a quality of life issue

Skunk P. Pilder

May 7, 1996 - April 21, 2014

Skunk was an unusual cat. Not very friendly. She didn't like most people. She loved to sleep under the covers and hide in closets. She loved donuts and tortilla chips and processed turkey lunch meat. Indoor all the way, she'd step outside  for a bite of grass and sneak back in right away to puke it up allover the carpet. Spitting distance from turning 18 years old, Skunk outlived her brother Brad by a few years. 

what were you doing    in 1996?

it's becoming apparent

it's becoming a parent 

what it looked like   this morning 

what it looked like   5 years ago

whatever it looks like to you

Happy Easter 

look   listen   feel

continuous trim continuum

give me your tired, your poor, your used PAUL brakes

photos remind me of other photos

everybody is 6 degrees from Craig 

but if you're reading this you're more like 1.5

pedal

petal

peddle

please take a moment to locate the context nearest you

Tom Chapel photo via Craig Etheridge or something like that

remember rolling up to the 4th Ave side of King at 4:27 and walking into the building completely calm knowing you had plenty of time to get through security and take the elevator to the clerk's office before you hit the judge's mailroom and there were already 8 or 10 legal messengers sitting outside smoking before they called their dispatcher?  remember when there were more legal messengers than jimmy johns? remember pay phones? remember parking meters?

Monday

Off the usual habit trails. On a cargo bike. On a ferry. On a Sunday into Monday. To an island. To wander in the sounds of silence and frogs and owls and work-related stuff. Enough said. Except riding a cargo bike on a bit of a jaunt made me for the first time seriously consider an electric assist rear wheel contraption. For real. Really.

Tuesday

Into a locked cage in the open-air parking garage of a downtown office building some people refer to as West 8th but in my mind it’s not even close to 8th Avenue West so I’d call it 2001 8th but in any case I never set foot in there as a messenger because it was constructed and completed but sat empty for the last year that I sat around emptying cans of beer as a messenger but I went in there Tuesday to wrench on bikes in sort of a cleanup mop-up tie-up loose ends on the tail end of a corporate team building exercise from some weeks back where software sales teams slapped together Torkers as fast as they could in expensive clothing back slapping big talking the talk sales people tend to do.

Visualize a front wheel with a quick-release skewer disassembled into its basic pieces. Toss in all the possible variables…  concave-convex forward-backward open-closed left-right up-down …and every possible permutation of wrong showed up fucked up. Things you would never think of were thought of and jammed into those front wheels. Then talk about brakes, brake pads, brake cables brake levers seat posts saddles and then go back and talk about corporate software sales teams on a convention weekend in a hotel conference room near a buffet lunch and open bar slapping together bikes as fast as possible.  

this bunch of Torkers is such a strange situation

it's not the time or the place to explain it all 

fill in the blanks    connect the dots

the story will be better that way

My peas are already planted in the garden this year poised to climb up their pea teepee just like last year. But maybe next year I’ll have one of these with a 36-hole hard anodized 27” rim laced to a solid axle hub with a rusty six-speed freewheel seized on up top of a 10-foot galvanized festivus pole strung to a rusty steel rim down below so the peas and beans can go crazy.

Chris Murray sent this photo today from the 01420, where the snow is melting, and I quote

Thanks Mark, Imagine my surprise when I come home and I have a new helmet and a new shirt in my mailbox. Awesome. Registration closes on April 1st. Come one come all.

Cheers
Chris

I didn't send him the helmet but I did send him the shirt as another symbolic representation symbolically representing the pilderwasser collective riding RAGBRAI since 2005 and I am impressed with the USPS and their speedy delivery delivering faster than Lance in the tour day france juiced up beyond belief wearing a USPS jersey in 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

I like the idea of coffee   more than coffee itself

pause for a moment to look around     and you may find yourself surrounded by people wearing pilderwasser hoodies

these are not pilderwasser hoodies

but Bike Works is pilderwasser approved

my right shoulder is still single-strap-lower than my left

The NFL free-agent marketplace, Major League Baseball opening day, Hockey, NCAA bracket-busting Cinderella stories, spring classics, Chris Horner’s hair line, swept back handlebars with a 25.4 clamp diameter shimmed out to 26ish with a beer can nesting in a Nitto stem, keeping cold drinks cold and warm hands warm sitting on a park bench or an old couch and much much more. 

3

3 years

3 years go by in the blink of an eye

here's a photo Matt Case took today of a pilderwasser T-shirt in situ somewhere not too far from the NAHBS in Charlotte, NC

57 Varieties time trial

Saturday April 5th mark your calendar

Sometimes I spot someone riding a bike with an ill-fitting helmet and rather nice clothes on looking a bit flustered and winded and rather uncomfortable and deduce that their car broke down and they grabbed their kid’s bike to get to work on time.

That person’s level of discomfort is exceeded by the discomfort I feel when I need to drive a car in the city. If I need to look for parking on the street then it’s a shit show. Back in the day when I was a teenager…I got a deduction on the driving test for parallel parking, and my skills haven’t improved since then.

Grocery shopping in a cargo bike is a treat not a chore and dropping the kid off at preschool with her bike and a big fat bag of cargo in a cargo bike brings a smile to my face, especially because it’s only 7 blocks away.

Today I watched a bunch of 2 or 3 or 4 year-olds ride bikes and trikes and scooters in counterclockwise circles round and round and round