Hungry I was so when I walked into the cafe/diner/bar/bookstore, a burger looked good. The large menu near the kitchen featured only one item:
The Brash Burger
Beef Patty $20
Bun $7
Cheese $5
Pickles-lettuce-onion $5
Sauces $6
My eye caught the $20 price tag while my brain said new normal hamburger. The smaller print faded back but would get my attention later, after I got the $63 tab for a burger and a beer.
In the kitchen was a familiar face but he was out of context. Wearing an apron and a paper soda jerk hat, both pristine clean white. Like a high school theater production of Al’s Diner, just this side of the uncanny valley as if applied to back-of-the-house restaurant staff. This guy was from the high-end bike world. Custom one-off titanium bike like. You might know him. You more than likely know of him. All that made me smile and wonder what he was doing in the kitchen and if this was his place. And what was this place? How did I get there? Where was I? Where am I?
As I placed my order I noticed a line of fine print on the menu. “inspired by Mark Pilder GED Advertising Marketing PR” Not sure what that was about. Could’ve been a PhD, MBA, DDS, MFA, BFD or a WTF?
And there were two other menus barely visible behind the Brash Burger. But I could not see all the details. This place does one thing at a time. Tomorrow they’ll flip the BRASH menu and reveal another adjective and higher high prices.
For a moment I turned over brash in my head. A word I never use. A word I’ve never written down until now. A word with a few definitional variations. Down on the third tier, maybe it’s a stretch for a Pilder credit.
A moment later I thought the NY Times marketing department was reaching me telepathically in this dream state. So I planned to toss out BRASH as my first wordle guess on the January day that was yet to come yesterday.
BRASH was not the wordle word, but it did get me an R, which I eventually eeked out in the correct word ROWER. Can’t say I’ve ever used the word rower either, but it reminds me of Sievert Rohwer, UW professor emeritus, ornithologist and all around badass. But there are no 5 letter words there and there are no proper nouns in wordle. Maybe I wandered into Sievert’s Bookstore Cafe Bar on an island somewhere between here and Canada.
The brain makes connections where there are none. Creating a connect-the-dot drawing from details that don’t know each other, they’ve never met and there’s a language barrier. But none of that matters to the brain waving its sharpie around connecting dots.
A USB rechargeable little 3-dollar blinky light lost & found between Chemical Engineering and Life Sciences one day going the wrong way on Okanogan Lane. The cute little plastic S-hook failed on the seatpost binder strap resulting in one man’s loss LOST. Which in turn led to another man’s find FOUND.
I loosened the phillips screw, removed the rubber strap but retained the flat washer.
It’s now a lowercase g backpack blinky light
high brightness
medium brightness
breathing flash
comet flash
hybrid flash
energy saving flash
Of its 6 modes, comet flash is my favorite. However, experts disagree on which mode is best for the zombie lizard brains of distracted drivers.
I’m a palindrome fan: street addresses, zip codes, QR codes, calendar dates, digital clocks, coffee shop customer numbers, bar tabs, random numbers, symbols, words, phrases even complete sentences that read the same forward and backward. Bilateral symmetry, one way or another, speaks to me.
I poached this Jon Agee cartoon from one of his books.
Aibohphobia is the fear of palindromes and of course the word itself is a palindrome. Somebody just made that shit up and I say top spot.
You must have me confused with someone who gives a shit
You must have me confused with some other 55 year old bald white neuro divergent electric ass bathtub glum mail carrier
Armantrout has gotten my attention a few times in the past few years with her poems in the New Yorker. So few words. So much going on.
But the other other day I got my hands on her 21st book of poetry:
GO FIGURE
it’s a keeper
“Crystalline poems refract the meaning and irony of human existence; a clarifying, cagey reckoning with experience that may never add up.” –provided by publisher
spot on
Rae Armantrout and Joy Williams walk into a bar
The bartender says nothing: (speechless)
What if…
…only for an hour or so you could see the world through their eyes (Williams or Armantrout) not only their eyes, but their eyes wired to their brains processing the input and feeding it to your brain. An hour might be too much, too overwhelming.
The only thing Campy at my house is a front hub in a wheel in a gate that I slapped together ten years ago to keep Junior Junior from crawling and falling off the stairs on the deck. Here and now it’s still hanging on by a zip tie or two and keeping the dogs contained, more or less.
Recently I uncovered one more Campy item in my basement. The 1997 Campagnolo Spare Parts Catalogue. It’s full of simple elegant exploded view diagrams of various Campy components.
In the past week I have dismantled the catalog and I’m in the process of creating a series of postcards. I enjoy silkscreening and mishmashing stickers and images and recycled cardboard with glue sticks and paint.
But what really brings me joy is the fact that I know that you know that I know Campy chainrings have a 135mm bolt circle diameter. And the chainring I’m slapping over the top of those beautiful Campy crank diagrams is a Shimano big ring with a 130 bcd. Little things like that bring me joy.
The exploded view of a Campy Record headset is great on its own and doesn’t need much help or improvement.
The old Suntour derailleur I’m screening over the elegant Campy record derailleur is from another time, another category, but when they end up together on a scrap of cardboard new things appear. Toss in a few arrow stickers and call it art. With proper postage, call it a postcard.
Years ago while working in a small nonprofit bike shop sorting through endless piles of bike shit, trying to organize usable parts and differentiate the shit-shit from the good-shit, I saw some other bike shop had chainrings displayed on pegs spaced to their corresponding bcd. So I created a display totem of common size chainrings with nails spaced to their bcds.
It turned out to be a bust. Finicky and not user friendly for customers or employees. It’s much easier to paw through a milk crate full of 130 chainrings and toss in fresh incoming donations too. Trying to line up the bolt holes on a stack of rings was time consuming and frustrating and that display was eventually abandoned.
getting to Safeway is easy, bombing downhill all the way. But getting home is a slow grind up the hills with a couple cheese pizzas, bananas and some grapefruit seltzer water in the Burley.
This little Burley came from Bike Works for only $10.00 a few months ago because Junior wanted it for a Halloween costume idea. She pushed her friend around the block a few times then forgot about it and it’s been gathering dust since mid October. Until yesterday when I hitched up a new grocery getter.
It was mostly enjoyable but I ran out of gears on the 1 x 7. Next time I might try the other 1 x 7. If I go with a single-speed there will be some walking back up a couple of the hills on the way home.
It’s been a long long time since I pulled a trailer. Since Junior and Junior Junior both fit in a double-wide Burley and I could actually take them to the park or the pool. We also had a CETMA cargo bike so the Burley was mostly used as a giant stroller, taking up the entire sidewalk. Very rarely did I hitch it to a bike.
yesteryear... ...before the CETMA I got a stripped down flatbed trailer from Jason Hultman and I used it to pick up pony kegs once in a while on a mostly flat round trip to 1221 E. Pike. Then I passed that trailer on to CMWC Craig Etheridge.
The other day Bret in ABQ told me about the Bicycle Film Festival (virtual) and then he bought me a ticket too. So now I’m watching it all in the comfort of my basement.
Over the years I bought tickets a couple times and attended variations of the bike film festival when it rolled through Seattle theaters.
But now I can watch all these films, fast forward, rewind and replay for days.
Yesterday I half-assedly read the headlines in the New York Times, noting one article about life after death.
Several hours later in the day in which it never stopped raining I pulled the electric ass bathtub all the way up into a covered cubby near the Ocean Sciences Building door to get out of the rain for a moment and deliver their mail. When I looked over at the bike on the rack I got a vague message from the bike’s owner who passed away a couple years ago.
Then I went back and read that article in the New York Times and I was fortunate because it was my only free article as I’m not a subscriber. I hope you can read it too. It focuses on a group of scientists doing research on reincarnation, life after death and the possibility of receiving messages from the dead. Or the possibility of the dead sending messages over to this side where we’re still living. If a message is sent but there’s no one to receive it, does it make a sound?
Long ago, Russell mentioned that this guy's bike was still locked up on campus. But it didn’t register with me, didn’t sink in. I visit Ocean Sciences often but I don’t usually park the bathtub in that spot and there are usually 50,000 people milling around campus and several other bikes on all the assorted bike racks.
Yesterday however, there was no one in sight and only one bike on the rack and I stood and stared at it for a couple minutes. Like a ghost bike in more ways than one.
This bike’s owner lived in his Astro van near the mothership. His van no longer functioned as an automobile and it was covered in reflective insulation bubble wrap. He kept his bike locked to a railing outside the mothership. As you can see in this old photo I pulled from the archives.
I would often see this guy riding to or from campus where he spent a lot of time in various buildings. We’d pass on sidewalks or the Burke-Gilman. I’d also see him in and around his Astro Van too because we rode by it all day everyday.
I never had any conversation with the guy. Perhaps that’s why yesterday’s message was vague but I acknowledged it respectfully like a subtle chin tilt when crossing paths with another messenger.
Signs everywhere. They’re not blocking out the scenery, they are the scenery. No longer looking at them, looking through them, over them, around them, taking them for granted, a given, a premise, a baseline riff, on or off, left or right, one way or another.
In situ signs blend in with everything. Especially when moving in traffic at traffic speed. But when a bomb cyclone blew through Seattle in November, this one was torn off its sign post, making it easier to see in a new light, in another context. To get up-close, to get hands-on, to realize how big and reflective and heavy and awkward and over-built traffic signs are.
This sign is 48” x 30” the largest in the collection so far and it needs its own wall space. By the way, I didn’t steal it, I just picked it up off the ground after a 28 day observation period in which I patiently watched it get kicked from here to there propped up, knocked down and moved around. A month is plenty of time to plan for another context.
I’ve been curating a collection of arrows and arrow signs for several years. Ground-scores, thrift stores, gifts and yard sales.
I don’t follow the academic calendar, I just roll around in it. Doing the same routes every day, plus or minus 50,000 students, faculty, staff and what-nots.
Here and now falls in the midst of a break between quarters with lots of open spaces, locked-down empty buildings and a little more down time than usual. Idle hands, as you know, are tools of the devil. But in my hands I hold 400 pages of Rachel Kushner’s latest and greatest book, Creation Lake
When it first came out I read a blurb about it and forgot it. Secret agent “noir” books are not my style. Then a few days ago I picked it up at the library and took a closer look. This is not your average book. I’ve read a couple Kushner books in the past and she’s a real badass.
I’ve read 47% of those 400 pages but I can 100% fully recommend that you read this book.
So I went through the motions of doing my job until 9am and then rolled back to Bulldog for some coffee. When I strolled in the owner was there saying “the espresso bar is closed but we have drip coffee” and I smiled thinking this is my dream coffeeshop:
pilder’s coffee
order anything you want, all those foo-foo, poo-poo, shmoopy-poopy espresso drinks that people drink, with every possible fucked up labor intensive bullshit combination… …we’ll let you spit all that shit out and we’ll charge you for it, but you’ll get a cup of drip coffee, just like everyone else
people love us on yelp
The photo I’ve poached here is Nathaniel, a godfather of coffee and a godfather of the U-district. It’s old and it’s not mine, but I poached it because it speaks to me on several levels. I met Nathaniel 29 years ago when I worked at Kids Co and his kid was in kindergarten. He was an owner of Cafe Allegro. I was an aimless liberal arts grad about to get a messenger job for the summer before grad school. Now his kid has her own kids and he’s retired. But he’s still a pillar in the 98105. Allegro, Bulldog and Big Time are old school U district establishments and I like that, that old school vibe. Sincerely for real. Really. These days I see Nathaniel once in a while on the street or at Big Time and he's a rock star rocking on.
This academic calendar year my coffee-beer continuum has consistently been Bulldog <---> Big Time. Kicking off the day and then wrapping it up on the way back home.
Just the other day I do does did git got get a card from Shaggy. The latest in the C-n-V holiday series of high quality hand built small batch cards from Milwaukee.
Staring off into space in a sleep deprived stupor sometimes reading the New Yorker until I can’t no more. Somewhere between here and there a woman got on the train with her pristine new e-bike and hoisted it on the hook next to my single speed. For about seven seconds I tried to compare and contrast the two and make a mental list of all the variables that could fall out of place to make them each dysfunctional. Then I gave up because I couldn’t keep track of them all.
I ride parsimonious single speeds and Occam’s Razor utility bikes. My tainted biased point of view comes from a consistently constant continuous cost-benefit analysis. I feel fine talking shit about e-bikes. I don’t own one, I just ride one all day, and it’s not just an e-bike, it’s a $15,000 electric ass bathtub that kicks ass. The e-assist is what makes my job possible.
I don’t have to pay for it, or work on it, or call customer service with any questions about it. I just ride it, Mr McFeely like for real, really. While a guy named Alistair builds up the fleet of e-cargo bikes and keeps them all running and repairs all the little shit. All the while I remain blissfully ignorant of the nitty gritty e-bike mechanics, electronics and hydraulics.
As I’m riding in and around the 98195 I’m watching all the chuffers out there on their e-bikes and scooters and skeets wizzing all around me cluelessly. They don’t ride like cyclists. They ride like e-bike ipso facto assholes.
I looked up this WING e-bike and you can too. That integrated light top tube thing made me Van Moof in my mouth. As those in the know know that’s not a good thing and they also know this shit was probably made in the same old Van Moof factory.
My recurring Scattante dreams are going Van Moof.
A mail order e-bike, some assembly required, for $1500… What could possibly go wrong? The feel-good honeymoon lasts about 48 hours or less before things go to shit. Bolts finger tight. Everything half-assed. Then you’re on hold with customer service in China while your local bike shop says “go fuck yourself. Don’t bring that shit in here” and you're sitting on a pile of e-bike shit. Heavy and slow and annoying.
I suggest spending more money on a bike from a shop that will stand behind their product and be able to service it when issues arise. Perhaps you could get a Wombi from Davey Oil.
…the bartender makes a mental note, smirks and ponders the statistical significance, taking into account each patron's date of birth and residential zip code
for thousands of years mathematicians have run the numbers
twenty two divided by seven
for 43 years anthropologists, sociologists, economists, actuaries, scammers, scratch ticket buyers and coin flippers have been calling 867-5309
A book I had as a kid, a book I revisit sometimes, like today when it's 29 outside and I'm wearing fleece-lined action slacks cut off at the knee
these are not the $246 gravel bike shorts you've read about on the Radavist. These are $25 eBay pants. They get the job done. So well in fact I got another pair so I can Mr Rodgers out of my black work cutoffs into my grey home cutoffs.
