cyclebetter.com, their comments indicate that cycling extends far beyond the marketed and publicized world of the popular cycling media.
Some people are more obsessed, more religiously fervent about riding than the mainstream media. Others are less obsessed. Both camps seem equally turned off by the force-feed of advertising and promotion that presents itself as the complete view of the activity. I say activity rather than sport, because for many of us it goes far beyond mere sport. I decline to use the term "lifestyle," because that trivializes it as an affectiation.
Cycling can simply be an integral part of an active, happy life. Take it as far as you want to go, in whatever direction. Change directions as you wish. The Industry will try to label and pigeonhole you, because it makes you easier to target for ads. Just keep moving. They can't hit you.
The downside is that when you do come into the shop, what you like may no longer be made, and the item intended to fill that need may not work with the rest of your stuff. That's when you have to decide whether the change reflects true improvement or just an annoying piece of industrial attention deficit disorder.
Just keep riding. The better you get at it, and at a bit of mechanical tinkering, the more you can be sure that, one way or another, you will always have something to ride.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Exposure
Citizen Rider is now listed in the Bicycle Blogs Directory. Hop over there to find lots of links to other cycling blogs and a world of fact and opinion. Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
High Visibility
Visibility is the primary component of traffic safety. We like to assume that if a motorist sees us he will avoid hitting us. For the most part that is true.
Many cyclists choose clothing in the eye-assaulting color I call Please Don’t Kill Me Yellow. While PDKMY certainly demands to be noticed, it has a few drawbacks that may reduce its overall effectiveness.
First of all, it only stands out because so few things in the natural or artificial world are that color, though some are. A certain species of crab spider that hunts on vivid yellow flowers masks its presence by sporting a variant you could call Please Let Me Kill You Yellow. But these spiders are very small.
If every small, underpowered vehicle followed the logic that bright yellow equals safety, anything smaller than a Lincoln Navigator, Hummer or Cadillac Escalade would blaze electric chartreuse. But then the tiny bicycle would be lost in that hideous sea of jangling color.
Wearing PDKMY all the time IS AS ANNOYING AS SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. PRETTY SOON NO ONE PAYS ATTENTION ANYMORE.
and when it fades to a gray shadow of its former glory it hardly shows up at all.
PDKMY also makes it impossible to make a clandestine visit to the shrubbery when need arises. Hey! Who’s that over there behind that bush, and what’s he doing!? Oh gross! Call the cops! You’d have to be 300 yards into thick woods to avoid detection. That’s when you’ll be glad if your PDKMY garment is something easily shed, like a wind vest.
In the bright months of summer I believe strongly in the power of the dark side. I wear lots of solid black or – because I got the jersey for free – a snappy black, white and red combo. Visibility comes from lane positioning in daylight and from lights at night. It comes from behaving relatively predictably and logically in the traffic flow, so you are where people expect to see an element of traffic when they are scanning routinely. Why be an eyesore on top of it?
Please Don’t Kill Me Yellow becomes useful in the fall, when days are short and commuters in particular may have to ride in the dusk. It’s also excellent in the fog. I got a PDKMY vest this fall, when we had a string of foggy days. In the dusk, when new, PDKMY garments actually seem to glow. They definitely enhance visibility in low light. At that point, aesthetics take a back seat to practicality. But given the chance I will choose aesthetics when I can.
Many cyclists choose clothing in the eye-assaulting color I call Please Don’t Kill Me Yellow. While PDKMY certainly demands to be noticed, it has a few drawbacks that may reduce its overall effectiveness.
First of all, it only stands out because so few things in the natural or artificial world are that color, though some are. A certain species of crab spider that hunts on vivid yellow flowers masks its presence by sporting a variant you could call Please Let Me Kill You Yellow. But these spiders are very small.
If every small, underpowered vehicle followed the logic that bright yellow equals safety, anything smaller than a Lincoln Navigator, Hummer or Cadillac Escalade would blaze electric chartreuse. But then the tiny bicycle would be lost in that hideous sea of jangling color.
Wearing PDKMY all the time IS AS ANNOYING AS SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. PRETTY SOON NO ONE PAYS ATTENTION ANYMORE.
and when it fades to a gray shadow of its former glory it hardly shows up at all.
PDKMY also makes it impossible to make a clandestine visit to the shrubbery when need arises. Hey! Who’s that over there behind that bush, and what’s he doing!? Oh gross! Call the cops! You’d have to be 300 yards into thick woods to avoid detection. That’s when you’ll be glad if your PDKMY garment is something easily shed, like a wind vest.
In the bright months of summer I believe strongly in the power of the dark side. I wear lots of solid black or – because I got the jersey for free – a snappy black, white and red combo. Visibility comes from lane positioning in daylight and from lights at night. It comes from behaving relatively predictably and logically in the traffic flow, so you are where people expect to see an element of traffic when they are scanning routinely. Why be an eyesore on top of it?
Please Don’t Kill Me Yellow becomes useful in the fall, when days are short and commuters in particular may have to ride in the dusk. It’s also excellent in the fog. I got a PDKMY vest this fall, when we had a string of foggy days. In the dusk, when new, PDKMY garments actually seem to glow. They definitely enhance visibility in low light. At that point, aesthetics take a back seat to practicality. But given the chance I will choose aesthetics when I can.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
What About a Work Stand?
No doubt a shop-quality workstand is the best thing to hold your bike while you work on it. If you can afford one and have a place for it, buy it. Consumer workstands can be almost as good or really miserably bad. If you can see the stand and push it around before you buy it you can see how stable it is and examine the clamp. On a stable base, get a clamp as close to the pro model as you can.
Short of a solid work stand you can simply hang the bike by a loop of cord from a door frame. The bike will sway around as you turn the pedals or reef on tight threads, but it’s better than nothing. If you have to hang the bike like that, do your heavy yanking with the bike on the ground and only hang it to adjust gears or do rough wheel truing through the brakes.
Short of a solid work stand you can simply hang the bike by a loop of cord from a door frame. The bike will sway around as you turn the pedals or reef on tight threads, but it’s better than nothing. If you have to hang the bike like that, do your heavy yanking with the bike on the ground and only hang it to adjust gears or do rough wheel truing through the brakes.
Tools to Buy
Once you have a basic tool box with metric open wrenches, metric socket set, locking pliers, standard slip-joint, needle nose and water-pump pliers, assorted screwdrivers, ball-peen hammer, hacksaw and whatnot you can start acquiring bike-specific tools.
Cone wrenches are good. You can’t adjust hubs without those thin, flat wrenches that fit the adjusting flats on hub cones. Hence the name. The 16 mm wrench opens bottles.
Next you might consider the fourth hand tool used to hold cables at the desired tension so you can tighten the cable anchor bolt of brake or derailleur. I got the third hand tool, used to hold caliper brake shoes against the rim so that cables can be adjusted, but hardly ever used it after I got a fourth hand. Park makes a fourth hand with a ratcheting lock on it, so you don’t even have to hold onto it once you position it. Lifu and Pedro’s also offer ratcheting models.
My old fourth hand with no ratchet lock has a narrower snout than the new models, so it fits into tighter spaces. That can be handy.
Buy a good cable cutter. I got the legendary Felco C-7 years ago, but Pedro’s has cloned it for less money. I haven’t seen it to compare the quality. The C-7 will cut just about anything, year after year.
Jagwire cloned the Shimano TL-CT 10 cable cutter, which has a crimper for housing ferrules behind the jaws. Park’s CN 10 also has a ferrule crimper. This appears to be an improved update of their older cutter, which I found unimpressive.
Y-wrenches with 8-, 9-, and 10-millimeter sockets come in handy, thought they don’t replace spanners.
Box-open wrenches in a range from at least 8 millimeter through 19 millimeter will be more comfortable than double-open wrenches with a different size on each end. Double up on at least the 17 mm wrenches for three-wrench technique when adjusting hubs. If you have anything old and French you’ll want two 16mm wrenches for those hub locknuts.
A hex-key multi tool is great, but sometimes you want the separate keys, particularly with longer shanks. The Bondhus type, with the ball-end on the long end allow you to spin socket-head hex bolts into place even if you can’t get lined up exactly straight above them. The full set includes everything from 1.5 mm to 10 mm.
Even with the quick-disconnect links in SRAM and other chains, you need a proper chain breaker to cut a new chain to correct length or make emergency repairs in the field. A small tool like the Park Compact is good in the seat pack. A bigger tool with longer handles will be more comfortable in the workshop.
Buy appropriate freewheel or cassette locknut removers to fit your equipment. You’ll want a chain whip to hold the cassette still while you unscrew the lock ring, or to spin off a fixed cog from a hub.
Years ago I bought a set of sliding jaws that fit in a vise so I could clamp a freewheel for disassembly or unthread a fixed cog from a hub after fixing the cog teeth with the pins of the vise insert. I haven’t seen the tool for sale in quite a while, but it may lurk in the back of the United Tool catalog or some other arcane tome. It’s not that important. There are many other ways to loosen a fixed cog, and most of us don’t pull cogs off of thread-on freewheels anymore.
Back in the days of cup-and-cone bottom brackets I bought a flat fixed-cup wrench and lock ring tool, and a couple of varieties of pin spanner to fit adjustable cups. Kingsbridge made a burly tool for installing fixed cups, which I never got around to buying. Now it seems to be discontinued, so I bought a Hozan that seems to be based on the same principle. Machined cylinders thread together, clamping the flat faces of the fixed cup, which can then be threaded into the bottom bracket shell with considerable force, using large wrenches on the flats of the tool.
Because most of us use some form of cartridge bottom bracket, concentrate on the appropriate tool for your favorite brand. These are smaller, lighter and cheaper than the Hozan or
Kingsbridge tools for the old style BB s. Change can be good.
You may find yourself needing Torx wrenches as well. Change can be a pain in the butt.
Get a good, shop-quality crank puller. If you have a hollow-axle BB you need a special puller. You can work around it by inserting something to cap the end of the hollow axle so you can use an old solid-axle puller you might already own.
The latest-greatest Shimano bottom brackets with the outboard bearings call for a completely different set of tools.
Cranks used to come with the appropriate tools, years ago, but that was years ago. Now you have to ask and you should know what you’re asking for. Shimano alone accounts for at least a half-dozen tools in the crank and bottom bracket area. Good luck.
Buy spoke wrenches only if you feel confident messing with your wheels. The round type with multiple sizes makes a good start, but it is not that comfortable to manipulate if you’re doing a lot of wheel work. You have a lot of choices here, but the basic Park set in black, green and red covers the common range of nipple sizes. Pedro’s wrenches offer two jaw shapes in each size wrench, so you can tension a wheel quickly with the U-shaped jaw and increase the tension with the more secure diamond-shaped side of the wrench.
If you really get into wheel work, shell out for the Park TS-2 or a similar shop-quality, self-centering truing stand. Cheesy truing stands waste time and money. You spend a lot of time making up for the imprecision of the stand. I hardly ever use a dishing tool with the TS-2. I do use the T-gauge for checking the alignment of the stand itself.
The Park offset brake wrenches come in handy for aligning caliper brakes and adjusting brake center bolts.
Back in the days of the threaded headset, the home or professional mechanic needed headset spanners. Actually, a big, fat adjustable wrench was good for the top nut, because the fat wrench could hold the thinner headset spanner securely in place on the flats of the top headset race. Park’s HW-2 headset wrench is a thick wrench for 32- and 36 mm top nuts. The jaws have a semi-box shape to hold the nut more securely.
The Campagnolo crank bolt wrench was called the peanut butter wrench because the hungry mechanic could use the handle end to spread the PB on his PB and J at lunch time. That’s another loss to the 8 mm socket-head crank bolt era. Actually, I like the 8 mm bolts, but I was lucky enough to get a Campy peanut butter wrench to keep in my lunch box.
Nowadays, you might want a star-nut setter and a threadless fork cutting guide, in case you decide to slap in a new fork. But where do you draw the line? Buy a headset press? Better by the head tube reamer-facer too, and the crown race setter. Uh oh. You’re way down the slippery slope by then.
You’ll see me downslope ahead of you, in a pile of tools.
Cone wrenches are good. You can’t adjust hubs without those thin, flat wrenches that fit the adjusting flats on hub cones. Hence the name. The 16 mm wrench opens bottles.
Next you might consider the fourth hand tool used to hold cables at the desired tension so you can tighten the cable anchor bolt of brake or derailleur. I got the third hand tool, used to hold caliper brake shoes against the rim so that cables can be adjusted, but hardly ever used it after I got a fourth hand. Park makes a fourth hand with a ratcheting lock on it, so you don’t even have to hold onto it once you position it. Lifu and Pedro’s also offer ratcheting models.
My old fourth hand with no ratchet lock has a narrower snout than the new models, so it fits into tighter spaces. That can be handy.
Buy a good cable cutter. I got the legendary Felco C-7 years ago, but Pedro’s has cloned it for less money. I haven’t seen it to compare the quality. The C-7 will cut just about anything, year after year.
Jagwire cloned the Shimano TL-CT 10 cable cutter, which has a crimper for housing ferrules behind the jaws. Park’s CN 10 also has a ferrule crimper. This appears to be an improved update of their older cutter, which I found unimpressive.
Y-wrenches with 8-, 9-, and 10-millimeter sockets come in handy, thought they don’t replace spanners.
Box-open wrenches in a range from at least 8 millimeter through 19 millimeter will be more comfortable than double-open wrenches with a different size on each end. Double up on at least the 17 mm wrenches for three-wrench technique when adjusting hubs. If you have anything old and French you’ll want two 16mm wrenches for those hub locknuts.
A hex-key multi tool is great, but sometimes you want the separate keys, particularly with longer shanks. The Bondhus type, with the ball-end on the long end allow you to spin socket-head hex bolts into place even if you can’t get lined up exactly straight above them. The full set includes everything from 1.5 mm to 10 mm.
Even with the quick-disconnect links in SRAM and other chains, you need a proper chain breaker to cut a new chain to correct length or make emergency repairs in the field. A small tool like the Park Compact is good in the seat pack. A bigger tool with longer handles will be more comfortable in the workshop.
Buy appropriate freewheel or cassette locknut removers to fit your equipment. You’ll want a chain whip to hold the cassette still while you unscrew the lock ring, or to spin off a fixed cog from a hub.
Years ago I bought a set of sliding jaws that fit in a vise so I could clamp a freewheel for disassembly or unthread a fixed cog from a hub after fixing the cog teeth with the pins of the vise insert. I haven’t seen the tool for sale in quite a while, but it may lurk in the back of the United Tool catalog or some other arcane tome. It’s not that important. There are many other ways to loosen a fixed cog, and most of us don’t pull cogs off of thread-on freewheels anymore.
Back in the days of cup-and-cone bottom brackets I bought a flat fixed-cup wrench and lock ring tool, and a couple of varieties of pin spanner to fit adjustable cups. Kingsbridge made a burly tool for installing fixed cups, which I never got around to buying. Now it seems to be discontinued, so I bought a Hozan that seems to be based on the same principle. Machined cylinders thread together, clamping the flat faces of the fixed cup, which can then be threaded into the bottom bracket shell with considerable force, using large wrenches on the flats of the tool.
Because most of us use some form of cartridge bottom bracket, concentrate on the appropriate tool for your favorite brand. These are smaller, lighter and cheaper than the Hozan or
Kingsbridge tools for the old style BB s. Change can be good.
You may find yourself needing Torx wrenches as well. Change can be a pain in the butt.
Get a good, shop-quality crank puller. If you have a hollow-axle BB you need a special puller. You can work around it by inserting something to cap the end of the hollow axle so you can use an old solid-axle puller you might already own.
The latest-greatest Shimano bottom brackets with the outboard bearings call for a completely different set of tools.
Cranks used to come with the appropriate tools, years ago, but that was years ago. Now you have to ask and you should know what you’re asking for. Shimano alone accounts for at least a half-dozen tools in the crank and bottom bracket area. Good luck.
Buy spoke wrenches only if you feel confident messing with your wheels. The round type with multiple sizes makes a good start, but it is not that comfortable to manipulate if you’re doing a lot of wheel work. You have a lot of choices here, but the basic Park set in black, green and red covers the common range of nipple sizes. Pedro’s wrenches offer two jaw shapes in each size wrench, so you can tension a wheel quickly with the U-shaped jaw and increase the tension with the more secure diamond-shaped side of the wrench.
If you really get into wheel work, shell out for the Park TS-2 or a similar shop-quality, self-centering truing stand. Cheesy truing stands waste time and money. You spend a lot of time making up for the imprecision of the stand. I hardly ever use a dishing tool with the TS-2. I do use the T-gauge for checking the alignment of the stand itself.
The Park offset brake wrenches come in handy for aligning caliper brakes and adjusting brake center bolts.
Back in the days of the threaded headset, the home or professional mechanic needed headset spanners. Actually, a big, fat adjustable wrench was good for the top nut, because the fat wrench could hold the thinner headset spanner securely in place on the flats of the top headset race. Park’s HW-2 headset wrench is a thick wrench for 32- and 36 mm top nuts. The jaws have a semi-box shape to hold the nut more securely.
The Campagnolo crank bolt wrench was called the peanut butter wrench because the hungry mechanic could use the handle end to spread the PB on his PB and J at lunch time. That’s another loss to the 8 mm socket-head crank bolt era. Actually, I like the 8 mm bolts, but I was lucky enough to get a Campy peanut butter wrench to keep in my lunch box.
Nowadays, you might want a star-nut setter and a threadless fork cutting guide, in case you decide to slap in a new fork. But where do you draw the line? Buy a headset press? Better by the head tube reamer-facer too, and the crown race setter. Uh oh. You’re way down the slippery slope by then.
You’ll see me downslope ahead of you, in a pile of tools.
Interesting Evening Commute
Last Friday I headed out the trail after work, in the last few minutes of daylight. The walkers and runners I met looked at me like I was a nasty skin rash they thought they’d gotten rid of. I wished them good evening. Most of them said nothing in return. We sidled past each other on the long causeways where the railroad used to cross parts of Crescent Lake or Lake Wentworth. The rails were left in place for a rail-car club, so two-way traffic is supposed to be able to fit in the width of what may not have been a full-gauge railway in the first place.
Except for the causeways, the trail runs beside the tracks, where it can be wider.
Further out, a husband and wife exercising their sled dog team were much more cordial. They knew their presence on the trail was even more controversial than mine, so they were being nice to everybody. Eight yipping huskies were excited but not aggressive.
The dusk deepened under the trees. I switched on the Wall of Fire, my two LED headlights and the 10-watt Vista light on the handlebars. I was testing the 10-watt after running the 5-watt the week before. The fiver wasn’t bad, but I wanted more! More! I switched it off to save it for the real darkness.
With the lights, I don’t bother to hurry home the way I do when the days are a bit longer and I’m racing to beat the dusk. I can’t win that race now, so I prefer to dawdle on the path and let the darkness establish itself. Then I can take the long way home, avoiding much of Route 28 by taking Route 109 to minor roads to the east.
Back on the open road, I knocked one of my LED lights off its bracket at the start of a descent, just as a car came over the rise behind me. I was able to wave him off with the other lights so I could rescue the lost one as it spun in the road.
In summer, the trip over the dirt is just a pleasant afternoon tour. In the dark, approaching Halloween, it’s hard to quell all spooky thoughts, entering a dark tunnel through the forest. Hungry goats at a farm on the first bit of dirt bleated so shrilly they sounded like someone screaming. A minute later I heard a chainsaw fire up in the black forest to my left. It wasn’t very close, but it’s a disturbing sound. Who the hell is out there chainsawing in the dark?
From the height of land I could look across miles of country, across Lakes Wentworth, part of Winnipesaukee and over toward the Sandwich Range and the Ossipee Mountains. Below the dark blue bowl of the night sky, the horizon glowed with the last orange of the vanished sun.
No werewolves or people in hockey masks came charging toward me.
From that height the route is basically downhill for ten miles to my house. There are minor climbs, but much more descending. It was time for the 10-watt light.
The light held up all the way to Route 28, where I rejoin the highway to go down to Route 16 for the short jump to my next exit onto secondary roads. Then I noticed it dimming. That threw me back on just the LED lights. I knew motorists could see me, but the light patch from the LEDs wasn’t strong enough for me to see through the headlight glare aimed at me.
Life is an adventure race. You deal with challenges as they arise. When the road was dark I could flit along steadily. I could even snap on the big light for quick snapshots of the road ahead, or to signal strongly to approaching cars. Maybe the old stick battery has seen its best day. Another ride or two will tell me more.
Except for the causeways, the trail runs beside the tracks, where it can be wider.
Further out, a husband and wife exercising their sled dog team were much more cordial. They knew their presence on the trail was even more controversial than mine, so they were being nice to everybody. Eight yipping huskies were excited but not aggressive.
The dusk deepened under the trees. I switched on the Wall of Fire, my two LED headlights and the 10-watt Vista light on the handlebars. I was testing the 10-watt after running the 5-watt the week before. The fiver wasn’t bad, but I wanted more! More! I switched it off to save it for the real darkness.
With the lights, I don’t bother to hurry home the way I do when the days are a bit longer and I’m racing to beat the dusk. I can’t win that race now, so I prefer to dawdle on the path and let the darkness establish itself. Then I can take the long way home, avoiding much of Route 28 by taking Route 109 to minor roads to the east.
Back on the open road, I knocked one of my LED lights off its bracket at the start of a descent, just as a car came over the rise behind me. I was able to wave him off with the other lights so I could rescue the lost one as it spun in the road.
In summer, the trip over the dirt is just a pleasant afternoon tour. In the dark, approaching Halloween, it’s hard to quell all spooky thoughts, entering a dark tunnel through the forest. Hungry goats at a farm on the first bit of dirt bleated so shrilly they sounded like someone screaming. A minute later I heard a chainsaw fire up in the black forest to my left. It wasn’t very close, but it’s a disturbing sound. Who the hell is out there chainsawing in the dark?
From the height of land I could look across miles of country, across Lakes Wentworth, part of Winnipesaukee and over toward the Sandwich Range and the Ossipee Mountains. Below the dark blue bowl of the night sky, the horizon glowed with the last orange of the vanished sun.
No werewolves or people in hockey masks came charging toward me.
From that height the route is basically downhill for ten miles to my house. There are minor climbs, but much more descending. It was time for the 10-watt light.
The light held up all the way to Route 28, where I rejoin the highway to go down to Route 16 for the short jump to my next exit onto secondary roads. Then I noticed it dimming. That threw me back on just the LED lights. I knew motorists could see me, but the light patch from the LEDs wasn’t strong enough for me to see through the headlight glare aimed at me.
Life is an adventure race. You deal with challenges as they arise. When the road was dark I could flit along steadily. I could even snap on the big light for quick snapshots of the road ahead, or to signal strongly to approaching cars. Maybe the old stick battery has seen its best day. Another ride or two will tell me more.
Great Time for Bike Commuting
It’s a great time to be a cyclist in Wolfeboro. Construction has tied up one major route into town, and the flooding in early October took out a bridge on the most popular alternate route. Motorists can either wait in long lines or drive several miles out of their way to the next alternate way into town.
In the morning I can ride past the backup at a gentle pace, threading the tangle even if oncoming vehicles keep me from using the left lane. I don’t fly by contemptuously. I don’t want to annoy people. It also gives me time to react to car doors, oncoming vehicles or someone’s sudden urge to cut out of line.
At the construction site itself, I can reach a multi-use path if the street is completely closed.
In the evening, the washed-out bridge on Bay Street keeps me from using my usual route out of town. Instead, I use the Sorry Excuse for a Rail Trail (not its official name) to go all the way to Route 109 East, about three miles out of town. I generally avoid the path because its poor design makes it hazardous for many users at once, but with the dark and cold of autumn, fewer people are on it.
In the morning I can ride past the backup at a gentle pace, threading the tangle even if oncoming vehicles keep me from using the left lane. I don’t fly by contemptuously. I don’t want to annoy people. It also gives me time to react to car doors, oncoming vehicles or someone’s sudden urge to cut out of line.
At the construction site itself, I can reach a multi-use path if the street is completely closed.
In the evening, the washed-out bridge on Bay Street keeps me from using my usual route out of town. Instead, I use the Sorry Excuse for a Rail Trail (not its official name) to go all the way to Route 109 East, about three miles out of town. I generally avoid the path because its poor design makes it hazardous for many users at once, but with the dark and cold of autumn, fewer people are on it.
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"Hey, just came across your blog. This post called me to comment. You're right about cycling being deceptively accessible. Except for the elitist snobs, and the consumerist industry culture. It becomes all too easy to buy into the lie of purchasing a new bike every other season. Manufacturers are building disposable bikes and components. And riders seem all too eager to eat it up. Getting the lightest this and the smoothest that. But then if you go against it, you become branded retro, or extremist. I'm not against buying new stuff, but I'm against riders blindfully lusting (and purchasing) new stuff just cause it's "new."
I don't know what my point is with this, other than you seem to be speaking about topics that are similer to thoughts and ideas I, myself am working through."