How would the bike industry survive without planned obsolescence? I don’t know. Consumer culture is all about buying the next big thing, whether you need it or not.
The bike industry is in a unique position because the bicycle is essentially very similar to what it was a long long time ago. There are plenty of advances, improvements, trends, fads, cycles. But I think it’s much ado about nothing much. Marketing horseshit jibber-jabber.
40 year old thumb shifters that feel great. 40 year old brake levers still kicking ass with no end in sight. An old XT short cage derailleur that works well in 2026. The bike industry wants to see this stuff in a museum somewhere. They don’t want me rolling it onto my next new-to-me used bike.
It wasn’t planned permanence. It wasn’t a durability-focused design. These kick ass Suntour 7-speed thumb shifters still kicking ass 38 years later, were accidentally endowed with sustainable longevity. No good for the bike industry. Good for me.
I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, that much is true...
August 1, 2026
Orange you HELLA glad I pulled a stack of legal size hanging file folders from the recycling bin in the College of Built Environments?
Why would I do that? Because I can.
I cannot believe it’s August already. As I flipped the calendar page I envisioned a train trip down to Rip City in a few weeks to hang out with Mister HELLA 39 Corndog. I’ve marked my calendar. This got me thinking HELLA even more…
Before you woke up this morning I screened myself a fresh HELLA shirt. Super opaque white paint on a black pocket-T. Simple, understated, timeless, classic. The L L A in HELLA transition neatly up onto the left breast pocket. Nobody has one of these. Except me. The paint is drying as we speak. HELLA Rip City PDX almost ready.
Screening only one T-shirt is rather labor intensive and kind of a waste of time and paint. So as the silkscreen was all slathered up, I pulled off a few postcards on orange legal size hanging file folders. They’re already dry and addressed to three different people, in three different states in the Pacific time zone. One of them is of...
Chris Cornell wrote a song about a guy going postal, “Mailman” is track #4 on Superunknown.
But what if Cornell was looking 33 years into the future, pondering the superunknown? What if he left a little room, a little opening, open to interpretation?
What if it’s a song about a guy rolling around a scenic 700 acre college campus on a $12,000 electric assist cargo bike, delivering mail. This guy always looks to be thinking about something, with a half smirk on his face. He seems to be talking to himself, or maybe talking to his bike:
I wasn’t looking for this book. But it kept looking at me. Quietly, consistently peeking out from the display case in the hall of Edwin R. Guthrie Hall, home of UW’s psychology department. I walk past it every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. It’s sitting there on a shelf among various artifacts, photos, correspondence, props, devices, tools, gadgets, remnants and psychological detritus. This book is the most current artifact in this collection representing UW psychology history.
“The scientific study of the mind and behavior” leaves some space for interpretation and improvisation. Science. But not so hard. It’s closer to social science and includes quite a variety of research and variations on the theme: clinical, cognitive, developmental, social… …biological, behavioral, psychodynamic.
One day I paused in the hallway and took a closer look at the book. Then I read a bit about the author. Finally, I found a used copy on eBay, to have and to hold as my very own. If this is my train-commute book du jour it will be sans dust jacket. Within 5 minutes of receiving my copy of the book, I removed the dust jacket and screen printed a gold derailleur...
Yesterday I took Junior-Junior to the BikeWorks Warehouse sale. We stayed for about 90 seconds as I had brief flashes of used bike part pile PTSD. Then we walked over to the yellow house and bought him this bike. A 13” TREK 3500 from 2016. The frame geometry brings me joy. Orange you glad he chose this bike?
The Gregg’s Cycle sticker is in pristine condition on the down tube near the BB shell. I like to visualize the original owner walking into Gregg’s Greenlake with their kid in 2016 to buy them this bike. The kid rides it 3, maybe 4 times. Then it sits in the basement for 10 years, until finally the parents donate it to BikeWorks after their kid’s college graduation motivates a little house cleaning.
Then the BikeWorks mechanics dust it off, spruce it up, put a price tag on it and roll it onto the shop floor --- as good as new. That’s when Junior-Junior spots it, test rides it and I buy it. His only complaint was the grips. So I swapped them out for a more comfortable user-friendly pair and installed a bottle cage in that little window on the...
