what was that? is that all there is? who is this? this is it.

Freudian lisp

Freudian slip

Freudian lips

bilabial Freudian lisp

that’s no slip

that’s both lips

As you can see Freud’s lips are chapped. He’s been around the block a few times with a zip tie in his mouth securing him to my front hub. Before that he sat in a raised garden bed for a season or two.  I found a Freud bobble head doll in a free pile in the UW Psychology department in the middle of the covid years, and I’ve gotten my money's worth. 

Now Freud is looking up from under my saddle.

It seemed like a good idea at the time…

In 2012 Portland Design Works released the Dios Thronous saddle. The first of its kind, 100% injection molded EVA foam. The Crocs saddle. In black, green, white and “red”. But it’s not even close to red. It’s full-on pink.

I was completely unaware of this saddle for years. Until there was a shitton of them at BikeWorks. PDW stopped making them. Bike shops couldn’t sell them.  They were kicked to the curb and donated. The word on the street was that they were too “sticky” and spongey and not cool.  OK for your bar bike but you wouldn't want to ride across Iowa on one of these. 

I got one at BikeWorks a few years ago and then it sat in a milkcrate in the garage until I slapped it on the Port Townsend that Sally gifted my 16 years ago. 

All my bikes are “bar bikes” so this thing works for me. I like the size and the shape. I’m not sure yet about the sticky-sticky high-friction texture. But for my butt the bike-to-train-to-bike to work, it’ll work. 

The support of the heavens, the seat of Zeus

Dios Thronous pink Crocs. 

Id, ego, super-ego bro. You name it. 

oral, anal, phallic, genital…   …fixation. 

Plus or minus punctuation. 

Jimmy James' JAMMER bikes are BIG in Japan. And only getting BIGGER. 

you'll find a wide selection of high quality photos of the bike on the radavist

Hella Corndog photo

Hella 22 Heather photo

imagine Hella Catarina photo here

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… 

Hella Hella Hella

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." 

Thank you for calling Pee-Dub Industries. Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly. The estimated wait time is currently 77 hours. 

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. 

take your bike to work day #1

take your bike to Big Time time 

“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.

It's my bike.

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. 

WWSD?

gold star for robot bro

hand delivered via bicycle

Just between you and me, the Poprad is progressing nicely. 

Ask me about DIY star nut installers and crown race removal tools...

The bike is in a holding pattern for a while, awaiting a new fork to complete the real feel of steel. 

visualize a Pig Boy sticker stuck

on the downtube 19 years later

it’s the same 

on the weekends 

as the rest of the days

those in-the-know know

what day it is

what day is it?

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.

so I fixed it

and took a picture

to make it last longer

Monday is working day

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.

old school analog

hands-on 

math manipulatives

sorting

grouping

counting

s a t i s f y i n g

math

color recognition

fine motor control

tactile 

touchy-feely

physical

abstract ideas

can be

concrete & reachable

counting bears

come through

too

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. 

Rode this bundle of joy to work today. 

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 guess I need to harden the fuck up. 

1991 Rock Hopper sport:

2 STONE=

12.7 kilograms=

28 pounds 

5:22 AM: 59 degrees and it’s all downhill

3:33 PM: 85 degrees and it’s all uphill

add wildfire SMOKE beyond taste

August in Seattle

word

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. 

the good old daze

justa buncha pictures of 39 

Are you my Bucky?

for real? 

really?

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.