How I know I’m not a real cyclist:

 Facebook feeds me cycling pages one after another. Worship of new technology and “n+1” dominate the content. Even among fanciers of the retro, people with large collections boast about their hoards and receive lavish praise.

I have no desire for more bikes than I have. I don’t want to get rid of any, but it’s already hard to find time to ride each of them. I could cut it back to one or both of the Surly Cross Check variants if I had to. That said, I put a lot of miles on the beater fixed gear. The vintage steel road bike is nice. The converted mountain bike commuter still might come in handy.

Particularly when it comes to the older bikes, I’m grateful for the collectors who preserve large numbers of the versatile steel frames from the 1970s to the ‘90s, especially those without vertical dropouts. They represent a resource, not a museum of superseded technology.

Because I started working on bikes in the mid 1970s, I view frames and parts as elements to combine and reshuffle. I could never afford a fancy complete-gruppo bike. It was fun to piece together something competitively functional within my budget. Some new features did represent actual improvements, so I incorporated them as I could.

My first “ten speed” was a used Peugeot. The first summer I had it, I put on a lighter alloy crank to replace its original steel Stronglight, and my friend and mentor Diane did a lot of fancy drill work, as well as hand painting all of the decals after a rattle can repaint. She also pinstriped it and added some personalized details.

A few years later, I’d picked up a used Eisentraut frame to build a second bike. That led to a few extra bike parts lying around. So I picked up a used Raleigh Super Course frame to build a sporty urban assault 5-speed like my racing buddy Mark had built. That quickly morphed into a fixed gear.

Those three frames formed the basis of a modifiable fleet. I raced one summer on the ‘Traut, then put a rack on it and slapped in the touring wheels I’d built, to ride for three weeks from San Mateo, California, to Eugene, Oregon. Back east after the tour, I put the race gearing and sewups back on it.

The Peugeot turned into a cyclocross bike that spring. Then I moved and took a different job, so it became my fixed gear commuter with fenders and, eventually, generator lights. The Super Course was my stripped down training fixed gear. 

When the Eisentraut got its first frame cracks (chainstays), I got a Grandis frame to build up with the parts from it. I raced that for a couple of years before Diane and her husband put new chainstays into the ‘Traut. Pinched for cash, I sold the Grandis frame, with a different parts kit, to a triathlete.

See how this can work? Three frames became half a dozen different bikes as needed. Good luck doing that with today’s excruciatingly specific designs.

My first mountain bike was someone else’s trade in at the shop. I swapped out the solid rear axle for a hollow one — same hub — to have both wheels quick-release. Put on sportier tires. Longer stem. Good to go.

Next, in about 1991, was a Specialized Stumpjumper, the first brand new complete bike I’d gotten in 20 years. It needed a couple of things, mostly just that longer stem. 

The Stumpjumper was a tad small. I wanted a steel frame, but none of the other mid-‘90s index-shifting crap. Working in a bike shop has some advantages, like employee discounts. A 1996 Gary Fisher Aquila had a decent frame. I transferred everything from the Stumpjumper that would fit, and sold the Stumpjumper frame with the rejected Gary Fisher parts.

The Aquila evolved as the 1990s reached their end. It finally grew fenders and a rear rack around 2009. So it’s been at least two bikes all by itself. More than that if you count its mountain evolution prior to the commuter conversion.

According to the algorithm, I should be a lot more acquisitive. I should always be craving one more. I did build one more to leave where my wife works for months at a time, so I wouldn’t have to transport a bike to and from. But it was another build on an old frame. With unlimited funds my answer would be the same. It’s an art.

Big Dealerships take over bike retail

 As part of the bike industry's damage control response to the Covid-19 bike boom, major players like Specialized and Trek have cut loose dozens (at least) of small shops in what they consider minor market areas. At the same time, they have started offering online direct sales, and bought up larger independent retailers to establish concept shops for their own brand where population is more concentrated and disposable income theoretically more common.

In 2021 we managed to wrangle several Specialized ebikes for wealthy customers who ordered them fully prepaid in the fall of 2020. First the orders were delayed by the supply issues that racked every industry, but hit the bike business particularly hard. Then the Big S jacked the price on them even though they were fully paid at the original price, requiring the customer to fork out hundreds more dollars per bike. Then Specialized told us that they didn't think they could deliver the bikes, which would have required us to refund all that money. The full order arrived eventually, a bike at a time over months. We ordered electronic diagnostic equipment to communicate properly with the brains of these technological marvels. Then Specialized terminated our dealership, leaving the people who bought their bikes in good faith with no reliable product support. 

Schwinn used the dealership strategy to build and hold market share for decades. Capitalizing on the dealership concept accepted without question in automobile sales, Schwinn had its shops, where a customer could be assured that all the parts were "Schwinn Approved," and would definitely fit. They had their own size of 26X1 3/8-inch tire, so that a generic 26-inch wouldn't fit the rims on Schwinn bikes. Their shop manuals standardized procedures for their mechanics. The bikes were mostly notoriously heavy, but undeniably durable. The business model weathered competition in the 1970s bike boom, but fell apart in the mountain bike boom that followed, although a lot of that could have to do with mismanagement by the inheritors of the company, who considered the family fortune to be as indestructible as the bikes themselves.

In Concord, NH, Trek has gone into direct competition with one of its own established and popular dealers. Trek bought the Goodale's chain of shops and converted them to Trek concept shops. This included the Concord location. Sorry, S&W. You're just collateral damage.

To the bean counters, a shop network that only follows the money is a good thing. The accountants don't care if riders find themselves in a town or village many miles from an authorized service center and suddenly need a proprietary part, or "dealer-only" service on an electrical component. While I have no sympathy for riders who shackle themselves to proprietary parts and electrical components, I acknowledge that new riders don't think about those issues when they buy their great new bike. Even a lot of riders who have been doing this for years never thought to worry about the trend. The onus is on them for enabling and encouraging the bike industry to do this to us all. Only a few relentlessly annoying voices spoke out against it.

Interesting footnote: I found some ridiculously expensive rigid mountain bike forks on the QBP site the other day when I was looking for rigid 26-inch forks to retrofit customers' bikes that have cheap suspension. This indicates to me that a cult of rigid mountain bikes may be taking hold. While they still embrace the ridiculous drivetrains currently fashionable, the new converts to rigid bikes are seeking refuge from the ongoing costs of maintaining suspension, and the generally poor function and heftiness of cheap and mid-price suspension parts. By making some crazy expensive forks of space-age materials, the industry helps the convert to rigidity show the world that it's a step up, not a step back. See the price tag? For that kind of money, it's got to be good.

The big dealer concept is going to hurt Big Bicycle eventually, if not sooner. In the meantime, my advice is what it always was: buy simple, durable stuff whenever you can. Hold on for its eventual return. There may always be people who will pay too much to have a very limited and expensive experience like technical mountain biking, but I wonder how long that sort of indulgence will survive the kind of economic and social reckoning that is being forced on us by consumer society's willful neglect of the consequences of its appetites since the mid 20th Century.

When things go boom

When I stumbled back into the bike business in 1989, the shop was selling a mix of road and mountain bikes. There was a citizen road racing series around New Hampshire and nearby Maine. Mountain bikes were a strong and rapidly rising category. Local riders seemed to be open to both. The last fade of the 1970s bike boom was dwindling away, while the roar of the onrushing mountain bike boom was winding up like a big jet on the runway.

By the early mid 1990s, the citizen road series was basically defunct. Customers would take ridiculously low trade-ins for the road bikes they were dumping. Mountain bike sales amounted to a feeding frenzy. Not everyone dumped their road bike. Some of them just gathered dust in basements, garages, and sheds until their time might come again.

The shift away from mountain biking locally followed a similar pattern approaching the turn of the century. Our local mountain biking ride group had shrunk to about three people. One of our former riders finally sheepishly admitted that he had been riding on the road.

"I just got tired of cleaning my bike all the time," he said. He liked riding on the road, and was afraid that we would harass him because we were all dedicated mountain bikers. We assured him that we loved road riding, and started a weekly road ride. One rider did try to keep the weekly mountain ride going for a couple of seasons, but it ultimately petered out. It recurred in irregular flickers, like a loose wire sparking, until the last year or so, when a mountain bike resurgence of sorts attracted a fairly regular group again.

From the end of the 1990s until the second decade of this century, the mix of bikes on the floor shifted almost completely to road bikes. A sale of a high end mountain bike became rare. But sales volume also fell, year after year. We were having a little road bike boom, as the nation experienced a similar blip. The average price per bike went up, because there was -- and is -- no real low end in road bikes. The real low end still belonged to wide, knobby tires.

Mountain biking didn't die, of course. It has never come back to its former commercial glory, but its devotees will never abandon it.

Bike sales figures overall have been steadily declining from the high marks of the late mountain bike boom. Categorization offers lots of choices, but deprives the industry of high volume in any category. This means that they can't offer as much price range and variety to customers. The number of units sold is down, while the average price goes up.

Electric bikes spark a lot of consumer interest, but their lowest unit price is at or near four figures, and it goes up quickly from there. Worldwide they are viewed as a strong growth category because so many of them are suitable as a car replacement.

When average price goes up it automatically erects a barrier. There will always be a market for used bikes, but the used bike shopper is limited to bikes that someone else already was willing to buy new. And in most places you can't just walk into the used bike store and browse the racks. There's always eBay and Craigslist, but many of us aren't comfortable with that style of commerce. Hunters and gatherers are different from traders. All three qualities might occur in an individual, but it's not a given.

In a bike boom, people buy machines that they have only considered superficially. They're met by bike enthusiasts who have been thinking about little else for years. Some of those enthusiasts are lifers. They got into it young and never left. Others are well-informed, but just passing through. They'll outgrow it and move on to either real adult motor vehicles or completely different interests. Among the incoming wave in any boom, some will get hooked and stick around. Others will become well-informed during their era, but lose interest by the time their first bike wears out. Or maybe their second.

When booms occur now they're more like pops, or premonitory rumbles that go nowhere. There are too many choices, and most of them cost too much. Among the local fat bikers, for instance, perhaps as many as half of them bought their bikes used from someone else who had forked out the coin for it new. This appears to be somewhat less true for three-season mountain bikes. The road category is virtually dead again.

All riders agree that the roads are not much fun to ride anymore. Even in the 1970s it could be intimidating. Now there are about 100 million more drivers on the roads, in actual trucks, or vehicles built on a truck chassis. People are more distracted, more irritable, and generally more hopeless. The lure of separated bike infrastructure of all kinds is strong. But you won't do much riding if you insist on riding only where it's "safe." The answer to that is, "Okay, I won't ride."

The bike industry is not cycling. What's good for the bike business in any given year may be a bad sign for biking overall. The bike industry is perfectly satisfied if you buy a bike, hang it up and never use it. They do like to see actual participation, because it means that people are wearing things out and breaking them, but just from a bean counter perspective, sales are all that matter. Use drives sales, but sales don't drive use. So when new bike sales drop it only means that people aren't buying new bikes right then. You have to dig deeper to find out why. That opens up a whole world of variables. It sounds expensive and open-ended. In the meantime, a bike economist can only look at category sales and extrapolate consumer interest based on who is opening the wallet for what.

Actual census data would be hard to collect. You would have to send a big team to observe every conceivable cycling venue to count users by type. Almost no one cares anyway.

Individual riders might wonder who their allies are, and where they are. For instance, around here I doubt if there are a dozen dedicated bike commuters, especially over longer distances and open roads like the route I run in commuting season. I didn't choose the route, I simply adopted it as the shortest distance between me and a paycheck where I happened to be employed. For many reasons, I would have been better off to buy a house in a different town, closer to where I work. But most of life is improvised. All this simply means that improvements in riding conditions in one area do almost nothing to make riding better in another area, except perhaps to raise public awareness overall.

Anyone in the middle of their bubble will believe that they're in the middle of a boom. People in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont probably feel like the world is being overrun with off-road riders, because their area is being overrun with off-road riders. But by creating a magnet for a certain user group, the popular area draws riders from far, far away. Those riders may travel through long stretches of country where their kind is little known, and not missed.

Certain categories of enthusiast have to be very enthusiastic indeed to keep up with the related expenses of participation. Cycling is at its most affordable when you can throw a leg over the machine outside your own domicile and start pedaling right from there. I kept waiting through all the long years for more people to catch on to the many benefits of that kind of riding, but it seems to have the least appeal. As a result, conditions have deteriorated because too few people have demanded that they improve.

Our accumulated bad decisions will soon force change upon us. The big question now is whether our species is basically terminally ill -- and therefore might as well just focus on pleasure in our swift decline, or whether we are treatable if we accept a stricter regimen than several generations have so far been willing to adopt. In other words, is it worth bothering to try to create that better world?

To see ourselves as others see us

Hard to believe that anyone in the technical mountain biking community bothers to read any of my rants, but apparently some do. Hey there.

Things written or said for rhetorical effect will focus on specific aspects that support the central thesis. It’s the basis for editorials, legal arguments, and marketing. The benefits of a drug are repeated loudly and clearly in the commercial, while the side effects are recited in a hasty blurb in a low tone.

When I say things that are true, bluntly summing up actual events, it might compose a picture that looked different from someone else’s angle. This is the unsettling effect of seeing ourselves as others see us. That doesn’t mean that everyone sees you that way, only that the dots can connect to create that image. But I went too far, and I apologize.

As an unsociable person, I lack the instinctive understanding of the needs and desires of sociable people. In every activity to which I was exposed growing up, advancement in the activity itself was primary. The social aspects were secondary. It was an unrealistic point of view. For a few hard chargers, achievement is a primary goal and benefit. But among normal people, the social side is much more crucial. It explains a lot about where I’ve landed, and the rough and desolate landscape in which my life will end.

In the case of off-road biking in any season, I’m not alone in my laments but I’m certainly in the minority. Around here I’m definitely alone in criticizing the avalanche of expensive and complicated equipment burying small shops and cutting the tech support cord for riders trying to get a long service life out of their stuff. I don’t see that it generates much public support or sympathetic interest for cycling in general. But I suppose that nothing can do that. We might as well each ride in our chosen style and let the world burn if it's going to.

As stated in the post before this one, cycling is being gentrified. Its greater value as a tool of social evolution is falling victim to its short-term attractiveness to an industry bent on exploiting it as a consumerist bait station. The technofascist element has its hooks into every category. It has the most to work with off-road, followed by high end road and its offspring, “gravel biking.” But the collateral damage shows up in the reprehensible quality of middle and low end componentry as seen on a lot of path bikes, hybrids, and entry level mountain bikes from companies that should be ashamed to have their logo on something like that. Like an asteroid on a converging trajectory, nothing can stop it. Actually, more like the deferred consequences of environmental destruction, it would take too many people to understand and agree all at once. We would prefer an asteroid, that we could maybe blow up with one quick nuke and go back to enjoying ourselves.

"Field destroy"

"Just render the frame unusable," said the email from Specialized's warranty department. So we handed it off to our colleague who has an excavator. I have not transferred his photos from the work computer yet, but here is the result:

The warranty department at Specialized was duly impressed.

Wasteful and destructive customer service

Along with so much else in the world, the bike industry is slumping to new lows in waste and destructiveness.

Today's topic: warranty. Back in the 1970s, any bike shop employee could rattle off the phrase, "lifetime warranty on the frame and a year on the parts" with casual assurance. Crash damage wasn't covered. Normal wear and tear were excluded. Not a lot of stuff seemed to come back. A simple warranty like that was a safe bet.

At the dawn of the mountain bike era, the industry held onto the memorized phrase until the strain of explaining the exclusions got to be too much. The 1990s saw a sharp change in the previous open-handed policy. No one was covering crash damage, but companies handed out a lot of freebies as the competition ramped up, just to try to win friends. But the accounting department soon stepped in to preserve profits during the unprecedented surge of business. And rightly so. Conniving riders were constantly scamming to get things covered. Unfortunately, honest claims suffered as well. And warranty terms became a moving target. We had to keep checking to see what current policy was.

Since the bike industry has broken up cycling into very specific categories, warranty has become more generous again, particularly in the less crash-prone sectors. And, with consumer interest far below what it was when everybody wanted a mountain bike, the industry senses a need to try to buy some friendship again.

All this sounds like it might be good. Here's how it isn't:

When bike shops were treated like trusted members of the industry, we were trusted to evaluate claims and submit them. As the 1990s cranked up, manufacturer's representatives would come through to validate our findings and write credit memos, but it was still pretty collegial. That shifted abruptly around the midpoint of the decade. Our shop received fewer and fewer rep visits. Warranty procedures varied from company to company. Response times got longer. Reporting requirements became more stringent. We would usually have to box up an item -- even if it was an entire bike -- and send it to the company to be evaluated.

Shipping is expensive, especially for a large, awkward box with a bike in it. This year, Fuji had us return two or three bikes that arrived damaged in shipment, but they were still basically packed, or easy to repack. Fuji sent a call tag, and off they went. Other than that, we have been successfully discouraged from pursuing much warranty for much of anything smaller than a bike. The process takes time, and time is, as they say, money.

A customer who bought an Orbea somewhere else brought it to us for a shifting problem. In the process of dealing with that, we discovered a crack in one chainstay. The customer did not want to repair the frame, so he contacted Orbea for warranty. Once his new frame arrives, we are supposed to saw the old one into pieces, and send photographic evidence to Orbea. As much as I rag on the carbon crowd, the bike is beautiful. I hate destroying beauty.

The bike hangs on death row in the workshop, while the customer waits for the new one in the color he wants. I wouldn't want to own it, but I can appreciate its appearance. And it's old enough still to have the cables on the outside. The new one won't.

As sad as it is to consider sawing up a carbon road frame that at least got to see several years of riding, the next case really shoves the wasteful consumer side of the bike industry in your face.

A customer bought a Specialized Fuse. He's an athletic adult in his late 40s, I would guess, a firefighter, a family man. What you would call a good and productive citizen, who has gotten into mountain biking. I don't know what his cycling background was before the little local mini-boom in mountain biking inspired him to get this bike. It doesn't matter really. He rides in a sporty but relatively sane fashion. He paid about $1,200 for what he -- and we -- thought was a solid and reliable bike.

A $1,200 bike today is about what a $500 bike was in 1995. Let that sink in a minute. One thousand, two hundred dollars. It used to seem like a lot of money. Now it's barely the threshold of anything built to stand up to the moderate abuse of a mountain biker who doesn't ride with a death wish.

Our buddy went up to the Kingdom Trails in Vermont early in October. The weather was cool, but not cold. The Suntour fork on his bike stiffened up and the controls ceased to function. The preload knob wouldn't turn, and the fork would barely react to bumps. He rode it anyway, because it was better than nothing, but he'd only had the bike for about two months. The conditions were not extreme. He had not crashed the bike or abused it. When we examined it, we found no signs that he had pressure-washed it or even hosed it down vigorously, which are two common mistakes. The fork was just foobed.

In the warmest conditions, the fork is almost normal. But this is New England.

A quick web search of "fork sticks in cold weather" or something similar will pull up lots of results that include this fork and most other low-end suspension forks from any manufacturer. We did suggest that the customer upgrade the fork, but the manufacturer still has a responsibility to back up the product.

In answer to the initial message to Specialized, they said to hit Suntour for warranty. It's a Specialized bike and the fork crown has a sticker saying that this particular fork was made to their specifications, but when it's time for warranty it's someone else's problem. Ooooo-kay. Sourcing is complicated these days, when a fork is its own set of complex moving parts.

Suntour responded helpfully enough, but the Fuse comes with a straight steerer on the fork. All the cool forks have tapered steerers. The OEM fork had 120mm of travel and a straight steerer. Suntour only had 100mm forks with straight steerers as replacements. Or they would send an upgrade with 120mm, but the customer would need to get a new headset.

Back I went to Specialized. I explained Suntour's deal, and asked if they would provide the headset necessary to make the change to a tapered fork. The head tube on the frame looks like it will accommodate it. Simple, right? Pretty cheap. Neat. Tidy.

Nope.

Specialized will send the guy a complete bike. That seems awfully generous. Bordering on foolishly generous, actually. And the terms of the deal require us to take the perfectly good frame of his "old" bike and smash it. In fact, if we have to field destroy the whole bike, that includes every component. It's a gross and nauseating waste of resources all the way from here to China. But they don't want to pay the freight to ship the derelict back to them, and we certainly don't. The customer should not be penalized for having trusted their product to perform according to its advertised specifications. The whole thing goes from a fixable glitch to an obscene example of consumerist gluttony. And the new bike will have the same fork, with the same straight steerer, setting up the possibility for the same failure on the next cold ride.

Remember when bikes were about saving resources and having less impact on the planet? Yeah, I barely do. And riders who came in any time after the mid 1990s will never have known anything but this conveyor belt of consumption and obsolescence.

Is the sad truth unavoidable?

A cartoonist and art teacher whose work I admire recently posted a piece in which he reveals that making art -- even making funny art -- for a living turns into as much of a boring grind as any job.

When I got to work last Wednesday, I thought, "There's nowhere else I'd rather be right now, and that makes me sad as hell, because I damn sure don't want to be here."

In all my years of incarceration in search of income, I either found things to like about what I was doing or could easily imagine what I would prefer to be doing as soon as I got the chance. When neither of those is true, what's left is bleak. I'm slogging forward out of nothing more than force of habit and the unfounded optimism of living things.

A few years out of college, I wrote to my independent study professor to suggest that the creative writing department include a course called The Day Job. While he responded to various other communications over the years, he never responded to that one. By basically drifting downstream rather than knowing where I was going and how to paddle effectively, I had ended up majoring in poetry rather than fiction. The professor, a poet, said that he'd been having to do a lot of academic writing and found that it drained his poetic energy as well. So even though his day job was closely related to his chosen creative path, it ended up as an obstacle to the kind of creativity he had expected to pursue.

The unfounded optimism of living things. Depression is manageable as long as the endless dull ache of an unidentifiable longing is preferable to the finality of nonexistence.

I believe that burnout is a function of temperament. Some people in nearly any profession you can name remain energetic and happy. It's probably another bell curve, with a blob in the middle experiencing fluctuating satisfaction, while each end reflects either a hum of happiness or unrelieved gloom.

As my work week began I felt like I was washed up and hadn't ever been much at best. I will still acknowledge that this might be true, but by the end of the week I felt like I regained some ground in my accidental profession. Modern bike componentry is a disease more than a cure, but I can bring myself to study it and treat it, because the sufferers still need succor. Because the symptoms are mental as well as physical, most of the sufferers don't know that they've been afflicted with an industrial disease. They think that they've purchased state of the art marvels that will serve them well for years, the way bikes always used to. Or they don't care if it lasts, because their interest won't either.

As recently as about 27 years ago, you really could spend top dollar on a bike -- particularly a road bike -- and have something that would give you pleasure for the rest of your life. Then came STI and the steady addition of cog after cog.

Consider the violin: Certain violins and other stringed instruments in the violin family from the 17th and 18th Century can command staggering prices not just because they are pretty pieces of cabinetry, but because they have all the audible and operational qualities that make a musical instrument desirable. Violins much younger can perform just as well, but they do so by adhering to qualities established centuries ago. You can also buy various mutants that make interesting and enjoyable noises, but the basic pattern remains so desirable that its extinction does not appear imminent. You can play all genres of music on it if you know the technique. You want to select one in your price range with the best playability and tone you can get. Then you meet its simplicity with your own willingness to practice.

The road bicycle frame was perfected before the middle of the 20th Century. All the strange looking frames you see today are still putting all of the critical contact points in the same position relative to the rider and the riding surface. But I've ridden that Draisine to death.

Mountain bikers face a bleaker future when it comes to technological enslavement. They're not going to be able to ride the way they want to ride without all those pivots, shock absorbers, and shifting and braking systems. All of those require maintenance or replacement at frequent intervals. Your hydraulic fluid goes bad even when the bike is stored. At least the DOT stuff does. It goes bad in the container and in your bike. If you've ever had brake fade, you created gas in the system that supposedly reabsorbs when the fluid cools, but never completely. And the absorbed water that made the brakes more prone to fade is still there, getting reinforcements by the day.

Shock seals dry out and pivot bearings rust, even in storage. You will pay in money and time to keep up with all of this relentless deterioration.

I, on the other hand, take my trusty road bike off the hook, pump up the tires, double check the chain lube, and go for a ride. The Cross Check even sees quite a bit of unpaved road and trail, and still gives very little trouble. I just replaced its original bottom bracket, installed in 2001, probably about 18,000 miles ago. I vaguely recall putting another one in there, but I don't seem to have written it down, and the one I took out is the right vintage to be 2001. But I could have stockpiled it. So maybe I only had 9,000 or 10,000 hard miles on the BB. Still pretty good, though.

The day job still eats my creative time and energy. When I could get by on less sleep, I could at least try to scratch out a drawing or a piece of writing in the scraps of time before or after work. I still held out the hope that I could produce something of publication quality in either genre. But now I find that a real professional is someone who has done so much for so long that it's less enjoyable than the morning bowel movement. It's more like just scooping the mental litter box for hours. I missed my opportunity to burn out on being a creative professional.

On the other hand, I entered the Union of Concerned Scientists cartoon contest four times and made the calendar three. I have actually gotten paid for some cartoon work, and for some writing. It was never enough to qualify as my living for tax purposes, but not because I was trying to pull a fast one. I just kept getting blown out of the groove.

Robert Pirsig is famous for basically one book. So is Harper Lee. So even if you don't manage to reach saturation and feel imprisoned by your former passion, you can still contribute works of value to humanity as a whole.

The basic problem facing cartoonists is the crappy pay scale. A few -- very few -- might manage to hit syndication and licensing deals, as well as crossover productions, that bring them financial comfort and actual fame. If a cartoonist springs to your mind, and you're not a fan and student of the art, you are probably naming one of these few. There's not much middle class in the cartooning world. Even when there was, the ink-stained wretches did have to slave at the drawing board for workday hours. It was their job, just like the steel mill or the garment factory or the offices of IBM. So the whole free expression part of it was always a bit elusive. A cartoonist for a big newspaper or commercial art house lived as a king's favorite, with the threat of beheading always in the background.

My friend suffers from the additional burden of artistic standards. He has a masters degree in fine arts. He composes his panels with all of those principles in mind. His draftsmanship is depressingly precise and clean. He has mastered not only the traditional techniques of ink and paper, but the digital techniques now de rigeur in graphic design. That means investing in hardware and software and spending time to learn how to use it.

Digital art and art editing make a piece of line art multiply useful because the digitized image can be copied and toned and colored in multiple different ways without having to be redrawn. The original can then be finished using traditional techniques and be available for gallery viewing or sale. I have not mastered any digital techniques. My old scanner might still work. The computer to which I had it hooked up is an old XP machine that I don't let out to play on the Internet anymore. My tentative attempts to use some software that a friend gave me didn't go well. And then concerns of daily life dragged me out of the studio because it wasn't my livelihood, so I couldn't shut the door and insist on finishing projects that never really coalesced anyway.

I used to really love sitting in a pool of light, working on a drawing with the smell of coffee and India ink mingling around me. I was dragged away from it so many times that being interrupted became the habit. Interruption is the enemy of flow. That's true no matter what you're doing. In every draft of my never-finished novel I would come back from any interruption with a disruptively different view of everything, whether the interruption was a single shift at the day job or months in the service of other people's needs. Eventually starting over becomes too painful because interruption seems inevitable. Why bother when the world has plenty of great creative stuff already made by people who managed to fight their way through the crap or got lucky and found a tunnel underneath it?

Writing does seem to survive interruption more easily than quality artistic rendering does. I don't find drawing easy, which is obvious from the stiff and overworked, yet still crude, look of my finished work. But thoughts in words can be scribbled and then typed, connected and reconnected like mechanical parts to make little vehicles for the mind. Readers can hop on or in them. Maybe when time permits, more elaborate, rooted edifices can be built: mind palaces rather than bikes and scooters and little camper trailers.

I will never give up the hope of enjoying what I do for a living. If it does not reward you in some way other than financially, it probably isn't a very good thing to be doing in the first place.

Technological advantages

People who think that electronic shifting is great should have to install and service it themselves. That wouldn't discourage all of them, but it would weed out the majority.

I can see the appeal. Electronic devices are fascinating. When they work properly, they're marvelous. Cable systems lack the finesse for the increasingly close tolerances of 10-, 11-, and 12-speed cassettes. I think that sheet metal cogs and tinfoil chains are junk, but they are the state of the art in racing, and among the masses of recreational riders who use racing-style bikes.

The more I work on this crap, the more determined I am to avoid it at all costs on my own machinery. I wouldn't even have one for fun if money was no object. If I'm going to spend money on something that isn't going to last, I'd rather spend it on ice cream.

Evolution is pitiless, even when it guides a species to its doom. The technofascist industry, ever in search of manufacturing efficiencies, will always try to market any piece of technology to every possible demographic. Anyone who won't play along will get stamped tin and plastic crap to punish them. Look at the derailleurs and cranks on $400 bikes with 8-speed cassettes and freewheels these days. It's nearly impossible to find a well-made bike at any price that doesn't have some element of disposable componentry. The cheap stuff bends when you look at it. The expensive stuff is built to be forgotten in a year or two when the next marvel comes in with a fanfare of digitally synthesized trumpets, because we can't be bothered to learn to play the real thing.

The more complicated we let bikes become, the more we limit their appeal. They are more expensive to purchase and much more costly to repair. If the choice is to repair or replace, and the comparable replacement costs thousands of dollars, only people with thousands of dollars to burn will be able to play. And, unlike automobiles, there is little subsidiary market for used high-tech bikes. They have no second life. They're like dead dragonflies. In life they were a perfect machine, jeweled, exoskeletal, agile and precise. When they quit working they're just dead. You might be able to contrive a usable machine with some of the parts, but it would not appeal to any consumer who has been primed with industry propaganda to "need" the latest innovation to enjoy riding at all. The industry attracts users, it doesn't create cyclists.

Yesterday, I had to pack a road bike for shipment. Its owner had finished his vacation in New England and headed back to Florida. When his bike arrived here a couple of weeks ago, it looked basically virginal. It was even white. When he brought it to us to pack for the return trip, the chain looked like he'd dipped it in the waste oil tank at the local quick lube place. The bike frame was still white, but the drive train was like a tar pit.

The job turned into a comedy of errors. Specialized has devised this really clever and annoying seat post clamp for the Roubaix. Instead of a simple pinch bolt at the top of the seat tube, the post is held by two bolts on a clamp on the seat tube below the top tube. The post itself has to extend down the tube a couple of inches below this clamp, to an inspection hole through which you're supposed to spot a black seat post in the black interior of a carbon-fiber frame.

To clamp this customer's diminutive frame in the work stand, I extended the seatpost and snugged the bolts on that hard-to reach clamp. The rider is short. The bike has a 51 centimeter frame. The seat post has actually been cut off. That doesn't matter as far as the traditional max height line, because the weird clamping system on the Roubaix makes it irrelevant, but it meant that I had less post to work with when I extended it.

We do have an alternative clamp that we call the Fred Clamp, because we purchased it initially to work on a tri bike for a guy named Fred, but the bike pivots awkwardly when held that way. I prefer to avoid it when I can.

The front wheel was off the bike when I came to work. After I put the bike in the work stand, I removed the rear wheel as well, and blocked the rear stays and fork ends to protect them in shipment. Then I put wrench on the pedals.

It's like they were welded in. I put the wrench on the right pedal, gave it a grunt, and then a harder grunt. The bike frame slid off the seatpost and fell toward the floor. I broke its fall with my leg and foot, which then wore a black smear from the incredibly grimy chain and crankset. But the fall yanked the wire out of the battery for the electronic shifting, which lives in the seatpost.

In keeping with the expensive dispos-a-bike concept promoted by the industry, the battery for a Di2 shifting system gets stuffed into the seat post in a sort of barbed holder that fiercely resists removal. When the battery for your shifters finally won't take a charge anymore, buy a new bike, or at least a new seat post. Not to worry. Something else will have rendered your bike hopelessly obsolete long before then. What you once loved when it was new and fresh you will have learned to scorn, and eagerly discard. Bikes are consumer goods, so learn to consume. Chew, swallow, and excrete.

I reoriented the clamp to hold the bike by the top tube. When I can hold the frame with the regular work stand clamp rather than the Fred clamp, it's less awkward. The bike still swings laterally and is not as well balanced, but it's closer to the center of rotation for the arm of the stand.

Fishing around in the seat post to plug the stupid wire back into the battery took about half an hour. The battery was an awkward distance into the post, and is not firmly held there. I was trying to hold the connector with tweezers, line it up with something I couldn't see, and apply sufficient pressure to get the connector firmly seated. Once I accomplished that, I had to squirrel away all the slack wire as I fitted the seat post back into the odd funnel that forms the top of the seat tube.

With every move I made, the black grime from the drive train smeared all over the glossy white bike as I swaddled it in foam and bubble wrap to protect it in its shipping case. I wiped it away continuously. I ended up wrapping the chain itself completely in plastic.

El Queso Grande had taken lots of pictures when he unpacked the bike and assembled it. He had also labeled each piece of packing material. That made things much easier. Even so, it was hard to figure out how to make some of the pieces look the way they did in the photos. I didn't try to duplicate every position exactly. At least I knew generally what went where. Finally I was able to close the lid on the bike and strap it up. It was someone else's problem now.

The next thing out of the time machine was a 1995 Trek mountain bike. How can you train anybody for this sort of thing? How do you get anyone even to want to learn?

Farmers aren’t cows

The merchant-customer relationship has a lot in common with farming or hunting. Specialty retail used to be different, because so many of the workers were also users, but it was never purely thus. It has moved steadily away from the fellow enthusiast model since the 1990s. The business model moved from small specialty stores to larger, higher-volume retail outlets, through mail order to the impersonal mechanism of the internet.

The larger and more impersonal the delivery systems become, the more the relationship changes not only from an interpersonal exchange between fellow enthusiasts to a quasi-predatory one, but also from a small scale hunting or farming metaphor to a factory farming analogy. You all are being processed, like a bunch of turkeys.

Granted, the metaphor falters because animals used in various ways for food production don't have any autonomy. As a human, you have your knowledge -- such as it may be -- and your free will, to question what seems questionable, to buy from someone else, or to quit an activity entirely. That last factor guides a lot of marketing thought. Purveyors of specialty stuff understand that many people get in, but few stay. This is dramatically evident in a boom and bust cycle, but goes on all the time in lesser waves.

Your knowledge may not be as comprehensive as you think it is. I've been in the business for about 30 years, and I still forget some things from the historical record, or have to dredge my memory for diagnostic information or procedures I might not have used in awhile. And my immersion in this area has taught me about the interdependence of a civilized society. Primitive hunter-gatherers needed to cooperate, but in the earliest times there was a lot less to know. Because we have eradicated that subsistence world, we have to function in the interconnected web of overlapping technology and customs that has evolved ever more rapidly as our species has invented and interpreted lots and lots of things. Become an expert in your field and you automatically don't have the time or the brain space to master many other fields. You have to trust others to inform and guide you. But can you trust anyone who is selling something?

If you have enough coin to have internet access and a credit card, your circumstances are probably not desperate enough to make a poor buying decision a fatal error. Not when it comes to bikes and parts thereof, anyway. Then again, I have both of those things, and I definitely do not have money to waste. But say you have to live entirely in the real world, obtaining whatever you need from physical locations where money changes hands directly. You have a personal relationship with your guardian and protector, or your hunter and exploiter.

Life is one big gray area. Working in a small shop, I have to balance the needs of the business to exist and support its staff against the desire to outfit every customer with the absolute perfect stuff for each individual. Working in a large shop, I would still run up against the limitations of that business's ability or willingness to stock a lot of variety and cater to anything other than the largest common denominator in any category. "It's good enough," the saying goes. And it's true, up to a point. But if you have the misfortune to buy into technology just before a massive shift, you will be on the wrong side of obsolescence for longer than if you'd stumbled in nearer the launch of a new platform. See much 9-speed Dura Ace these days?

New platforms do not guarantee less trouble from the get-go. Early versions often hit the market with bugs that the industry counts on early adopters to disclose. The first customers for any new marvel are often test pilots, whether they know it or not. That's the predatory angle. Someone has to buy the latest crap so that its real-world failings can be discerned and refined out in later editions. So the smart money waits as much as a whole season. But if everyone held back, it would simply delay the onset of this testing period. They've got you by the components, man.

The bike industry began as a cauldron of innovation. The machines evolved steadily from something with wheels like a wagon to the sleek wonders that you see today...and fat bikes...and 75-pound smokeless mopeds. From the beginning, they were creatures of desire, not need. But luxuries become needs. Transportation on demand found a ready market when "the poor man's horse" came on the scene. That led fairly shortly to motorized vehicles that could carry a person around the countryside without the need to build a railroad. By the late 20th Century, automobiles featured in ads for employment: "must have own transportation," "Reliable transportation a must," and so on. These were not high level jobs, either. The regular grunts were expected to own a car. We went from having a workforce on foot to a workforce using mass transit to a workforce swarming around like the Dunkirk evacuation fleet, only doing it every morning and evening, five or six days a week, year after year.

The needs of mass production slow the pace of change slightly, but the pressures of marketing accelerate it. Bike manufacturers seem to be keeping production runs really low in spite of access to the lower costs in Asia. They know that the pool of people with the wherewithal to buy their trinkets is shrinking, and that within an economic sector not everyone will want to play with those toys. Sell-through is easier if you accept that some customers will miss out. It still frees up each company to pump out a newer and better model about every ten months. This is like dumping piles of old doughnuts out in the woods to attract bears, or putting out apples and a salt lick to be "nice" to the deer. Bait 'em in and pick 'em off. Regulations from state to state may require some variations on the theme to meet strict legality, but the underlying motive to create habits in the prey that make hunting them easier is always the same. Have you seen the latest issue of Bicycling!!?!?!

One sales rep we had in the 1990s listened to me griping and said, "You sound like a consumer!" That's it right there: Industry versus customers. He wasn't facing customers every day, getting chewed on for the shortcomings of the latest mechanical marvel. Indeed, from the very early 1990s to the end of the decade I saw a serious gap open up between the manufacturers and distributors, and the front line retailers. Reps who were friendly and available at the start of the decade disappeared, replaced by increasingly numbers-driven salesmen looking for as big an order as they could write, with as little feedback as possible. We weren't insiders anymore. We became the first rank of suckers. Don't talk back. No one cares. Better minds than you have already decided what will be best for several years in advance.

The vast majority of customers these days do not complain, but I don't think it's because they are satisfied. Maybe they don't know what to ask. Maybe they don't ride enough to break anything. Maybe they don't care enough about function to take issue with something that works haphazardly. Maybe all the years of dealing with tech support for just about everything have finally beaten consumers down to the point where they don't even bother to try.

As someone who has devoted a lifetime to educating people about human powered transportation and environmental issues and the connection between economy, ecology, and quality of life, I can tell you, it's hopeless. Should I have figured this out 40 years ago and gone straight for as big a pile of money as I could amass? Too late now. What I hoped would bear fruit in a couple of decades looks like it might bring about some improvement in two or three generations. Or not. C'est la vie. We still seem to be uncovering deeper and deeper layers of problems even in areas where we seemed to have made considerable progress as of the late 1970s. Are we really going backwards, or simply finding out that we hadn't come forward in the first place?

The best you can do is try to be trustworthy. Is it really all just a metaphorical food chain out there?

Evolved from its environment

As winter comes closer, bicyclists are like birds: a few still flit around, but most have vanished until spring.

The shop where I have spent the last 28 years started out as a cross-country ski shop in 1972, as that sport began a phenomenal boom across the entire country. Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, skinny skis showed up anywhere a heavy frost might occur. People discovered as a result how short and warm the winters really were, in most places, so the sport receded again to what we believed were the more reliably snowy areas.

Many ski shops in snow country developed other business for the snowless seasons. Bikes were a common choice. In the 1970s, the "ten-speed boom" provided a summer counterpart to the cross-country ski boom. As the ten-speed boom mutated into the triathlon boom and the rising tide of mountain biking, some form of bicycle continued to bring in decent money in what ski shops had considered the off season.

Other economic forces in New Hampshire helped to create a year-round local economy for a while. People actually lived here and had disposable income. They raised families and bought equipment for them. It was never sustainable, based as it was on the illusion of prosperity created in the 1980s by ignoring the environmental and social consequences of overpopulation and predatory economic practices. But enough people had what appeared to be a good life that they spent freely on lighthearted recreation. On the fringes of that, a few cranks like me advocated for generally non-motorized lifestyles while deriving our sustenance from the more frivolous majority. We could keep harping on the more practical, larger applications and hope that the message got through. We were all lulled by the sense that things would somehow be okay. Improvement is only gradual at the best of times, because people have to figure things out for themselves. If our species collectively makes the worse choice, we're all goin' down, and there's really nothing you can do about it. It's exactly like being in an airliner that some crazy bastards have decided to fly into the World Trade Center. You may disagree, but the whack jobs at the controls have decided that we gonna die.

Cross-country skis have not been a gold mine for quite a while now. And fragmentation of bicycling into what are essentially warring religions has broken up that revenue stream. It has also made the service side harder. Not only are the machines more complex, the riders in their factions want to go where they hear the familiar liturgy of their respective faith. This is clearest in the road/mountain divide. Look at comment threads on the problems of road cycling and you will see mountain bikers asserting that no one should ride on the road anyway. The smart kids are all hurtling down the trail on hefty beasts, safely away from traffic. It's a strange combination of bravado and fear.

The rivalry between road and mountain bikes was largely made up during the early years of the mountain bike. But it became more real as the technology diverged more and more. Many factors can be manipulated to drive the rider groups further apart. Course design pre-selects for a riding style that will prevail. Cost of the machine makes people choose one or the other. Lack of vigorous industry support for better road conditions leaves road cyclists exposed to a hostile environment while the debate about infrastructure rages. Mountain biking, meanwhile, takes place in constructed environments rather than found environments. Off-road cyclists don't look for trails in their area that they think they can ride. They look for constructed facilities that favor the trick and gravity riding style that makes good videos.

Pure bike shops promote winter service as a way to bring in money and take the edge off of the spring avalanche of service demand. As a ski shop, we can't do that. As long as we cling to the remnants of cross-country skiing, we must convert to cold-weather activities in the hope that the weather and the economy bring us some income.

Even converting to a pure cycling focus would require a lot of advertising and promotion. In the 1990s, when cross-country skiing started to decline, mountain bikers were exploring winter trails. This happened mostly when we didn't have a lot of snow. It was the beginning of the studded tire movement, using existing trails, and frozen lakes. The return of deeper snow would shift the majority back to skiing. As shops dropped out of the cross-country ski business, our shop grew because we had established ourselves in the sport and were too dumb to quit. We drew from a wider and wider geographical area.

Now that winter is much less reliable, cross-country skiing is barely clinging to life, and shoppers can get what little gear they need from internet merchants, we can no longer afford to stock in depth and variety that serves the whole spectrum of the cross-country ski experience. As with bicycling, the different forms have diverged so widely that they are practically different sports entirely. Telemark is just another way to preen on the slopes. Touring can mean anything from a casual trudge around a local golf course to a multi-day trek across the tundra. Performance skiing requires excellent grooming on carefully constructed trails. And the whole thing depends on the arrival of natural snow. The cross-country areas that make snow can only do so on small, closed courses, so only the most dedicated addicts will accept its limitations for the sake of the workout. Racing gear may be expensive, but you don't make a lot of money off of racers.

My last experience in a year-round bike shop was my first experience working in a bike shop at all. Winters in Alexandria, Virginia, were short enough that we did not make a huge effort to solicit winter business. The gap between Christmas sales and the onset of spring was barely three months. That period was hardly dead. The DC area in 1980-'81 had a thriving commuter culture. This new thing called The Ironman brought in runners who suddenly wanted to learn about racing bikes. And new bike inventory had to be assembled well before the fair-weather riders came looking. When I left in May 1981, my job choices took me away from cycling until the spring of 1989, hundreds of miles to the north.

The idea of spending a winter with less direct customer contact and a steady flow of unhurried mechanical work sounds pretty pleasant. But maybe a steady, unhurried flow is not enough to pay the bills. When I left the first bike shop in 1981, I went to a sail loft that made most of its money on winter service. I started in May of '81. Summer business seemed pretty steady to me. But right after the beginning of January the floodgates opened. We were on overtime, 50-60 hours a week with only one day off, until some time in March. If it hadn't been that intense, we would not have had the money to get through the rest of the year. I hadn't thought about the fact that people don't want to give up their sails until the boat's laid up. On top of that we would get orders for racing yachts going south. The first winter was insane. The second winter was not so bad...and half the production staff got laid off by July.

It all depends on your overhead. The owner of the loft had a lifestyle to maintain. It's a luxury business. There's not a lot of transportational sailing in this country. And we did not do small boat sails. The whole production line was geared to large pieces of fabric. Once in a while, as a favor, the owner would take an order for dinghy sails and they would jam things up unbelievably. Dinky sails is more like it. But then a big genoa for a 58-footer would totally blanket a loft built around dinghy sails.

As weird as bikes get, they have not approached the size range of boats and the things that you attach to boats. About the most awkward thing we get in the bike shop is the occasional tandem. Even e-bikes, despite their incredible mass, are not much larger in volume than the biggest upright cruiser.

For this winter, we are working our usual routine. That's the plan, anyway. Because prosperity has been based on flawed concepts for hundreds -- if not thousands -- of years, the cracks run deep. At some point we may have to face the truth, that a civilization in which you need to make a special effort to get healthful exercise in your leisure time is itself so unnatural that it must be dismantled before it destroys everything else. At that point, efficient human-powered transportation will be an asset, combined with public transit and vehicles that derive motive power from external renewable energy sources. But I don't think that will happen in the next few months. We'll spend the winter pretending that weekend recreation and vacation travel are still viable with a shriveling middle class stretching static incomes across widening gaps in their budget.

A (blank) is a hole in the (blank) into which you pour money

The phrase is applied to boats (a hole in the water into which you pour money), aircraft (a hole in the sky into which you pour money), horses (a hole in the field into which you pour money), and pretty much anything else you can think of.

This week, for me, a car is a hole in the road into which you pour money. My mechanic had already told me we should schedule a timing belt pretty soon, and there was a little piece of exhaust system basically right off the manifold that hadn't gotten changed during the last exhaust system project in the spring, when the older exhaust system had failed prematurely and been replaced under warranty. The car was sounding sportier and sportier as I tried to find time to schedule the repairs.

Thursday night, on the way home from music class, I was buzzing up Route 16 at the mode average speed of 60+ when the car suddenly got much louder. Beneath the roar of the engine was another component that I couldn't identify.

I had to stop for a few groceries, so I slowed when I got to the shopping center. At that point I could hear that the undertone was scraping metal. The exhaust pipe was dragging on the road. One big plus: people don't tend to tailgate you when you have a fountain of sparks billowing out from under the rear of the car. Big minus: you have a fountain of sparks billowing out from under the rear of the car. Actually, I don't know how showy it might have been. I saw nothing in my mirrors to tip me off.

I scraped my way to a parking spot and peered beneath the car. Then I called my mechanic. That's the advantage of going to a guy who is basically nocturnal. I can call him from a supermarket parking lot at 8 p.m. to discuss the situation. Of course I am totally out of luck if I have a problem before lunch time...

On the drive from the supermarket to the house, I discovered that the Ossipee road crew had spent the day dumping tons of chip stone on Elm Street. It looked like a gravel road. I had to assume there was some sort of tar sealant under several inches of loose rock, but you couldn't detect it. I crawled along, listening to the loose pipe bounce around, hitting various things on the undercarriage. I waited for it to take out a tire, a brake line, or the gas tank. With both a bike and my fiddle in the car, I would have had to move fast if the vehicle burst into flames. But it didn't.

I pulled into the driveway in an arc, so that I could pull out again without backing up, but I wasn't about to take the car back out on the road without securing or removing the dangling 4 feet of muffler pipe. It had detached just ahead of the muffler.

The next evening after work I devised a rig with a pipe and wire, some toe straps and duct tape, to hold the loose section up while I piloted the car to Gilford. Then I went to bed early so I could get up and out of the house by 6:30 in the morning. That was the plan, anyway.

The jury rig on the exhaust pipe held up perfectly. Traffic was a little slow in a couple of critical places. I got to Gilford knowing I couldn't sprint the 27 miles to Wolfe City by 9 a.m., but at least the car was there for the mechanic to examine as soon as he got the chance. I don't really need it until September 6, but it might come in handy before then. The mechanic works alone, and he was buried in big jobs that had come in ahead of mine.

I slammed my remaining 12 ounces of morning coffee and started down the road. After a hundred yards or so , I realized that I'd locked the car with the spare keys inside it, so I whipped around to unlock it with the key fob on my own set. I heard the locks click open, and started off again. I'd forgotten that the doors would automatically re-lock if I didn't open one of them within about 30 seconds. I was well out of earshot when the car made that noise.

For some weird reason, I felt really strong and did not have to stop for a whiz every four miles. I'd worried about that when I guzzled the coffee, but it was a good cup. Now I was finding out how good. On my hefty Surly, with lights, fenders, and the day's supplies of clothing and food, I was pushing 19-20 mph quite a bit of the time. Purely unintentional I assure you. I let any climb slow me down as much as it wanted.

Despite a pretty sporty performance for an old fart on a heavy bike, my average was not good enough to get me to work anywhere near on time. But my shame-fueled efforts on arrival were good enough to mollify the high command, after a bit of scratchiness.

The mechanic called around 1 p.m. to ask where I'd left the key, because the car was locked. I cursed the automatic security feature, but I appreciated the sitcom aspect. The audience would have gotten to see and hear the car re-lock itself after I rode away. I asked if he needed me to call AAA.

"No," he said. "I can get in."

"With a brick?" I asked. He knew I was kidding. I was ready to wing a brick at the car just for that automatic locking trick.

"No, I have a real lock-out kit." He also told me where he stashes the key on cars of this type, to avoid such problems in the future.

The riding season began with a couple of periods of forced carlessness. Now another one puts a closing bracket around at least the summer. As usual, I will keep riding as long as I can into the cold and darkness.

The chip-stone on Elm Street improved only gradually over the next couple of days. I rode out on Monday on a fixed gear with panniers to get more grocery items. Drifts of stone at the right edges made it dicey when traffic forced me over there. I've mostly quit trying to herd them. The ones who will be safe will be safe, and the ones who will be assholes turn into even bigger assholes when you try to force them to be safe.

On the way home from the grocery store I saw the Ossipee road crew with a street sweeper and a couple of dump trucks, trying to tame the mess a bit. I'm sure residents along the road have been screaming. Parked cars are covered with an inch of dust. The clouds of grit have settled on lawns, shrubbery, and buildings close to the road.

The horseless carriage was an improvement over the horse because it was durable, repairable, and did not need to be fed while it was idle. But cars now are not durable or repairable, and they rot and harbor vermin when they're left idle for very long. We shell out thousands of dollars every few years to buy new ones, and spend millions on roads and shelters for them. The horse starts to make economical sense again.

The bicycle is what really makes sense. Called "the poor man's horse" in the late 19th Century, when sales of the relatively expensive machines were surprisingly strong among people below the luxury class, bicycles represented transportation independence and increased cruising range that made them worth the investment. They were simple, durable, easily repairable, and did not eat when idle. They could fit in a shelter much smaller than a barn.

We can't have the lower classes living well on modest incomes, now can we? Goodness knows it's hard enough to get the lazy sluggards to put in an honest day's work for their pittance, and keep striving for more. Who knows what mischief they'll get up to if they aren't constantly toiling to purchase expensive necessities from companies owned by their employers and social superiors? We can't do company towns and stores anymore, at least not overtly, but we can certainly build infrastructure that serves only a certain size and speed of vehicle really well.

This trap was not planned. It grew from the prosperity of industrial societies. The fact that this prosperity was digging industrial society into a hole was talked about very little as life just seemed to be getting better and better among the demographic sectors attractive to advertisers. Screw the rest of the world. Right here in Happyville, things are going great, and they're only getting better.

Holes seem to be a theme here. Consumer society is a hole in the planet that you pour money into. Unfortunately, it grows from natural instincts to devour, trample, shit, and walk away. Because our salvation depends on being smarter and better than that, what we will get instead is a Malthusian collapse, and a species reduced in numbers and destructive powers, but probably no wiser. We can and will rebuild our numbers and destructive powers. It's what we do.

I can imagine instead a rational civilization in which motor vehicle use is limited to necessities like maintenance of the non-motorized transportation system, emergency vehicles, and not much else. Hell, I can imagine a lot of nice things. And I like to. I just know better than to hope or expect. I'll keep the idea alive for whoever might find it before the beacon goes out.