On a dead-end street.— “It Makes No Difference,” The Band
Sounds like day three of the Interbike trade show, doesn’t it? A convention center full of thousand-yard stares from zombies who are getting too much Scotch and not enough brains.
OK, so I rushed right out and bought some potatoes for the green chile stew I’ll be making this evening. Also a sixer of Bohemia. And I picked up an extra day of work posting news (remotely) from Vegas about stuff I can’t afford and don’t need anyway.
But I did persuade one of my colleagues who is actually at Interbike to spend some time focusing on affordable goodies. There should be plenty now that we’re all shittin’ in the tall cotton again, right? Right.
Cheers, too, to homeboy Danny Pate — I feared he might be jobless going into 2011, but it seems he’s leaving Garmin-Transitions for HTC-Columbia instead of the dole and the Dumpster. I’m still waiting for word on Mike Creed, whose relationship with Team Type 1 appears to have soured. I don’t care who he pisses off, I like him. His old man’s all right, too.
And finally, a twirl of the jet-black Mad Dog Livewrong bracelet to Taylor Phinney and Ben King for completing a Trek-Livestrong sweep at the USA Cycling Professional Road Championships in South Carolina.
Yeah, yeah, I know — they are affiliated with He Who Shall Not Be Named, and Trek sucks, and the dormant journalist in me is mumbling, “Oh, really?” over his second beer. But at least it’s not another steer from that same sorry old herd crossing the line first.
And as for me? I have the day off. I should be in Santa Rosa, California, sipping local microbrew and contemplating a week’s worth of cycling up hill and down dale with my old pals Merrill and Chris, but what the hell? A guy can ride his bike around here, too, even if most of the routes feel a bit stale, like Repuglican campaign rhetoric. “Why, by gum, if we just give our poor rich folks some more money, we’ll soon be as right as rain. Well, we will be, anyway. Your mileage may vary.”
The road bike remains unforked at Old Town, Ritchey being somewhat slow on the uptake, warranty-wise, so it seemed like a ’cross-bike kind of day. As the Vuelta was wrapping Dr. Schenkenstein rolled by astride his ’cross bike to say howdy, a tad weak and pale from his Yom Kippur fast, so I — full of last night’s green-chile chicken enchiladas, rice, salad and Mirror Pond Pale Ale — seized the opportunity, broke out the Nobilette and flogged him like the miserable pissant he is for 90 minutes or thereabouts.
That he had an asthma attack as we were climbing the weed-lined, dusty single-track to Gold Camp Road had nothing to do with it. My triumph is untainted. God’s judgment, I call it. The Irish are one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, don’t you know. And you can tell Yahweh likes us best ’cause he didn’t dump us off in the middle of a desert bereft of whisky.
The lads the last time we had the band together in Santa Rosa, circa 2006.
Busy, busy, busy. I know, that’s no excuse — my duty is to bring the snark, 24/7 — but I’ve forgotten where I left it. The ravages of age, don’t you know.
Hell, you’re lucky I’m around at all. I had planned a cycling trip to California — I was gonna hit the road tomorrow, drive to Ely, Nevada, spend the night, then make the final push into Santa Rosa for a week of pedaling around the wine (and beer) country with a couple of old newsie buds.
But midweek I was still feeling the effects of leaving my DNA on the Palmer Park trails, my chiropractor was threatening to tear me down for parts, and there was work to be done over at VeloNews.com.
My SOPWAMTOS Golden Toiddy from Interbike Anaheim, circa 1996 or thereabouts. It is my sole award in a long and checkered career as a "cycling journalist."
Well, well, well. Interbike is moving back to Anaheim after all these years. That means a shorter drive for the BRAINiacs — about 22 miles, seeing as how the present-day Bicycle Retailer & Industry News is based in Laguna Hills instead of Santa Fe, New Mexico — and an even shorter drive for me, since the show and I lost interest in each other more or less simultaneously about four years ago.
I vaguely recall enjoying the Mouse-house Interbike more than its whorehouse cousin, in part because I didn’t have to wander through the desert for 40 days and 40 nights to get to the convention center from the BRAIN hotel, which was blessedly free of white trash chain-smoking Luckies and jerking off one-armed bandits, prayin’ for a gusher.
But this was back in the Nineties, when we were all rich, the only swarthy foreigners we feared were driving taxis instead of hijacked aircraft, and we kept Republicans chained up in the basement where they belong until Clinton, crazed by young and tender poontang, let them out.
There was plenty of high-grade bullshit being slung in Anaheim, to be sure. But there also seemed to be more mom-and-pop ops at Interbike Disneyland — Steelman Cycles, Bruce and Jodie Ruana of the late, lamented Off the Front, Ross Shafer of Salsa (the Petaluma Salsa, not this newfangled outfit). Folks with a sense of humor, like the Society of People Who Actually Make Their Own Shit (SOPWAMTOS). I still prize my Golden Toiddy from that outfit.
Ah, Memory Lane. Watch out for those trips down that sucker. It’s full of potholes, speed bumps and blind corners. I found a few in dredging up the column I wrote for the October 1, 1997, edition of Bicycle Retailer, in which I proposed renaming Anaheim “Thorazine,” adding, “If California needed an enema, this is where you’d stick the hose.”
“Has it been so slow a year that everyone had to pawn their sense of humor to pay the bills?” I wrote. “I was looking forward to some serious amusement, but I came away feeling as though I had just spent a month in Sagging Jowls, South Dakota, with the United Brotherhood of Refrigerator Repairpersons.”
There was more, plenty more, including references to Hell and Tom Waits (prefiguring “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” by a dozen years at least, and I want my royalties, goddamnit).
But, still, jeez. I can see why nobody wants me to go anywhere on their dime anymore. It’s like inviting a rabid badger to dinner.
Summer is hitting the door running with its bike slung over one shoulder. The leaves are turning, we’re back to breakfasts like steel-cut Irish oatmeal with black tea, and dinners involving copious quantities of freshly roasted green chile and free-range pork are in our very near future.
I haven’t made the ultimate concession to cooler weather — pulling on the ratty old gray sweatpants — because I’m still a tad scabby and stiff from stacking it on the trail last week. But I may have to start adding socks to my usual T-shirt-and-shorts ensemble, if only in the early mornings.
Political signs have replaced roses in the yard — Hickenlooper, Bennet, Merrifield and Mowle — and a few more opposing three insane tax-slashing initiatives will be joining them soon. I don’t see that overfed, under-taught windbag Doug Bruce volunteering to underwrite a few streetlights, patch a couple potholes or water a park, and frankly some things are worth paying for.
Between you and me, I’ll be glad when the midterms are behind us if only so we won’t have to listen to the ceaseless drumbeat of an ass-whuppin’ a-comin’ from the mainstream media. I’d rather take three beatings than endlessly anticipate one.
Meanwhile, cyclo-cross season starts this weekend. Already? I can still walk, but I haven’t tried running lately, and I haven’t been on a bike since a week ago Monday. So don’t look for me at the Pikes Peak Velo Supercross on the 18th. On a bike, wearing a number, anyway.
Sounds like day three of the Interbike trade show, doesn’t it? A convention center full of thousand-yard stares from zombies who are getting too much Scotch and not enough brains.
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