a space that brings you joy

April 29, 2024

Wheel Fanatyk  pint cup


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one glove

April 27, 2024

“One” 

U2

 

Is it getting better?

Or do you feel the same?

Will it make it easier on you now?

You got someone to blame

 

You say, one glove, one life

When it's one need in the night

One glove, we get to share it

Leaves you baby if you don't care for it

 

Did I disappoint you?

Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?

You act like you never had glove

And you want me to go without

 

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. 

 

“Losing one glove is certainly painful,

but nothing compared to the pain,

of losing one, throwing away the other,

and finding the first one again.”

Piet Hein

 

 


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electrode potential

April 26, 2024

crow

knows

this

 

crow 

knows

that

 

dissimilar

metals

stack

 

steel

copper

aluminum 

 

speaking 

different

languages

 

saying 

same

thing

 

4130

6061

220-221

 

whatever

it 

takes 

 


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twoferwasser

April 23, 2024

justabunchapicturesof39

April 23, 2024

if an electric ass mailman

knocks at the door

but there’s nobody there

to let him in

 

does it make a sound? 




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. 

 

just a bunch of pictures of 3939

 


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intention

April 23, 2024

just like bike

April 21, 2024

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

 

word

 


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number 9

April 20, 2024

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.  

 


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gunter glieben glauchen globen

April 18, 2024

Ode to the plumb bob

fashioned from found objects

aka  I.S.R.U.

 

stationary biking

treadmilling

hamster wheeling

 

busting ass

sweating balls

getting nowhere

 

m i s d i r e c t e d

energy      barking

up all the wrong trees

 

riding up hills

just                to

ride back down

 

clock in

clock out

40 hour repeat

 

routine

route     rout

rut

 

better to

burn out      than

fade away

 

Neil Young

if & only if

Def Leppard 

 

Rock of Ages

rock paper scissors

rock & hard place

 

unlimited

renewable resources

you’d like to think

 

you’re the one

telling them

how it is

 

word

cloud

generator

 

overhead projector

transparency

meltdown

 

pissing

power point

presentations

 

unrealistic expectations

unachievable—---goals

unobtainable     ideals

 

forbidden fruit

ferments to

sour grapes 

 

be careful

what you

wish for

 

six   of   one

half dozen

the other

 

obsessive

compulsive

disorder

 

ten

minutes 

to Wapner


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from me to you

April 17, 2024

what if I sent you a photo of a postcard

 

from me to you in 0.67 seconds



 

then proceeded to mail it to you

 

from me to you in 6 to 7 working days

 


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crow knows this & crow knows that

April 17, 2024

no talking

April 16, 2024

1 x 7

April 14, 2024

one more snifter

high plains drifter

down tube shifter


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contingencies

April 12, 2024

not counting contingencies

53 degrees and overcast

don’t overthink it

today’s your Thursday

pre-ride preparations 

or lack thereof:

  • tall can coozie
  • cotton t-shirt
  • cotton hoodie
  • mini tool

 

what could possibly go wrong?

no way to boyscout out of this one

MacGyver

 

give me a 5mm wrench long enough and a pocket to put it in and I will move the world.

 

but what if it’s on the miniest mini tool in the world? 

"Big Time Mini Tool"

4/11/24 


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meanwhile, have another beer

April 10, 2024

compartmentalize

intellectualize

rationalize

clockwise

fall back

phantom nostalgia

rearview retrospect

with a nod

oh so subtle 

barely perceptible

messenger chin tilt 

to Our Lady of 

shoulda woulda inertia

ONEWAY or another

explain it away

look the other way

put it away

put it down

put it back

put it on the back      burner

pat on the back

congratulate

all the goods

all that good stuff

bright side blindness

oblivious optimism

half-fulling everything

wishfully wishy-washy

that’s ok

That’s OK   you say

again and again

and again

It’s OK

it’s ok

until it’s not

fake it 

til you break it

then it’s not OK




maybe we’ll leave come springtime

meanwhile, have another beer

 

       –“Sunset Grill” Don Henley

 


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Tuesday afternoon

April 9, 2024

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

 

would you?

 


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imagine, if you will

April 7, 2024

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.

That's the signpost up ahead

—your next stop,

the T-shirt Zone


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today's bicycle

April 4, 2024

 

Bicycle

by Paul Fattaruso

 

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. 


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dry the rain

April 3, 2024

 

 

so 6 years ago bro

got an electric ass bathtub

whatever works

works

 

 


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yesterday was my Tuesday

April 3, 2024

speech & hearing

April 2, 2024

on the grid

off the grid

 

in the alley

parked out back

 

brick by brick

step by step

 

School of Social Work

Speech & Hearing bro

 

verso - recto

i know you know

 

aerial photo

if you say so

 

full circle

both here & there 

 

you are here

here you are

 

in more ways

than    one

 

in situ resource utilization

“who killed Bambi?”

 

that’s my jam

hurry up & wait

 

i don’t know

is it raining?

 

it’s not me it’s you

it’s not you it’s me

 

busy     busy 

busy bodies

 

chow down

eat it up

 


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brass tacks

April 1, 2024

this photo poached from THE RADAVIST

is just to get you to get to Shovel Research

they say you can't get there from here

but you're already there 

 


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