Words I am Officially Tired of Hearing

Please do not utter the following words or phrases in my presence:

brifter
clydesdale
monocoque
should of
alleycat
primer
discs breaks
skidable
milieu
edgy
WTF
marketing opportunity

Thanks,
Skip

"Well, we're fully into the new year."
"Like I needed YOU to tell me that."
"Sorry ..."
"What?!"
"Oh ... I thought you were sleeping."
"Shut up, freak!"
"Uh, was I talking again?"

Now, new year's reflection may seem a bit long in the tooth at this point in January, but it is warranted. The dawn of the year means something special in the Great White North surrounding Surlyville. Sure, the days begin to stay lighter longer and, believe it or not, it actually feels like winter is going to end in the not-so-distant future. The days just drip with wonderful potential as ice melts a bit each afternoon. After all, spring is right around the corner, eh? Yeah, right.

The special something I'm specifically referring to is far more significant than weather. After the calendar adds a fresh numeral the per annum assortment of party rides is reset and we get to start counting all over again. You have to seize these opportunities by their collars and rough 'em up accordingly. You see, the seasons, they'll keep on a-changin' and there's nothing you can do about that; but that next party ride, it could be your last chance, or your last -- period. Who can ever know?

Now the pagans, they had a different set of chronological references. It is even conjectured that the most inebriated among them cared nothing for the new year at all. For those hearty bastards the party rides had no beginning and no end. Winter, summer? Who cares? Lucky souls. The weaker and less reformed among us look to mile markers along the path -- faint etchings, faded photos, tattered tighty-whities.

Enough of the dubious fanfare! I present the jolly good news of the First Annual Hiawatha Cyclery Pub Crawl. Check it out. There's even a map. The HC folks, they're good people. Locally owned with loco operators, they sell good gear and aren't afraid to tell it how it is, or perhaps how it should be. Like most of you, dear readers, they get the fact that the bicycle is not only a practical transportation machine, but it's a social engine as well. After all, aren't some of the best friends you've ever made also fellow cyclists? I'll drink to that.

Now what the hell does a Minnesota winter pub crawl by bicycle have to do with god-less debauchers who can't remember what month it is? Ha! Funny you should ask. I will tell you I looked deep into the sordid details of this ominous affair and made a startling discovery. The HC Pub Crawl is no less than a preamble to the real pagan kickoff to 2009 -- the Lunar New Year. That's right, the event goes down on Lunar New Year's Eve. That's this Sunday, January 25th, folks. Saddle up yer steed and put on yer layers, because Jim and the crew will be lucky if the mercury cracks the positive side of the dial by the start of the ride at noon. Soon after the first stop at the Bulldog Nordeast, however, the antifreeze will kick in and there's no lookin' back. Just don't count on the moon to light your way home.

Have one on me. Sir Fleck is off to the Kingdom of the United for a generous helping of fish and chips and some English lessons. Trip report pending successful debriefing at Scotland Yard. Tootles!

So last Saturday was the Triple D adventure race - snowy business on a bike from Dubuque to Dyersville to Durango. Lots of folks have written in detail about how tough it was - imagine glare ice covered with the finest powdery snow and you've got a recipe for pushing and not riding. Nobody finished.

I blame global warming.

Still, it was a good time. Markles-he-Sparkles and Yum Yums joined me from Milwaukee and we had laughs the night before the race. We drank Hub City Oatmeal Stout in the basement, worked on the bikes, and penciled out our last wishes. We also had a good time after the race at the Handle Bar in Durango laying waste to a free bar tab. Well, Markles and I had fun at the bar. Yum Yums was still out there death marching to the black metal in his brain sac. We had already given him up for dead (and had some very nice rounds of drinks in his honor), but he ended up alive - if quite frosty.

Decorah represented well - and by that I mean Spinner narrowly avoided jail and everyone else survived.

Thanks to Lance and all the volunteers. You put on a good show despite the damnation of the wintery gods.

I think I pulled a hammy.


Check out the links:

The Organizers
The Grelk
The Shockstar
The Devon
The Sconnie
The Decorah

And finally:

The Diamond Dave

Skip

Skip was right in that last post: you people are wrong for being right about being wronged. You love us. We thank you. You come back for more. We back off and laugh uncomfortably. You get in close trying to prove you're not weird. And that makes daddy drink. Still, the confusion lies in our unsettling silence. It's not you, it's us. You should know we think of you often even though we can't be where you are. And yet still you are there, waiting patiently. But we are not free yet. So now you will have to close your eyes and pretend this is real bikesmartfotainment. To wit: a thick slab of that what has drifted through our nets recently. Eat it slow. We have miles to go before we sleep.

John O, a proud Pugsley owner, was sent this photo by his brother Paul in Virginia, MN, which is way up nort', up by Hibbing and Embarrass, north and west of Lac Superior on the famed Iron Range, framed by several national forests. The area is as beautiful as it is cold. The subject header on the email containing only the photo was Now I've Seen It All.
Oh yeah? Brother you ain't seen nothing yet.



Sweet. Who is that guy? He looks tough as shit.



In other news, the physical space occupied by Surly Bikes Intergalactic HQ is connected to an automated lighting system named -and I am not making this up- HAL, named so by the facilities staff presumably for its occasionally schizo behavior. SuperFlatFloor Nelson's email about HAL's antics outlined what they believe to have been the source of the problem, the parts ordered to fix, it, why those parts didn't work, and why they believe that with now newer parts they have finally secured the perimeter, as it were. Incredulous to the desert dry humor of sentences like "Thanks for making it through this ordeal with us and being very, very patient with HAL’s antics.", and "...causing the lights throughout the new DC to turn on and off at all different times of the day. Hence, HAL was getting the upper hand.", I wrote and asked our man Aaron if he was picking up the frequency kenneth or if my mind was playing tricks on me. He responded, "Totally. I didn’t think much of it until I left last night and the parking lot lights were off." Yeah, plus the alarm system acts up around this Facility too and so do the vending machines. Best keep your powder dry. Because, as Aaron points out (about something entirely unrelated --or is it?), "As the phenomenal piece of Subgenius propaganda famously says, 'The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.' Turns out it’s a Zappa reference. Who knew?"

There's a lot of truth stuffed gasping into the trunk of that biscuit. That apostrophe thing goes way back. One book I recently read traces it back to a time before existed even the most rudimentary single celled organisms, when Life on Earth was just an unordered, unowned soup of inspired chemical interactions. And then the apostrophe came like a flash of binary lightning, and some compounds began to keep previously random useful chemical subsections for themselves, actively. Agressively. Getting the upper hand. That was the crux of it anyway. To my mind parentheses are almost as bad. Secretive interruptions. Commas are one step from that. It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you.
But isn't it really the fault of the binary flash, the idea itself? Blinding light and blinding shadow insisting on your immediate submission or anhililation. Easy, sailor. Where's the romance, the adventure, the nuance that makes all this fragility so achingly beautiful and thus worth something in this great big empty?

On to other things.

Frostbike is coming. What is Frostbike? Well it ain't nothing unless you work in a bike shop, or are an attache' to the so-called Bicycle Industry, are almost certainly in the U.S., and most likely within 500 miles of Bloomington, MN (which is most decidedly NOT as beautiful as Virginia, MN, nor as beautiful as HAL for that matter). Frostbike is a tradeshow of sorts, put on by QBP, our overlords, on/at the aforementioned HAL-occupied compound facility. It occurs near the end of February, which around here means about as cold and windy as it gets. So yeah, it's a pretty big deal. I bring it up for two reasons:
1) If you're coming to Frostbike this year be advised Surly is doing the Pug race out back again. If that doesn't show you how much we love you I don't know what could. Just know that we will have fat tire bikes for you to ride and a fire (fire good) and some semblance of an 'event,' whatever that means. And at some point we will shout at you through a megaphone to leave promptly and shortly thereafter we'll release the hounds. And the bees. And the hounds with bees in their mouths so when they bark they shoot bees at you.
So show up. Have fun. Go to bed late. Feel like shit in the morning. It's fun. Like we say up north. Hold my beer and watch this.

And 2) Frostbike made me think of Tobie The Paw, owner of North Central Cyclery in DeKalb, IL, who first approached me lo these many years ago at Frostbike asking how to sell Surlies in his shop. Like I know. But sell them they did, and Tobie wrote recently and said, in part,
"I remember laughing at the idea of selling 10 Surly bikes. We’ve got big plans for 2009er. Or the world will collapse and we’ll all start farming to feed our families; that would be cool, too."

And that in turn made me think about the topic on everybody's fear-makers, the economy. People have asked me How's Surly going to weather this? Again: Like I know. But I will say this: we're not only at the crossroad of a darkening national and global economy, and as well national governmental leadership change, and natural and man-made disasters aplenty, but also we're at a point of greater than ever before environmental and social awareness and action on the part of nearly every person reading this.

We at Surly are sticking with our plan to design good stuff that's built to last and not cost you a ton of cash. People need a decent value on quality stuff that makes their lives easier. Our goods fit that bill pretty well I think. Aren't you worried people say. You make bikes. Bikes are luxury items. No they aren't. Cars are luxury items. And I don't mean trucks, not working vehicles, but cars. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people. Enough to matter. Enough that convenience is killing us. Single use plastics are luxury items. Try going a week without using any plastic that you can't use more than one time. Go on, I dare you. Our world is awash in plastic at all levels. Plastics cause physical and, we're understanding more now, chemical changes in an already stressed food chain. And it doesn't go away. All cheap disposable crap is a luxury item, and there's a lot of that around. But Surly doesn't do that, never has. And you people know it. So let's all take a deep breath and start in. I look to the future with optimism. Or at least optimism as much as a person like me has squirreled away.

Will the coming days be easy? Well, they won't all be great. It might be messy going or it might be fine. Just like always. But it'll be change, and lord knows we all need some of that. If a small, independent business like North Central Cyclery (or One On One, or Speedgoat, or Free Range, or a hundred others) can become a destination shop for a brand of bicycles that make so much sense they don't look good to hipsters, I think things will be o.k. They did it through hard work and observation and being human beings. That's how we try to do it too.

Some people get scared -for good reason- and this causes them to hoard and own lots of things and demand their freedom and in the same breath defend their right to convenience as if it were worth fighting for. Which I suppose it is. George Bernard Shaw said something like 'The reasonable man adapts to the world. The unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.' And those people and other people and all people say things like You're lucky to have a job. Which is true actually. But if that were all it came to there wouldn't be a sane one among us. Insanity isn't the absence of reason, it's the absence of everything but reason. Who said that? Doesn't much matter. We're all in this together.

If you need proof of that, the back cover of the December 2008 MetLife insurance newsletter Life Advice features a story -complete with photo- of a woman and her Surly Big Dummy, which the article explains she bought after careful consideration when she needed to replace her car. I want stress that I, as Surly's liason to this sort of PR, had nothing to do with this even though I sort of wish I had. In fact I wrote to the author to thank her and ask her questions about how she decided to do this article. She responded:

"I'm trying to retrain the MetLife clients to think more 'green.' So, including the Surly was an interesting way of presenting a person--Sarah Sweedler--who cares about the environment, the world, and her children. And she's helping her children have social/environmental consciousness. This is my version of subtle propaganda."

See? HAL. The crux of the biscuit. Keep the powder dry. We're all in this together.

Sarah Sweedler brings us to this last bit, a subject worth talking about today as long as we're talking about serious things: passengering people on your longbike, such as an Xtracycle Freerad or a Surly Big Dummy. Xtracycle are the people who designed one of those Things That Make Sense in their FreeRad cargo half-frame/bike add on, which led directly to the Surly Big Dummy, as I'm sure you must know by now. They wrote a piece about it on their blog which is worth a read, and I sure can't say it any better than that.

And me? I pulled into Nazareth feeling about half past dead. Lately I've been locked away in the Fortress of Solitude looking like Celine Dion's corpse in my homemade ivory (with baby blue thread) raw silk acoutremont with knotted shoulder piece, a cancer of a corsaged ball gown remnant fitted to a haggard stack of 5 o'clock shadow, my zombied eyes following slowly the movements of all the things running away from me in their terror. Even humor. I am a caged cat endlessly pacing. Don't take your eyes off me or I might disappear and then you won't know where I am. Photos speak a thousand words and some things are better left unsaid so I will not explain further. In short, I know why Frankenstein's monster threw that girl down the well. It was love.

So, to recap: senseless drivel? Or foofangled fubnarb? I assure you it makes as much sense as you let it. Go to sleep you weary hobos.

Every once in a while - like when there are holidays, when some of us are in other countries, or when individuals among us (and their special someones) successfully procreate - there is a lull in the high-brow intellecutalizing that goes on here on the Surly Blogswamp.

Sometimes this inspires people to write to us and complain that we have not been entertaining enough for them, and that they are chagrined at our lack of concern for them.

They are right to be angry. I understand that we occupy the convergence of smartitude and bikefotainment. We should really be more thoughtful.

But we probably won't be.

With that, I give you the pre-unveiling of our new model. We call it "the Emily."

You should know that the Surly youth midnight flower t-shirts are on sale. This means you can get one for your kid, the small girl who watches your kid, or that underdeveloped friend of yours. We won't be ordering more of these for a long time...possibly never, so these shirts now fall under the category of "limited edition" or "final production" that we bike nerds love so much.