A few weeks ago I screened myself a Hella t-shirt and pulled off a few postcards too, residual byproduct side effects.
Then I mailed them to Corndog, 22 Heather and Catarina. It took a few weeks for Heather’s to travel one mile, a few weeks++ for Corndog’s to get to Rip City 200 miles south, and I’m still hoping Catarina’s will surface in McKinleyville some day soon, 571 miles south of here.
These postcards sat in some US Postal purgatory for a few weeks. I think they were stuck together and maybe stuck to other mail too and tossed aside until someone somewhere sorted them out and put them back on their way. My postcard to Perkins Coie took weeks and weeks to get to Molly. Ashurst Perkins Coie, that is, just a few miles south of here in downtown Seattle.
I believe my fondness for Dot-a-Lot dimensional craft paint is the reason my postcards have glommed onto each other. And perhaps I need to scale back on the use of it with USPS items.
However, I hand-delivered a card to the Medicinal Herb Garden Guy Keith via the Life Sciences Building at UW and it took nearly 3 weeks to get into his hands. Dot-a-Lot or not…
I went to Portland for 67 hours to visit Corn Dog and the MADE show. Now I’m in recovery mode, aka: robot boy zombie electric ass mailman. I got some photos I plan to put in a slide show. But I’m in a bit of a technology pickle. So it might take a while. I started a MADE PDX slideshow on the slideshow page. And eventually I'll get the photos up there.
"Toto represents Dorothy’s deep connection to home, her grounded reality and the voice of truth."
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Rare Buffalo leather San Marco Rolls saddle. Light brown with gold highlights. This is a vintage rare saddle. Perfect finishing touch to your 90's restoration project. Or you can buy it and flip it on eBay for $200. They don't make these anymore. The only thing wrong with it is the rivet head that popped off on the rear ROLLS panel, as you can see in the photo.
This saddle is gently used but over all, it's in good condition.
that was my craigslist ad
A couple days later, one response, no bullshit, no stupid questions, she showed up early-on-time, on a bike, and paid cash.
sometimes craigslist is cool
I got this saddle years ago at Bike Works and Steve Maluk frowned upon my "employee 5-finger discount" because he knew this was not just any old saddle. I put it on my purple Bianchi for stint. Then I gave it to Steve Young for a bit and he rode it for a moment. Then I took it back from him because the other Steve said it was so valuable. And then it just sat in a milkcrate full of saddles in the garage for 12 years. Until today. When it SOLD
the proceeds will be poured directly back into the local economy and beers with Steve Young down in Rip City
Up on upon its first test ride I had the rear brake only laced up to Ye Olde School Suntour cantilever lever. It felt like nothingness. It felt like a rainsoaked super saturated nerf ball on a trampoline. It felt like a stress dream where you’re trying too hard to look like you’re not trying too hard.
It did not inspire confidence.
Then I slapped on some XT levers and the brakes felt better. I rode it around the block a few times trying to burn off all the BikeWorks greasy grease on the rotors. It started to feel a little bit better.
And then I thought of Steve Maluk scolding me for building up a bike with canti levers on V-brakes. It works. But it’s half-ass. And we don’t sell half-ass bikes here. Those were not his words but they’re my summation of the situation. Lesson learned.
On these XT levers you can switch the cable pull from canti to V-brake. Quick as a wink. If you’re cable actuating disc brakes you want to be in V-brake mode and pull more cable. Not until today did I realize I was test riding in cantilever mode. When I switched them over, the fine red bicycle finally felt rideable.
“Note the fine red bicycle leaning on the sunny side of the outhouse.”
-Paul Fattaruso
Bicycle page 63
The Poprad’s maiden voyage was just down the street to shoot hoops with Junior-Junior.
With only the rear brake strung up, it was a slow roll. The microSHIFT shifters shift just like shifters should shift. This fine red bicycle still needs work, and a new fork. But it’s coming along.
This cold brains Cannondale sat outside of Fisheries all week, unlocked.
unlocked…
cold brains, unmoved
untouched, unglued
alone at last
no thoughts, no mind
to rot behind
a trail of disasters
“Cold Brains”
Beck 1998
Perhaps it’s been there more than a week, but I do that fishery route every third week, so I’m not sure. The fact that U-district bike thieves have bigger fish to fry in 2026, makes me chuckle.
Cannondales make good cheater bars. If this bike rolled into BikeWorks during my tenure, I’d tag it: “AS IS ONLY” I would not touch it with any tools. But if it was damaged, I’d strip any usable parts and hack-saw the downtube into an oversized cheater bar. This cold-brains Cannondale would fall on the cheater bar spectrum somewhere between the Gary Fisher and the Klein.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. But don’t give me your blown out HeadShok. What would Pig Boy do? (WWPBD) Note the superfluous seat post clamp on the saddle.
Like an angel, the bicycle is born with an innate choreography, which it cannot fail to understand.
-Paul Fattaruso
Just yesterday morning I got my hands on these microshift bar-end shifters at Recycled Cycles, you know 1007 NE Boat Street. They were just sitting there waiting for me, like it was meant to be, like innate choreography at half the MSRP.
A few hours later I ditched the bar-end set up and put them on the Poprad as downtube shifters. All frictioned-out to control my shiny new 2 x 7 drivetrain. Like Steve always said, shifting is overrated. I'm keeping it simple, shaving with Occam's razor.
Going to the downtube allows me to ditch a country mile of cable housing that would normally travel from the thumb shifters down to the el diablos. This set up also makes the Sim Works handlebar oh so elegantly clean and simple.
It's a luxury to have days & weeks to refurbish a new-to-me used bike. It's my bike. Not a nosy neighbor's. Not a shop customer's. Not an annoying coworker's.
I don’t remember the last time I saw Sally before I saw him yesterday at Flying Lion. We picked up just about right where we left off. What would Sally do? I think he’d have a beer. We talked about delivering mail, Toyota Land Cruisers and what not. We talked about stuff & things, kinda like Raymond Carver’s classic short “What We Talk About When We Talk About Single Speed Cyclocross”
But Sally knows not to talk too much of that shit with me, as I’m a spectator at most, a drunk spectator at best. It’s not about the words spoken, it's about the space left in and around what’s said. It's about what's not said. As Hemmingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” comes to mind. Plenty of space there left open to interpretation. Spin it as you will. Spin it in your favor.
Check your calendar:
Single Speed CX Worlds Bellingham 10/2/26
Woodland Park Hodala Last Hurrah 11/22/26
I once saw Tess Gallagher speak at Village Books in Bellingham in the early 90’s in a full circle Raymond Carver recollection retrospection 98225 - 2026 single speed cyclocross projection.
With only 6 colors to choose from, I installed both Friday and Saturday with purple bears, in a ROYGB-V-V way in this little plastic pill popper weekly calendar.
Then Junior advised me that Saturday and Sunday should both have red counting bears. Her eye is intrinsically trained to size-up patterns and asymmetry and imbalance and then offer symmetric solutions.
It’s been about 11.67 years since I got myself a new-to-me used bike. Yesterday I adopted this Poprad at BikeWorks with a super bro deal thanks to Steve G.
Within 5 minutes of arriving home I chucked the carbon seatpost and the saddle and replaced the crap seatpost collar with an investment cast lost wax steel collar. I thought of Steve Gluckman a la old school Novara and I smiled a quality old school steel bike part smile. That collar has been hanging on the wall in the garage for years, waiting for its chance to get back out into the world. Now it's on my new used Poprad.
A work in progress. After a couple hours tinkering with parts I had sitting around the garage. Including the Schwalbe 700 x 38 marathons and the SimWorks handlebar that cost me more than this entire bike. I will be investing in a new steel fork, a new old stock 7-speed cassette and a brand-spanking-new chain. I’ll get back to you with before and after photos when I’m actually riding this thing. There will be no Bucky's training day. There will be no electric assist. There will be no carbon fiber. This thing is well on its way to becoming a 2-stone clunker cadillac cross bike cruiser and it's not even put together yet.
Every once in a while I wear a Grinnell College hoodie. Sometimes someone will chat me up about their friend that went there. I took Junior to the airport recently and I was wearing this hoodie… …but got not a word from anyone about the finest liberal arts school in the country. If I was wearing it at O’Hare, I’d get high fives and backslaps and free beers all around, as Grinnell, Iowa is just a western suburb in the greater Chicago-Land area and there are way more Grinnell alumni in Chicago than there are in the entire Pacific Time Zone.
Shortly after I arrived I rolled it onto the industrial scale at the mothership. (The mothership is cool like that)
This thing weighs in at 28lbs.
In my mind it was clocking 35ish. Psychosomatically. It was all in my mind. As heavy as the day is long.
Then I stepped on the scale to weigh myself. (we can talk about this some other day someday) I’m where I was 40 years ago as a placekicker in Spokane. No joke. Some kind of genetic miracle, as I drink enough beer to feed a family of four, day in - day out, here & now 2026.
I’m now inspired to weigh all my other bikes at the mothership. Compare & contrast.
My actions inspired coworkers to weigh their bikes and weigh themselves too. Some of them have very expensive, very light gravel bikes. But some of their bikes are steel and heavy. Heavy duty.
I was digging through the archives for a photo I thought I had in my photographic memory. That photo eluded me. But I found this one from 2007. It brings me joy in a phantom nostalgia syndrome way. The good old daze.
A small part of me wishes I was back there on that Sunday afternoon, October 14, 2007. With nothing but free time. Having a beer with Corndog.
...A small part of me wishes I still had that green Fuji hanging in the garage, collecting dust. Simple clean coaster brake fun, easy like Sunday afternoon. I’d like to draw your attention to the radially laced 27” steel rim on a Schwinn BMX hub. And the glitter green grips.
Please now direct your attention to 39’s bike and how clean it was in 2007.
On the first Monday of the month the NewYork Times publishes a focus challenge. Inviting you to inspect one piece of art for 10 minutes. Or as long as you feel like. This month they invite you to focus on “A Sunday on Le Grande Jatte - 1884” by Georges Seurat.
I enjoy these art history lessons. But I never make it anywhere near 10 minutes of uninterrupted focus. The longest I survived, was looking closely at Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” several months ago. Even that was just a few minutes.
Today I learned a bit more about Seurat’s painting and his process. The real thing is ten feet wide and seven feet tall. That’s a metric shit ton of paint dabs. My cute little Bucky copy is only 22" x 26" including the frame.
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 course Corndog.
What does Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” have to do with any of this shit? What does anything have to do with anything? Everything has to do with Everything. Every little thing. It’s all connected.
I heard that song on the radio this morning, that much is true. Actual AM-FM radio. Not youtube. Not spotify. No wi-fi. No alexa. On the radio, like when that song came out in 1981.
After you listen to that song again, take a few moments and read the fiction in the new New Yorker. It’s good. Really. Sincerely for real. Really. HELLA good.
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:
