Taken by the son of a local motorcyclisist, this short cell phone video says so much about the challenges of being a dad. The story behind the video is that the cop didn’t catch this wheelie-popping patriarch, and the guy was unaware that he had been chased until his kid showed him the video later that day.

Suddenly he has two ethical questions: 1) was it wrong to show off to his kids by performing illegal and somewhat dangerous stunt riding on a public street, and 2) how should he deal with the cop situation in order to set the right example? The answer to question (1) is certainly “no”, it is not wrong to show off to your kids with illegal and somewhat dangerous stunt riding- as long as you don’t get caught.

Nothing captures a boy’s respect and admiration like a father who exhibits a flagrant disregard for safety and propriety while having fun.

However, when a child witnesses the long arm of the law in hot pursuit, a father has a more challenging dilemma on his hands. Set the wrong example, and the kid is likely to wind up in juvenile detention for riding his dirt bike up and down the halls of the high school during a pep rally…

The stunt-riding father in this video did the right thing: he called the police station and informed on himself. It turned out that the cop who gave chase was also a motorcyclist, and let the matter rest with a stern warning. So everybody wins. The policeman remains respected and feared, the dad retains his “totally awesomeness”, and those jubilant kids will have a story for years about the time their crazy dad outran the cops on one wheel.

1974 R90/6

A horde of visigoths descended on All City Coffee this morning…

Battlebuell

Lake Sammamotron

The Snow-Peach makes fun of me for taking glam shots of my own bike in front of beautiful scenery. Is that weird? Is anyone not impressed by its massive shininess? I don’t think so.

I can't help it.

These pictures are from a ride up to the top of Cougar Mountain today, where I visited a “geodetic survey” marker on top of the world. Well, at least it was on the top of the Eastside. I also trespassed my way onto a vacant lot with a spectacular view of the Olympics and all mountains northward, and a pavé-like service road going up into the clouds.

Geodetic plug

Look at tiny, silly little Bellevue!

Edip, riding his Husqvarna supermoto like Ataturk in Portland.

Redmond isn’t so bad. You might think that living with my in-laws in this quiet cul-de-sac is not as wild and fun as living on Capitol Hill in Seattle. And you would be right.  But you would be overlooking some of the homey charm of this place, and I’m beginning to enjoy it. Today I lounged in the peanut-shaped lawn with Bubba, then rode my bike around the quiet and prosperous hills of Redmond, Bellevue, and Issaquah. Like all Redmond bike rides, this one had me circling a lake and ended up at Marymoor park.

For a cyclist, Redmond is the kind of town where you’ll see some lowered Honda Civics, but they won’t necessarily try to kill you all the time.  Here’s a link to my route today, it took about two hours:
View Bicycling directions to 4100 156th Avenue Northeast, Redmond, WA in a larger map

East Lake Sammamish Pkwy

Free Wheel

The messengers of Wa Legal, in repose.

After all the cocaine scandals and the injuries, Tom Boonen is still the king. For those who didn’t get to see the Paris-Roubaix yesterday, here’s a quick re-cap:

After four hours of racing, the treacherous cobbles that make up a large part of the 260km course had already claimed a number of riders in the typical series of horrific crashes that characterize this race. An early breakaway group had been caught, and the peloton was in chaos. With 55km to go, Tom Boonen was in an excellent position at the front of the leading group of riders. He and his Omega Pharma Quick-Step team-mate took the lead. Juan-Antonio Flecha and three other Team Sky riders were there, working together, but Boonen is a sprinter, and all he had to do was sit still until the finish and win the sprint.

There was absolutely no reason for him to ride off the front, leave the group, ditch his team mate, and begin mashing over the cobblestones like a demonic stone-mason. But he did, alone, more than an hour from the finish. The announcers were speechless for a moment, then one said, “that’s either an incredibly stupid move… or genius!!” Even when he had opened up an impressive lead of 30 seconds, it still seemed impossible for him to hold off the four Team Sky riders, all working in unison to catch him. Then the 30 second lead stretched out to 45, then 55 seconds. Then a minute. Boonen was flying over the tops of the pot holes and paving stones, and it was unbelievable to watch him riding 30 miles an hour, by himself, over the most brutal Napoleon-era cart-track imaginable. By the time he reached the velodrome at the finish, he had increased his lead to a minute and thirty seconds, and won the Paris-Roubaix for the fourth time.

Sometimes you have to go it alone.

Lil CL

The best motorcycle documentary ever made turns out to be a no-budget Youtube serial called Adventure Prone. It is made by a couple of kids who ride beater vintage Hondas, don’t wear gloves, and sport temporary neck tats. I’m hooked on these little 10 minute episodes!

From the Tampa Bay Online: “Bush was charged with two counts of leaving the scene of a crash involving property damage, a second degree felony; two counts of DUI with property damage, a first degree misdemeanor; one count of failure to stop and remain at a crash involving an injury, a third degree felony; one count of driving with a suspended license, a third degree felony, and one count of DUI with serious bodily injury to another, a third degree felony.”

Getting a signing bonus of $3,150,000 to play professional baseball right when you get out of high school doesn’t necessarily turn you into a professional, apparently.

World's most expensive seat cover.

Most guys are lucky if their mother-in-law will make them a sandwich; mine will drop what she’s doing at 10pm on a weeknight and whip out a custom motorcycle seat-cover pattern.

Recovering a motorcycle seat from a yard of material is not an easy task, and requires the experience of someone who knows how to use tin foil and fabric chalk. I do not. I was actually going to try and stretch my piece of marine/RV vinyl to fit over my seat and just staple it down, which would have looked like a big lumpy raisin when I was done. Luckily, Carolyn stepped in and saved the operation. By forming a three-piece pattern out of tin foil and bed sheet and then carefully cutting the pieces from my yard of vinyl, she made a perfect fitting seat cover for my VFR750. A layer of closed-cell foam was used to firm up the old saddle, and it’s now better than new.

World's greatest mother-in-law

Chalk outline

When do we ride??

Adjustable rake angle

Eddie has a new supermoto that is very pleasing to the eye. It is a Husqvarna SM 450RR, a limited production race bike. It cost $7,000 (used), which is exactly the same amount as a one-year supply of earth-friendly, biodegradable diapers. Guess I’ll just take the diapers.

There aren’t many opportunities to connect my geek-obsession with motorcycles to the law school curriculum. In fact, most of the time, motorcycling and the law just don’t really get along. During my Criminal Law class last semester, I realized that riding a motorcycle on one wheel down a public street would be seen as criminal negligence by a jury of my peers. It was a sobering moment.

After having such a difficult time trying to meaningfully daydream about bikes while in class, I was relieved to discover Hegel’s philosophical view about the justification of private property, because it seems to correspond so well with my visit today to see Tower’s latest cafe projects at Twinline. Basically, Hegel thought that a human being cannot live a full life, and cannot reach the best state of his or her true capability and agency, without deeply engaging with not only our human society and culture but with the very creation of our culture. Hegel’s “culture creation” involved an individual’s creative material interaction and work with physical objects, along with the individual’s knowledge that a particular creation be imprinted with his or her unique mark and personalized style. People must be made to feel secure in their control over the objects that they use or create, at least temporarily, in order to fully develop their true efficacy and agency. So, things need to be owned, because the control of ownership is conducive to the fulfillment of this basic human interest. In other words, one’s greatest self development might be attained by spending dozens of hours making a custom fabricated motorcycle tank.

Twinline has changed a bit in the last year, but the shop-heart is still beating strong, and the bikes are more dangerous and beautiful than ever. The parking lot was empty when I drove up and parked, but that wasn’t surprising on a February weekday in Seattle. After entering the grungy warehouse door, I found Brian and Keo tinkering in the main mechanic’s bay. I had a bag of taco-truck mulitas to share, and they put down their wrenches while I spread the greasy food out on one of the benches. We laughed and they told me about some project bikes, some drama, a death, and a birth. I worked here over a year ago and for only a few months, but today I found something therapeutic in the smell of the solvents, the sound of the distant hiss and puff of an air compressor. I let myself slowly look around the huge shop space.

Some George Strait was playing quietly on the speakers. A shy high school student from Bremerton was polishing aluminum engine case covers in the back. At least sixty motorcycles were lined up in rows against the far wall. A custom chopper, a vintage two-stroke racer, a KZ1000 battle bike, a Royal Enfield with an icon of a Hindu god on the headlight bucket, and dozens more, waiting for service. And, of course, Tower’s custom creations, all full of personal agency.

Keo's personal XS650

I’ve had a fear of ticks with lyme disease ever since mountain-bike goddess Julie Furtado’s dreams of an Olympic gold medal were crushed by a lyme-tick. It was later determined that Furtado actually had lupus, not lyme disease, but this fact does nothing to allay my fear of the crab-like parasitic monsters that thrive here in the Berkeley Hills. 

My ride into Sibley the other day began with another disease-carrying tick warning sign at the trail head. I’ve gotten used to seeing this little sign, and in spite of my fears, I’d soon forgotten the little buggers within a half mile of spiriting down the dirt track.

Ticktrack

The only single-track in Sibley are the little goat trails that skirt the cliffs and peter out into nowhere, and it was on one of these goat trails that I picked up my first tick. Since I had been obsessively checking my legs every thirty seconds, I saw the thing right away, and flicked him off. I had a chance to look at the insect, and I noted that it did not have the little red horse-shoe shape that apparently indicates the disease carrier. I looked around and realized that the trail I was on was a tick hot-zone; tall grass everywhere, with scrubby oak trees over the trail. Trying to remain calm, I carefully turned my bike around and tried to get back to the main trail and out of the tall grass. Within seconds, I noticed another tick on my lower leg. As I reached to flick it off, the beast seemed to realize what was happening, and started madly scrambling through my leg hair, looking for a place to bite and set up camp. I looked more closely at him, and thought I saw the infamous red horse-shoe on his tiny, repulsive body. It was a disease carrier, and it wanted my blood.

The adrenaline hit me like a shot of cocaine to the testicles. I began swatting at the tick with both hands as though I were trying to put out a fire, shouting and swearing. Riding as fast as I could back to the main trail, I started to imagine how many millions of blood-starved ticks were teeming in the grass just out of sight. It was like a nightmare.

As I reached the top of a grassy hillside, out of breath and still panic-stricken, I nearly ran over a young couple on a blanket. They were lying in the grass, completely ignorant of the hordes of ticks who were no doubt coming for them. I thought it was only appropriate to warn them of the danger. Trying to settle myself down, I screamed:

“THE TICKS- THEY ARE EVERYWHERE-THOUSANDS-I’VE JUST BEEN ATTACKED TWICE-GET OUT-GET AWAY FROM HERE.”

“oh, really? thaaanks,” said the girl, barely moving. Her boyfriend said nothing. I couldn’t believe it, and turned to ride away. Before I was out of earshot I heard the boyfriend making some grotesque sort of insect noises, and turned to see him pounce on the girl on the blanket. He was pinching her everywhere while making his tick-sounds, and the girl was giggling hysterically. Apparently a fun-loving tick-attack was a hilarious joke to these people.

cliffs vs. ticks

Wonderful, I thought. I’m like the out-of-towner, afraid of bears in Central Park. Laugh while you can, you crazy, care-free East Bay day hikers. I seriously doubt that Julie Furtado would think it was funny.

One of Rustin's five Hondas

Rustin sent me these photos of a wheel chock and repair stand that he whipped out in his garage. Note to self: learn how to weld!

Morning rush-hour

My brother Jordan commutes to work on a Huffy beach cruiser. He brings a small truckload of gardening tools with him, artfully strapped to his bike with bungee cords. I rode along with him the other day as an assistant to see his professional skills in action, and also to help prepare a secret garden plot that he had discovered in North Berkeley.

green machine

The assistant's vehicle

When we arrived at the “squatter’s garden”, I unloaded the tools that I had brought in my large yellow bag and checked out our little plot. Jordan figured that it had not been planted in at least three years, and it was full of overgrown weeds and random trash. Since a gas-powered rototiller doesn’t transport well on a beach cruiser (or a Mexican track bike), we would be breaking up the soil by hand, with shovels. It was time for me to find out that gardening is no picnic.

the squatter's garden before...

...and after

Adding soil

Making rows

Evening commute

view from Grizzly Peak Boulevard

View Larger Map
Skyline Boulevard is a winding, two-lane road that heads south from Grizzly Peak, and passes along some impressive regional parks, such as the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, Redwood Park, and Anthony Chabot Park. All were very neat, all were very crowded on this memorial day weekend.

Grass Valley Road

Redwood Regional Park

Cathedral Building, downtown Oakland

San Pablo Reservoir from Grizzly Peak

I have become the kind of guy who brings a backpack on road bike rides. Call it being old, call it being incredibly out of shape, but for whatever reason I now feel the need to bring snacks, a jacket, a tool and a camera on any ride that lasts more than three hours.
View Larger Map

Miles: 37

Hours: 3-ish with snack stops

Hills: So, so many

Critters spotted: Wild turkeys and other miscellaneous fowl, deer, cows, and lots of Berkeley dogs.

A shot of Wild Turkey

Briones Reservoir

Golden Gate Bridge

Riding around in Wildcat Canyon Park the other day….

City of Oakland!

Unknown Trail

Cows in the canyon

Unreleased

The thought of riding an old Honda twin doesn’t usually make my heart skip a beat. I associate old bikes like the 1974 CB360 with reliability, trips to the grocery store, something my Grandpa might have liked, etc. Because of those preconceptions, I was in a perfect state of shock and awe after riding Hightower’s latest cafe project, shown in these photos.

When Twinline’s Ian or Tower wheels out a completed project and says, “take it for a spin, dude,” I have learned to drop whatever I’m doing, quickly find the nearest helmet, and go. This CB360 was “unreleased” when I had the chance to ride it, meaning it had not even been seen by the customer, let alone Cafe Racer magazine.

My first impression, after scrunching myself into the tucked-up rear sets and pulling out of the Twinline parking lot, was how well Tower’s custom brake and shift pedals are set up. The brake pedal is totally hand fabricated and shortened, so that when the ball of your foot is on the peg, you can access it with your toes just perfectly. It works.

Custom rear brake pedal

Riding the bike is nothing short of grin-inspiring. Tower has kept the motor totally stock except for pod filters, straight pipes, jetting changes, and maybe a mysterious tweak to the ignition timing via old-school mechanical points adjustment. The tune is perfect: no de-cel popping (which is next to impossible with straight pipes), smooth power band, and very impressive acceleration for such a little guy. The new Hagon shocks and rebuilt front suspension combined with excellent tires created a reckless confidence in the corners, and I found myself pitching it down into questionable lean angles almost immediately. No danger of dragging toes with those rear sets, though. Overall, another lovely creation.

The proud papa

Christmas time

It’s been awhile since I’ve visited the Twinline gang, and walking into the shop yesterday was like returning to a mother’s arms. Especially if my mother was a grease-covered wench dressed in Carhartts. I noticed that Dave’s Honda project was up on the stand, and Dave was bouncing around like a kid on Christmas. The moment that I was walking in just happened to be a special time: time for the first ride of this long winded project. He was hooking up a battery and praying for the rain to stop, so he could fire it up and tear ass down to the O Boy Oberto jerky factory and back. I took some pics before it came off the stand, because it may never be this clean again. To Dave: If you’re reading this, the video of you starting the bike that I shot with my camera is too crappy to include here, the sound of that motor just did not transfer to my little Canon. Kind of like trying to take photos of the Grand Canyon.

The Works

Hightower's custom shift lever

Engine mount

Exhaust and Rear Set

the crew

From a PNWRiders forum member, March 31:

“I responded to your post awhile back about the couriers, and was wondering if I could get some more info.

How did you get started running deliveries? It sounds like a fun gig for those of us who love to ride.

Any helpful info is greatly appreciated.

Thank you”

It was the best job I’ve ever had, and unfortunately the party’s over. Over a period of several years I’ve logged about 130,000 miles, and murdered three sportbikes. How did I get started, you ask…  This is a great chance for me to launch into a rambling, self-indulgent odyssey about my career as a courier. It probably isn’t the helpful info that you’re asking for, and will no doubt be more fun for me to write than for you to read. Nonetheless, let me start at the beginning.
It was the summer of 1994, and the place was Seattle. I was a 19 year old hayseed from Winthrop, Washington, and fresh off the turnip truck. Seattle was actually a somewhat affordable and interesting city back then, and I was easily dazzled by the skyscrapers, the urban grime, and the throngs of exotic-looking heroin users on Capitol Hill. I needed to find a job, so I did what any socially challenged high school drop-out with an addiction to Ernest Hemingway novels might have done: I got hired as a bicycle messenger.

The first six months of messenger work were sort of a fantastic nightmare- I got hit by a car, I made minimum wage, I smelled bad and was starving for calories all the time. But I soon came to love the job, and the co-workers were the most fascinating bunch of weirdos that I had ever seen. There was 45-Carl, a friendly punk rocker from the East coast, who would shoot heroin in the bathroom while waiting for jobs from the dispatcher. There was the car-board dispatcher, a calm, bearded man, who was somehow high on cocaine every single day. There was 61-Travis, who should have been a professional cyclist, and could destroy an entire field of seasoned bike racers whenever he put the bong down long enough to enter a mountain bike race. It was an occupational culture that seemed to attract drug users, hippy jocks, and broken athletes. I suppose not much has changed.

The “Quicksilver” era of the late seventies and eighties may have been the true zenith of bike messenger culture, but things were still pretty good in the mid-nineties. You could easily jump on a Greyhound bus and land in any one of a number of cities- New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Baltimore, etc., and immediately get hired as a courier, as long as you had a bike and the look (cut-off Dickies over lycra, cycling shoes, rampant body odor). After several years of working in Seattle, I decided to check out the scene in San Francisco, which is where I first saw an actual motorcycle courier.

San Francisco has a place called “the wall” on Market Street, sort of a concrete pavilion in the middle of a city block in the financial district, and at any time of day it was possible to see several dozen bicycle couriers there, picking at their scabs and “burning down.” Upon my arrival in the city, I went to the wall to find out about who might be hiring, which dispatchers to avoid, and where could I find some of the hemp-oil chain lube that people had been talking about.  I noticed a guy with a messenger bag sitting on a beat-up, flat black FZR600. I realized that he must be a courier when I heard his radio squawking, and I watched him say something to his dispatcher, put on his tattered helmet, and start his machine. In a split second he was pointed down Market street in the middle of all the afternoon traffic. There was a loud bark of exhaust, and his front wheel shot up in the air like a salute in a massive, perfect wheelie- going right down Market into third gear, probably traveling 60 miles an hour before he let it back down. The rest of the messengers watched and murmured a collective “ho-HO!”, before lazily turning back to their hacky-sack games and hand-blown glass devices.

When I was hired later that day at Go! Couriers, I was surprised to see that half of the crew rode motorcycles. Four bicycles, four motorcycles, one car. The motorcycle messengers were a totally different breed of animal than any of the bike messengers I had worked with. Bike guys were into pot, food, fitness, and Campagnolo parts. The motorbike guys were hard-drinking, leather-clad tavern brawlers who cheated death on a daily basis, and were into wheelie stories and whiskey. After work, these two seemingly incompatible stereotypes put their differences aside and got drunk together, at messenger bars like Zeitgeist.

Years later, say 2004, I found myself working as a bicycle messenger in Seattle again. To my knowledge, Seattle has simply never had motorbike couriers, for whatever reason (the weather? hello?), but the motorbike idea was somewhere in the back of my mind. I didn’t own a motorcycle at the time, but I’ve had my endorsement since high school. Still, I didn’t give it much thought until I heard about a guy named Devin, who was apparently making a killing at IndyStealth Couriers on one of those big Honda scooters. We heard that he was clearing nearly twice the number of jobs as the other car drivers, and raking in the commissions. That was when the light bulb came on: since email and electronic file transfer had become ubiquitous, it was nearly impossible to make real money on a bicycle, and bike messengers had been in a slow, downward spiral for years. Drivers, on the other hand, who were able to cover a much wider area, were still making decent commissions.

I found a cheap SV650, and bought it. I was working as an independent contractor at the time, and started contracting for a messenger company that needed a driver. They were already using one motorbike rider, a guy named Steve. Like me, Steve was a long time bike messenger who saw an opportunity to keep riding while making a bunch more money. He had bought a brand new DL650, and we compared notes on rain gear, maintenance, and the danger factor.

The danger factor was something I hadn’t really expected. The job was so terrifically dangerous that it was impossible to even talk to anyone about it. I’ve never been a crab fisherman or a choker on a logging crew, but I can’t imagine the potential for bodily harm being any higher than it is for a motorcycle courier in a metropolitan area. Consider this: of the characters in this story- myself, Devin, Steve, and Earl (who I will introduce shortly), I’m the only one to avoid a serious collision with another vehicle. That isn’t due to me being a better rider; just more cautious, and lucky.

Of the four of us, Steve went down first, one day on Fifth Avenue in downtown Seattle. Steve was a fantastic rider, with a unique, authoritative riding style. He would always sit perfectly upright on his DL, the way that the motorcycle cops sit. He had this tremendous respect for the motorcycle cops, and use to watch them at their training facility, performing maneuvers. The day that he crashed, he says that he “saw a gap, went for it, and the gap closed up too quickly. It was my fault.” He was hit and briefly pinned under the front bumper of a yellow cab, but somehow emerged in one piece and was able to ride the next day. He was wearing a Dainese chest protector, and some part of the underside of that cab punched a hole through the protector, but didn’t punch through his rib cage.

Then we heard about Devin’s gruesome accident with the UPS truck on 15th Avenue West. Devin was traveling North towards Ballard, and saw the UPS panel truck stopped in the middle turn lane. The truck abruptly went into reverse, and started backing into the oncoming lanes. The driver later said he was trying to quickly back up to a loading ramp. Devin says he just had time to think that he might be able to get around, ahead of the backing truck. He didn’t have time, and when he hit the truck’s rear end, his bike went underneath and Devin got tangled up in that little step-up deck that the UPS man stands on when he’s unloading stuff. Devin was mashed, and his leg was hideously mangled. He had to use a walker to get around for close to a year, and he’s lucky to be walking at all today. This was in 2007, he has not ridden a motorcycle since, and will never again.

Enter Earl. Earl is in his 50s and a father of four, and was the most reckless rider I had ever seen. We had all known him for years, when he had been a bike messenger company owner. Everyone also knew he was a little crazy, had beat up some cops and done some jail time, and everyone had a notorious story to tell about him. He claimed to have been a cowboy, a logger, and a professional downhill skier. He was an excellent rider and incredibly fit for an older dude, but also a manipulative sociopath and a chronic liar. When he began contracting for the same company that Steve and I worked for, he was determined to be the fastest courier on the crew. He idolized Valentino Rossi and talked incessantly about MotoGP results, and rode his SV650 like a cat perched on a bulldozer. One of Earl’s memorable claims was that he drug his knees in corners- while in downtown Seattle intersections. To back it up, he took the knee pucks from his riding pants and applied them to a belt sander, grinding them down to make them appear “well used.” Anyone who has done a track day knows what worn- down knee sliders look like, but Earl hasn’t, so he didn’t. It was funny in a pathetic sort of way, like the way he put a Yoshimura sticker on his stock SV muffler. When Earl T-boned an old lady’s car at Third Avenue and Lenora, no one was very surprised, but what we didn’t realize was that Earl’s crash would effectively kill Seattle’s motorcycle messenger experiment. Virtually overnight while in the hospital, with his pelvis shattered and jacked up on morphine, Earl became an anti-motorcycle evangelist. The guy who used to rant about the motorcycle-messenger-as-samurai-warrior, who used to tell everyone how to take corners, was now vehemently against motorcycles altogether. There was wild talk of legal liability, even though we were all independent contractors. He threatened to expose the fact that we didn’t carry the proper commercial driver insurance, and couldn’t be bonded as drivers. The company owner freaked out and dropped us, claiming his clients were demanding proof of proper insurance. I frantically called my old friends at Go! Couriers in San Francisco, hoping to find out how they had worked around the insurance conundrum. I was told that Go! had been sold to a conglomerate, and they didn’t use motorcycles anymore. To this day, I have not found any insurance company that offers the proper commercial driver coverage for motorcycles.

And that was it, no more motorcycle messengers. Steve immediately quit, and never rode a motorbike again. I showed up to his house with a van and picked up a couple of his dead bikes, including his original DL650 with over 120,000 miles on the odometer. Earl is currently working downtown as a bike messenger. Devin works for some printing company. And me, I’m going to law school this fall.

tacoma overpass

end of the road

I heard a familiar complaint the other day from a motorcycle mechanic, that “the problem with America is that we don’t know how to work on stuff anymore. We’ve become de-industrialized.” It’s a common theme in books like Shop Class as Soul Craft; the idea that when we can’t fix our cars or our leaky roof or the washing machine, we lose a truly essential aspect of our American identity. It’s true that these are important skills, and it is rewarding to make a broken machine come back to life. My Dad, for instance, is the kind of guy that can fix anything from a dead tractor to a broken sink, the kind of guy who builds a home-made CNC milling machine in his garage. And then there’s me, just one generation away, who can barely adjust the valves properly on this old SV650.

Battle SV

The problem is, the industrial age is gone. This bike repair stuff is either a cute hobby, or it’s your full time job and you get paid a shitty wage and will soon learn to hate what you do. There’s no future in it. (Edit: There are exceptions, if you happen to be a self-made wizard like Ian or Hightower over at Twinline.) A friend of mine just got a job that pays really well- as a SDET, or QA engineer, or something. I don’t really know what that is, except that it’s way more valuable than knowing how to hone valves. Another friend of mine is in a specialized electrical engineering program, learning about micro-processors and digital controllers, signals and systems theory. He will soon be on the cutting edge of a lucrative industry, designing gizmos that don’t even exist yet. Both of these friends bring their bikes to my garage when a derailleur is out of adjustment, or a headset needs to be re-packed. It’s neat to help my friends out with my specialized skill set, which is worth about fourteen dollars an hour.

I guess what I’m saying is, I will always love turning wrenches, but I’m glad to be going back to school this fall. And the quintessential character of the American identity is not simply knowing how to fix industrial-age machines. If anything, it is about adapting to new environments using whatever tools are available, whether it’s designing gizmos, testing software, or getting your law degree. The only age in human history that we should be truly nostalgic about is the first one, the best one, the hunter-gatherer stage. It’s either that, or full speed ahead.

Touratech studs

Honda Racing NSR250

It has hooks for tie-downs and it rolls around on little shopping cart wheels. What else do you want? Designed by Edip the Turk

Thank You for Shopping at Hardwick's Hardware

The trails at Tahuya were virtually empty today, due to some televised sporting event that attracted all of the ATV riders, like ants to a picnic. I had the place to myself, and found some off-course single track that was much to my liking.

Requirements: Must be able to lift 320lbs.

Managed to get hung up on a large log crossing, and had to lift the KTM up and over it. This bike is no lightweight.

On the ferry ride back home, some passengers spotted a whale in the middle of Puget Sound. Someone noticed that the whale appeared to be dead and floating in the water, and then noticed that it actually looked like a dead person, floating on something. The ferry stopped and changed it’s course, heading towards the strange dead thing. From fifty yards away, we could see that the person was in a wetsuit, moving, and floating on what looked like a surfboard. The life raft was deployed to go and make the dramatic rescue, and everyone cheered from the decks. It turned out that board-bro’s windsurfer had broken apart. He had been trying to paddle with his hands, laying on the board. There was high wind, big swells, it was 3:30 PM, and he was literally in the middle of Puget Sound, about to die. When we were back on course, the captain came on the horn and thanked the passengers that had spotted the hypothermic wind-shredder, and said “this is a good day.” Everyone clapped and cheered again.

Fun's over, brah