Coming home from a grocery run yesterday I turned into the cul-de-sac to see a nondescript white Chevy SUV parked in front of the new neighbors’ house.
Didn’t think anything of it at first — new neighbors mean strange vehicles full of inspectors, handymen, and new neighbors.
And then, as I rolled past, three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests stepped out of the vehicle and stalked across the street to the Bulgarians’ place.
I call them Bulgarians because I think that’s their nationality. Can’t quite remember. It’s a multigenerational, multilingual household, and the owners have adult children in the area who are always popping round in a variety of top-shelf vehicles bearing dogs and grandchildren and whatnot.
They’re probably the neighbors we have the least amount of contact with, mostly because they seem a self-contained unit. Describing them to a reporter after a capital-E Event of some sort you’d say something like: “They were quiet. Kept to themselves. We never had any problems with them.”
Still, with one eye on the rear view as I punched the button to raise the garage door, I was thinking what I was going to say to the three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests if they suddenly stopped talking to the Bulgarians, slapped the cuffs on their wrists and the hoods over their heads, and dragged them shrieking into the white SUV.
Time to earn that democratic-socialist street cred, bruh!
So I snapped some quick pix of the SUV, ran the groceries inside, grabbed the binoculars, went back outside, jotted down the deets from the license plate — which was not easy, it being a typically sun-bleached New Mexico plate and barely readable — and just generally made myself realobvious standing there in my driveway three houses down, waiting to see whether I needed to go over there and get my ass kicked for some people I barely know.
And then the discussion ended without violence and the authorities ambled down the cul-de-sac to the next house over. It was then that I saw, stenciled on the back of one dude’s stout black vest, not “ICE,” but “PSA.”
“PSA?” I mumbled to myself. “Public Service Announcement? Prostate-Specific Antigen? Pi Sigma Alpha?”
And then it hit me. Police Service Aide. The unarmed crew that helps the Albuquerque Police Department with traffic control, writing reports on property crime, and other low-risk chores while sworn officers focus on scraping the stiffs off the streets.
And as that neighbor stepped out to speak with the PSA posse I recalled that he does have a problem with the Bulgarians, who have kept a broken-down rust-bucket with a right front flat and weeds growing through the engine compartment parked at the curb for the better part of quite some time, and whose functioning vehicles have been known to take up a fair amount of the limited parking in our little cul-de-sac, occasionally blocking his mailbox and/or making it tough to find a spot for the bins on trash-pickup day.
Well … at least he didn’t call the ICEholes on them. He is a Trumper, after all. And I’m not at Alligator Alcatraz, picking worms out of the chow I can’t eat with my jaw wired shut.
One of the many books Sam Abt wrote about his summer vacations.
The great Sam Abt is finally done following the Tour de France. He went west this week at age 91.
I never met Sam, much less worked with him. He was an editor at The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, a real chain-smoking pro who worked on the Pentagon Papers and other top-shelf stories and covered the Tour de France — in his spare time — because he loved it. I was a editor at a series of lesser papers who read Sam at work (if the paper subscribed to the NYT wire service) and rode bicycles in my spare time because I loved it.
But my friends Charles Pelkey and Andrew Hood knew and worked with Sam, as did James Startt, who has a fond remembrance of him over at Velo.
Writes James:
Simply put, his writing was exceptional. It was at once efficient, witty, insightful and at times downright transcendent. Oh, and his fans went well beyond the press room, as at least one head of state would call him during the Tour to get his take on the race. All of this from a chain-smoking reporter who never really rode a bike. But he knew the sport like few others did.
Sam was covering Le Tour in those dark days when an American fan had to settle for a soupçon of “Wide World of Sports” coverage, a couple grafs from The Associated Press in your local paper’s sports section (if you were lucky), and Winning: Bicycle Racing Illustrated, which would hit your mailbox about three months after the race was done and dusted.
When VeloNews moved to Boulder in the late Eighties I latched onto the back of that breakaway and hung on for dear life, doing what I’d always done for newspapers — cartooning, writing and editing. I even helped cover a few Tours, from a distance, as an editor. The magazine offered to send me abroad a time or two, but I always declined, thinking I could get more done at home.
But that meant I never got to meet one of the titans of the Tour. Not a racer — I met more than a few of those folks — but Sam, who fed the monkey for all us bike-racing junkies.
Abt was a mentor and inspiration for a generation of English-language journalists who later came to cover a once-exotic sport that’s since gone global.
Peace to Sam, his family and friends, and to his many, many devoted readers.
Writing at The Atlantic, freelancer Erin Sagen says today’s kids are very much not riding their bicycles, and for a variety of perfectly defensible reasons, too:
Since the 1990s, speed limits have ticked upward. Each year (minus a few temporary dips), drivers have progressively clocked more collective miles and driven ever larger cars. According to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “Over the past 30 years, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 4 inches wider, 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier.” These machines may be protecting drivers and passengers, but they can be much more intimidating to people on bikes. The annual number of children killed on bikes has actually fallen, a 2021 CDC report found, but the report acknowledges that this is likely in part because fewer kids are out riding.
Boy howdy. Citing stats from the National Sporting Goods Association, Sagen writes that during the 1990s, an average of 20.5 million children ages 7 to 17 rode a bike six or more times a year. By 2023, a few decades later, that number dropped to about 10.9 million. And of those kids, less than 5 percent rode their bikes “frequently.”
Six or more times a year? Sheeyit. We hopped on our bikes six or more times a week. Some of us still do. It’s fun, it’s exercise, it’s transportation … it’s liberation. Damn The Man! Let’s get big air at the gravel pit! Using one chain to break another, as it were.
No mas, no mas. !Que triste es la vida velo!
No wonder the Adventure Cycling Association has put its storied headquarters up for sale. Once a must-see for the membership, it’s only visited now by a handful of overripe saddle tramps in saggy wool shorts who just herded a 36-pound steel bike, hung about with tattered ripstop sacks stuffed with camping gear, canned beans, and one change of underwear, from Miami to Missoula without once stopping for a shower.
According to the ACA board of directors, the group’s membership has been dwindling for at least five years as its demographic “ages out” of bike travel. Tours and map sales are likewise struggling, and the association is failing to attract a younger crowd because ACA’s “brand” is seen as a raggedy-assed herd of sunburnt old roadies who just aren’t hep to the latest jive (gravel, bikepacking, insert your thrill of the minute here).
So, bam! The ACA HQ goes on the block, listed for $2.7 million, reports The Missoulian, its hometown newspaper.
I don’t know how this sale might save the ACA, because I haven’t seen any actual rescue proposals put forward. Just some MarketSpeak® in Bicycle Retailer about how ACA is “facing a crossroads,” “grappling with challenges,” and “addressing brutal truths while maintaining faith in the mission,” and how selling the HQ will “help us adapt to our reality, giving us the runway to reshape our programs and resources to continue inspiring transformative bike travel experiences.”
Friend of the Blog Diane “The Outspoken Cyclist” Lees is among those not convinced. She has viewed with alarm at her Substack, and former members of the organization — including its founders — are among the people who put together this petition urging that the sale be stopped.
Now, $2.7 mil’ may sound like a lot of money, especially if you don’t have it. But since Bikecentennial hit the road in 1976 I have, despite an appalling shortage of investment capital and absolutely no plan at all, pissed away at least that much on cigarettes, booze, drugs, guns, comic books, actual literature, albums, CDs, stereo gear, Toyota trucks and Subaru cars, road trips in three countries, moving violations in one of them, cheap motels, pet-friendly rentals, real estate, meals remarkable and questionable, vet bills, drawing paper, pencils, and pens, countless Apple products and peripherals, cable TV, streaming video, Internet hookups (no, not that kind of Internet hookup), blog/podcast hosting, and audio-visual gear.
And the only person who got any bicycling out of it all was me — in 1976, because I had been doing without a driver’s license for a few years thanks to a minor traffic accident (hit by a train), and afterward because I learned to love it (the cycling, not being hit by trains).
By the time Bikecentennial blossomed into the Adventure Cycling Association in 1993 I had settled down a great deal. It helped that after 15 years of newspapering I was officially and permanently unemployed, building a second career of sorts as a freelancer peddling vicious libels, ugly scribbles, and outright lies to niche magazines with the circulation of a week-old murder victim. I had also begun racing bicycles, and acquiring them, the latter a jones which haunts me to this day.
And after a decade and a half of that, thanks to the risk-taking spirit of the late, great Mike Deme, and his successors, Alex Strickland and Dan Meyer, I even sold some word count to Adventure Cyclist, at a time when the decline and fall of the for-profit bicycle magazine had left me short on runway and having trouble adapting to my reality.
Those dudes, and the other great advocates for and facilitators of bicycle travel I met while scribbling bike reviews for Adventure Cyclist, have all left the building that ACA plans to sell for … whatever. I’m sorry that I never visited them there, because now I never will. The building will become a bespoke hotel, law office, or assisted-living residence, whose half-daffy inmates will swear to their keepers that in the wee hours of the darkening night they hear the clicking of wide-range cassettes and catch a whiff of overworked chamois cream.
Sell the real estate? That’s what vulture capitalists do when they add another newspaper to their portfolio. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A storied newspaper building becomes office space, condos, or a parking lot, the printing gets outsourced, and the few remaining journos who produce the paper are exiled to some soulless strip-mail shithole with all the joie de vivre of a happy-ending massage parlor — chances are the space used to be a happy-ending massage parlor — because the vulture capitalists don’t have any souls of their own and can’t imagine why anyone would want one. Bad for the bottom line.
Sell the real estate? Would the pope sell the Sistine Chapel? Puh-leeze. Dude won’t even Airbnb his summer place at Castel Gandolfo. Even a fucking Realtor will tell you it’s all about location, location, location.
Sell the real estate? It’s like eating your seed corn. Nothing down that long and winding road except for maybe one big dump and then death. Remember the wisdom of another intrepid traveler, Buckaroo Banzai, who has taught us: “No matter where you go, there you are.”
Is it too late for all these weak-in-the-knees whippersnappers askeered of the big, bad cars to revisit their cushy lifestyles, take a big ol’ bite out of life, savor the flavor of adventure cycling? And save the Adventure Cycling Association’s venerable headquarters, the hub around which America’s bicycle-travel universe revolves?
For the love of Deme, put that smartphone down, Rain, Drain or Spokane, whatever the hell your helicopter parents named your sorry ass, unless you’re calling Soma Fabrications to order up a damn’ Pescadero. Listen to the Voices. Here’s your panniers, there’s the door, what’s your hurry?
Mom’s chili, a staple of my childhood. It’s good … but I prefer Pierre Franey’s version.
I was idly cooking up a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili yesterday when some doglike portion of my brain not focused on the task at hand hopped the wall and came back with a bone for me to gnaw.
It was the Fourth of July. I was preparing a meal of Mexican origin that Texas claims as its own (along with a sizable portion of Mexico) using a Frenchman’s recipe in a New Mexican kitchen.
Mom’s recipe. You can see it’s got a lot of miles on it.
This particular recipe was “fairly traditional,” according to Franey, and not so very different from my Iowa-born mother’s take on the dish, which dates back to the O’Grady family’s stint on Randolph AFB at San Antonio, circa 1962-67. But Franey’s version uses turkey instead of beef, with a particular season in mind — not the Fourth of July, but Thanksgiving, which is when his recipe was published in The New York Times in 1992.
Franey’s journey to a quick, simple, and delicious chili recipe certainly took the scenic route, if we use his biography as our map. As a young man he left France to join “an impressive team of cooks” at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. When World War II erupted a few years later, he took another job — with the U.S. Army.
Offered a cushy berth as personal chef to Gen. Douglas McArthur, Franey declined, saying he’d rather help his countrymen fight Nazis in France. Thus, after boot camp at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he shipped out to Europe as a machine gunner, rising to the rank of sergeant and collecting a Purple Heart for his troubles.
After the war, Franey went on to work with Craig Claiborne on recipes and restaurant reviews for the NYT, and in 1975 hung out his own shingle there as “The 60-Minute Gourmet.” A decade later he was cooking on public television, too.
Imagine that.
What might an 18-year-old Pierre Franey encounter upon his arrival in today’s America? An immigrant … and from France? Taking American jobs? Willing, even eager, to fight Nazis rather than serve his betters in the kitchen?
He’d be in a Salvadoran slammer before he could get his apron on. And without machine-gunning any Nazis, more’s the pity. If the kid could channel the Pierre Franey from that other timeline I expect his 1942 self would be astonished that 83 years later we’re fighting brownshirts in America as Lady Liberty hides her face in shame.
Me, I’d still be using Mom’s chili recipe. Which is fine. But it takes a lot more time, and runs light on peppers and long on tomatoes.
It’s a Dropkick Murphys kind of Fourth around the Dog House. Up the rebels!
As Dropkick Murphys release a new album, “For the People,” frontman Ken Casey has a few thoughts about the big red pickle in which we find ourselves during our annual Independence Day picnic.
Speaking with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Casey said he was shocked that so many people in his life fell for Trumpism:
“My father died when I was young, and I was raised by my grandfather, who was basically like, ‘If I ever see you bullying someone, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you back down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”
“I’ve just never liked bullies, and I don’t understand people who do. It’s really not that hard. I wish more people would see that it’s not hard to stand up.”
So stand up with Dropkick Murphys and the people on this Fourth of July, and all the other ones, too, even after we kick the shit out of these bullies. And sing along, if you can keep up. Here are the lyrics for anyone who’s not fluent in Celtic punk.
Mad Blog Media 