I stumbled upon this photo of Peter’s bike. I took it after he let me ride that Serotta for a bit on the Burke-Gilman on our way home from Mad Fiber HQ in 2011. We paused at this point so he could get his bike back because it’s where I would dogleg left-right on up to the U Bridge and roll south. While he continued east on the Burke.
A Mad Fiber commute passed this point twice a day.
These photos were taken right where 7th Ave NE plows into the Burke Gilman, between the Benjamin Hall Interdisciplinary Research building and the Publication Services Building aka the Mailing Services’ Mothership (that’s where I work these days)
Those are 27" wheels on my Shogun singlespeed. As heavy and slow as the day is long. I'll be riding them home tonight, slowly, uphill, in the rain, in the dark.
Those are Mad Fiber tubulars on Peter's Serotta. Light and responsive and rather expensive. They're probably in a landfill somewhere as we speak.
14.583 years ago feels like a really long time ago, a couple-three lifetimes in carbon fiber years...
A wise woman once said, “there’s more than one way to get to Safeway.” My local store recently had Rainier 12-packs at $13.99 and Rainier 18-packs at $14.99. What’s a man to do? What would you do? What do you think I did?
At a very large Thanksgiving gathering in Grays Harbor County there was a hosted bar. When I made my way through the line I said, “I’d like a beer please” and the host said, “we have Coors Light and Rainier.” What’s a man to do? What would you do? What do you think I did? On my third trip to the bar, the host pointed at the cooler and said “dig in, just help yourself.” Of the 120 people in attendance I believe I was the only person drinking Rainier and I did my due diligence, chipping away at a couple cases of cans in the cooler. As you know three little Rainiers add up to less than one big IPA.
Another other weekend I took Junior-Junior & friend to a UW Basketball game. After I set them up with concessions I got in the beer line for an over-overpriced tall can of Lush IPA. When I got to the cashier she asked for ID, then not even looking at my date of birth, she eyed the ID photo then me then back to the ID and said, “the haircut’s not cutting it…” I said nothing then she said “my husband started going bald when he was 19” Nearly two weeks later I’m still not exactly sure what’s up with the haircut, cutting it or not cutting it.
I met a non-dairy creamer Explicitly laid out like a fruitcake With a wet spot Bigger than a great lake Took me to the new church And baptized me with salt She told me, "liquor" I am a new man
Hot freaks
This one is on the house This one is better than ever
I walked into the house of miraculous recovery And stood before king everything And he asked me to join him in the red wing Took me to pie land Said, "I'm a thigh man" I will be eternally hateful
Hot freaks Hot freaks Hot freaks
This one is on the house This one is better than ever And this one is on the house This one is better than ever This one is on the house This one is better than ever
Over the past seven to ten days I was nonchalantly perusing these two books. The Dirt, Motley Crue’s autobiography and God is Dead, a Frank Vandenbroucke biography.
Here and there. Now and then. One or the other or both. With coffee or beer or both in one hand or the other. Then the Turkey Day holiday gave me some extra down time and VDB went on a breakaway where I plowed through the final 200 pages of Andy McGrath’s book.
The Motley Crue book is amusing and dumbfounding. Crazy tales of crazy things leaving me wondering how they survived it all.
The VDB book is not so amusing but sort of astounding. Crazy tales of crazy things leaving me wondering how Vandenbroucke survived it all as long as he did.
Andy McGrath did an amazing job on this book. Travelling all over the place and interviewing over 60 people to put it all together. Family, friends, teammates, managers, journalists, doctors, therapists, bartenders and people who knew Frank Vandenbroucke. Many of those people wondered why he was working so hard on another book about VDB when there were already several out there.
In the final ten years of his life VDB was in the news for his transgressions, doping, car accidents, legal troubles and marriage problems. Very little media coverage of bike racing success because there was little to speak of.
Early on in my reading both of these books I arrived upon an excessive-excess common theme. Then yesterday I read on page 219 of the VDB book where McGrath talks of overly hungry aggressive inconsiderate cycling journalists:
their often legitimate argument would be that they were also feeding a rampant public interest. People wanted to read all about it; nothing succeeds like excess.
inexplicable excessively excessive excess
A former teammate-friend of Vandenbroucke said in the book that only about ten people knew Frank, but thousands thought they knew the rock star VDB.
VDB refused to train or race with a cycling computer. He said all those numbers just got in the way. That made me smile. He was a real badass with amazing physical gifts and talents.
As a messenger I had a cycling computer for a few weeks. Then I chucked it. The numbers just pissed me off. Miles. Miles. Miles. And nothing to show for it, at least in a bottom line dollars per mile way.
As a mechanic at Bike Works I had a bucket full of cycling computers chucked in one at a time, one refurbished old bike with an old computer at a time. Some of them made it onto the “artwork” you see in these photos.
I highly recommend this book. Molly Foster has spoken for my copy, but when she’s done with it, maybe she’ll give it to you. Or you can buy your own on eBay.
I am not now, nor have I ever been much of a Mötley Crüe fan. I’ve learned more than I wanted to know about the members of the band from this book which I wasn’t looking for. It found me in the little free library and I almost chucked it back, but I couldn’t put it down.
Here and now I was looking for this VDB book and I bought it on eBay. But I will say that when Frank Vandenbroucke was kicking ass over in Europe in the late 90s, I wasn’t really paying attention to pro bike racing. I was a bike messenger and I thought I knew a lot about bicycles.
I’m going way way out on a limb here claiming to be the only person on earth that’s reading these two books at the same time. A chapter here. A chapter there. Bouncing back & forth. Connecting dots between the two. Noting common themes: sex, drugs and bicycles. Plenty of drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs and alcohol too. EPO and heroin. Cocaine and EPO. Growth hormones, steroids, testosterone, amphetamines, morphine, clenbuterol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. Sleeping pills and alcohol. Excessively excessive excess. Self destruction. Eyebrows and hairstyles. Hair spray. Pyrotechnics. Car accidents.
Pointing to inexplicable parallels.
Talking in time lines:
1978
VDB was 4 years old and out on a bike ride when he was hit by a car. The collision left permanent damage to his knee after multiple surgeries.
Mötley Crüe was three years away from becoming a band in Hollywood.
I was in Mrs Grier’s 3rd grade at Audubon Elementary School and riding a Blue Schwinn Stingray.
1994
VDB was a pro at age 19 with Lotto turning heads winning big races
Mötley Crüe released their sixth album and Tommy Lee was somewhere between Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson.
I was working at Whatcom Pathology Lab in Bellingham. A car courier driving all over Whatcom County, schlepping lab reports, pap smears, urine samples, blood, various biohazards and body parts. I was riding a GT Continuum on 700d wheels. That's a 587 BSD. No joke.
2001
VDB was into a stretch of disappointment. Unable to match the phenomenal success he achieved in the late 90s, he bounced between teams and had various setbacks, legal problems, drug problems, marital problems and suicide attempts.
Mötley Crüe released their autobiography The Dirt which would then become a 2019 Netflix rockumentary.
I was between legal messenger jobs, working for a remodeling contractor. I thought you said you’d never forget.
it’s hard to put a finger on but I know it when I see it
If I really did pull the plug on this site in 2012 and all I had to look back on was a few 3-ring binders full of paper print outs, it wouldn’t be the same. The photos of photos cut & pasted onto cardboard and dropped in the mail are inspiring me to go back and find the photos in the archives and hold them up side by side, back to back, end to end, top to bottom. Seeing things in a new way. Retrospect. Nostalgia. A crusty old man complaining about the price of coffee…
This photo is just about almost exactly 18 years old. That’s my cat Brad. He passed away 15 years ago. I sold that RB-2 to Brian O’niell shortly after that and he promptly stacked it up and destroyed the frame. But that top tube pad is still rolling, evoking fond memories of Mama’s Mexican Kitchen in a cheap festive tablecloth Belltown yesteryear kind of way. I’m not sure of the story of how those guys at DANK bags got their hands on this material. But it always reminds me of Mama’s and an Elvis burrito in the Elvis room with plenty of beer to wash it all down.
I wasn’t setting out to build a Nick Blades postcard triptych. It just worked out that way. A pattern emerging from the phantom nostalgia static.
Made one last week. And two more today. Then the triptych spoke to me, saying “one plus one plus one is three” and “take a picture it’ll last longer” A photo of a photo of a photo is a postcard somewhere in there.
Then I looked up Mr Nick Blades. As you may or may not know: baby’s in Reno with the vitamin D. In my nostalgia daze I forget that not everyone knows Nick Blades. And not everyone knows that Nick is Greg Lemond's nephew.
I’m going to mail the framed flip-off photo to Blades himself.
The Colonnades Blades & bike chatting up Buttercup will be mailed to Mr Wheel Fanatyk Ric Hjertberg. Because Ric knows Greg Lemond and it’s a small world afterall. It’s a small small world. Sincerely for real. Really.
The Blades seated at Monorail will be mailed to Ali because that’s 25 stage-left standing by near his Merckx eating noodles with chopsticks.
Yesterday I read in the NY Times about David Szalay’s book Flesh winning the Booker Prize. Then I checked the local library where I would be #397 in line if I wanted to put it on hold. And then I visited my local bookstore, bought myself a book and jumped on the Booker Prize bandwagon. Dumping some money into the local economy on something besides coffee and beer... ...books.
The University Bookstore is the largest and oldest independent bookstore in the state of Washington. Founded in 1900. The bookstore side of the operation is now run by Barnes & Noble. But the good news is it actually looks like a real bookstore again. Two full floors of books, fully racked, fully stocked, fully stacked.
read a book,
read a book,
read a Booker winning book
Today I was admiring this VDB graphic by Snake Hawk via Drunk Cyclist from 2009. It appealed to me then and still speaks to me now, inspiring me to reflect on VDB’s career and read a bit more about him. Which led me to this book. This time I didn’t even check the library. I went straight to eBay and bought a used one for $7.50
One of these kids is doing his own thing but 4 out of 5 of the recipients for today’s batch of phantom nostalgia syndrome postcards worked at ABC for at least a portion of their messenger careers:
Matt Face
Toothaker
Justin Littell
Jeffrey L. Kidder
Five out of twelve of the humans found in these old photos also worked at ABC. 5 of the 12 were Sonics Cheerleaders. The Venn diagram gets a bit more complicated. All four of the ABC cards were notarized. Not with some half-ass rubber stamp, but with my first-tour notary full-on fully embossed crimped crimps crimping gold seals just right in and for the State of Washington residing in Seattle almost exactly 23 years expired.
Go figure.
ABC Legal was not my intended theme this morning, however the pattern emerged from the static.
Much like Nathan Blum describes themes in his writing:
“To say that these patterns are “unintentional” seems wrong; a better word might be “emergent.” And emerge they did. When I read back, it appears that I could not for the life of me keep them down.”
Pulling a printed-on-paper photo from the archives inspired me to dig up the digital original as well as create a new digital copy of the printed paper copy. A photo of a photo of a photo of a photo. Full circle 3.5 times around clockwise plus or minus 18 years.
We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files
At UW Surplus last week I got a pack of Pushkin Portrait Postcards. Only one brick short of a load: fifteen out of sixteen original oversized postcards printed in the USSR in 1987, for 50 cents. Are you fucking kidding me? What a deal. I can’t say I knew anything about Pushkin last week. Now a week later I can say I know a very little small miniscule amount. But these cards are inspiring me to learn more about this Russian dude. I encourage you to read the wiki page description of how he died. I won’t spoil the story for you.
And a few days ago this Proust book jumped into my hands out of the little free library. I’m only 17% into it so far but it’s a great one. I recommend it to you. Sort of a self-help book. A tool to gain appreciation for everyday life as well as everyday books you’re reading. It beats the hell out of slogging through all 4,215 pages of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
I don't pay much attention to cars. But this van parked across from Recycled Cycles got my attention, calling out to the Matchbox Car collector kid in me
My doctoral thesis research continues. Ongoing over the past 35 years, consistently inconsistent, sporadically sporadic. Here & there. Now & then. Once in a while clues can be found in the archives of this here site. But most of the time I’ll make a mental note of it, then forget about it. Write it down on a scrap of paper only to wad up my gum and chuck it. Once in a while I get the feeling I’m forgetting something. Then I remember. I forgot something. But I can’t remember what it was. Repeat as needed.
The working title is “Same Shit Different Day”
If anyone ever asked, I’d describe it as an interdisciplinary potpourri mishmash blend of anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, human centered design, statistics, poetry, historic nonfiction, mathematics, geography, art history, utility cycling, physics, chemistry, dark coffee and craft beer.
The gist of it is: I’m compiling data in an attempt to quantify the number of variables that must fall into place for me to see the same things each day at nearly the exact same times.
The same asshole driver, the same bike commuter, the same dude on the train with the e-scooter, the same coffee shop customer with the foo-foo drink order, the same regular on the corner stool at the bar with his guide dog watching me stroll in like clockwork at 3:33.
It’s the traveling salesman problem playing out in real time, one more time, time after time. Day after day. Groundhog Day.
wonderful
wonderful
wonderful
gold star for robot boy
To quantify the unquantifiable ::: aye, there’s the rub. Decimal places. Percentage points. Probabilities. Put that in a pie chart and smoke it. Boil it down into a clean Venn diagram. Blow it up to poster-size and present it in the conference room to the dissertation committee. Oh and by the way, that committee, they were never there to begin with and if they were, they’ve long since moved on, retired or passed away.
The Jaguars’ Cam Little kicked an NFL-record 68 yard field goal yesterday. It’d be a lot cooler if it was six-seven.
He also hit one from 70 in preseason, but the rules say those don’t count.
Justin Tucker held the previous record of 66 when his kick barely doinked over the crossbar back in 2021. Little’s kick yesterday looked good from 70+.
Tom Dempsey kicked a 63 yarder in 1970. It was equaled six times over the following 40 years but unsurpassed until 2013 when Matt Prater hit a 64 yarder. I believe the records will be stacking up faster than ever.
The 68 record may be broken this season. The NFL recently lightened up their restrictions on kicking balls. So each individual placekicker and punter can doctor up their own balls, break them in and juice them up and do what they want to them. Even if it’s all psychosomatic, the placebo effect is measurable. Put that on a postcard and mail it from 69 yards out.
This batch of phantom nostalgia postcards really got my goat in a good way this fall-back Sunday morning. Before the glue was dry the silkscreen was applied. Now I’m watching paint dry atop the glue. When the smoke clears, I’ll slap a stamp on one and mail it to you and you two too.
For real really, it was exactly 24 hours in Portland sandwiched between two epic Amtrak rides along the I-5 corridor. Down & Back. Ye olde trainy trains.
Junior-Junior asked if he could see the Golden State Warriors play someday and that day was Friday. We got to see Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green playing Damian Lillard and Donovan Clingan from section 308 in the Moda Center.
I saw a rainbow. I saw Powell’s Books for the first time in a long long time. I saw a food-truck burrito unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I ate it. I saw the Pearl District inside and out wandering around and around like a clueless tourist.
I did not see any inflatable frogs, ICE Agents or National Guard troops.
I did see Three-Nine and have a beer or three with him. That was cool. Very cool. Please take a moment to locate the Messquerade Hoody nearest you. Keep in mind, it may be behind you.
There are a lot of photos on this site. But this is one of my favorites. It’s been regurgitated here several times.
I think the original photo is 2007 or 08 or 09. But when I stumbled upon the paper copy of the digital copy from the 2011 iteration, I made a postcard for the messengers at SMC and dropped it in their LSB DNA drop box this morning.
The jaywalker yelling “LAWBREAKER” also inspired me to wear my SMC lawbreaker jawbreaker morton salt girt t-shirt today.
What will Wednesday bring? It will bring it all full circle. Regurgitated rumination loopity-loop loopy cyclical cycles cycling via bicycle.
orange you glad I didn’t say the grass is greener?
nothing says greener grass like an orange T-shirt. Nothing reminds a person to ask questions like a helium filled alien bovine invasion.
Is the grass always greener?
Are those really cows?
What day is it?
How did I get here?
Is that the best you can do?
“We do it that way because that’s the way it’s always been done.”
That’s horseshit.
Dig Deeper.
There’s no “I” in team.
There’s no “I” in go-fuck-yourself.
When I pulled a copy of this little chapbook from the archives to hand off to 22 Heather, I was inspired to add a few alien bovines to my new orange t-shirt.
I think I have about 56 black t-shirts and 3 orange ones.
This photo caught my attention in one of the dusty 3-ring binders full of this site on paper. I cut & pasted it onto some cardboard and it’s now on its way to Toothaker in the form of a neo-retro black & white postcard.
That seatpost was the only Campy thing in my life. The duct taped nose on the Flite saddle was a recurring theme on many of my bikes.
I spent a lot of time staring off into space, pondering unanswerable questions. I guess I’m still doing that. But back then I was “standing by” on the coffee-beer continuum, heavily weighted to the beer side, hiding in plain sight, with 5th & Seneca tall cans, sitting on the walls outside 1200 5th, where my Bianchi was leaning in this photo. You can still call it the IBM Building if you want to. Designed by Yamasaki and kitty-corner from the Rainier Tower, another Yamasaki building.
That OG DANK toptube pad was later stolen off of Bluish’s bike outside the Elysian while she was working.
As an ant is an acid tank and a kid in dank ick can stink
Kickstand is an act and a stand.
It can sin, sic a cad at staid kin
As ticks sink in skins.
Kickstand can scan ants in sand, skin cats, stain a saint
nick, kid, kick, stack, and sack a sick and sad anti-antics din
As it aids kids. It isn’t AIDS and can’t stand
tan Dan and Candi’s tics in a skit in skin.
As I sat and stank, I said
Kick it, kids. Dan, dick Candi!
And Candi said,
It ain’t in, it’s an act: a knick-knack, tic-tac, sin-din in a tin can
An act can’t stick its dick in.
In Kickstand, I said, it can.
###
I have no recollection of how Doug Nufer got these words to me. Perhaps he handed it to me at the Elysian. Or he handed it to a bike messenger and they handed it to me downtown. Maybe he sent a fax to WA Legal... ...Anyway either way, it was printed in kickstand #9 in 1999. printed on actual paper. Photocopied, folded, stapled and hand delivered via bicycle. I'm sure I got a copy to Doug at the wine shop.
It was “reprinted” here ten years later. Now re-re-reprinted 26 years later. I’ve gained another whole new appreciation for it, as an interesting and humorous poem constrained by the letters found in the word kickstand. I also have a lot of respect for Mr. Doug Nufer who is a badass writeras well as a cyclist, former messenger, poet, MC and wine expert.
I created a postcard of the 2009 post and slapped a couple stamps on it to mail to Doug Nufer at the wine shop. Full circle so to speak. More like crazy loopty-loops.
Around 2012 there were rumblings of pulling the plug on this site. Shutting it down. I was a washed up messenger with a very young daughter. I was huffing acetone and carbon dust at Mad Fiber aimlessly regurgitating glory days in a phantom nostalgia syndrome daze. (I'm probably still doing the same old glory daze shit. But at least there's no acetone or carbon fiber slivers and my daughter is much older)
Somewhere back in there, someone I know gifted me three huge three-ring binders of heavy weight paper printed single sided with this here website. No joke. It was intended to make me feel better. Give me something to look back on. To refer to when this site was gonzo.
But it kind of creeped me out. Made me sad. Made me chuckle. A 15 inch stack of paper. Literal reams and reams of paper trying to commemorate this tiny slice of the internet. (How many reams would it take to print all this shit through 10/19/25?)
I put those three fat binders high on a shelf to collect dust. Until yesterday when I cracked one open. And saw it in a whole new light. That’s one reason I’ve been partying like it’s 2009 here and now.
It’s a treasure trove of postcard fodder. An all-you-can-eat buffet of memories with bottomless spicy bloody marys. Chronological archival quality all right there in black & white. It does not invoke the same feelings as scrolling back on the internet. The dusty paper 3-hole punched brings out some old legal messenger courthouse researcher in me. I have already created several one-of-a-kind postcards, including this Doug Nufer antic ink doozy.
Someday soon you too might see one in your mailbox, hand delivered via USPS.
I finally got this book in my hands. Got my hands on this book. Resisting the urge to drop $30 at my local independent bookstore when it came out in July, I put my name on the hold list at the library. Now here we are in October and I’m actually reading it.
We’ve discussed it before when the reviews in the NY Times and the New Yorker were great reading in and of themselves.
I’m about 47% into the book and recommending it to you again. The author is not your average Cliff Claven slouch. He’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He’s my age. He has kids. He lost his very high-paying “consumer strategist” job when covid made it go away and he took a mail carrier job because he needed health insurance. It happens to be in Blacksburg, Virginia, home of Virginia Tech.
In no way do I claim to be a full-on USPS mailman. I’m an electric ass Mr. McFeeley on a large college campus. But the amount of mail I sort and deliver gives me a taste for things this guy is describing. And he describes those things very well.
I won’t ruin the book for you. You can read it yourself.
You could call it an inch & a half. But it’s kind of a big deal in this context. 720mm to 680mm is rolling into a different timezone. It was rather labor intensive with the half-ass hacksaw I had hanging around. However the cost benefit analysis is coming up Milhouse after just a brief spin around the block. It now feels like my bike. Sincerely for real. Really.
What did you do today?
is it a dickstank day?
is it a kickstand day?
either way. anyway. both ways.
Two sides of the same coin. The same sign, two sided. The arrows point the same way. It’s a double edge sword bro. Cuts both ways. The good with the bad. Cost-benefit. Pros. Cons. Flip a coin. Take your pick. dickstank. kickstand.
Over the summer this sign pointed the way to some kids’ computer camp on campus. Then the summer ended and the kids went back to school. But the sign lingered on in a parking strip for weeks and weeks. Until I scooped it up and offered it a second chance. A new home. A better life. Taken out of context and put back in. In my garage.
The font on those stickers would not be my first choice. But they’re what I had sitting around. Dollar Store bro.
Sticker fonts bring to mind the font of choice on the classic covers of kickstand. Those letters were stickers I had sitting around at the time, in the late 90’s. But I actually found them at a yard sale in Bellingham several years before that. No joke. In situ resource utilization. Or is it hoarding?
The kickstand font tumble-jumble made its way onto a run or two of arrow stickers. It also made its way into a tattoo on my nondriveside leg. And somewhere along the way someone, perhaps Tyler Goldsmith, took a kickstand sticker and cut & pasted it into a dickstank sticker. The idea stuck and I did a run or two of dickstank stickers too. And then kickstand #11 was dickstank.
Rolling the wrong way on Okanogan Lane all day — day in day out but today someone rolled up behind me and grabbed my hoodie. My brain rolled through all the what-the-fuck possibilities of who it could be — wishfull thinking — excluding all the fucked up whack job U-district shit show oh shits… …it was Matt Messenger and we had a little chat as I final fifty fucking feet flipped another AMAZON package. This photo is SIX years old but it’s the same shit different year bro dawg.
As the temperature drops into the 40s I’ve pulled some layers out of storage. This hoodie I’ve had for years got called up recently. It’s an Outdoor Research full-zip fleece hoodie. Broken-in in a scruffy crusty commuter kind of way. Just like all my clothes.
On Saturday I added some arrows to both elbows. 24 hours later the paint was still wet. I used a super-opaque white that’s as thick as a brick. So thick it’s tough to squeegee through the silkscreen. But it’s opaque. Its opacity is without question. It’s opaqueness beyond compare. However it takes forever and a day to dry.
I wanted to accelerate the drying process and wear that thing to work, because I wouldn’t want your job on a day like this.
I don’t have a hair dryer. But I do have a heat gun. Hair dryers blow about 140 °F. Heat guns can blow up to 1200 °F. What could go wrong? It’s like being thirsty and trying to take a sip of water from a pressure washer.
I wafted the heat gun over the arrows in a couple different sessions. The second time on the left elbow I lingered a bit too long and melted a hole right through it. Like a party in off-campus housing circa 1973. There were ashtrays everywhere but your drunk roommates still burned cigarette holes in all the furniture.
100% polyester fleece hoodies melt like Velveeta under a heatgun. That little hole is now a souvenir
***
Imperfection is perfection. Hand made in Rainier Beach.
When I woke up this morning the arrows were still a little sticky. Polyester does not absorb paint like cotton does.
That hoodie will take me to work. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe someday.
An amalgamation of positive attributes in an amorphous setting neither here nor there but oh so all the way there all in my mind
satirical yet deeply moving
a poignant and ironic commentary on life
a raw and naked acceptance of the messy, often painful nature of life
A few weeks back I stumbled upon the Iowa alumni magazine featuring a Kurt Vonnegut portrait on the cover. After reading the article inside about the painting and learning more about the artist and Vonnegut as well, I decided I needed to read “Slaughterhouse-Five”. Then the very next day I found a copy in the little free library.
Ruminating on the book upon completion, I had a vague recollection of a past show at the Henry Art Gallery titled “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” At the time of the show back in 2022-23, I had no clue it was a Vonnegut line.
But in September of 2025 it all came together when I asked Margarita at the Henry if she could retrieve the poster for that show from the archives. It turns out she is the “poster person” at the Henry and was the perfect person to ask. A couple days later she handed me this poster. Now it’s on my door hanging very near that Iowa magazine that’s nestled within an 8” x 10” mat & frame that I found at surplus. Thank you very much.
Action Figure Freud: "What’s up Bobby Bobble Head? You get to go for a ride with that well placed zip tie. Round and Round. While I’m stuck in this little free fucking library with two screws, phillips and star-drive too. No Freudian slips here. Horseshit. Lips. Lisp. Slip. Slips. Lippy. Slippy. Tippy. Tipsy. Tips."
Bobble Head Freud: "Be careful what you wish for bro. Chill out. Have another cigar. Bend your elbow. Turn your head. Bend your other elbow."
Around about 15 years ago Sally Claus sent me this Raleigh Port Townsend. Shipped it directly, did he, to Mad Fiber as a Christmas present early. When Sally was Raleigh. Raleigh was Sally.
It’s been kicking around here ever since. The only OE thing left is the headset. Multiple handlebar combinatorial configurations continue on with this bull-moose Still Cruisin' bar made by Nitto and brought to you and me too by SimWorks. As you know, the dream of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s & 90’s is alive in Portland. Rip City. PDX.
This handlebar recently rolled into my garage and today I installed it with some SunTour levers, cables & housing and OURI grips.
Somewhere in that there nip & tuck session a strategically placed zip tie went between bobblehead Sigmund’s lips and on around the front hub. It will allow intentional Freudian slips. Clockwise and or counterclockwise too, depending on your point of view.
Why?
You might ask.
Why not?
I might say.
This bar is 720mm of steel reminding me to chill out, shut up and enjoy the ride. Thanks Sally. Thanks Nitto. Thanks SimWorks.
you can read all about the Still Cruisin' bar here
This bike will be getting more and more rides as more and more rain rains and it rides me to more and more trains.
I wasn’t exactly sure why these tepid milquetoast haikus bothered me so much. Then the big boss told me they were AI generated.
The robot was only concerned with staying within the parameters, counting syllables with beige safe word choices. A complete lack of feeling or emotion. Vapid. No sounds or smells or anything that occurs in nature. Less authenticity than the nacho cheese pump at 7-11.
There’s a growth unfolding in the back of my throat, maybe it's a haiku...
this is a haiku I would be proud to stick on the side of my electric ass bathtub
They say denial is the first stage. But I find myself flying through stages six, seven, eight and on into nine, still trying to play my denial card. All along the way the cashiers say, “I’m sorry sir, your denial card has been denied”
You may have noticed I’m doing a lot of looking back these days. Perhaps it’s because the here & now is so so fucked. A total shit show. So so fucked.
I’m looking back at times I can manufacture and manipulate in my head, adjusting the hue, to create a picture, however contrived, that’s a bit more comforting than current events. It’s my own special phantom nostalgia syndrome. It makes sense because I made it make sense.
Like Kurt Vonnegut said
EVERYTHING
WAS
BEAUTIFUL
AND
NOTHING
HURT
I can’t even begin to talk about the FUCKED UP shit that fills the so-called news these days. Maybe it’s because I took some Tylenol and now I’m autistic.
Moving forward
Looking back
Retrospect
Watching Matt Messenger sell weed to each and every attorney in need right there in their very own law firm mailroom
Buying acid from Pip in the mailroom of a large law firm at 1420.
Buying fat sacks of mushrooms from Ortega right there in the open air of Pioneer Square.
Tripping balls
Reading the headlines in the NY Times
Buying a new oven mitt
Retreating into the past in a cycle of denial fueled by strong beer and Wilson Phillips lyrics
Don't you know, things can change Things'll go your way If you hold... on for one more day Can you hold... on for one more day? Things'll go your way (oh, things'll go your way) Hold on for one more day
the 9/22/25 issue is a great one featuring TC Boyle, Rachel Kushner and much much more including this cartoon which actually made me laugh out loud. That LOL thing is a very rare thing for me in 2025.
If you've ever heard me string together the words HOW WAS YOUR WEEKEND in the form of a question, you know it's sarcastic. It's a joke. It's horseshit. Because I don't care about your weekend. If I did, I'd ask. But I do not. I don't. I will not. I won't.
I never learned to play the idle chit-chat game, to pretend to care about things I don't care at all about. Inane conversation about nothing. Perhaps if I could pretend to hold that ability I'd have a high-paying office job and I could stand around in the break room and babble on about my big plans for the weekend.
h o r s e shit
however, if you actually had a nephew and he got into Tufts, I would stop what I was doing and look you in the eye and encourage you to finish your story.
There are Tufts Jumbos all around us but most of us are unaware. While I was still lauging at Chast's cartoon I sent it to Catarina because she's a Jumbo.
2) an utterance, discourse, or address conveying urgent advice or recommendations
This Cannondale got my attention twice in the Henry Art Gallery loading dock yesterday. Let me just say I commend the owner for riding to work. Thank you. But these handlebars bother me in seven different ways.
I’m a big fan of simple utility. Occam’s Razor. If I still worked at BikeWorks and this thing rolled into the donation queue, I’d grab Occam’s hacksaw and chuck those fucking bars into the nearest recycling bin.
Both times I saw this bike yesterday, all I could say was
“Dig Deeper”
The old messenger exhortation which I attribute to 39 and whenever I mutter it to myself I say it in his voice:
“Dig Deeper!”
Steve would shout this at other messengers and a select few commuters in a comical, sarcastic, ironic way. For example, we might be sitting on a stoop on the backside of triple nine enjoying a tall can or six, when another messenger slowly rolls past, making their way back towards 5th & Pike, and Steve yells
Last week I pulled this Iowa alumni magazine from a recycling bin at the mother ship. It was face down, but I have a good eye as well as a soft spot for the state of Iowa.
Numerous alumni magazines from colleges and universities all over the country make their way through our sorting area. I get my hands on a lot of them and many of them don’t reach their intended audience because their addresses are insufficient.
The Tufts University magazine gets my attention because I happen to know a Tufts Jumbo named Catarina.
The Lawrence University magazine will always bring to mind Professor David Gerard.
The Bush School magazine gets a little puke in my mouth.
On the spectrum of quality, production and design this issue of the Iowa magazine scores very well. It's better than the UW magazine. But maybe I’m biased because I have to schlepp metric shittons of the UW magazine around campus 4 times a year.
The cover art Kurt Vonnegut painting and the story that explains it are both top notch. Really great stuff. You can read it yourself. When I finished the article I decided to add Slaughterhouse-Five to my reading list. The very next day I opened the little free library and front & center was this dainty little paperback edition of Slaughterhouse-Five. No joke. The universe smiled at me.
This book is now at the top of my list and all my other books are standing by.
So it goes.
A few days ago while reading this NewYorker article about Bella Freud I decided I needed to add Hideous Kinky to my reading list. It’s an autobiographical novel by Esther Freud, Bella’s sister.
Bella and Esther are both daughters of artist Lucien Freud, who was the grandson of Sigmund Freud. That’s Sigmund’s disembodied bobble head in the photo. I pulled it off its stick in the garden bed for this occasion.
Lucien acknowledged having 14 children with 5 different women. He didn’t acknowledge the possibility he may have fathered even more kids.
I’d like to say I went to the little free library yesterday and there in the stacks was a first edition hardback Hideous Kinky. But that was not the case so I got myself a cheap cheap copy on eBay.
Yesterday as I was hamsterwheeling the pickup-dropoff dance at 1320 NE Campus Parkway, a discarded cigar wrapper caught my eye. I smiled a mini phantom nostalgia syndrome smile and probably mumbled to myself as my brain scrolled through images of Junior-Junior holding Swisher Sweet wrappers on various streets & sidewalks, parks & playgrounds. We spotted them everywhere and his trained eye could not be untrained.
Sehnsucht. A longing for simpler times. Rose colored retrospect adjusting the hue on old days that may or may not have been good.
A good-old-days daze.
Circumspect retrospection.
Introspective recollection.
Some of those old days were good for sure, and here and now in today’s shitshow, my brain cherry-picks only those good old days to hold up in comparison as I sip a $5 cup of coffee or a $10 pint of beer and scroll NY Times headlines.
What if Marcel Duchamp had one of these? Ric from Wheel Fanatyk sent me this oiler. I can’t say I’ve used it yet except in this sunset garage photo shoot. But just holding it in my hands I can feel its quality and simple old school utility. Ric only sells quality stuff.
I cannot remember the last wheel I built. It’s been a while, a long long while. But I can say with confidence I did build this radially laced front wheel that spins in my Duchamp knock-off within a REDLIP fork that I bent one morning 26 years ago bombing down Denny, plowing into the back of a Cadillac.
That was then. This is now. Talk about connecting dots that were never meant to be connected... ...My friend Steve calls me Matt and I have 07:07 inked on the back of my hand and Matt 07:07 says “Ask and it will be given to you bro; seek and you will find" the squeaky wheel gets the grease
As we speak 51,317 students are slowly making their way back to the You Dub campus. I can’t see them yet, but I know they’re coming.
An earthquake 6,000 miles away will trigger a tsunami that makes its way across the Pacific. I can’t see it yet but I know it’s coming and I know it’s going to fuck shit up.
Like that and like this.
Equivalent to the entire population of Olympia disappearing in June. Everything is chill. Quiet. Mellow. Wide open. Accessible. For a few months lulling me into a stupor.
Then one day, the entire population comes back to the U-District. Out of nowhere. A recurring zombie apocalypse. Just like it says on the academic calendar, classes begin on the last Wednesday in September and they'll be moving into their dorms and apartments and houses a week earlier.
I don't follow the academic calendar, I just roll around in it.
The other other day after a brief conversation with 22 Heather about sprinkles-jimmies-hundreds & thousands-shots-vermicelli or whatever you called them when you were a kid where you grew up… Heather created these Jimmy covered Timmy letters. Then I glued them on some pink paper and cardboard with magnetic strips on the back so Jimmy Timmy can wear it on his locker at work. Nothing says Jimmy Timmy like Timmy covered in jimmies.
Today I completed a special postcard on a 14” square of packing cardboard saved from a scrap pile. Now I’m watching paint dry. Rotate the square 90 degrees and it's still a square. The bolt and washers are installed intentionally so it’ll hang just so. Don’t bro me bro. One inch thick. One less care. One to be hand delivered via electric ass bathtub someday soon.
22 Heather pointed out the phrase in other languages and cultures as she is now the pround owner of a glass apple & a glass orange
“Why do you keep saying that " he asked in response "Apples and oranges aren't that different really. I mean they're both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They're both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine I can't think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple. If I was having lunch with a man who was eating an apple and-while I was looking away-he replaced that apple with an orange I doubt I'd even notice. So how is this a metaphor for difference I could understand if you said 'That's like comparing apples and uranium ' or 'That's like comparing apples with baby wolverines ' or 'That's like comparing apples with the early work of Raymond Carver ' or 'That's like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.' Those would all be valid examples of profound disparity.”
― Chuck Klosterman
this book just jumped from the little free library into my hands.
better late than never. 22 years later there's a message in there somewhere
I like Klosterman in small bites, here and there, now and then.
Pilder, a writer with a pointed blog, has honed his outlook on the polar glimpses the job provides, from Columbia Center's 72nd floor to Third Avenue's homeless men. And from spending as much time in elevators as in the saddle, listening to absurdly intimate conversations or countless versions of the same question: "Is it raining?"
"That's the worst question you can ask a messenger that's soaking wet," he said. "Just because you don't have windows in your work, you ask me if it's raining. Of course it's raining."
That’s not a top tube pad, that's a TaylorMade golf umbrella. A country mile long and wider than your wingspan, ziptied to the bike. The extended toptube effect VanMoof’d in my shorts. But like Alistair said, it got me home. Russell said it might not make it past the bike rack at Big Time and I agreed with him in a karmic comes-around-goes-around on the Ave kind of way…
I didn’t take the photo to share with you. I took it to see if it would make it past the Big Time bike rack. I took it to commemorate a calendar date like: remember that one time I found a fucking golf umbrella leaning on a dumpster and I grabbed it? Then I spent three weeks thinking about how I’d get it home? Kinda like this and like that and like this
And then?
No and then
And then?
No and then
And then it set off a sequence of memories when I finally ziptied it on for the ride home and it actually made it past Big Time…
I used to talk shit about umbrella’d peds downtown. As I was a soaking wet messenger with rain dribbling into my eyes off of whatever I happened to have on my head and then on down into my mouth contributing to the various postnasal drip tributaries that were dripping down as well. I’d mumble to myself “I hope your hair doesn’t get wet as you make your way from your parking space to your office door”
I visualized various methods of schlepping this thing home, zip ties, toe straps, sticking out of my backpack, or wearing it like Conan across my back. Not that Conan. THAT Conan. The guy that lived in the Mohawk Apartments at 13th & Jefferson in the late 90’s. The guy with the incredible Italian steel road bike collection. The guy that rode one of those sweet bikes to get Korean food on Broadway every single day with a fucking sword on his back. That guy. Yeah that guy. Peloton Cafe cannot help but absorb some of Conan’s mojo. The Mitten coffee shop, even more so. I just hope it’s the sweet Italian lugged steel vibes, not the weird whacko sword toting vibes.
The one and only truing stand I own is an old old old Park Tool version that I got from 09 Dave. 09 lived in the Mohawk Apartments in the late 90s before we both got jobs at Elliott Bay Messenger Company. Dave developed a friendly bike-like chit-chat relationship with Conan and got a few hand-me-down bike tools and tidbits from him. Like the truing stand that he passed on to me. 29 years later it’s gathering dust in my garage.
I’m still not an umbrella guy. A Seattle resident for 34 years, I do not reach for an umbrella on the way out the door. But this fucking golf umbrella got my attention because I’m a soccer dad these days. There have been a few soccer games where I’ve watched Junior-Junior play, standing completely still for 2+ hours in pouring rain. In my so-called rain gear. Soaked. Cold and fucking soaked. And not in a bike messenger way. In a stationary soccer dad super saturated sad sack spongey way…
This thing is HUGE. It’s made for golfing golfers but now it’s all about standing still in Woodland Park on the sidelines watching Junior-Junior’s soccer game in the rain.
That back-to-school feeling always got to me as a kid. Then long after I was out of school various things would trigger flashbacks.
It hits me in several ways these days. In addition to my usual back-to-school gut feelings, now Junior and Junior-Junior are going back to school and I’m rolling around a quiet empty 700 acre campus with the annual culture-shock-kick of 50,000 people coming back to school, looming in the very near future.
If this quote had ever entered my ear it immediately exited the other ear. But when I recently read in the NewYorker that RF Kuang has it tattooed on her wrist I realized the quote will be sticking with me this time.
show don’t tell
walk the talk
you gotta walk it like you talk it or you’ll lose that beat
Authentic authenticity means something to me. My dad once complimented my innate bullshit detector. Here’s some further reading on the subject that recently added itself to my reading list:
22 Heather shared these photos with me in an email. She knows I like arrows. When I saw the thumbnail images, I thought they were cool.
Arrows are cool. I will flip through catalogs of traffic signs and scroll through sites that sell arrow signs. I find arrow signs all around on the ground and offer them a new home. The walls of my batcave are covered with arrows. There are arrows tattooed on my arms and legs so I don't lose them. There are arrows silkscreened on my hoodies so I know which way to go. There are arrows all around. So many in fact, they tend to blend in and become the scenery.
When I started looking at the full size images of these, I realized they're more than cool, they’re really really really cool. Actual arrows on asphalt enhanced by Thai Bui the artist with chalk, adding drop shadows and highlights.
East Bound in the bike lane one day. A bike lane I’ve ridden countless times before. So many times I subliminally know when the bumps are bumping, the cracks are cracking, I know what’s down there, because I’ve been there, done that. I post up out of the saddle and absorb the bumps right in time as they’re bumping. All muscle memory. No thought bandwidth used. No static at all. I’m pretty proud of my lizard brain. But just as I’m patting myself on the back the front wheel hits a chunk of wood, hits it hard, a chunk that’s not supposed to be there. I snap out of my stupor and the universe says, “don’t get too cocky bro, I’m the one telling you how it is”
This scrap of cardboard is the jumbo postcard of the day. Soon to be hand-delivered via electric ass bathtub to the Medicinal Herb Garden Guy via the Life Sciences Greenhouse.
The gold cow is on the fence, looking one way, then the other. She cannot decide which side has the greener grass. All the while she’s hearing her grandma’s voice in her head, repeatedly repeating reminders to be careful what you wish for...
got my hands on a rather large number of planning committee blue ribbons with built-in adhesive strips to adhere to your name tag at the convention or meeting or large event that required a planning committee to plan. So as I walk around and mingle and schmooze you’ll clearly see my name MATT PINTER and that I’m obviously a proud member of the planning committee.
In this package there are several hundred perhaps a thousand of these blue ribbons. Why would I buy it? You might ask. Well I bought it because it was there. Because it was 50 cents. Because I could take them out of context and put them back in some how some where some time.
These ribbons have been sitting here for a few weeks, waiting for me to deploy them in a new and interesting way. But a little while back I gave about 25% of them to 22 Heather and said “what would you do with a bunch of planning committee blue ribbons?”
Several days later Heather presented me with a little cabin in the woods down by the river made with cardboard and a healthy heaping helping of planning committee blue ribbons, as you can see in the photo above.
Tuesday I got this matted & framed photo at UW Surplus. Not for the photo, for the frame. However, the photo has since haunted me and I’m not sure I want to mess with its mojo. I may just keep it intact as a true 1987 artifact. I can always find another thriftstore frame for the project I’m envisioning.
The more I read about this quintet, the more respect I have for the frame.
Philip A. Trautman was a distinguished professor in the UW Law school for 50 years. He passed away in 2019.
Mark E. Abhold fell off the internet, perhaps in an Applied Physics military secret nuclear engineering way. Let me know what you know about him.
Ann L. Darling is in the UW Communications Hall of Fame. She went on to teach at the University of Utah for years.
Paul Pascal was a distinguished Classics professor at UW for 38 years. He passed away in 2015.
Loveday Conquest is currently Professor Emeritus in School of Aquatic and Fishery Science. She taught at UW from 1978 - 2014. Even though she retired before my time, her name vaults her into the top 5 on my list of UW faculty-staff names that float through my vision as an electric ass bathtub mail man.
My mental list includes names like:
Bo Woo
Jade Cox
Velocity Rose
Pepper Schwartz
Tres Tracy Ballon
Sherri VanSickle
Ursula Elspeth Owen
Lochlan Michael Hickok
Andrea Chateaubriand
Loveday Conquest is an all-time-great name.
PS::: I also found a Grinnell College T-shirt at UW Surplus in my size for $1. Sometimes you’re not looking for something, but it’s looking for you like the Ace of Spades.
A few days ago one of my coworkers discovered a dusty old large box of paperclips in a storage cabinet at the mother ship. It was placed there years ago by a former government worker.
Yesterday I dug my hand into the box for no real reason. Just to hold a heaping helping of old paper clips. Just because I could. This of course, inspired me to make a chain of clips. Which in turn brought to mind a little ditty I wrote 17 years ago when I was a shit-talking legal messenger, making shit-talk observations of various government workers, specifically King County Superior Court clerks.
Here and now, seventeen years later, I’m a shit-talking government worker observing other government workers. As I taped a chain of paperclips to a pen I smiled the smile of a completed round trip. Out & back. Full circle. Always on time. Never working late. Getting the job done. See my pen-paperclip display below.
This guy Alex, actually was your Bucky back in the days when he was a teenager, before he had status but he probably had a pager. He did the Bucky’s Blood run all over First Hill to various hospitals, here & there, out & back. Towing the biohazard insulated trailer, until he ditched it when no one was looking and just chucked the shit in his bag.
A while back when we were talking about the good old days and he told me about Bucky’s I knew I had to make him a Bucky Blue t-shirt.
He was wearing it today when I spotted him in situ and got a photo. Alex rides an electric ass bathtub to work sometimes with his dog up front. Because it’s a quality of life issue and when you’re the building coordinator, every day is bring-your-dog-to-work day.
All I wanted was a pepsi. When I say pepsi, I mean IPA. But really all I needed was a birthday balloon or two or three. As those in the know know the dollar store is the place to go for helium birthday balloons.
While finding the balloons some hummingbird stickers found me.
I wasn’t planning on a limited run series of hummingbird postcards, it just came to be.
This book of short stories jumped into my hands out of the little free library. Then I looked it over and learned Charles Johnson is a professor emeritus of English at UW where he taught creative writing from 1976 until 2009.
I’m not a dust jacket fan so I ditched it. Then I added some crows feet because I’m a crow fan and that plain white cover sans jacket was sad.
These stories would hold my attention regardless of the author. But the fact that Johnson is a UW badass makes it even more interesting to me as I schlepp it around campus in an electric ass bathtub and read a short story now and then, here and there, here and now.
As work progresses on this work in progress, I recently added a zero. Because, as you know, it all added up to zero. Then I created an equation bottom-line-underline from a vacuum cleaner belt and a plus sign from some heat-shrink tubing. A short while later Junior-Junior said “those don’t add up to zero unless you make the 5 and the 8 negative”
My brain was running Public Enemy and his brain was running the numbers, doing the math. He also quickly mentally calculated the total MSRP for all seven sevens that Steve Young recently gifted me.
Spot on.
The ceramic heads above the Channel Zero addition equation don’t have much to do with it. They were just there first and proximity leads to assumptions. Your brain invents connections where there are none.
Everything is a work in progress. Somewhere along the lines of expansion or contraction. Red shift. Blue shift. Renewal. Decay. Layers. Iterations. Additions. Subtractions. Positive. Negative. It all adds up to zero.
Fourteen years ago I made a silkscreen of the slippery-when-wet bike safety sign (if you speak the lingo you know it's W8-10 bro) Yesterday I made myself another black t-shirt with it and it came out OK. But when the silkscreen was still wet I slathered it onto a campus map that was sitting around. And that [map + sign] got me more excited than the t-shirt. The front hub just happened to land in the middle of Red Square. I couldn't have lined that up if I tried.
Bob Ross would say it's less of a logical progression and more of a happy little accident.
Yesterday I got seven sevens from Steve hand-delivered all the way from Rip City. Each digit is hand-painted with unique color combinations. Each digit also has two kick-ass magnets installed.
warning sticker off the ground in the LifeSciencesBuildingbro loading dock?
Yes I am
Then I chopped the sticker into pieces and shuffled them onto a scrap of cardboard and called it a postcard. Weeks and weeks later I wrote on it and hand delivered it via electric ass bathtub to the Medicinal Herb Garden Guy.
A recent shift in my shop space created a gap for a table, a drying rack, a slop-sink mop-sink utility-sink off-loading silk-screen supply platform if you will.
I could go to the store and buy some new fasteners. I could find the exact match online and buy two of them. I could give a shit about color coordination. I could get a brand new table, in just the right size at IKEA and it would off-gas its particle board odors for 5 to 7 years. Fuck that.
What truly brings me joy is finding old seemingly incompatible shit that’s been sitting around in the garage for years and slapping it together to create something new. Something new to me. Some people call that In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU)
I call it taking it out of context and putting it back in.
On this project there was no measuring, no calculation, no trips to the hardware store and no out-of-pocket expenses. This project cost a total of zero dollars because it was all just sitting in the garage collecting dust.
A few years ago I found a Lyon stool in a to-be-tossed pile. It was missing a couple of spacers at the base of two legs, so it was a little ricky-rocky. But a washer solved that problem.
Lyon Stools are steel and bombproof. Old school like your Junior High shop teacher. They used to be made in Aurora, IL. I’m not sure if that’s still the case. However, there is no doubt in my mind that this particular stool was made in the USA some time in the last 75 years.
The loss of paint, rust, battle scars and duct tape residue clearly illustrate the life that this stool led in chemistry labs for years and years at UW before it was kicked to the curb. Which is where I spotted it and adopted it and offered it another life in a quiet, less toxic space.
A few months ago I found a nice sturdy piece of plywood in a loading dock scrap pile. 24” x 16” x ⅝” = solid. A real keeper.
Yesterday, all the scraps came together.
I rounded off the edges of the plywood, sprayed painted a crow stencil (from Bret in ABQ) and silkscreened on a few lines of elevator conversation. Then I slathered it all in six layers of polyurethane.
Now it’s a table, it’s a stool, it’s a silk-screen supply platform drying rack. Nobody has one of these, except me.
56 is the number on the mail room in Bagley Hall. It’s more like a storage closet where the mail gets delivered each Mister-McFeely-morning.
Bagley was built in 1937 and houses the Chemistry Department at UW. I like to visualize the craftsman that hand painted those digits on the doors in Bagley some time between now and 1937. Years later the 56 was covered up with tape and a sign for some reason. Then more years later the sign was removed but the residue remains and it makes me smile in 2025...
Just moments ago, Chris Murray sent me this shot and it occurred to me that we're in the last full week of July.
That's my old RB-1 still rolling across Iowa for yet another RAGBRAI. I've lost count of how many it has done now. Same stem, same saddle, same cranks, maybe even the same rear wheel...
I believe Mr Chris Muray is on his 21st RAGBRAI leading team pilderwasser on a great bike ride across Iowa from West to East. I'd like to draw your attention to the team's new green & black jerseys in the background.
This book is 10 years old. But new to me as I plucked it from the public library. It’s a satisfying smaller size, not too heavy to schlepp around in your bag. But it’s not light and fluffy reading. It’s unlike the books you’re used to. And it features a crow.
This book is 18 years old. It got my attention in the little free library on a Thursday night then I finished it in a day and a half. A 400 page page-turner. It’s disturbing, distracting, entertaining and well written.
This book is 9 years old. But the English translation is only 7. Cat thanked me for recommending it to her. Then I told her it wasn't me and I took it as a recommendation and bought a used copy. Here's another book unlike the books you're used to. I haven't been blown away by it, but it has helped me appreciate some small details of the work-a-day-world that I don't always think about. And it's a great size to have and to hold and to read on a summer day sitting in the shade somewhere.
One day back in the day Junior was given a hefty bag full of hand-me-downs. That bag included a zebra print coat that she would never wear.
So I gave that coat to those guys down at DANK bags and a while later they gave me a zebra print coozie.
Fast forward 13 years and call it "today" when I’m standing in the garage holding a can of Dalton and I pair it up with that there zebra coozie. (Bon Jovi added to show scale) Then I paired that pair up with this photo of 39 in the zebra print coat and here we are
fever, tiredness, body aches, skin reactions, flushing, sweating, constipation, diarrhea, dizziness, drowsiness, dry mouth, halitosis, vertigo, headache, insomnia, nausea, suicidal thoughts, abnormal heart rhythms, internal bleeding, liver problems, kidney problems, drop in sex drive, confusion, regret, rumination, loss of appetite, alopecia, muscle soreness, joint stiffness, fatigue, swelling in the affected area, inertia, complacency, seamlessly smooth transitions from coffee to beer and back again, a dwindling number of fucks to give, a total absence of give-a-shits, phantom nostalgia syndrome, phantom ass-pocket U-lock syndrome, asking “what if?”, questioning “if only”, repeatedly repeating the same old stories, bad jokes, poor punch lines, when-I-was-your-age-phrasing paired with you’re-doing-it-wrong-proclamations.
Zeppelin II cassette stuck in the deck of a Datsun B210 to auto-reverse forever.
In most situations with a strong correlation I say let’s not jump to causation. But here I say causation all the way.
27 years ago I did a little zine called kickstand with the Soundgarden song looping in the back of my mind…
…correlation? Yes.
…causation? Hell Yes.
Today I made myself a dickstank trike shirt and I also got myself a knock-off Soundgarden kickstand trike shirt
In the late 90s I had this t-shirt, not from a concert, from the cool poster shop at 6th & Denny. I wore it very few times. If only I still had it I could sell it on Etsy for $450.
For my second attempt at owning a version of this shirt I went with a tasteful understated black instead of the original sickly brownish green.
kickstand
Kicksand, you got loose and I threw up Yeah kickstand, you got the juice to fill my cup My mother say that it's alright My mother says that's the only life
So do it right Do it right Come stand me up Come stand me up Come stand me up
Yeah kickstand, I got saddle made of leather Oh kickstand, I got the words to come together I got the urge to ride your trike My mother says that's the only life
So do it right Do it right Come stand me up come stand me up come stand me up
Oh kicksand, you got loose and I threw up Yeah kickstand, you got the juice to fill my cup My mother say that it's alright
Do it right Do it right Stand me up stand me up, stand me up
When I was a bike messenger I took these photos at 1000 2nd Ave when Martin Selig the Seattle real estate titan, owned 33.3% of downtown Seattle. Selig probably owned 66.6% of the buildings I frequented as a legal messenger.
5 years ago the covid shutdown lockdown ghosttown downtown zombie shitshow (working remotely) changed Seattle in many ways. It still has not recovered or returned to the work-a-day office space of yesteryear. Here and now Selig’s grip on the city is slipping away. You can read all the details in this Seattle Times article
If you own the building you can do what ever you want with it. You can paint huge canvases, call them art and hang them in the lobby, in the hallways, in the offices of your real estate empire. Selig painted these giant paintings (12’ x 7’ ish) that got my attention back then. That's Mary posing in front of one circa 2006.
The USPS will call it a postcard if it’s no more than 4.25" high x 6" long x 0.016" thick.
Some of these pilder mashups are 12” x 18” and up to 0.25” thick. I like to write on the back, put on a fake stamp or three and “mail them” to special penpals I know on campus or nearby in coffee shops or bike shops. Hand-Delivered via electric ass cargo bike.
Junior Junior will take over delivery duties on a crow creation I recently made for one of his teachers that is retiring, a guy you might know: Chris Quigley. As if. If only.
One day a few months ago, I hand-delivered an old-marine -climatic-map-crow-creation with the words I wouldn’t want your job on a day like thisslathered over it, to Dr. Cliff Mass at Atmospheric Sciences. When I asked him about it later, he laughed and said he got a real kick out of it.
I enjoy handing off postcard-size postcards to the USPS, for penpals around the country. Those feature some of these same themes but are constrained by their size limits. However, I’m not ready to pay the postage on these 18” x 12” lumpy creations that would have to be bundled up to make the journey and therefore would no longer appear to be giant postcards.
It’s not my birthday but it will be soon. A calendar date to commemorate. When you get to be my age you start thinking about fresh tennis balls for your walker.
Today I went out for a dry-fit test-run. The drive side ball needed a little tweaking and luckily the Medicinal Herb Garden guy had a Rambo knife that he let me use for 23 seconds. Perhaps later on, the Electric-Ass-Cargo-Bike-Fleet-Mechanic can dial the tennis balls in for the big day.
In 2003-2004 I was silkscreening T-shirts, one at a time. Stick figure bikes on the front with “a quality of life issue” on the back. I gave them away to friends and sold a few on eBay. With postage fees and eBay’s cut of the deal, my profits added up to Jack Shit. So in 2005, I started this website to sell some t-shirts directly to consumers.
Somewhere in that there time span I asked my college friend Dan Murray if he wanted to do a little bike ride in Iowa called RAGBRAI. He asked his brother Chris to come along and we all rode our first RAGBRAI, calling ourselves “team pilderwasser” because we were wearing some of those stick figure bike shirts I made. As seen in the photo above on our way home after our first Great Bike Ride Across Iowa.
1047 weeks later...
...this site is still up
YOU ARE HERE but not to buy t-shirts.
And Mr. Chris Murray has done every single RAGBRAI since 2005. With Jimbo’s help, they’ve grown team pilderwasser into kind of a big deal. With luggage trucks and charter buses. A strong core of regulars surrounded by a rotating cast of newbies. They’re not messing around in halfass t-shirts. They’re sporting pilderwasser jerseys with matching caps and coozies too.
It took me a second to realize the green-black-white color scheme of this edition of the jersey is a nod to the Grinnell Griffins Rugby team which is a nod to the 2007 original pilderwasser team bus
A Bulldog T-shirt under a Big Time Hoodie. Both ends of my coffee-beer continuum. Literally, figuratively, metaphorically, symbolically, gastronomically, economically, anaerobically, wardrobically.
Single-handedly supporting the local economy, one beverage at a time. Frequent flyer cards in my wallet side-by-side. Buy 10,000 pints, get one free. Not just talking the talk, walking the walk, wearing the shirt. Wearing the shirt and the hoodie too. A “most-regular regular” candidate. I’m drawn to authentic real-deal really-real places like these. They’re not fluffy or shiny or trendy or new. They're not perfect. They are what they are. Good coffee. Great beer. Cool people.
The owners of both establishments are pillars in the U-district community with a rich history of UW connections and plenty of stories to go along with it all. Bulldog opened in 1983. Big Time in 1988.
More often than not, my workday begins at Bulldog with coffee and ends at Big Time with beer. Old School U-district all the way both ways. Round the way, University Way NE bro, you know "the Ave". Just this side of 42nd on the Ave to just that side of 42nd across the Ave.
I shared this photo with UW President Ana Mari Cauce and she responded with a “That’s great. It made my day. Thank you.” all before 8:17am this Monday morning.
President Cauce is winding down her final weeks as President. I’ve had the privilege of being the electric ass Mr McFeely to her office in Gerberding for 73.7% of her tenure. I don’t talk to the president but I talk to the staff in her office and they talk to her for me.
Ana Mari Cauce is a real badass, on so many levels and I believe she has done things the way they should be done, working through many difficult situations over the years. Now she can take a deep breath, relax a little bit and go back to being a psychology professor.
I know a guy named Alistair and he’s kind of a big deal in the electric-ass bathtub world. This status is confirmed by the fact that Grin Tech recently asked him to pose for a selfie. He expressed his discomfort in this, saying he’s probably been in three selfies in his entire life. Then I asked if that included the Sally-Stevil fake selfie. He claimed to have no recollection of the events in question. But his recollection was actually spot-on.
It took me a long time to find this shot in my slap-dash photo filing system. I even asked Sally to send it to me. But how could Sally have a fake selfie on his phone? June of 2021 feels like four years ago plus or minus fourteen more.
Stepping off the elevator, the smell of microwave popcorn hangs thick in the air, recycled for hours by the so-called HVAC system. Eventually the entire floor reeks of Orville Redenbocker. Each arriving elevator opens to capture a few cubic yards of popcorn air and take it on a journey up or down to share with other floors in the building. Until finally, in a day or so, the smell will dissipate.
The source of the smell can be traced to the microwave in the breakroom, the underbelly of the law firm. A gritty, filthy, behind-the-scenes hangout for support staff.
This is the office of our biggest client. I’ve been coming here off and on, but mostly on, for the past eleven years. Employed by four different messenger companies over that span. My paychecks have changed, at least the return address printed on them has changed although my net pay has stayed the same.
In eleven years I’ve seen numerous receptionists come and go, countless legal secretaries as well as support staff and mailroom employees. Attorneys come and go too, but that does not affect me. A rookie in receiving or a temp at the front desk, those are the people that really affect me.
I’ve seen the office remodeled once. I saw the dot com boom. I saw big tobacco litigation. I’ve seen a few things in the legal messenger world. These people have seen me, the old-timers here know my name and say hello. I say hello back and sometimes I smile. One day years ago it was cold and raining and someone invited me into the break room for coffee and it has since become part of my routine.
The coffee here is bad, but it’s free. And free is free. It’s Folgers in individually wrapped filter packs. No measuring. No mess. You just toss one in and press the red button. I don’t actually work here and I think I’m the only person that drinks this shit, except maybe James in office services.
I prefer to drink my coffee from light colored mugs so I can see what I’m drinking. But today my choices are limited so I’m using a dark blue pharmaceutical company mug and gazing up at the ceiling.
Fluorescent lights behind large plastic panels among acoustic tiles in a drop ceiling give everyone and everything here a sickly pale sheen. The lights give off an audible hum that nobody notices. This hum paired with the drone of the ventilation system creates a dull white noise that forms the background to a workday filled with beeps, chirps, squeals, whines, murmurs and buzzes. Computers, phones, printers, copiers and elevator bells. Muffled conversations among the workers blend together. Inane chit chat and jibber jabber. Some say ten percent of the workday is spent on personal matters. But I think ten percent or less of the workday is actually work, the rest is personal shit. I’m not sure what these people do for 8 hours.
A large round table dominates the room with mismatched chairs scattered around. All of them cast off from the conference room or various offices. When an attorney gets a new chair their old one is adopted by a secretary or paralegal. And the hand-me-down trickle down continues on. A chair that nobody wants ends up here in the break room. There is a sizable magazine collection, heavily weighted to women’s fashion, home decor and Hollywood gossip, with a few outliers being golf and fly fishing.
Taped to the microwave is a sign that reads COVER FOODS COOKING MICROWAVE This sign bothers me, as I continually read it, rearranging the words in my mind. I imagine the author’s voice and motivation. Was it carelessness, or their sense of humor? Their choice of fonts was all wrong and the way they chose to tape across the corners instead of creating neat tape loops on the back of the sign. Rumpled and splattered with various liquids, this sign should be replaced. But it’s been there for years and I’m just visiting.
The refrigerator is the unofficial bulletin board for the office and features flyers about a blood drive, a lunchtime concert series from last summer and a memo about the company holiday party. I haven’t ever opened the fridge and do not plan on it. By the time left over food is that left over, I’m not interested.
The floor is covered in industrial strength linoleum squares, as boring as a government job. The hallway just outside features brown low-profile carpet, crushed down, years past its prime, traffic patterns clearly visible, threadbare in spots. I imagine the worn out carpet being mentioned at a staff meeting and the office manager laughing and changing the subject. Then one day I overheard her telling the receptionist that they’d already signed a lease on office space in a South Lake Union spot. So the lame ass ugly old carpet is the least of her worries.
It’s their scenic 700 acre campus, I just roll through it. This crow duo’s territory includes the Life Sciences Building and they know me and my habitrails and that my habits include coffee and fig bars in the morning, and that I’ll gladly hand over a bite or two of my snacks when I have some. However, just one stop earlier at Chemical Engineering, I tossed out the last of my snacks to another crow.
The aggressive one in this pair perched on the rear fender and took a few whacks at it to get my attention, creating a metallic racket. As I explained my food situation to her, she then hopped up to the saddle and began to really dig in with her beak, like a deranged woodpecker. Then I said I’d gladly pay them Tuesday because I had no more fig bars today and I rolled on.
I wasn’t in the market for grips, but I guess these grips were looking for me. If the first stage is denial then the next first stage is reaching out to Steve Maluk because these silicone grips will always and forever and forever and always remind me of Steve. He talked them up and stocked them up in the shop at Bike Works when we both worked under that 501(c)(3) ten years ago or so.
I actually had a pair of these grips on the Allez once upon a time. In a tasteful understated gray grey way. But they were sliced off when I ditched the thumb shifters.
But anyway as I was aimlessly loitering in Recycled Cycles in a former bike messenger now government worker asking Andy Voight if he’s my Bucky kind of way this past take-your-baby-yoda-to-work-day afternoon around 2:22 when I saw these grips and I picked them up only to take that photo for Steve in a thinking-of-you Hallmark Card kind of way. As I was ham-fisting a thumby text message to express those thoughts, in-walked Steve G and the entire Bike Works posse on their Seattle bike shop bike ride tour du jour. It was a big ball of Bike Works energy bouncing on Boat Street for one brief shining silicone moment.
I’m not making this shit up.
Then I bought those grips and put them on this bike.
There are only 5 points of contact on a bike: hand-hand foot-foot & ass. So why not float those points on something that brings you joy. ESI 100% Silicone grips made in the USA. Platform pedals and a WTB saddle.
I like to think that it’s possible to send out telepathic messages to people through the earth, through time and space. And I’ll go with that thought and sometimes I feel like backing it up with a photo and or a text.
Like when I see a #56 Lawrence Taylor jersey and think of Koshalla
Or all those produce PLU # rubber bands that say Catarina
And “Pour Some Sugar on Me” will always say Sara G
Or in my inner ear, I’m hearing “you can do it” from 02 Joey in his Corky voice
Or 33 John saying “just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…” repeating repeatedly
Or a vivid dream featuring my old pets Brad or Skunk or Jody or Buppy or Wendy, just checking in, saying HEY. Across time and space and modes of existence, speaking from the hereafter.
Those telepathic messages are flying around all the time. But most of us are oblivious to them. However, some of us can tune into them sporadically, and when we do, it’s amazing. Like a crystal clear blast from the past in the middle of the AM dial that comes in for a while just outside Ellensburg and then it fades to static once again.
If anyone could tune in to those types of messages it was Aldous Huxley. But that’s another story.
These 5 Double Darns are still in heavy rotation. The black cotton at the top is the newest member of the family. Just breaking in this week as the morning temperatures are in the 40s but the afternoons get into the 70s. The winter weight wool has been the go-to for the past several months under a bucket helmet. But the helmets are getting lighter and the caps are getting cottonier as the days are getting longer.
I’ve had several other Double Darns that I wore until they fell apart. Then I patched them up and wore them some more.
When the Giants top draft pick Abdul Carter asked Lawrence Taylor if he could wear #56 and bring it out of retirement, Taylor said “No”
That made me smile. It also made me think of Koshalla.
There are 56’s all around you. But maybe you haven’t noticed because they’re lurking in the scenery. Around 3:33 this past Thursday I stumbled upon a 56 lingering on the bar leftover from the lunch rush. It spoke to me and then we had a beer together.
Welcome to pilder’s coffee shop where you can order whatever you want but when all is said and done, you’ll be presented with a 12 ounce drip coffee, black.
Only 49 pages into this book but it’s a five star thirty three thumbs up, reinforcing my appreciation for what goes on in the brain of a writer non stop all the time any time whatever time and what time is it? What appears on the surface may or may not be giving any indication of that brain activity. This book has evoked memories of The Coin
Ask me about the difference between a hyphen and a dash. This free library score brings me joy flipping to any random page and pondering the ridiculous inconsistencies in the English language.
Right Brain-Left Brain. anxiety spirals vs creativity spirals. Good stuff. For real. Really. On so many levels. So much…
Free library score. Can’t say I’ve read it. Because I have not. But I will. Some day. I think.
Another free library score. I was a 509 kid and as those in the know know, that’s east of the mountains here in Washington. The other Washington. Haven’t read anything beyond the story line and the inside cover maps. But I’m looking forward to it and or back on it like a 1997 road trip…
Sunday morning easy like staring at the wall making an effort to not be informed on current events, to remain unaware of breaking news and to not let politicians be what I think about all day.
The other other day at work, Timmy Jimmy broke out a perfectly-timed and spot-on:
Big Fucking Shit
Right Now Man
And it made me smile and nod and ponder Double Nickels on the Dime and ask myself how long it’s been since I sat and listened to all 43 tracks in a row. It’s been a long time. Years and years.
I gave track 5 a spin, but today could be the day I zone out to the whole thing at least once.
"It's Expected I'm Gone"
Minutemen
I don't want to hurt See my position was here I mean as it was I was
So this led to the downfall of man I can make seconds feel hours
I make certain That my head is connected to my body
No hope See, that's what gives me guts Big fucking shit Right now, man
Please take a moment to locate the 22 nearest you. Keep in mind, it may be behind you.
April 23, 2025
Today I’d like to draw your attention to the number 22. And with that attention you’ll start to notice 22s all around you. They’ve been there all along but you haven’t really seen them, until now. Yesterday was April 22. But that was so six hours ago. That two-two is behind you.
Fire Station 22 is on Roanoke. Which is right on my line when I ride my bike to work because the trains are jacked. And a couple weeks ago I spotted Engine 22, which resides at Station 22. It was parked at Urban Horticulture on a non-emergency sightseeing mission.
Two-Two to you two too.
I live way down by Fire Station 33. And the less-train more-bike to work for the past 10 days has been a real Phantom Nostalgia Tour of Seattle for me. Remembering yesteryear, the good old daze. When Capitol Hill was home.
Slowly rolling past the places I used to live. Two of them are long gone, two of them are still there but I’m sure the rent is three or four times what I paid.
My commute seemingly takes forever on a bike. It’s actually just a bit longer but I’ve grown soft over the years on my daily slack jaw zombie train rides with a book or the New Yorker or Wordle and Spelling Bee.
4070 is the PLU number for celery. It’s also the PO Box number for the department of Intercollegiate Athletics at a large state university on the Montlake Cut that’s now in the Big Ten conference. You might know of it. Last week this rubber band ended up on my arm and it reminded me of Cat and her encyclopedic knowledge of PLU #s. So I sent her this photo and she guessed “broccoli?”
In our very brief texts she explained her “knack for numbers” has fallen into the background since she’s had kids. I believe if she was thrown back into that number salad her recall would quickly return.
Bike messengers’ brains grow in a special place to accommodate numbers, street addresses, suite numbers, messenger numbers, times, dates and all kinds of random numerical shit. Just as barista brains grow to accommodate non fat decaf extra hot iced white hemp milk mochas with half vanilla half pumpkin spice moo moo choo choo foo foo horseshit coffee drinks.
That messenger part of my brain glommed right on to the number casserole in my current place of employment. There are a lot of numbers floating around.
9410 forwards to 4943 which forwards to 8051
4990 used to forward to 4950 but now 4400 forwards to 4990 so don’t fuck it up
5320 and 5325 go to 1800 and so does 1812
5915 goes to 1635
Most of the mail for 3903 Brooklyn Ave NE doesn’t go to 5667 the department in there, it goes to 4969 which used to be at that address before it moved to 4300 Roosevelt but now it’s at 4328 Brooklyn NE
regurgitated
reiterated
renumerated
two actuaries
walk into a bar
play it again
numerology
numerals
numbers
taxonomy
codification
nomenclature
jargon
lingo
language
meaningless
gibberish
out of context
room numbers
street addresses
zip codes
post office
box numbers
hand delivered
analog
analogy
number salad
route the route
run the numbers
don’t fuck it up
1150
1202
1207
1248
1210
1230
1237
1242
1243
1244
1245
1263
1264
1265
1266
1267
1268
1270
1271
1277
1310
1410
1525
1550
1560
1570
1580
1610
1615
1616
1617
1618
1619
1620
1621
1622
1640
1651
1652
1653
1654
1655
1700
1750
1800
1812
5200
5320
5325
5720
5726
5730
5734
5740
these are the box numbers on my morning route but I'm not necessarily hitting them in this order
we can talk about street addresses too as much as you'd like to
we can also talk about the afternoon routes and their box numbers and street addresses some other time
One day among the days that all seem to blend together in the daze that blends it all together, I was on the loading dock that’s spitting distance from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network HQ loading and unloading Amazon boxes from the electric ass bathtub I was Mr McFeely-hamster-wheelie-final-fifty-fucking-feeting.
Some people call that loading dock 3920 Okanogan Lane NE. Some people call me Maurice. I call that loading dock MOLES with a side of ATG.
One of the PNSN guys was loading up his truck with what I like to think of as Sasquatch Surveillance equipment. If anyone is going to spot Bigfoot out there in situ, those guys are. As I was getting back on the bathtub the PNSN guy said “LoLo” and I guess he was speaking in my direction. But I was all the way down Okanogan Lane before I realized what he was talking about. I chuckled to myself thinking maybe someday I can talk Zero-Sevens with that guy. I’m surprised he could read the digits on my hand from 15 feet away.
When I got the tattoo, Joe Who the tattoo guru said “don’t you just want to go with 707? You know, LOL?” I said “no. no I don’t”
Lolo is a badass in the movie "Joy Ride" and you can google L-o-L-o and make it mean whatever you want it to mean. But the tattoo is no no LoLo bro.
It’s 07:07
just last night I added a couple surplus address number 7s to that road sign with spray adhesive, giving it a touch of 07:07
got my hands on some fresh black paint and some kick ass spray adhesive and now Bret’s crows from ABQ are once again popping up on projects and postcards and flying into zipcodes here & there
The other other day I showed that urinal photo to a UW plumber on the train ride home in a have-you-ever-seen-such-a-sight-in-your-life kind of way. It’s the Schmitz Hall 2nd floor men’s room by the way. He laughed and quoted me building code center-to-center urinal installation measurements. That Schmitz setup is a joke, like a bad piss joke punchline. As we were talking urinals, the 5 Point periscope came up and another train passenger jumped right in telling us he replaced the roof on the 5 Point many years ago and earned free meals for a long while as interest payments on his delayed roofing job payments. The 5 Point is legit real deal Seattle history and this guy let me know it all the way to Beacon Hill.
no eyed deer
I only visited The 5 Point a few times. But it brings up a certain memory that lingers somewhere in my phantom nostalgia syndrome, all these years later. The lingering memory does not surprise me. But I’m amazed I was able to find these photos to back it up.
I was just beginning my morning routine of legal messenger deliveries at 2101 4th. When these two crusty old messengers were strolling south through Bell Town after opening The 5 Point. Or maybe they closed it at 2am and opened it again at 6am. Either way they definitely opened it and were carrying on with their day. We chatted briefly and I snapped a few shots on my digital camera.
The plus or minus 1.67mm of Rainier Can protruding wrapping enveloping circulating cascading visibly is no sloppy oversight. It’s out there to let you know that I know that you know that I shimmed it out with a beer can.
this Ritchey Force stem brings me joy NITTO going forth with whatever handlebar needs that need to be handled
bringing even more joy than the Ritchey Logic cranks which we can talk about on another day
As I’ve ridden this SHOGUN to work for two days in a row now onto day three. On an odometer that’s like 9 miles. As the crow flies with the bike along for all the train rides, that’s like 90 miles. Either way. Anyway. It’s a lugged steel single speed circa 1987. As heavy as the day is long. Cadillac smooth 27” wheels on the downhills. Cadillac heavy everything adding up on the uphills.
Herb Alpert wasn’t really playing in the garage but it could have been in my mind as Moon (the cat) was supervising a Saturday 27” tire-swap test ride while his brother Cosmo was around somewhere but couldn’t care less about bike tires or anything much at all except his next nap.
I finally got my hands on a pair of 27” tires that don’t suck and now maybe I’ll ride this bike more often…
The other-other day I was delivering mail when a busted chunk of a NO BICYCLES sign caught my eye. So I stopped and scooped it up. Later when I took a moment to take a closer look I decided to complete the loop and look for the remainder of the sign. When I found it I could see the spot on the wall where it resided for the past 30 to 50 years until sometime very recently when somebody decided to rip it down, bust it in half and chuck it on the ground.
Cue the electric ass bathtub mailman, stage left.
The sign was hanging just above a very large bike rack on the water side of the South Campus Center. Just a stone's throw from the corner of San Juan Road NE and NE San Juan Road. I’m not making this shit up. See red arrows on campus map above.
That sign, not that sign, that sign was painted by hand as you can see the brushstrokes are visible but confident and experienced. A textbook example of hand painted letters. I like to think of a UW sign painter in the 70’s earning a living wage in an affordable city enjoying their work while they smoked their cigarettes. No need to take “smoke breaks” because there were ashtrays everywhere all around all the time.
An article in the 01/02/1972 issue of the Seattle Times said of this new South Campus Center: “June tentatively is the time set for beginning construction of a $3.5 million south campus center on the shores of Portage Bay. It will be built under financing of special student fees. The center, to serve students and others in field of fisheries, oceanography and health sciences, will be between the Harris Hydraulics Building and the old Oceanography Building. There will be food service for 750 persons and recreational, meeting and lounge areas, including a multipurpose room for 200. Unlike the Student Union Building, the new center is not designed as a facility for student government. Services in the center planned are a branch of the University BookStore a barbershop, check-cashing facilities and a postal substation. There also is space for a future tavern, should the legislature permit it. The Bumgardner Partnership designed the center to contrast with the other south-campus structures ‘so that members of the community will be drawn to it’ in moments of escape from their work and study areas. A large terrace shielded by glass skylights cuts into the building mass and opens to the south for sun and view. A sloping lawn with perimeter stairs links the major social spaces with a campus road and the bay, The buff-colored reinforced concrete structure will have a total area of 71,500 square feet. Occupancy is expected in the fall of 1973.” (See Julie Emery, "U.W. beginning last big year of rapid capital expansion," Seattle Times, 01/02/1972, p, F2.)
Please observe no smoking areas and get your goddamn bicycles off my lawn.
Standing on a crowded train near my bike on the hook staring off into space, glazed over, when the couple in the jumpseat asks me what the toptube pad says, what it means, what it’s all about?...
EXTREME, I say, it’s a road sign, highly reflective. Which leads to an exchange of bike things, bike stories, bike experience, bike wisdom. Some of which was lost in the heavy tunnel train noise. But here’s the gist of it:
-Yes that’s my bike, I tell them
-Oh we ride bikes too — 50,000 miles together ridden on our tandem
-Wow, I say. I thought tandems made people split up, driving them to divorce?
-No, tandems just accelerate the direction the relationship is already headed in. We’ve been together for 40 years.
-Right on, I say. That explains it well
Then they got off the train
I’m not a tandem guy. No thanks. I’ve been passed by tandems bombing downhill at 53 mph in the middle of Iowa. I’ve passed tandems grinding uphill at 7 mph in the middle of Iowa. I see plenty of fair-weather tandems on the Burke-Gilman trail.
I’ve seen entire families on bicycles built for 4 with a trailer for the littlest little kid in the back. A parent-child tandem ride brings a smile to my face.
I have a lot of respect for the frame builders of tandems and the mechanics that maintain them. But I have no interest in riding one. Even if the stoker is a teddy bear or a zombie or an olympic athlete or an inflatable doll on RAGBRAI.
My relationships are already moving in the direction they’re headed, they need no extra push, no extra pressure. I like to ride bikes to get away from horseshit. An escape. I don’t need a bike to accelerate my personal relationship horseshit one way or another.
Ride on
Rock on
that happy 50,000 mile tandem couple inspired this one-of-a-kind tandem postcard
Same crows, different day. Atmospheric Sciences looking for a snack from the electric ass mailman’s bike around 9:22 am. While waiting, one of the crows took a shit. As you can see. It’s right where the offramp from Exit 169 off northbound I-5 feeds into 7th Ave NE just south of 45th. In line with the scale of the map this turd is the size of a small apartment building.
Neither here nor there. Everywhere. All around. ONEWAY or another.
A little. A sprinkle. A dash. A skosh. Kinda sorta. Hinting.
A lot. A load. A fuckton. A metric fuck ton. Full-on. All the way.
I’m a little bit country.
I’m a little bit rock ‘n roll.
I’m a little autistic.
I’m a little alcoholic.
I'm a little bit of a slouch.
“Don't sell yourself short, you're a tremendous slouch.”
like Ty Webb said in Caddyshack
We’re all somewhere along the spectrum. Some of us are further along than others.
This little quiz will sum up your Autism Spectrum Quotient…
Here are a couple statements I plucked from the list and my answers expanded upon:
I notice patterns in things all the time.
—I strongly agree. I’m rolling around paying attention to things that a lot of people never notice. Patterns. Rhymes. Repetitions. Clockwork. Habits. From the static patterns emerge.
I am fascinated by numbers.
—I agree. I like numbers. But not all numbers. Fascination may be too strong of a word. Some numbers get my attention and stick with me. Street addresses, phone numbers, analog watches, digital clocks, VCR clocks blinking 12:00, zip codes, PO Box numbers, messenger numbers, hospital room numbers, coffee shop customer numbers, Lawrence Taylor's jersey number, dates and any palindromic numbers. Please note that up to this moment I’ve refrained from saying anything about 3.14159 this Pi Day.
I still remember the license plate on my mom’s 1971 Monte Carlo: CPJ 895. She sold that car in 1985. I remember the phone number we had as a kid for our yellow rotary phone: 328-2952. I remember my grandma’s old phone number too: 325-1209. Grandma had a wall mount beige rotary in the hallway with an extra long handset cord so she could pace around and talk on the phone for hours. Those were hard-hard wired land lines in the 509 of course.
I enjoy social chit-chat.
—I STRONGLY DISAGREE. I fucking hate chit chat. Can’t do it. Find ways to avoid it or I just walk away. It bothers me. I do not pretend to care about things that I don’t give a shit about. I’m not interested in what you did over the weekend. If I was, I'd ask you about it. But I’m not.
Sometimes when people are talking to me, I glaze over and stare off into space over their shoulder, then they turn and look around, wondering what the hell I’m looking at while they’re trying to tell me something important.
Before I answered the questions, I had an idea of what my score would be and it was spot-on. I have an idea of what some of my friends and coworkers’ scores might be too. There are a couple guys on my mail routes that would crush this thing. Outta the park. Off the charts. I wouldn’t want to see things from their perspective, because I can guess what it’s like. But I’m curious to learn more and I’m not just talking shit. This little quizlet has already helped me laugh at my own habits and anxieties. And I think it will help me see things differently, to walk a mile in their shoes, so to speak. Let them try to walk a mile in my blown out Sambas.
Please take 90 seconds and complete the 50 questions. Upon conclusion there will be no opportunities to enter your email and win a $2 Starbucks gift card. Your score is not important, it's just a place to start the conversation. It's not a pass-fail. It's a dipstick. But it is what it is. You can't add to it, or run low. You are you. You are here. You don’t have to share your score. You can share your score if you want. Or share it anonymously. You can tell me someday and buy me a beer. Then I’ll tell you my score and buy you a beer.
The UW Mailing Services Bullitt, affectionately called an Electric Ass Bathtub, was invented to help the USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL and Amazon deliver parcels the final fifty fucking feet.
this FUN FACT T-shirt is brought to you by the Medicinal Herb Garden Guy at UW. Those in the know know that's Keith.
Keith has achieved the zen-like state of not-giving-a-shit. This is a state of being we all strive for but rarely achieve, aside from momentary glimpses, lapses and chemically induced imparement. Through years of work, repetition and dedication, Keith is there. And he might soon have the T-shirt to prove it.
As you're shopping for your new T-shirt to be more like Keith, you might want to throw in a few stickers from Stevil too.
Signs with proper punctuation and spelling just fade into the background like elevator muzak or white noise. But when you tack on an extra S or two, you might get my attention as I pause and mumble the words to myself. Then you might even get a chuckle out of me.
I’m not sure who made this sign which lives on a cart in the mothership at my POE. But it catches my eye almost every day these days.
Within this negative image inversion of Mark Wamsley’s bar-napkin sketch of Emily Wamsley, I’d like to draw your attention to the kickstand hoodie.
And now I’d like to draw your attention to one of Emily Wamsley’s latest works of art. Around 24" x 48" it’s her largest piece ever and she said “it’s heavy as fuck”
I haven’t seen it with my own eyes. But I plan to on March 14 at RedWing Cafe deep in Rainier Beach. You can see it too along with some of her other works on display for a few weeks.
Here is a book I had in my hands last week at the University Bookstore. But I didn’t buy it. Now I’m #41 in line for the Seattle Public Library’s ten copies. Which means I can go back and buy the book today, read it this weekend and then pass it along to three or four friends before I’d ever see the book from the library.
It’s a quality of life issue.
editor’s note: I bought the book today and both employees behind the counter gave me the thumbs up good choice way to go good call and on and so on:
07 days later &
07 hours later today
double oh seven
this time it’s for real sincerely for real really in my hands and I can cancel my hold on a SPL copy
“the possibilities of my current situation had not occurred to me before now”
-page 14
just diving into the book now. it’s a compact 120 page bird-in-hand to the outside observer. but it’s not light reading. there are no redundancies. No fluffy fluffies. No poofy poofies. 120 pages of questioning, pondering, re-reading, asking, absorbing, soaking…
we’ll talk more later...
In the photos below, is a book I saw in the Miller Library art book show last week. Letter to Crow by Dorothy McCuistion. It wasn’t really in my hands. But they let me turn the pages if I was careful. This one-of-a-kind book was not for sale and if it was it’d be way beyond my discretionary funds.
Recently, the back cover of a catalog in the recycling bin caught my eye. Actual beer goggles. Fatal Vision goggles, marketed to high school health science teachers to teach their students the perils of alcohol consumption by simulating impairment.
For only $169.00
This cracks me up. I’ve got a better idea kids. Why don’t you give me $169 and I’ll pick up a six pack of tall cans and you can experience actual impairment. No need for simulation.
Yesterday I released this postcard out into the world via USPS. Directing it over to the 98103 and Mischief Bicycles. As Dr. Chris discusses beautiful fully-custom titanium bicycles with his clientele, Q-factor, crank length and riding style, he is not tweaking the chainstays with his trusty ball-peen hammer. All that and more is why this image in a high-end Ti bike shop brings me joy.
Around the same time, Toothaker was enjoying a cup of coffee on Capitol Hill. Here are his own words to describe it:
The young barista at little odd fellows said to their coworker, 'after work today my boyfriend and I are going to Bike Works to get bikes. He's ok with buying whatever bike is available but I can't do that-I need to feel the pull of the bike I am buying. It's a relationship thing'
This brings me joy for other reasons. That barista was spot-on. I’m all about feeling that pull. I shared this with Steve G at BikeWorks because he knows a thing or two about used bikes and their pull or lack thereof.
BikeWorks is a special place. It kicks ass. And not just in a 501(c)(3) way. It is tapped into the amazing aquifer of used bicycles in Seattle. I had my hands on thousands of them over the years I worked there and volunteered too. There are bicycles that give off great energy. There are bicycles that need to be heaved into a dumpster. And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bikes in the mid range. But it won’t take long when you walk into the shop or warehouse to feel the pull of a bike that’s right for you and build a relationship.
Marching forth this March Fourth — Fat Tuesday on into Ash Wednesday — on into giving up non-alcoholic beer for the six weeks of Lent. Ready to spring forward like the Easter Bunny, more than ready. With countless shipping containers full of plastic easter grass, plastic eggs, plastic baskets, plastic Jesi and all the other single-use plastic shit that people need for 90 seconds on Easter morning before they chuck it in the ocean like a dental pick.
stand by
have your cake
eat it too
stunt double
you’re doing it wrong
I’m happy to see February in the rearview mirror. Sincerely for real. Really. Fuck February.
Last week I got my hands on a new safety orange hoodie with plans to screen print all over it. So Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to give the new hoodie some black. But when she came there the black jar was bare and so the new hoodie would just have to wait a while.
Friday at Artist & Craftsman Supply I found a fresh jar of black ink but I also found a jar of fluorescent orange, a color never before screened through my screens. It was calling out to me from the shelf. “Look up here. Look up here. Look up here.”
The two new oranges (hoodie & ink) will not be working together directly but they’ll be in the same space at different times. They are works in progress as we speak.
Orange whip?
Orange whip?
3 orange whips
Last year I pulled from a recycling bin a 1981 US Navy Marine Climatic Atlas of the World. It has been an upcycling gift that keeps on giving postcards and various art projects. Chock full of 12” x 20” maps for each month of the year featuring world-wide means and standard deviations. One man’s junk is another man’s orange whip postcard catalog.
"we now join our regular commute, already in progress"
February 21, 2025
Another epic commute to work
A herky-jerky train ride sandwiched between two short bike rides like this and like that and like this
And then 9.5 hours later, do it all again in reverse order like this and like that and like this completing the round trip so to speak
And then 24 hours later do it
ALL AGAIN AND AGAIN
As often as necessary
Reading The New Yorker cover-to-cover or any random book dujour like The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin (thanks Cat) “no man is an island - every book is a world”
Wordle & Spelling Bee & Connections
With plenty of slack-jaw thousand-yard stares off into space. That’s how I roll in the groundhog-day hamster-wheel work-a-day rat race rut rote route routine
if I had a can of spray paint that's not where I would go with it. I'm more of a lowercase g guy. but as I parked the electric ass bathtub beneath it every day this week at 1320 NE Campus Parkway right around 11:27 am, it's made me smile for various reasons
This book was published in 1972. Chock full of exploded view diagrams and classic hands-on black & white photos of bikes and tools and tools on bikes. I got it at a thrift store some time in the late 90’s. The book was pretty cool, but the cover kicks ass. The go-go boots, the inverted bike repair chat in the park, the all-ages joy ride and on and on and so on. It was an original painting, specifically done to be the cover of this book. When I go back and find the artist’s name, I’ll let you know. Or you can get your own copy on ebay and let me know his name.
The other day I was about to chuck it in the little free library when I flipped through it one last time and noticed a few pages of diagrams had already been hacked out. They were probably cut and pasted into an issue of dickstank some time in the late 90’s.
Here and now a few more of those exploded view diagrams are on their way into upcycled postcard status because I decided to tear off the cover and put it in a thrift store 8" x 10" frame to hang on the wall and collect dust like “art”
I wasn’t looking for this book. But I guess it was looking for me when it found me at the local library. Now I suggest you look for it. Neko Case is a true rock star and she grew up right around here “raised by two dogs and a space heater” She spent a lot of time in Whatcom County and Washington state. And much of that time she was alone.
I’m halfway through it but it’s not too soon to recommend that you read it too. This week’s book of the month. This month’s book of the year.
At the Bulldog street window I set down my coffee cup to reach for my wallet. No words were spoken until the barista poured my coffee and said “you’ve got some competition for the most regular-regular. Maybe we’ll take a photo and post it on the wall.”
I smiled and said thankyou.
Which brought to mind the regular-regular status I earned at Bean & Bagel — being so consistent they named a bagel setup after me
“The Mark”
Everything bagel toasted
Cream cheese
Tomato
Hot sauce
It’s like a phantom nostalgia BRASH burger PTSD covid stress dream. That place went out of business, unable to survive the covid lockdown zombie shit show. Sometimes I sit on the steps across the street at Gould and ponder it all retrospectively…
On the beer end of the continuum I’d say I’m not even in the top 30 regular-regulars at Big Time. But right around 3:33 I might be in the top 10.
Same old same old, boring, predictable, invariable, blase you say.
How about dependable, solid, steady and trustworthy.
It’s not that I enjoy drip coffee so so much. It’s that I don’t give it any thought. I don’t want to think about it. Which frees up some bandwidth to think about very important things, like making a list of cat names:
CAT names for cats
Smokey
Colloquia
Knock Knock
Turkey Jerky
Regularly
Dennis
Potsy
Audubon Autobahn
Ziptie
Adirondack
Nipples
Kerouac
Stoner
Tuesday
Brash
Squeeze
Sriracha
VanSickle
Precipitate
Actuary
Significance
Super Bon Bon
Sharrow
Poncho
Tanya
Tamika
Sharon
Karen
Zero Seven
Ciocc
Notary
Hi Viz
Tall Can
TacocaT
Catarina
Inertia
Reciprocity
Nomenclature
Cats and their cat names bring to mind the movie Flow, which I saw yesterday in the theater with my kids. You can stream it soon. spot on.
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.
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