The sun has returned, and just in time, too. I got the hell out of the house and onto the bike the past couple days, thereby missing the roundly panned Obama address from the Oval Office, the Limeys finally figuring out that Bloody Sunday was a bloody cock-up, and Apple’s quiet update of the Mini (we’ll be buying one to run the 20th Century Dog videoplex so I can get my ’06 MacBook back for purposes of revenue generation).
The cycling was the usual hodgepodge of on road and off, with one ill-advised, impulsive detour through the Garden of the Gods on Tuesday. How some folks pass a driver’s exam is a mystery to me. In one half-lap of the Garden I encountered three SUV pilots who apparently were incapable of reading the ubiquitous “No Parking” signs stenciled in the bike lane and posted at roadside.
At least one of them didn’t even understand spoken English, because I explained the bike lane/no parking concept to him after watching him park in the bike lane for a photo, leave it without signaling, and then zip back into it again for another snap, confusing two- and four-wheeled traffic equally. Ever try reasoning with a feedlot cow? You get the idea. Dude was 25 meters from a parking lot and 25 pounds shy of that first ton, which I hear is the hardest to lose. At least this one didn’t want to fight.
Today, as a change of pace, I fired up the Vespa for my trip to the chiropractor, who hates it when I show up all sweaty from cycling (makes it hard to get a secure grip for the back-cracking, don’t you know). The carb’ was fouled after a particularly damp and chilly May, but the folks at Sportique set it right and now I’m back to scooting hither and thither, drawing admiring glances from all and sundry.
“Cool scooter,” said a fixie hipster with the iBuds in as we both sat at a stoplight. Yes, indeedy. Don’t have to pedal or nothin’. Burns gas, too, just like a Harley, if at a slightly reduced rate.
After the back-cracking and a bit of cartooning for fun and profit I went for another one of my patented weirdo cyclo-cross rides (concrete, asphalt, pulverized granite, singletrack, etc.). Then I broke out the townie and a messenger bag for some light grocery shopping.
First it was south to America the Beautiful Park for this summer’s inaugural Colorado Farm and Art Market, buying some frozen free-range pork chops from Doug Wiley of Larga Vista Ranch. Next it was north to Ranch Foods Direct for a flatiron steak and some asparagus from Pueblo’s Milberger Farms so I’d have something to eat tonight.
Mind you, this was hardly the Frozen Chosin in the Freezing Season — I’m talking about 10 miles of leisurely cycling in fine weather for a dinner of grilled steak, boiled spuds and asparagus. Wiley’s pork chops are thawing in the ’fridge awaiting Herself’s return from The Big Easy. But my velo-shopping set me to to thinking about that roundly panned Obama speech.
The prez spake thusly:
The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face. This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again. What sees us through — what has always seen us through — is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it.
If we can’t park our SUVs and walk a few meters for a Kodak moment, how strong, resilient and courageous are we? Because the hard times are surely coming. And the SUV pilot who couldn’t be bothered to hump a few meters? He was a Marine.
Mad Blog Media 
I have been privy over the years to just a small bit of what others in the bike industry think of you, your perspectives, and your writing, but I, for one, gotta say that your style fits me just fine…Posts like this one is what keep me comin’ back. I look forward to every update and all the attached comments, as I’ve posted before. Even that bastard Larry T, with his It’ly updates on food and vino that make us all loathe him so (I’m a kiddin’ Larry).
Great blog Patrick…
And a belated Happy Bloomsday to everyone.
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Its easy to point our increasingly pudgy fingers at Butthead Petroleum, but for the uneasy truth that Americans are willing to rape, pillage, and burn any coastline but our own to feed our energy habit. Not to mention ignore the slow, insidious progress of climate change and looming oil debt with a “not my problem” attitude. The fat slob in the SUV is typical. Obama got that part right, but who wants to hear it? Most would rather believe Dick Cheney because that takes the onus off of Suburban Joe to change his SUV-and-50 miles/day gas habit.
I just got back from a business trip to Lost Wages, Nevada. Aside from the fuelishly wasteful fact that the work sponsors could have scheduled the work here rather than there thus saving the incremental jet fuel it took to lift my sorry ass and laptop 36,000 feet into the air on a 737 (the students I flew out to teach were in BombTown the previous week), my trip reminded me of Patrick’s essay written at the annual Interbike, ironically held in a city where no one in their right mind would ride a bike if they had any other option.
https://maddogmedia.com/outerbiking.html
Like O’G, I saw a few of them slowly pedaling their clunkers down the oven-like sidewalk (it was hitting triple digits) getting to jobs taking care of gambling addicts and expense-account asshats like me. All the while the glitzy National Shrine to Consumption burned through enough oil to justify ten BP fuckups. As long as they are on someone else’s sandy beach.
Its pretty frustrating to watch this unfold. Frankly, I’m glad we didn’t have kids. The best solution to the energy/climate problem is to have fewer humans buggering things up.
Geez, I was trying not to think about Lost Wages and Interbike just yet. By the time it rolls around I’ve missed my Italian friends in the bike biz enough to somehow justify getting into another aluminum tube and flying into the anus of North America where every bad habit in the US is on full-monty display. Nice to hear OG’s riding his bike and eating well, at least as well as one can do somewhere other than Italy of course! I’m with Khal on the kid issue, so many of the world’s problems come from the fact there are just too damn many of us — especially us in the country with 5% of the population consuming 25% of the world’s energy. Is it just a coincidence that we also have 25% of the worlds prison population as well?
Aside from the human glitz and glitter, the Las Vegas Valley and its surrounding mountains are spectacular to look at, esp. from the air. Its just too bad that you can’t see much of the surrounding countryside because of the high rises on all sides.
I have a friend who just retired from the DOE complex and decided to stay in Sin City, where he and his wife have lived for the last ten years as they worked on Yucca Mt. and other stuff making relocation in Nevada a useful thing to do. I know him as an avid climber and outdoorsman, so always wondered what the attraction was. Well, its the mountains on all sides. Another former collegue here in BombTown recently took a job with a DOE affiliate in Los Wages. She snagged a home there on the cheap, courtesy of LV’s record number of foreclosures. But she did have to reinstall all the appliances…
I guess Lost Wages has become quite the relocation capital of the USA. What I wonder is, given all the projections for more people and less snowpack, what they are all going to do when someone takes that last glass of water out of the mudflat formerly known as Lake Mead.
Regarding my comment about us not giving a rat’s ass about other people’s coastlines:
“BODO, Nigeria — Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless. Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab…”
What goes around, comes around.
David … surely you’re not suggesting that I am less than beloved in the industry? I’m shocked, shocked, to learn that my dulcet tones occasionally fall upon tin ears. But I’m glad you like the stuff.
Steve, a belated happy Bloomsday back at you. James Joyce is not my favorite Irish author — that would be Frank O’Connor — but any old excuse for a pub crawl, no? Slainte.
Khal, there’s some outdoor fun to be had outside Vegas in Blue Diamond and the Red Rock Canyon area, where Interbike used to hold its demo day before shifting operations to Boulder City. Doesn’t justify the existence of Sin City, of course, but it does make the place slightly more palatable if you have to be there for some reason. And thanks for posting that link to the NYT piece. I was gonna do it but got sidetracked by having to write a last-minute, high-speed column for BRAIN, which jumped up my deadline by a week to accommodate a hitch in its production gitalong. Finally, hip-hip-hooray for the no-kids program. I wouldn’t know what to say to mine, barring, “Sure wiped our asses with your American Dream, huh?”
And Larry, we all want to be you when (and if ) we grow up.
Uhhh, guys? Stupid people breed more anyway, so the rest of us have an obligation to have more kids, if only to slow down the pollution of the gene pool, not to mention the electorate. A moot point for most of us here, considering our ages, but we should be mentoring our younger brethren (and sisteren) on this point for the sake of the species. In the mean time, let’s oppose mandatory seat belt & helmet laws, because they interfere with natural selection, which is, after all, A Good Thing.
BTW, I’m no longer speaking to Larry after that “…Barolo (nah, we had that last night…” crack. Now where did I put the pins & voodoo tires? 😉
Bill, I don’t even think we need to worry about it. Nowdays the youth would rather text each other than screw. Darwin will get his wish one way or the other.