Big Bikes

I'm Living in The Ice Age...

Nothing will hold,
Nothing will fit,
Into the cold,
a smile on your lips

-Joy Division

What I want to talk about today is how old and lame I am, but first I will state briefly for the record (my own record - this blog serves as my only real training log. Web Log = "Blog", maybe Training Log = "Trog". I like The film Trog, at least I did when I was 8 years old. I like The Troggs and I like Les Troglodistes from the film Delicatessen, from now on I will refer to my BLAWG as my Trog) that I rode my Fix-Ed gear for almost two and a half hours today in the ice and the crap and the crud.

My road was shear ice but after surviving that the only real trouble I ran into was crossing over from Lincoln into Weston, the salt/no-salt line or the ice/no-ice line. I didn't go down but I did some fish-tailing while pedaling. Probably the highest my heart rate went the whole ride.

The woods were too icy to ride without studs so I hit the road

Old & Lame. So before my ride I notice my Facebook buddy Fatmarc has posted an interesting quote, it sounds like lyrics to a song, my curiosity is piqued, I Google them. What I find is that they are in fact song lyrics and they belong to a song called "Time to Pretend" by a band called MGMT (I'm not sure if the kids call them "Management", "M-G-M-T", or "Mug-muh-tuh", I'll probably never know). I "Youtube" them, listen to the song, and say to myself "Hey, that's pretty good, I think I'll download it and listen to it on my ride today".

I rode around on my fixed gear listening to MGMT, rockin' out, having a hell of a time. Sort of sounded like a combination of Ween, The Flaming Lips, and a less insane Daniel Johnston. Not bad things. When I got home I ran straight back to my laptop to see what incredible exciting-ness had happened on Facebook during my brief absence (which is what I do) and found that my Facebook buddy Sean Horita had posted a quote from Bike Snob NYC. It was a re-working of an old joke with a great new punchline,
you can scroll down and see it (it's actually an anonymous comment) in its original context here. Or just read it below:

"A hipster was strutting down Bedford one day when his bro, another hipster, rode up on an incredibly shiny new Pista. The first hipster was stunned by his friend's sweet whip and asked, "WOW! Where'd you score that sweet whip?" The second hipster replied, "Well, the other night I was walking home, listening to MGMT on my Ipod, when this breezy rode up to me on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, 'Take what you want!'" The second hipster nodded approvingly, "Good choice. And I see you took her pants, too."

The beauty of being old and lame is that I had no preconceptions about this music or this band, when apparently they are the pinnacle of cliched hipster rock (I still have no idea what a "Breezy" is). I could enjoy it for its artistic merit in the vacuum of my ignorance. I do remember a time when it was important to be up on the latest shit, to pretend that you'd been into a band before the album with their big hit single came out.

Example: art class, circa 1991, Nirvana's Nevermind is blowing up MTV, all over pop radio, people were freaking out because they'd never heard a band play really, really quiet then really, really loud before. Kids started coming into class with copies of their first album "Bleach" and talking about how they'd been "into Nirvana for a couple years". It was pretty easy to reach across the table and check to see if their copy of Bleach was a re-issue since it was statistically highly unlikely that a kid in Massa-freakin'-chusetts had a copy from the first run. Invariably it was. When called out they would claim that they had "worn through" their original copy.

You didn't need a degree in Animal Husbandry to know that was a whole bunch of Bull Crap.

My point is that I have, as a result of my advanced age, developed the ability to appreciate things for what they are. That's what this Trog is all about - deep, valuable life lessons.

Ow, the Arthur-itis in my head is acting up.