like a fish
March 18, 2024
bikes bicycle
bicycles bike bicycling
like a fish needs a bicycle
from 1201 to McKinleyville
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as if
March 17, 2024
only only
except
if only
only if
as if
if and only if
iff <--->
what if
if then
then what
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green glitter grips
March 16, 2024
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.
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87 Catarina Face
March 15, 2024
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. ONEWAY or 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
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summit
March 15, 2024
that one-of-a-kind kickstand hoodie was an alleycat prize from yesteryear
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hose clamped milk crate douche bags expecting respect from bungee corded pickle bucket Dexter Avenue warriors
March 14, 2024
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.
or something like that
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three point one four
March 14, 2024
what a difference
a day makes
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Pittsburgh paperboy
March 12, 2024
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
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good old ballard
March 12, 2024
good is a good doctor,
but Bad is sometimes a better.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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squeegee on a window into history
March 10, 2024
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…
seek and you will find sometimes
for $3.50 in a thriftstore
or $700.00 on eBay
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47.6061° N
March 8, 2024
Springing forward
Spring forwarding
Spring forward bro
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
wrote that little ditty in 2009...
when i was still a real messenger
as if I could see into the future
with train rides and uniforms
and weak work weeks
...same as it ever was
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the stem
March 6, 2024
all these photos are Rivendell
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.
Is that the best you can do?
12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00 12:00
Nitto knows what I mean.
Nitto knows stems.
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the calls are coming from inside the house
March 5, 2024
"Daddy, what's dickstank?"
March 3, 2024
What’s dickstank?
a question a child might ask
but not a childish question
a question
that in the past has led
not to answers
but only to
other questions...
Effective advertising?
If the ad ran in 1985
and I’m still stuck on it
today
fuckin A
I’d say
it was effective
Raise your hand if you’re old enough to remember the Reagan Years.
Raise both hands if you remember this ad
Perhaps your grandparents purchased some Time-Life books.
Perhaps they had a rotary phone in their home.
Perhaps you sent them occasional postcards.
I don’t own any Time-Life books.
I grew up on a rotary phone.
I’m still sending occasional postcards to people.
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decisions decisions
March 1, 2024
1906 to 1935 inclusive
March 1, 2024
already been chewed
February 28, 2024
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.
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a probability of 1
February 28, 2024
clear eyes
February 27, 2024
I didn't write that stuff, it's MOHAI bro
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.
Like a good idea at the time time.
Like Big Time time.
Big Time.
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4 quarts to a gallon
February 27, 2024
Thought a Rarity on Paper
---by Billy Collins---
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.
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today's my Tuesday
February 27, 2024
got 99 problems
but a key leash aint one
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.
It’s time to stock up. RE order
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oh so 25 years ago bro
February 26, 2024
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.
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joy ride
February 24, 2024
Joy Ride
14.5” x 8.5”
Emily Wamsley
tin artist
taking in the big picture, take a closer look and break it down into the individual elements painstakingly cut by hand and fastened on with little nails, piece by piece, one at a time, one of a kind.
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point NO point
February 22, 2024
Smells like six days into a 9-day weekend. Looks like Captain Junior Junior on the bow of a boat washed up on the Chehalis River just this side of where the Wishkah spits out and chimes in. I’d like to think it’s the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. It’s close, close enough. Not very close to Point No Point, but I like the name and the chance to use it in a sentence. It reminds me of the band from Tacoma more than the Kitsap Peninsula.
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mid-winter break
February 18, 2024
smells like a 9-day weekend
I don't know the reason
stayed up all season
with nothing to show but a brand-new tattoo
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coincidence? I think not.
February 17, 2024
50112
Is the zip code for Grinnell, Iowa
home of Grinnell College
established in 1846
colors: Scarlet & Black
50112
Is the SKU for the ClearWeld™ epoxy syringe
made by JB Weld
established in 1969
colors: Scarlet & Black
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stuff it in a cup
February 16, 2024
first-come first-served
February 15, 2024
kick kicker kickest
February 13, 2024
What it all comes down to
is that everything’s
gonna be
fine fine fine
sincerely
for real
really
What it all comes down to
is that pudgy balding guy with a mustache sitting on the bench over there looking at art history books might have to put his helmet on and trot out onto the field to win the game.
hey Steve, check out Herrera's rookie card with the Cowboys...
same deal. conspiracy... inside job...
this 1979 Terry Beeson might confirm my hypothesis
if I had a hypothesis
I'll get back to you Steve
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authentic apathy axiom
February 11, 2024
As authentic as an airport Azteca
As apathetic as an August afternoon
As axiomatic as an accepted absolute
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