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.
