On some good advice that these days of winter are for relaxing a bit and letting the muscles grow supple, I spent last week riding to the Metro, taking the Red Line downtown, and reading my book for a little while in the morning and evening. I figured it wouldn’t be as frantic over the holidays as I remembered, and it wasn’t. In fact, it was pleasant enough that I’m doing it again this week and reading some more. This is the first time in two years I’ve taken the Metro to work instead of riding my bike. It feels a little bit like I lost something, but that something might have been a chip off my shoulder rather than anything important.

Other than that… what’s to say? It’s not that life hasn’t been interesting, after all the holidays have been a swarm of family and friends and events and food, the kids astonish and nourish me in new ways just about every day, there’s some bike and non-bike projects in the works, and there’s no shortage of current events to ponder aloud (or at least to ignite vehement reactions). I just haven’t been interested in writing about any of it.

Unless I become suddenly inspired, this right here’s the year-end wrap-up:

• I should finish the year with about 4050 miles and 131035 not-feet* of climbing.
• Number of rides is a less precise stat, because I’ll list a ride like “Farmers’ Market and Back” as a single ride, whereas the ride to work and the ride home are two, both because they’re broken up by a whole day of sitting and because it makes it easier to use different routes. The number of rides I’ve recorded for the year stands at 558, but there’s a few days left yet to cross 560 for the year.
• My weekly averages came out to approximately 10 3/4 rides a week for 77 miles and change. The biggest week was 189 miles and a little over 11400 not-feet of climbing, which was the week in August of the Livestrong Challenge. That month was my biggest with almost 625 miles.
• I put over 1575 delightful miles on Cledus (the Long Haul Trucker) this year, which is pretty cool. Cooler still was that Nigel, my Trek 930 based Xtracycle, racked up 1925 miles, and logged over 61k not-feet to Cledus’ 54k. No wonder I had to replace his Fat Franks this year, they got all wore out from kicking everyone’s ass all the time.
• I’m not sure how many miles we put on the car this year, but I’m almost positive it was well under 4k miles. Gotta verify it, but that’ll definitely deserve its own toast on New Year’s Eve.

* MapMyRide.com’s elevation statistics are horribly inaccurate, I’m certain that a year’s worth of GPS data from the same rides would yield an entirely different number. But since MMR was my method of measure throughout the year, it is at least consistently inaccurate. Or it’s not.

So there’s the tale of the tape. Pretty good year! I don’t know if I’ll beat those numbers next year, or if I’ll keep numbers for that matter, but this was worth doing and knowing. Even though it sure felt like I was piling on miles before and during the century, those only accounted for 500-600 of the total. The vast majority of the miles I rode this year were just to work and back, with a regular ride to the market on Saturdays. Pity the cyclist that thinks of those miles as “junk”!

Other things to remember and be thankful for this year:

• I lost a good bike. I miss you, buddy.
• I gained a couple more. I love you all.
• The Bike Clinics at Mt. Pleasant Farmers’ Market (and then at Bloomingdale, 14th and U, and H St.) were incredibly successful this year, more than anyone could’ve guessed. Estimates indicate we may have helped as many as 800 people get their bikes back on the road, and that’s pretty darn cool.
• Every day my wife proves to me how smart I was to marry her, and my children demonstrate to me that there’s nothing that could have adequately prepared me for the experience of raising children.
• And then there’s y’all. Or yinz. Or youse guys. Whatever ya call yourselves, thanks for tuning in. I’d probably write this stuff down somewhere, and bookmark these Internet oddities, but it’s much more satisfying to talk to you than just to myself, and there’s less annoying reverb.

I think that’s enough to call it a year, don’t ya think? Feel free to drop a comment about something awesome or not so awesome that you did, or were just in the path of, this year. And when it gets close to midnight on Thursday night, when I raise a glass to the end of this year, consider it hoisted in your direction.

Cheers!

I learned recently that my father had printed out one of these posts, and my grandmother had read it, and remarked, “Someone’s trying to be funny.” When she found out it was me, and that I frequently try to be funny here on my blog, she simply replied, “Blogs are ruining the world.”

Ruining the world! It’s nice to know that my grandmother believes I’m involved in something as important as ruining the world, really warms my heart, but I can’t take credit for it. I wasn’t involved in creating violent video games, movies with ratings of “R” or better, comic books, Howard Stern, pulps, jazz, country, or rock and roll. I didn’t replace live musicians with 78’s, vaudevillians with movies and television, or telegraph messengers with telephones. I haven’t modernized or downsized or offshored anyone’s manufacturing job. I haven’t sold anyone a tranch of anyone else’s shitty mortgage, nor have I sold anything resembling an insurance bet on anyone’s tranches of other people’s shitty mortgages. I didn’t replace human-scaled towns and cities with unwalkable automobile slums, and I sure as fuck didn’t fill these streets with luxury automobiles the size of train cars, complete with cybernetic navigation and personal multimedia systems to absorb all the surplus cognition their drivers have left over from buying these asinine metal mammoths and paying almost no attention to actually piloting them.

But perhaps that’s not the part of the world she’s talking about. Perhaps she’s referring to the world of opinion journalism, a Broderian utopia in which respected public figures like Michael Gerson can take to the pages of the serious, tempered, grown-up pages of the Washington Post and opine…

American conservatism — intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history — is now staring into an abyss.

…without some anonymous scoundrel from a steel town responding…

Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The “engine” of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4″ interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

I realize, of course, that it’s just a matter of perception. When I look at the discursive world she thinks is being ruined, from where I’m standing it’s a crispy smoldering lump without much in it worth saving. I’ll consider it substantially closer to unfucked when IOZ has a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, while Gerson checks his mailbox, fingers crossed, hoping he’ll find a check from Pajamas Media.

Also in my unfucked world: Joe Scarborough is arrested, but it doesn’t make the news, because who the fuck is Joe Scarborough? In my grandmother’s unfucked world, by contrast, people don’t say “fuck” on the Internet, or anywhere else. You can understand how we’d be pretty far apart on the most effective route to media Nirvana.

A few days ago, I knocked out my not-very-old Facebook account. I was already feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole enterprise when I got a message from my past that I definitely didn’t expect. It’s not that I bear this person any malice, but the last 25 years of not being in touch with them was going really well, all things considered. There are some loose threads in each of our tapestries, I believe, that are simply better left unrepaired. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that what I ought to do is ask some of the folks I’d gotten back in touch with for their preferred method of contact, and that I should actually write (or at least call) them if I was really going to make the effort to “stay in touch”. So I asked, some have responded, and now the Facebook account’s toast. Good riddance.

Today, as I was scanning Twitter more out of habit than interest, I realized that there was nothing there I truly valued, that I was just spending time. Typically I feel like I’d get more out of watching the Brady Bunch for 30 minutes than I do reading people’s tweets throughout the day, and those are from people I know and love. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to keep the account, so that’s toast as well.

The problem with these revolutionary digital thneeds, like the consumer crap and cultural detritus that form waist-high drifts of meaninglessness in my life, is that there’s novelty, but little else worth caring about. Each of these toys cost precious and finite moments of my life that I could be doing something worthwhile, unrecoverable time I could be spending with my children before they grow up and I grow old, time I could be spending eating and drinking with friends or cuddling my wife.

I turned the same critical eye to this blog, wondering if it too needed to go, but I stopped short of dropping the axe on it. Updike I’m not (and thank the good Lord for that), or Mencken or Royko for that matter, but art, craft, and skill are part of what I’m doing here. I’m writing, and I enjoy it, that’s what this is about.

I would have a hard time justifying the time and effort I put into this, were it just about the roughly eight of you gracious enough to drop in on a regular basis. But making this blog, to me, isn’t just about the posts or the audience. It’s about thinking and writing and photographing and editing and publishing, about the joy that comes from creating. And it’s about more than just producing any particular work of art or craft, it’s about cultivating the artist and craftsman. I’d find value in that whether or not I ever showed this to another soul.

So the blog stays. Lucky me, lucky you.

Perhaps I’ll change my mind about all this tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see the value in the social media revolution, and decide that the rare, beautiful gem one occasionally finds in it makes all the digging and sifting through mud worth it. But for now, my distilled sentiment on such things is that social media can blow it out its web-two-point-ass. I’m just a blawger, I suppose.

Ya know what’s awesome? I’ve written a couple hundred entries since March or so, about bikes and family and politics and media and stoner rock and all sortsa things. So what sort of search term would you think people follow to this blog more than any other? Xtracycle? Nigel? Karate + Donkey + Coffee? One of Carlin’s seven words?

How about this: “fucking poncho”.

Sweet, I’ll take it.

You know I’m just a bike rider. You know I don’t race. You know I like my bikes heavy, with big cushy tires. You know that if there’s a Girl Scout behind me when I’m on my way to work, it means one thing, namely that I’m about to get dropped by a Girl Scout.

Nevertheless, I think it’s time I bought a jersey, perhaps in XL for “eXtra Luxury”. And I think it’s about time you bought one too. Sure, you could do it because it’ll support some really wonderful folks that could use the help right now, or because the company that’s making them is the kind of company that restores your faith in the goodness of humanity. You could get one because you’re a serious racer, and when the competition sees “WIN” in all-caps on your sleeve, the competition will whither and crumble. You could get one of these jerseys because you will look even haw-haw-hawter in one than you already look when you’re firing yourself down the road like a sexy two-wheeled missile carrying a warhead filled with 50 megatons of Sassy. You could do it for any or all of those reasons, and that’d be swell.

I’m doing it for one reason, and one reason only. I’m doing it because these jerseys will make me faster, and I’m tired of getting dropped by a Girl Scout with a messenger bag full of Thin Mints.

I’m crankin’ on a project with a Friday deadline, so I haven’t been able to think about much else, and my thoughts on this aren’t very interesting if you aren’t me and don’t have this project due on Friday. So posting this week has been, and will be, light.

Know that fall is in full effect here in D.C., the leaves haven’t turned quite yet, but they’re on the edge. The weather’s been perfect, if you like hoody weather, crystal clear skies, and biking in cool breezes. And bygawd I do.

Also, last night in my sleep, I was dreaming my own personal horror movie about a certain snake charming, book banning, enemies-list-keeping, demagogue from Alaska becoming president and bringing some Main St. Wasilla to our nation’s capitol. I came up with a nickname for Governor Palin that I think will stick, and become the “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” of 2008. Check Wkipedia in 2108, you’ll see. So, you ready for it? Okay, here it is:

“Moose-olini”.

Thank you! Thank you very much! There’s that humor rearin’ its head, there.

Let me get to work on this stuff, and next week I’ll be provocative, topical, and mellifluous. For now, here’s muh boy checkin’ out a fixie at the Mt. Pleasant Farmers’ Market. Cheers.

Huck checkin’ out a fixie

It’s happened to any number of cyclists around downtown D.C. You’re pedaling along, stayin’ outta trouble, when suddenly a big guy on a mountain bike rolls up, stakes a position ahead of you and starts clicking away.

And you know you’ve been blawged by Gwadzilla. Not only that, but evidently I stand accused of being a Kool-Aid drinker. I can only refute that charge by noting that the life of an Xtracyclist is always intense, and that what I’m sippin’ ain’t some kid’s stuff, but something else of an entirely different, third-eye opening variety. Grip ‘n’ Sip!

Sorry about the helmet mirror, Senor ‘Zilla, but what can I tell ya, I’m a dork. At least Nigel’s lookin’ good, eh?

A young lady here in D.C. was killed riding her bicycle in the Dupont Circle area last week. Evidently she was going straight through an intersection and was run over by a garbage truck turning right. It’s the kind of story that makes my stomach knot and my heart break for her, for the family, and for the driver as well. The life of everyone involved has been redefined in that instant, and not in a good way.

The blog pundits have weighed in. Matthew Yglesias isn’t looking to accommodate, he thinks we ought to take more street back from the cars and use it for bus lanes, bike lanes, and light rail. Megan McArdle stokes flames by asking whether drivers or cyclists suck worse, and comes to the easy conclusion that it’s the drivers, and further that it’s D.C. drivers in particular. I disagree with Ms. McArdle on a variety of issues, but we’re solidly in concurrence on this one.

Ezra Klein draws attention to a study finding countries with more cyclists are safer. Sounds about right to me, the more familiar people are with mixed traffic, the less freaked out they should be sharing the road. Additionally, as more and more people turn to bicycles for relief from rising fuel costs, we’ll have a larger, more affluent, and therefore more powerful constituency. Sucks that you need numbers and money to get anyone in power to take notice, but that’s life. Mayor Fenty is already a strong supporter of alternative transportation, I’m hoping that between the growing ranks of cyclists and smart, progressive administrations we should see some real improvements in infrastructure.

And then come the comments (some of them mine) where each side shouts J’accuse!, and describes how they saw this bike/car run this red light/stop sign etc, etc. It’s predictable, like a fight in a small town bar that keeps happening between the same drunks over habitual insults and injuries. I frequently throw a punch or two, because shit, someone is wrong on the internet. But every so often, a stranger will walk through the door and throw down with something really special that just leaves jaws on the floor.

This country is not set up for bikers like Europe is, with its smaller city streets and huge population of bikers. Biking to work in most American cities is just taking an unnecessary risk. Go bike on a bike path for fun, but get the hell out of traffic.

Yeah that’s nothin’ I haven’t heard before. Blow it out your…

Biking to work is an affectation, and selfish in many ways. Look at the consequences to the family of that poor girl who was killed.

Wha-wha-Whatdidyoujustsay?!?

It IS selfish to unneccessarily risk your life if you have a family. Of course you can find cities in Europe that are not good for biking — such as Paris and Prague. Those that are, and have by COMMON practice and agreement, a large urban bike population, like Amsterdam, are the ones I was speaking of.

Paris, huh?

On July 15, the day after Bastille Day, Parisians will wake up to discover thousands of low-cost rental bikes at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations scattered throughout the city, an ambitious program to cut traffic, reduce pollution, improve parking and enhance the city’s image as a greener, quieter, more relaxed place.

Hey, those Frenchie bike rental stations look just like… ah nevermind. It should be noted that we do have common agreements, called laws, that lay out how we share the road. But g’head, continue.

Here, biking to work is eccentric, and therefore often done by people trying to strike a pose. There are some people who refuse to go along with the herd on most things, insisting that every single thing they do be marked by the stamp of their individuality. In my experience, that’s the person who bikes to work in a large U.S. city.

I was angry about this yesterday, but now I can’t stop giggling. Put aside the laughable Eisenhower-era attack on “eccentricity”, or the false equivalencies of cycling with eccentricity, or eccentricity with vanity. Put aside the fact that anyone who’s paying attention knows that your “stamp of individuality” in modern America comes from the products and media you consume. I mean really, c’mon, whattaya new here?

What I’m really curious about is this person’s experience. I know plenty of folks that ride to work, and I read a bunch who care to write about it. Many do it because they love bicycling, some do it because they hate driving, some do it to reduce their impact on the environment, and some believe it’s great for their health. Self sufficiency comes up pretty frequently, as does the need to respond to our country’s addiction to oil. Some even see it as an alternative to war, ambitious! At least one person believes that it saved his life. There are as many reasons for biking to work as there are people doing it, and most of us have more than one.

But I have never, ever heard anyone say, “I bike to work because it’s an expression of my individuality.” I’ve heard people say that about their hair, their clothes, their tattoos, their jewelry, their kitchens, their barbeques, and their lawns. People say it about their cars and motorcycles every day. After all, what’s a Hummer but an attempt to show the world your hairy swingin’ grapefruit-filled ballsack? But I’ve never heard anything remotely like, “I’m going to ride my bike to work and show the world who I am!” (Well, okay, there’s these guys, but to be fair, lookin’ hip is their business, and business is good.)

Which leads me to conclude that this commenter’s “experience” isn’t worth a shot of warm spit.

…in a city like DC, there is ample public transport. Taking a bike is not a practical choice, but some other kind of choice.

Au contraire, mon frer. If we leave the Brookland station of the Red Line, you on the train, and I on my bike, and we both head for Capitol South, I will have been waiting for you for about 20 minutes when you emerge from the station, and that’s if I’ve waited at every red light on the way. I will also be eating a breakfast sandwich, paid for with the $4 I’ve saved from not taking the train both ways. I will also have an extra one to three hours of my day that you do not have, due to your slower mode of transit, and the hour that you now need to spend at the gym to make up for your suffocating cubicle-based job. A gym which, I must remind you, requires lighting, air conditioning, and power so that you can watch television while spinning your hamster wheel.

Tell me again about practicality?

And so long as we’re talking public transportation, let’s return to your original point about selfishness. If you’re driving your automobile (I’ll even assume that it’s not a Ford Excursion for sake of argument) to work in this city, contributing to congestion, pollution, lack of parking, and a general decline in the quality of life for everyone else when there’s ample public transport available, then who’s being selfish?

If you drive a car and are honest about your observations, you know that the lives of bikers are entirely dependent on your driving accuracy and attention in a way that other drivers’ lives are not — you are behind tons of steel, and they are exposed. It’s just that simple — a huge risk, with utterly predictable tragic consequences for some bikers and their poor families. It’s just not a risk worth defending.

Living life in a steel box, decoupled from people and terrain, spending precious moments of a finite life hating everything is not worth defending. Vainly attempting to meet our transportation needs by escalating car-centric solutions is not worth defending. Destroying the livability of a city by accommodating the selfish desires of suburban car commuters, at the expense of our quality of life, is not worth defending. Continuing this way of life that’s wrecking the environment, changing the climate, miring us in middle-east geopolitical conflicts and transferring trillions of dollars of our wealth into the coffers of foreign dictators while our economy continues to degrade is not worth defending.

Riding bikes certainly involves some risk, but the stakes are high and the upside is huge. I think the risk is well worth defending.