you came and you gave without taking

that's the signpost up ahead, next stop  the twilight zone

I prefer to auto pilot back burner low bandwidth subconsciously lizard brain muscle memory pigeonhole all the stupid petty bullshit of everyday existence the workaday subsistence whenever I can.  It’s often easier said than done but when it goes down it opens up a little space for the good shit.  

Being 40 hour work week weak I don’t really care about your weekend plans or the idle chit chat that seems to be considered normal and or friendly. All that banter is an energy suck. 

You can make it yourself at home, it takes about nine hours. 

      or     

You can buy a 10lb chub of it at Safeway for $2.49. 

is it raining? 

I thought you said you'd never forget

is it raining? 

I'm a frayed knot 

is it raining?

you came and you gave without taking

is it raining?

I'm nervous and my socks are too loose

is it raining? 

I cannot give any legal advice

is it raining? 

let's roll 

Don’t ask me about $400 12-speed cassettes spanning 10-50t or the derailleurs that go with them. You’ll get nothing.  Ask me about 7-speed freewheels and thumb shifters and shortcage XT derailleurs. This little number Steve set aside for me at Bike Works opens up possibilities to transform my monstrous single speed Rock Hopper into a 1 x 7 or make my kid’s Mt. Lion 1 x 6 look a whole lot cooler. 

Which reminds me, I like IPA.  I like Caddy Shack. I like Caddy-Shack-inspired names for IPA. In this big beer vortex we live in there are endless choices. But the colorful packaging graphics and great names are often far more impressive than the actual beer. this time the beer is as good as the name. 

 “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["the perfect riser bar"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the handlebar involved in this case is not that."    Paraphrasing supreme court justice Potter Stewart’s famous quote. I’ve been digging around recently for a riser bar to neoretro-retrofit a bike I’ve had for 20 years. I cannot and will not try to document the metrics in millimeters of rise and degrees of sweep. I’m more into eye-balling it as I pull it from a milkcrate packed with used handlebars. Visualizing it and how it fits in on any given bike with particular attention to the stem it'll be stuck in.  Visiting Bike Works yesterday I was surprised by the lack of packed milkcrates in both the warehouse and shop as they recently cleared shit out in their fall sale. Recycled Cycles actually had more used bars to look at this week and that hasn't happened very often in the last ten years.  The search continues. I'll know it when I see you get nothing and like it. 

At 11:14am the dispatcher chirps me,

“pickup a rush roundtrip from the ACLU going to 44 West Mercer. Wait for the signature then take it back right away. We need you in the core to cover Nooners!”

Who is this we?  We only have two riders and the other one called in sick, again. And 44 West Mercer my ass. Bad addresses are no problem and We’ll be there right away. Labor costs are down while caloric output is steadily increasing in this December weather. It’s coming up Burberry everywhere, but where is the accompanying warm fuzzy holiday feeling I read about in the paper? 

Oh yeah. It’ll be a quick little jaunt out of the core… 

“Copy ACLU and the story to go with it”, I chirp

There used to be a little patch of nature on the way to LQA, a wetlands preservation greenbelt. It was one of my favorite strips of asphalt in Seattle. Surrounded by trees with a short descent into a sweeping right turn and no traffic on the smoothest road ever. The city recently sold the land to developers after the river dried up and there wasn’t really any wetland to preserve anymore. Then budget shortfalls heavily outweighed the weak protests about the loss of greenspace in the city. The loss of a place to sit down and actually feel like you weren’t in Seattle. The loss of a place where you could pull off the road to take a piss and easily disappear into thick undergrowth and maybe say hi to a few happy raccoons and some crazy looking birds and chirp out. The loss of a place where a Vietnam vet I once met, could campout for months.   

“Base to Matt!”

“I’m still 4 blocks away” I say, “it‘s a bad address anyway”

“Swipe it once!”

What? Swipe what? I’m not exactly sure what that phrase means, but in this context, I catch his misinformed drift. No 10-9 needed. This job would be a lot cooler if I didn’t have to talk to anyone on the Nextel. If I wanted to talk on the phone, I’d work in an office. Now I'm starting to smell a little stress. The attorney I‘m looking for, if he even has an office on West Mercer Street, and if he's in his office and available, will most likely take his time signing these documents, especially since the ACLU appears to be hounding him. It’s all the same to me, but I don’t need any added stress direct connecting me. 44 West Mercer? Is that a typo or what? It’s not like it could be confused with “eighteen” over the phone. And it’s not as simple or recognizable as the old 1911 2nd Ave dyslexic slip. 

I’m almost there or where it would be but this road doesn’t go through. Maybe I can take the stairs and they’ll spit me out up on Mercer... 

I open my eyes and look at the clock, it’s 12:03 so I guess we don’t need to worry about those Noon rushes anymore... But I’m not sure where I am. These stairs could be in any building built within the last 30 years. There are no windows but the floors are clearly labeled on each landing.  I try the doors on each floor, until I find one that's unlocked on level M2. When I step out of the stairwell the temperature is 20 degrees warmer and the stuffy air reeks like Graham & Dunn. The walls are covered with O’Keefe impressions and bad bleached bone desert scene murals. Around the corner I find myself in that Azteca we talked about earlier. Only it’s no longer an Azteca. But it obviously used to be. They just taped over the name on the sign and wrote the new name --Guadeloupe’s--in sharpie. If this building wasn’t even here three weeks ago how could Azteca already go out of business?.. 

I’m just trying to find the out, the way, up to West Mercer. 

A woman in a hound’s-tooth coat with matching earmuffs is leaving the restaurant with a stack of Styrofoam clamshells to-go. She gets up in my personal space and tells me there’s an elevator that goes up to Mercer. But I didn’t even ask her a question. When I approach the front counter, the hostess and a two busboys are gathered around a large Anasazi ceramic bowl filled with individually wrapped peppermint candies. But these aren’t the good kind, they’re some cheap Chinese knock-offs that look stale. When I reach for a mint, the busboys laugh at me and mumble something and before I say anything, the hostess says she’ll show me the elevator.  She walks around the counter once in a clockwise direction then into the restaurant. I follow her but have trouble keeping up. The place is packed.  The aisles are full and the tables are too close together. The third aisle is less crowded so I make my way through and bang my messenger bag against the back of several people’s heads as they eat their lunches of chimichanga combo platters and nachos mega grande. Nobody says anything they just get very angry, Seattle style. Near the far wall I come upon a large bald woman with the heavy shadow of a recently shaved moustache. She’s wearing a fake tuxedo T-shirt and the bottom half of a Snuggy held up with an old innertube. I can hear Simple Minds blaring on the one earbud she has in, but it doesn't remind me of Breakfast Club. She’s sitting on the floor and she's in the process of breast feeding a kid in a Houston Oilers helmet with an Earl Campbell jersey that‘s too small for him. No matter how far I extend my leg to step over her and the kid, the cleat on my shoe keeps snagging on her shirt because of her enormous breasts. After a few attempts looking like karate kid,  I’m committed and finally ready to shift my weight forward with a little hop off my left foot, my right shoe pulls her shirt down. She says, “I see an alligator” but I keep walking, scared to look back because I assume she’s referring to one of her tattoos that is now exposed. When I eventually get out of Guadeloupe’s, the hostess is long gone and all I can see are non-descript cement walls and rows of planter boxes containing no plants and no soil but filled with exhausted inkjet cartridges. There are piles of expired fire extinguishers stacked neatly here and there. Walking and walking the vacant office plaza there is nobody in sight.  

Pondering various maladies that could cause me to feel like I’m walking in quicksand wearing cement shoes and a lead suit. Expending so much energy and accomplishing so little. It’s no longer stressful, just frustrating. 

I have no idea what time it is and I can’t remember where I locked my bike.

I'm pretty sure I dreamed this in 2009

I took the photo in 2019

a sweet sweet Italian steel frame with a Campy Record headset punctuated by a threadless stem converter, a stack of spacers and an adjustable stem maxed out to eleven clamped to a drop bar with interrupter levers. 

horseshit

*Lil Wayne 

It’s not so much a commentary on bilking the taxpayers. That story is worn out and worn thin. Key words are replaced and rearranged and it runs again. So much so it’s no longer interesting. Like Inslee’s presidential campaign expenses. Although this has to be one of the most expensive bike racks in the state of Washington, with room for six bikes to get out of the rain. I see it used once every other month or so. The only bike rack I can think of that costs more taxpayer dollars is a car on the light rail that has hooks for only two bikes with room for a total of six bikes on an entire train.   

I’m more interested in light and shadow and the angle of the sun in late August at this latitude. Negative space. Parallel lines. Groups of three. Triptychs and Guided by Voices lyrics. 

What are we waiting for? We’re not waiting for godot we’re waiting for our supervisor to walk by with yet another americano. That’s how we roll. Those lines painted on the road are suggestions that some people follow. I got a sharrow here bro but nobody is really sure what that means. It’s not piffy, it’s pithy as in concise or terse. Occam’s disposable razor. Single use throw away culture.  Nepotism runs in the family. The map says “you are here”   how did I get here? Dead reckoning from the last known fix in 1997. A nonspecific length of innertube wrapped around then covered in electrical tape and secured with neatly trimmed zip ties. I’m not making this shit up I’m just the conduit moving it around town. 

dual pivot long reach mentholatum

washed up ceramic bearing big in Japan

big pulley short cage conduit

cable actuated retroactive attitude

cross threaded cream filled reverse commute  

all tool interfaces stripped rounded mashed 

just riding along

in absentia

reduce   reuse   fuck off

no in loco parentis    

your mom doesn’t work here

clean up your shit 

dirty laundry aired loudly at the front of the room 

“nonfat decaf latte extra hot no foam!”

sentimental reasons to hang onto the quilt

stitched from souvenir Tyvek® STP jackets 

Tom Bice always said

Is this the life or what?

he also said

It’s worse when you lie about it 

Lately I’ve been thinking about the final 50 feet and this photo that Craig Etheridge took ten years ago gets the message across. 

An autonomous vehicle could find 1201 3rd but it couldn’t get the documents up to Perkins Coie. A drone could find 1001 4th but it couldn’t bring those four boxes up to the 21st floor and stack them behind the paralegal’s desk. The on-trac robot won't catch the typo and will be circling the block near 2nd Ave West when it should be going to 2nd Ave South. 

Lots of logistics experts and transportation planners sit around conference room tables and talk about streamlining delivery, improving loading docks and traffic flow in dense urban areas.  But they still need a messenger to take that theoretical shit the final fifty feet. I can assure you there were no experienced messengers sitting in on any of those meetings.

I think it would be tough to find a messenger that could stomach one of these meetings and there's a $15,000 buy-in for a seat at the table

Most experts agree that the final piece of the puzzle will not be automated for many years. 

the final fifty fucking feet

the final fucking fifty feet

the fucking final fifty feet

Jonny Sundt’s Axleys finally bit the dust.  August 5, 2019 10:27am I reached down to retrieve them from the bottom of the cargo box but because their right arm was pinned under a box of books it bent backwards beyond repair. 

Since whatever year (2006ish) Mr. Sundt gave me these shades they mostly sat in storage and came out once in a while in the summer months. I believe they made at least one trip with me on a great bike ride across Iowa. But recently they’ve gotten more daily use because the sun reflects off the large laminated campus map affixed atop the cargo box on the electric assist bathtub I roll around in Monday through Friday giving everything a sunny disposition.

The glass is half full.

Pilder junior junior has developed a keen eye for Swisher Sweet wrappers in the wild as you may have seen 15 or 20 photos of him here holding fragments of varying flavor and size. I have not gotten him hooked on hunting dental picks although it wouldn’t be hard to do. I have however gotten Dr 37 Mike to see them all over the place because once you see them you can’t unsee them and they’re everywhere. He recently sent me photos of a bike ride on a pristine wilderness trail where he rolled up upon a dental pick.  

Poached the photo above from a book I like but I’d like it even more if its constructions were constructed with only things found on the ground. 

My next coffee table book is going to be photos of garbage cans near schools and parks overflowing with hundreds of colorful bags of dogshit and photos of entitled dog owners setting just one more little doodie bag on top of the precarious pile. 

Q factor : Jan Heine  :: rubber bands : Shelley Tennant

bringing home the canadian bacon

the ponytail won’t hide the bald spot but the beret will

taciturn fecundity

psychosomatic consumerism

how many different routes can he walk from his office to the men’s room 

She obsessed compulsively over the details delusional in thinking that if she stuck to the routine she’d have some control over the outcome the results the events unfolding yesterday today and everyday

Nomar Garciaparra 

Step out of the box 

Idle hands are tools of the devil 

Set an alarm but be sure to wake before it goes off 

TMJ-inducing stress dreams somewhere along the coffee-beer continuum

When your first stop this morning was your last stop last night 

Dead men don’t wear plaid 

(Your Name Here) 

arial rounded italic bold 

numerous variables must fall into place for the two commuters to meet each morning at the same time in the same place on the Burke Gilman Trail

plug n chug

dig deeper

get in the drops

the broken clock on the wall behind the bar keeps catching my eye subconsciously noting the passage of time or lack thereof same time different day

free beer tomorrow 

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I’m not angry  I’m disappointed

Is it anxiety?       Is it creativity?

it’s the other side of the same coin

Yin Yang this   bro

Franklin claims Kenny G but Garfield had Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee

Ask me about entitled millennials on electric assist cargo bikes

Ask me if I had a good weekend

Ask me about your learned helplessness

it’s a steep learning curve but any one-eyed dyslexic monkey could do it as long as they can ride a bike and pretend to differentiate between 353650 and 353560 as well as 355630 and 355360

do me a favor - don’t do me any favors

separate they’re three simple words used in a variety of contexts but when they’re strung together just so they invoke feelings of dread and disgust like no other. Those three words are: South Lake Union

Proceed to the point of the turn

This too shall pass

On your left

broken social scene behind blue eyes

servings per container  alcohol by volume 

as of 7/30/19 Patsy Swayze is kicking the shit out of Merce Cunningham 

gold star for robot boy

Is that all there is? 

RAGBRAI 2019 with the pilderwasser collective

Yesterday I delivered a shovel to Life Sciences which was a 5 minute jaunt but it reminded me of the guy that took the photo below, the guy that rides around town with a shovel and a rake, a hori hori and a pair of gloves. But the real highlight of the ride was Patsy Swayze. G&O has nicknames for the electric assist getups on the bikes they build. The fleet we’ve had features the Merce Cunningham which is based on the EZ front hub motor. And now we have two new bikes featuring the Patsy Swayze built around the GMAC rear hub motor from GRIN Technologies. This thing kicks ass. It’s powerful and ideal for hauling heavy cargo with the regenerative braking. Coasting down hill you’re actually pumping juice back into the battery and not burning through brake pads every two weeks.  It was designed by gear heads and bike geeks that actually get outside and ride. Not by a bunch of chuffers sitting at a conference room table discussing trends in the bike industry.  

one of these custom made caps not hats you've seen on instagram made its way into my zipcode and soon packs of them will be making their way across Iowa from west to east