The Captain’s Log

Yeah, yeah, it’s been a long time. Quit yer whining and listen up. My “little” sister (okay, she’s 44) brightened my day today by sending a bunch of slides she’s been scanning from my dad’s 35mm slide collection. (Click on them to see them bigger.)

This one is the lineup of my first race, sponsored by Ski Market on the New York State Office Building Campus in Albany, NY. Junior men went five miles. I’m back a few rows in a CCM hockey helmet (thanks to Bob Maswick) on my repainted Sears 10-speed sporting tube socks, cut off jeans and Nike running shoes. I led the entire last lap and got fourth, not knowing any better.

This was my second race. Bike’s been upgraded to a Peugeot PX 10 LE–the first of two bikes I ever financed through my dad–but the rest of my kit is still pure dork. That’s John Connaly, I think, behind me. Three got away and I took the field sprint for fourth.

Oh. My. God. I’d had shoulder-width hair prior to racing. I think I put my helmet on and cut off whatever else stuck out. Coulda been worse. Coulda had man boobs. That’s little sister on the right looking on in awe. Or is that horror?

That’s Leslie Moore’s bike I’m holding a year later, lining up for the next year’s Cohoes Crit. Her hands were full and I was agog. Leslie is the only person I’ve ever seen race in mascara. She used to do the men’s races in New York, so we actually got to know each other a little as packmates. This year I stomped on the pedals, intending to break right from the start, and cocked my rear tire against the chainstay when the hub slipped in the chrome dropout. I hopped off, made the fix, then chased the three man break in a solo pursuit for fourth place. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Did a bunch of training that winter. Those are wool shorts made by my mom, silk-screened in art class by me with my last name. Small diameter rollers gave lots of resistance. I used to kill myself down there all winter, rocking out to Chicago and/or Paul McCartney and Wings. Gimme a break. It was the 70’s. Disco was the other choice.

Dad thought it was funny to open the freezer door to cool me off. Felt pretty good, actually. Look at the size of that head tube. I’m all legs.

Did a spring break bike tour in March with Les Young and Alan Wozniak, two of my Colonie Central High School classmates. We rode from Albany to Lake George for a campout and pretty much frozes our heinies off in all that lovely polyester. Still the 70’s, remember.

Good summer of racing, yadda, yadda. Now it’s late summer and time for the Cohoes Criterium. Solo guy takes off, three of us chase, including John Connaly (far right). That’s me in Serotta red/white/blue on my soon-to-be-retired Peugeot. (Phil Fisher would have my custom bike finished the following May.) Okay, so it comes down to the four of us sprinting for the finish. I got fourth. Just kidding. I won finally. Best ten seconds of my life…until the pain burst through the adrenalin rush. Spent another 19 years chasing that dragon, but it was never as good as that first one. The junkies are all nodding their heads.

There. Aren’t you glad you checked back one last time?

Here’s a bonus: catching air on the second-ever bike my dad financed for me. Rye Airfield, Rye, New Hampshire, May 2008.

Cover your eyes and keep reading. I was in the shower this morning with a headful of shampoo lather when the water temp went from pleasant to “drop the lobster.” I immediately thought, “What a great test of spirituality or humility or patience or something desirable like that.”

I couldn’t quite get my brain around what I was testing, but I knew I was having an okay day because it didn’t completely derail because somebody in the house flushed or ran the tap too hard rinsing their toothbrush. I stepped back and waited, enjoying the rising steam and keeping my feet clear of the spatter, rather than ranting like a, well, dropped lobster.

Maybe it was because I’ve had a week off, or it was Saturday, or I had no place to be in a certain number of few minutes that I could just chill out and wait for the water to return to normal. Or maybe it was because I have these moments lately when I can step back, see the big picture and perceive my current crisis for what it is: a luxury problem. I’ll take that over being too poor to eat or find shelter any day.

Anyway, (cover your eyes again), I got this twisted idea that we could test for true enlightenment by observing how, say, a handful of televangelists react in similar circumstances. Let ‘em soap up real good, then flush the toilet and see if they totally lose it or if they can handle it with patience. Now that I’ve explained it, I realize I shouldn’t entertain profound ideas right after a big cup of coffee in the morning because this one’s pretty stupid.

Never mind.

I was wondering the other day how different things would be if the concept of inheritance no longer existed. What I mean is, when you move on from this life, your leftover wealth gets distributed among the entire tribe instead of to your immediate relatives.

Wow. Wouldn’t that change things? What would the great names be? Carnegie? Rockefeller? Forbes? How would you become great if you couldn’t pass your loot along to, say, Paris Hilton? What would happen to us if the incentive to make way more money than we can spend in a lifetime went away? I imagine some people would still do it because that’s what they enjoy. But I’m wondering if a whole lot of others might snap out of their collective stupor and maybe do something else.

Okay, there are some hitches in the plan. What I think I’m describing is a form of socialism, which hasn’t really performed well when compared to pure capitalism. But what if we removed the royalty from capitalism and leveled the playing field? You still get to choose your job and make money whatever legal way you wish, but you come out of the shoot no better or worse off than the guy in the next birthing room. All you give up is the opportunity to perpetuate a class of financially secure antecedents who can work or not work as they see fit. Is that bad?

I guess what I’m wondering is if there would be more for the rest of us if a handful wasn’t hogging a majority of the world’s wealth. Or would we wind up a post-WWII Soviet Union with a royal class (some comrades more equal than others) and as much corruption as we have in our capitalist democracy? I’m sure the government would have to be involved in the redistribution of the deceased’s wealth, so there’s plenty of room for corruption there. Or is there? Isn’t that what the IRS does with inheritance tax? This would just be a whole lot more. I wonder if it could be done.

I keep dreaming of a world in which people become baseball players because they love to play baseball and don’t really have any other career urge. I dream of world where teachers become teachers because they love to teach, not because they’ve decided to trade earning a large income for having the summers off. Or doctors who have a primary interest in keeping people healthy, not making the big bucks (okay, the inheritance thing wouldn’t prevent that, but maybe it’s time we look at the salary scale as well). Or lawyers who dig justice more than winning. How about publishers more interested in presenting the truth than in selling copies?

I’m a little tired of patting rich people on the back for their philanthropic largesse when their contributions don’t really diminish their capacity for living large. I’m sure I’d have a different opinion of all this if I were one of the moneyed elite. But my materialism gland has nearly gone dry over the years. I plan to be buried with my assets–unless the embalmer happens to grab the spare change out my pocket before I go in the hole.

Just to prove how jaded I am, I completely forgot to mention in the last entry’s laundry list of happenings that Dr. Dizzle and I made a pilgrimage to Somerville, MA to see a premier of Klunkerz, introduced by one of the forefathers himself: Gary Fisher.

I don’t think I’ve seen Gary face-to-face in maybe a decade. I stayed at his house for a few days way back when I was writing a feature story about him for Mountain Bike magazine that was perhaps a bit more honest than it needed to be. In other words, it never got published. Despite his jet lag from flying in from the premier in Scotland the night before, Gary managed to recognize me. There was a line of autograph seekers behind me, so I left it at “Hi, how are ya?” and took my seat. He did manage to tell me that he’d ponied up a ticket so Charlie Kelly, the godfather of all mountain bike journalism, could join him. That was pretty big news, if you know the history.

I think this movie has helped heal a lot of old wounds. Everybody gets their say in it and, more importantly, nobody slags anybody else. It’s the most coherent assemblage of all the various stories on the origin of the species I’ve ever heard. That is to say, I didn’t learn anything new by watching this movie. I knew about the Larkspur Canyon gang. I knew about the cyclo-cross race with modified newpaper boy bikes. I know Repack, chapter and verse. I’ve even toured the course with Mr. 4:22 himself, Gary Fisher. But the movie put it all together in a way that illustrates what happened where and who had the inspiration to take it further. I think that’s the nutshell version.

The shocker for me is how old all of my old Marin County friends have become. I guess they’d probably say the same about me. Lots more white hair on my head and face and belly hanging over my belt than when I was stomping around out there, mining for magazine copy. I love these guys (including Jacquie Phelan, who’s been one of the guys more than some of the guys have been–I never got to meet Wendy Cragge in person, but she seems like one of the guys as well). They’ve taken me on great rides, invited me into their homes, let me sleep on the floor of their offices (well, that was just Seekay), let me sit in with their bands (well, okay, that was just Seekay again), and slipped me preliminary peeks at their prototypes so I could get news of them out to you all in a timely fashion.

Anyway. It was more like a family reunion than a Hollywood event for me, so I guess it slipped my mind. My bad. The film focused on the core players. Mike Sinyard was about as far out as they were willing to go. So no Scot Nicol, no Ross Shafer, no Gary Helfrich, no Richard Cunningham, no Mert Lawwill, no Chris Chance and, thank goodness, none of us latter day mountain bike journalists who got on the bus as it was going by at full speed.

The bonus was we ate at McDonald’s. I don’t know why that cracks me up so much. Maybe because Dr. Dizzle cooks for a living. It’s like me riding a K-Mart bike. Anyway.

Wow. After January dragging on for so long, February sure got by in a hurry.

Several people have written wondering if there’s something wrong with me because of the lack of blog entries. Actually, that mostly happens when things are right with me. Writing is therapeutic for me, helps me get connected and purges whatever demons are conspiring to twist my head into an unhappy shape. So when you don’t hear from me these days, it’s most likely because I’m firing on all cylinders, getting lots of work done and having fun. Sucks for you, but I’m quite happy with the arrangement.

To sum up, January included:
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I’m not sure if it’s the full moon or just one of those days, but I had two old friends returned to me from the lost and found bin today. The first, Bill Lucas, popped up in email after a few years of no contact. He stumbled across this website and dropped me a line to let me know he was riding again. The other, Brooks Mitchell, was at a gathering several towns over that I wasn’t all that psyched to attend, but went anyway. Boy, am I glad I went anyway.

Bill is my oldest, in terms of long-standing, friend. He’s two years older than me, but when we met thirty years ago, he was really old. We were both disciples of Phil Fisher, a backyard bicycle frame builder and counterculture icon in Albany, NY. Phil was as pro-bike as he was anti-car. Bill and I were both doing stuff with him, but hadn’t yet met. I was headed over to Phil’s to fix a busted spoke from a rough race weekend when I met him and Bill, on bikes, headed out to get some pie and coffee. Phil implored Bill to ride my bike and check out how it handled. Bill rode it, handed it back to me with a sneer and commented that it was in such poor working condition that he couldn’t tell anything about the frame. I was pissed. It was the start of a lifelong friendship.
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Christmas break was just a blur, but somewhere in there was a day. Let’s call it a Metal Health Day. Dr. Dizzle and I ventured north one day to seek out Frank the Welder in his Bellows Fall, VT lair. Frank the Welder was recently inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame for his copious contributions to the mountain bike industry by way of his innovative bike designs and immaculate construction. Starting at some BMX company I forget, moving on through the Yeti years (and several world championships), to Sinister (those lovely dirt jump/skate park/freeride/downhill rigs) to his most current incarnation, the Viris WTF trials bike.

We got the nickel tour of the aluminum tubing rack, complete with handy dandy rollers and built-in chop saw, various vintage Bridgeport mills set up for specific tube mitering operations, the ubiquitous frame builder’s welding jigs, an engineer’s table, drill press and a CNC machining rig that reminded me of the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars. Then we went to the Miss Bellows Falls Diner for lunch.
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December, for all it’s darkness, snow and cold, is a very busy time for me. I’ve cranked out more website stories, magazines, playbills, posters and spin in the past two weeks than I have in the previous month or so. Bike riding has slipped and snowshoeing and skiing are still not in full swing. But work is good. I must say that work is going well. The new boss is good at helping me get out from under everybody else’s good ideas so I can pursue my own.

But tonight I had a few moments to incorporate some of Jeff’s suggestions into the museum logo and I’m really liking it. I boosted the size of the headbadge and carefully slid the name plate up a bit. Well, you’ve got eyes. Tell me how this one looks to you.

More end-of-semester meetings tomorrow and another party. Thursday is looking good for some x-c ski adventuring with Mrs. and Dr. Dizzle. Work is good, but play is better. You knew that.

I meant to use small caps for the wording around the chainring. That’s a silhouette of a one-inch pitch chainring, the old-fashioned kind used on the original Klunkers, which were spelled with a K in Fat Tire Flyer, so I’m down wit dat. In both of these I faded the bike back an additional 10 percent to cut down on the clutter. The bike is still the Breezer #2 owned (before it got swiped) by Charlie Kelly, the great-granddaddy of mountain bike journalism (Fat Tire Flyer). The “shield” is a sanitized head badge from a Schwinn Excelsior. Again, a nod to the original newspaper boy bikes that were integral to the Klunker conversion experience. I added the First Flight logo because this whole operation wouldn’t be operating if not for Jeff and his shop in Statesville, NC. I tried fading back the chainring a bit and outlining the type to help emphasize the head badge. I haven’t heard from Jeff yet today, but he’d probably like to hear your preferences. We close here, er wut?

Not easy to make those curves work, but I’m starting to like this one a lot. How’s bout youse?