In today's news...

From the Too Much Information Department:

Lots of talk over at .83 about guys getting their nuts shaved and their little swimmers evicted. My only comment was that they not get waxed down there. Unless you're a hit and run driver.

Spent this past Saturday at the Olympus Women's Spa, soaking nekkid in the hot baths and getting a body scrub. I'd never received a body scrub and it's the closest I'd like to get to being in a slaughter house. They bring you into an open, tiled room with 4 white, rubber covered beds with lots of hoses and water buckets constantly rinsing the floor and the women on the other beds. You lie down and a friendly Asian woman procedes to exfoliate the living crap out of your skin with hard rubber scrubby mitts like prepping a turkey on Tday morning. When she's done with one side of you, she tosses a big bucket of water over you (close your eyes! hold your nose!) and the bed and washes all the nasty dead skin onto the floor where it's rinsed yet again down a drain. She tosses and turns you all around and continues the rough rubbing and rinsing and hosing. Women come in, women come out. Water is tossed, the floor is rinsed, the rubber beds wait for the next sack of flesh. It's like a factory line. Finally you are free to waltz out of the room with your new skin and soak a little longer with your friends. I leave the nastiness of dead skin behind and sink like a baby into a hot tub.

Now that spring is officially here, it's that time of year when you don't really know what to wear in the morning on the ride into work. Sure it's chilly, but after a few miles you've warmed up plenty and find yourself unzipping everything in an attempt air out. So at dawn do you bundle up or strip down? This morning I decided to strip down, but that also leaves me open to the perils of not wearing a bra when riding in the winter. Why should I? I'm layered in god knows how many pieces of wool and polypro. One more stringy piece of cotton/lycra is only going to get stinky and fill up my laundry basket. So for 5 months of the year my girls go commando. This morning was one of those borderline times though. To bra or not to bra? My girls aren't exactly mistaken for size A's. Hell with it. I don't like to be bound. I had on my thin base layer and sweet blue wool Fiat jersey. Comfortable? Yes. Warm enough? Perfect. But being commando my girls were strutting their thing and all I could think was that I gave a few commuters something destracting the first few hours at work. Enjoy it, commuters. Summer is just around the corner and I'll have to reel the girls in.

Happy Spring Equinox

Spring! Daylight! Warmth! Flowers! Greenery!

Despite the cherry blossoms' fading blooms and tulips ready to burst from their bright green husks, I come home shivering in my cold cold house. My old windows leak like rice paper. Had to crank the heat up and wait an hour for the numbness to dispell. Feels an awful lot like it did in November...and December...and January and February. It feels like this every year but we stubbornly insist that this year will be different and we'll get summer a little bit sooner and won't have to suffer through another month of high heating bills or heavy clothing.

And we wait. For summer. But the spring equinox is a mile marker on the road to warm summer bliss. Closer. But not yet here. I'll watch the changing folliage pass before my eyes and try to acknowledge that it is indeed real and not a moving canvas. One day I will wake up and it will be warm and the days will last until midnight and we will play like children free from school.

But right now time stands still despite the etchings of the sun.

One big happy family

I was a bit worried about getting my precious new wheels home tonight. I finished gluing the sewups on last night and let the wheels sleep over at their fairy godfather's shop so I didn't get glue all over my existence. So tonight I went to the shop to swaddle them in blankets and take my babies home. Everyone oohed and ahhhed over them (note: I was not raising money) and asked about the spoke pattern and hubs and rims and tires. My fairy godfather answered all the questions like any proud father. He smiled and laughed and held them up high. He should have had a cigar!

Finally it was time to pack the babies up and bring them home. Before I started lashing them to my pack, my fairy godfather said, "Wait! I want you to have one more thing." He shuffled into the backroom and appeared a few minutes later with a black nylon Campy wheelbag. "Here, you have to protect at least one of them so they don't bang into each other." He tucked the rear wheel into the bag and gently zipped it up. Wow! A Campy wheelbag. I'm so official now! He wants the bag back, but for the next 20 minutes on the ride home I'll look like I know what I'm doing.

I lashed the babies to my pack and with many cheerful goodbyes we rode off. I had a little concern with how loose the wheels were on my pack, but they weren't anything I hadn't handled before. A nasty storm had blown in and the sky was black and rain began pelting my face. Not so bad riding down the trail. I had one hand on the Campy bag so it didn't swing too far to the side and one hand on my bars. We navigated through Fremont and Ballard and cut the u-turn onto the pedestrian path on the Ballard Bridge.

Now, I love the Ballard Bridge. We have a great relationship. People condemn it to hell and are scared shitless of it, calling it a mass of aged concrete and rebar. They loathe walking or riding across it, saying that the cars are too close or it feels like they're going to fall into the water or the bridge is about to collapse. BAH. This bridge has history and glory. This bridge is like a salty old fisherman with so many stories he'd keep you up for days listening to tales of what he's seen. I look forward to every trip across the bridge and looking down into the water and across to Fishermen's Terminal and all the boats who have sailed the cold dark seas. And the murals. How can you not love the murals??

But you know, on stormy days the bridge kind of sucks. It faces south and any weather is unimpeded shooting up pretty much from Oregon straight onto the bridge. You get the wind and rain right in your face like a train. So tonight as I started south over the bridge, my precious cargo, not lashed down particularly well (hey it's only a 2 mile ride), and one wheel nestled into a nylon bag disguised as a sail, decided to take flight and wave uncontrolably around my bike and I. I was torn between steadying the wheels in place with one hand or holding onto my handlebars with two hands and attempting to stabilize my bike that was being tossed around the walkway like a mad kite. The decision was quick. I had to hold onto my bike and my babies would have to fend for themselves. The cars whizzed by and splashed water across the berm. The wind tossed us about. The sleet and hail pelted my face. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the one baby waving around saying hello to the cars. "Stay closer!" I barked, but she was having too much fun out in the new world. As the bag flailed around she tossed me even more. I kept envisioning myself being flung across the berm and onto the windshield of a passing car. I kept pedaling and the end came closer. Closer yes, but also closer to the lightning that has now begun. Oh great. Hail, sleet, insane wind, rush hour traffic 2 feet from me, and now lightning. I'm a giant lightning rod. I can see the paper tomorrow: "Girl struck by lightning, found dead with two sweet wheels lashed to her back." My friends would stand around at my wake pitying me, "All that work and she didn't even get to ride her new bike and those sweet wheels. (pssst...does anyone have dibs on them yet?)"

But we made it. We turned west and out of the direct wind. I put my left hand back on the wheels to keep them close and they regaled in the fun they had just had. Damn kids, I thought. We got home safely and they are dry and on their new bike. One big happy family.

N.A. Handmade Bike Show 2006

Ok, enough of the malicious ranting. I'm centered. On to more enlightening moments of the week.

The North American Handmade Bike Show ended this past weekend. A major showing by some of the remaining true artisians of our time. Artists who still feel liberation in the molding of hot metal and the expression of love in the steady swirl of color. Sacha from Vanilla represented the Northwest as only he can and won Best in Show from cyclingnews.com. A tricycle. A titanium seatpost. The most orgasmically smooth handlebars I've ever laid eyes on. Crafters from old Fat City created some sweet cable guides like a dancer's hands wrapping around steel tubing. And lugs, lugs, and more lugs.

If you stop in a mainstream bike shop you miss out on pieces like this. The art. The love. The history. They are bikes, but they aren't meant to be machined by robots and mass produced. They're made with an artist's hand. Granted, if the mass-produced bikes reach the right person, they will be loved and given their own identity among the hoards of aluminum machines. They might even get to sleep next to their owner in a warm house. But to have true artists still create simplicity of motion is a special place and time that we need to hold on to. I don't want a machined piece of plastic. My bikes have soul, like children, they are unique individuals. They carry me to my own world. And it's artists like these who go there with me.

Adios KEXP

A few months ago the Seattle Weekly (not that I endorse this paper) published a story about what lurks behind the financial and managerial doors of KEXP. It not only explained why the station and its board failed in making its South Sound broadcast succeed (fucked up decisions, way to go asshats), but also that the station's dj's make upward of SIX DIGITS. I don't make 6 digits. I never will. KEXP is a non-profit, public radio station, paid for by its listeners. I've been listening to 90.3 FM for 11 years, since it was the pubescent station called KCMU. Now its djs are making over twice as much money as I am? And they can't get a fucking signal to extend past fucking Tacoma??? Yet they can stream to Antarctica and take the show on the road to fucking NYC and create Podcasts (whatever the hell they are), but they can't fucking get a signal past North Bend or down to its loyal listeners in Olympia.

Fuck that. Fuck you guys. You say you're not commercial radio, but you're all about the fucking money. How far around the world can we extend. How much fucking money can we raise during our membership drive to create more technology that our real core listeners don't have the time or resources to appreciate. How much fucking money can we raise to make our djs approach the salary level of commercial djs.

And then to top it off, to really show how distanced you are from where you came from, John and Cheryl, the other morning you had to ask listeners at 7 in the morning to send in their pics of the precious children. Like that wasn't a blatant, whoring request for parents to give you money after you oohhhh and ahhhhh over pictures of their children. Give me a fucking break. That was the last straw. You play nothing but emo music, you've lost the element of rawness where you came from, and now you want to look at pictures of precious children to dish up more money for your six digit salary. You've sold out, kids.

Enjoy your whoring during the memebership drive. As my friend who lives in Olympia put on her membership renewal notice this month: "Who??? You want what??? You want more money from me? I'm sorry I CAN'T FUCKING HEAR YOU!!!"

(Oh, and Riz, you still da Man.)

She's Piste

After my tumultuous on-again/off-again twelve year relationship with snowboarding, I've given it the finger and found the nirvana I've been searching for, where I can skin up mountains free of thought and descend in quiet solitude: skiing. But not just normal skiing. No I have to bump up the difficulty level by making it telemark skiing. So not only am I attempting to figure out how to guide two planks down a hill, but I'm supposed to bend down at every turn with the grace of a debutante picking a flower. There are no flowers at my feet as of yet. I'm not nearly as clumsy as yard sale victims would have you believe your initial foray into skiing should be. I've been out five times and can safely rock the bunny hill, even the steeper parts of the bunny hill. A few times I've tried to take my confidence to the steeper blue runs, but quickly retreated back to the fluffy bunny hill with my tail between my legs. Right now those blue runs have the appeal of leaping off the Empire State Building. I have a 2 hour lesson next week with a Norweigen instructor named Nils, the kind of guy who looks like he was born in a Swedish chalet and slid into a ski suit and mini-skis before he hit the ground. After my first lesson with him he said I was doing great and naturally athletic and that by the time my lessons were done I'd be an advanced intermediate. Oh god is he naive. If only he could hot wire my brain so it would coordinate with my legs and that could be true.