Category: Small hat sizes

Indoor sports

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
Oak Creek Grade, between Cañon City and Weirdcliffe, where a fella is definitely gonna want something lower than 30x30.
Oak Creek Grade, between Cañon City and Weirdcliffe, where a fella is definitely gonna want something lower than 30×30.
The silver maple in the front yard at Chez Dog wearing a thick coat of snowy goodness.
The silver maple in the front yard at Chez Dog wearing a thick coat of snowy goodness.

“Man plans, God laughs,” goes the Yiddish proverb.

So, naturally, as I was contemplating the intricacies,  logistics and amusements of a bicycle tour, Management reminded me that spring is only a word, an arbitrary date on a manmade calendar.

Yesterday I was motoring around Fremont and Custer counties with the windows down, scoping out various back roads between Florence and Weirdcliffe with a Colorado Atlas & Gazetteer in the passenger seat while tugging frequently from a water bottle. Today I awakened to a few inches of heavy, wet snow on the deck, with more on the way.

No complaints here, mind you. Water from on high is water I don’t have to buy from Colorado Springs Utilities. And it sure beats being on fire.

So it looks to be a fine day for hanging around indoors, viewing with alarm. For instance, I notice that the Supremes are trying to make it less onerous for the 1 percent to run the country the way they see fit. And a Colorado judge is intent on making it harder for the 99 percent to catch them at it.

I’m starting to think Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito are deserving of life terms after all. Not on the high court, mind you, but in Leavenworth, making little rocks out of big ones for their crimes against the people.

An ill wind

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 35 Comments
The northwest side of the Cheyenne Trail in Palmer Park.
The northwest side of the Cheyenne Trail in Palmer Park.

Ah, jaysis. One of those forecasts. The devil must be eating beans again, because the wind is up, and it stinks.

After spending the morning working on various velo-projects and watching the trees prostrate themselves like monks before the altar I decided to leave all the bikes in the garage, no matter what class of tires they were wearing, and go for a 90-minute hike in Palmer Park.

Some dipshit lit the place up the other day, briefly, and with Beelzebub’s butt-trumpet blasting hell-farts hither and yon suddenly the Asplundh folks are in there turning foliage into sawdust. It’s either a fire-mitigation effort or a thinly disguised attempt to deny cover to those horny Bibleburgers who are either too free-spirited for a hotel or too cheap to rent a room, the park’s shadier nooks long having served as havens for spirited and unsanctioned rounds of Hide the Bishop.

There was none of that going on today — not that I saw, anyway — though I did spot what could have been a few post-coital cigarette butts along the way. There was, however, a veritable parade of mountain bikers disinclined to yield trail, unleashed dogs dropping deuces, and oblivious pedestrians.

One day these three factions will come together in some blind corner as yet uncleared by Asplundh and there will be a fine old donnybrook. I will sell tickets and use the proceeds to buy a house in some place where neither the wind nor the populace blows.

 

Indica ciclavia

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Roll another one. ...
Roll another one. …

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of the news that Apple wants to get drivers playing with their cars instead of driving them comes this tale of stoned cycling from “The Cannabist,” The Denver Post‘s ganja gazette (hey, it can’t be all Broncos, all the time; not after that Super Bowl, anyway).

I’m old enough to have cycled while stoned in an era when (a) you couldn’t buy the shit at Buds ‘r’ Us, and (2) if you wrote about it for your city editor he wouldn’t read it because he was on a three-day bender somewhere. The assistant city editor would chuckle, tear it up, and reassign you to cover the cop shop until you got your mind right.

Being that old, and having grown less resilient over the decades, especially when it comes to high-speed contact with the ground, I’d prefer that the folks sharing the trails and streets with me have their minds right and keep ’em that way until they get home, where they can do whatever they please.

Plenty of my fellow cyclists appear to lack many basic skills already, and piling impaired judgment on top of that regrettably sparse skill set strikes me as … well, as impaired judgment. Add a pair of earbuds and what you have is a dumb bomb seeking a target.

Jesus. MFA poets writing about stoned cycling for The Denver Post. Another thing I’m old enough to remember? When The Post was a real newspaper.

Meanwhile, congratulations are in order to a cyclist who almost certainly was not stoned, though he was certainly burning a fatty — Ned Overend, who over the weekend won the inaugural U.S. National Fat Bike Championship in Wisconsin.

A gay old time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
"Don't we have anything to read in here that isn't a bicycle magazine?"
“Don’t we have anything to read in here that isn’t a bicycle magazine?”

That little Albuquerque training camp spoiled me for the remainder of February in Colorado.

After a week of long, steady distance in springlike temperatures, coming back to winter flat crawled up my butt. Twenty, feels like 10, y’say? Well, to hell with that, I think I’ll just stay inside and eat everything, watch Arizona try to out-stupid Colorado. Next these sunburnt simpletons will be issuing 55-gallon spray cans of Homo-NoMo® to the National Guard. Send the bill to the po’ folks, sonny, this here’s a Christian state.

Anyway, I was in danger of reaching that tipping point at which my inner fat bastard says, “Fuck a bunch of bicycles, let’s sell ’em all and buy a pie factory.” And it struck me that the problem wasn’t so much the weather as it was riding other people’s bikes all the damn’ time. Inspecting this, questioning that, making notes about it all — this is not unlike riding a couch in the company of a psychotherapist.

“How does that 30-inch low gear make you feel, Patrick?”

“Like a fat little girl with polio, you head-shrinking halfwit. Now shut the fuck up, I’m trying to climb this hill without chowing on the handlebar tape.”

So today I dragged the old Voodoo Nakisi out of the garage, aired up its Bruce Gordon Rock n’ Roads, and rode off to see how many times I could fall down on the ice in Palmer Park (none, though one sneaky patch in the South Cañon nearly got me). It was a beautiful day and I hardly endured any shrinkage at all, being covered from tonsure to toenails in colorful fossil-fuel weather repellent.

I even saw one bozo riding in shorts. Take that, Arizona.

For whom the bell tolls

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
It was warmer today — but not that much warmer.
It was warmer today — but not that much warmer.

Finally, the temperature crept above zero, and then above freezing, and after I shipped my “Shop Talk” cartoon for the March 1 edition of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News I was able to sneak out for my first ride in the better part of quite some time that didn’t require pulling on enough neoprene to make wetsuits for every frogman in the Chinese navy.

First I took the Bootleg Hobo out and about with a GoPro on board, so I could get some winter footage for its video review, which Adventure Cyclist wants early next month.

Then I pulled the old mountain bike out of the garage again and rode over to Bear Creek Regional Park, where the Mad Dogs used to promote cyclo-cross races back when we were men instead of whatever it is that we are now.

There was still plenty of snow and ice on the ground, plus some slush to keep it company, and the trails were thick with feckin’ eejits who were either unable or unwilling to hear the crunch of fat tires on old snow, a bell rung thrice, and a cheery voice warning, “On your left!”

I startled the mortal shit out of at least two of ’em when I passed. They jumped smack out of their shivering skins and left ’em splayed on the ground like sex dolls awaiting inflation, their internal workings exposed to the elements. Stupidity should be painful.

Speaking of which, our local fish-wrapper, which is dead set on helping politicians, developers and other shameless hoors further enrich themselves at the taxpayers’ expense by elevating The Olympic Movement to cult status hereabouts, couldn’t even be bothered to localize an Associated Press story about a new national mountain-bike series that will finish right here in Bibleburg, home to (wait for it) The U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Cycling, in the U-nited States of America.

Nope, they’re too busy pimping the Winter Games, which is all the way around the damn’ world in Red Roosha, is what.

Shit, the lazy sonsabitches didn’t even fix the typos. Looks like we lost the Cold War after all.