Remember "House?"

 In the medical drama "House," caustic genius Dr. Gregory House diagnosed mysterious afflictions that suddenly struck down the patient of the week, for eight seasons of often nauseating entertainment. The nasty genius used his mega mind, extensive education, and long experience to slice through the confusion and bring us the answer.

After the previous medical drama ER made patient -- and even doctor -- survival far less likely, viewers were trained not to expect a happy ending. House delivered pretty often, but sometimes the patient died. Also, House would be wrong several times in the episode before delivering the right diagnosis within a few minutes of the end. After you watch a few, you realize that early certainties never pan out. "Do this!" House snaps at his team. We look at the clock and go, "Nah, that ain't it."

Without all of the good-looking actors, life and death stakes, and medical bills that would bankrupt a medium sized city, bike repair has become like episode after episode of House. A patient comes in with weird symptoms or what looks like a simple problem at first. We diagnose and treat. It fails. We try something else. Thing is, no one has bike medical insurance, so we the greasy healers are the ones who stand to lose a lot of money on these false starts.

Bike shops have no medical associations in which we share our experiences and publish papers in a journal. We don't know what other mechanics are doing. Online videos show either idealized versions of various procedures or selected experiences of individuals who may be amateurs and inexperienced. And if the video doesn't cover the exact model in the exact year that you're dealing with, the information might not help at all. On top of that, who has time to spend hours trolling through search results in hope of finding a tutorial that might not even be out there.

Forums may yield some useful knowledge, but are just as likely to attract experienced misinformation or loud, confident, and wrong newbies. You have to sift carefully to find cases that fit what's in front of you on your work stand.

The manufacturers really don't care if you can fix anything. They just want you to buy it. Ancestral sources like Sutherland's and Sheldon Brown can't keep up. We're thrown back on our experience and education -- such as it may be -- to analyze the problem.

With every added cog in the cassette, mechanical shifting gets more and more temperamental. As the manufacturers abandon what used to be the state of the art, replacement parts for that number of speeds are made more cheaply. This includes shifters and derailleurs. You had fancy ten-speed when it was the best? You're just part of the rabble now. Eleven speed is rapidly going the same way.

Any repair could turn into a frustrating mystery these days. I like a challenge, but most of this crap is just an affront. Parts are disappearing for the old, reliable, simple bikes, while tech support barely exists for the new, throwaway bikes. I get it: to a racer, the entire bike is as consumable as chains, tires, and tubes used to be. As long ago as the 1980s, racing was already turning into a massive science experiment. It has only gotten more so. Rider and machine need a complex support system to eke out those hundredths of a second per kilometer.

Advancements in racing technology through the 1970s improved quality for all riders, because we all used similar mechanisms, shaped slightly differently for variations like racing versus touring, and, later mountain biking. As disciplines diverged, particularly off-road, there was a lot less cross-pollination.

People here used to complain from time to time about the level of detail I would go into, but less time was wasted diving right in as opposed to dithering around trying to figure out how to avoid it. Lately, though, it seems that diving in doesn't assure solid results. Too many things have to work too perfectly together.

The road bike that's giving me fits right now was built on a bare frame in 2017. The owner rides hard. He raced a couple of short seasons, mostly just a nearby training series, but it's a competitive series. He rides with people who never go easy. Over the years, we have replaced gear cables and housings as necessary to restore precise shifting, along with chains and cassettes. This time, though, I can't get it to behave.

The brifter seemed to be worn out. It needed too much lever travel to engage, which meant that it didn't have enough left to climb to the low gear cog. I changed the brifter. It was crisper, but still did not have the reach. The chain gauged pretty new. We'd already changed all cables and housings with tried and true 5mm. The bottom bracket cable guide can't be removed because the bolt that threads into an insert in the BB is rusted in, and the insert itself is broken loose from the bottom bracket shell. It's been that way for years. It shouldn't matter as long as the guide stays in position. Cable tension should hold it.

I rigged a brifter in parallel, using full-length housing, to test the derailleur itself. It shifts the full range. So something in the cable system is eating lever travel. I can see motion where the cable housing enters the upper end of the downtube. There's a bit more waggle where the housing exits the chainstay near the derailleur. Is that enough to cause the problem? Parts are all original, and very simple. But the hole in the downtube could be worn. After all this, is the answer something simultaneously stupid and difficult?

Possibilities on the whiteboard: Maybe I should drill out the frame and run full-length housing. That's a one-way trip, though. How about using carbon-compatible epoxy to shim up the frame hole? But I don't want to glue the cable stop into the frame. That might make future cable changes even more time consuming.

I tried every combination of cable housing, including 4mm, 5mm, and mixing widths in case the flex characteristics of the 4mm handled the bends better than the 5mm we can get now. I'm happy to say that 4mm did nothing to help. Eventually, I put on a new brifter, new cassette, and the 5mm housing we had installed first when we thought it would be the routine repair we had completed successfully several times over the bike's life. I got it to hit every gear from the 39, and every gear but the Ned -- the full cross 53-28 -- from the big ring.

Given the option of taking the bike with the gears we could get or making permanent modifications to install full-length housing, the rider opted to take the bike as it is. He even said that it hadn't been getting the Ned for a while, and he was fine with that. We'll see how things go.

Nothing is a sure cure anymore. Every fix is temporary. Who needs another metaphor for life when we just want reliable machinery? I hop on my primitive bike, day after day, and just go. I can change a cable on the side of the road in about 15 leisurely minutes. If I get a flat, I put in a new inner tube, pump it up, and ride on.

What seems dangerous

 An 80-year-old woman driving a small SUV was obliterated by a drunk driver in a dump truck on Route 28 a couple of weeks ago. She was southbound. The truck driver was northbound. He crossed the centerline.

The skid marks, crumpled guard rail, and churned-up road shoulder gave mute witness to the horror that had unfolded in a few long seconds. The dump truck careened on its way to overturning, leaving broad, curved swaths of black. The SUV left straighter, fainter marks. The road had been closed for about six hours, but had reopened in time for me to ride through on my way home. Few but the investigators had seen the crash site at that point.

Over the ensuing days, the investigation continued, leaving more and more marks. There's a countdown to impact from each direction, and a mark where the vehicles collided. Cryptic notations on the pavement. Motorists seemed subdued for a day or two. It's hard to be impressed for long, when your own flow and schedule dominate your continuing life.

As a cyclist, I'm not only aware of my exposure to danger, I'm reminded of it regularly by people who remark on my own persistence as a road rider or tell me about how they decided to give it up. It's true: bicyclists don't have fender benders. If we get tagged, it leaves a mark, at the very least.

(Cartoon from 1984)

In your motor vehicle, you are not only required to stay out there in the lane and maintain speed, you have few options for a quick escape. Peer pressure generally enforces faster travel than the speed limit, although dedicated road blockers will ooze along. Even at annoyingly slow motorized speeds, the vehicles they're in have considerable mass and limited maneuverability. Most of the time, traffic rips along at the posted limit or higher. On a two-lane highway, you can easily race toward each other at 120 miles per hour. A motorcyclist might combine skill and luck to shoot a gap to survival, but skill is vital and luck is indispensable. A regular car, SUV, or light truck is just stuck there. If the antagonist is a dump truck, you know how it's going to end. In the recent crash on 28, the dump truck driver survived with minor enough injuries that he was able to go straight to jail. He laid the truck down and dumped its load, but got no more than banged up.

One message is clear: If you bought a large vehicle because you wanted greater crash safety, it better have been a dump truck.

As common as highway fatalities are, millions more people complete their trips each day than die or are injured in the attempt. It's not because all of those millions of drivers have perfect safety habits. It's because they get away with their foolish risks. If nothing goes wrong, was it really dangerous? 

A few nights ago, I heard a motorcycle blaze past my house at a speed that guaranteed that the rider's body would haunt the first responders for the rest of their lives. At that kind of speed, you don't even need to hit a deer. A porcupine, raccoon, or possum will do the trick. But the deer is highly likely, especially along that stretch. The idiot held his speed all the way out of earshot. The roar of the bike Dopplered away without ending abruptly.

Right now, raw milk has been getting a lot of press, because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a big proponent of it. Scientific consensus agrees that you're better off drinking pasteurized milk, but no one is forcing you to take this precaution. Occasional explosive diarrhea keeps you cleaned out. Extended periods of it can be a big help with weight loss. Just be sure to stay hydrated with refreshing water from Rock Creek.

Our entire country is living through the risks ignored or welcomed by the small percentage of voters who embraced it and the other percentage who didn't care enough to come out and vote against it. We're roaring down a highway full of blind curves and hills, with occasional fog, and impaired drivers at the wheel.

I've said it before: risky behavior persists because most people get away with it. You could say the same thing about the few persistent road cyclists. We're fine until we're not. Our small size and relatively slow speed can be advantages as well as disadvantages. I'm constantly scanning for escape routes and mentally rehearsing situations suggested by conditions. When things get hectic, I have to trust the motorists. For the most part, they come through.

We hear from quitters all the time. El Queso Grande told someone out in the shop about yet another one who simply assumes that the majority of drivers are impaired in some way. Could be. I smell a lot of the wake-and-bake crowd on my morning commute. Major drawback to stinky weed, y'all. It advertises your choice to the world. The worst booze breath can't match that.

Then there's electronics. Our helpful devices feed us mostly useful navigation information, but also draw a glance or a lingering look for what seems like no time at all until you snap back and straighten out. Hopefully you do it before going completely into the ditch, down a ravine, through a crosswalk full of people, or into oncoming vehicles.

EQG's outlook could be soured by the fact that he developed medical conditions that severely limited his ability to ride. He may take comfort in the idea that it's a bad idea anyway. Who likes to see other people having fun when you can't? Especially when it defined so much of his personality. When he delivers these reports of the steady decline of road cycling, it reminds me a little bit of my ex-mother-in-law who loved to tell me about the latest cyclist fatality on the roads around her home. "They hate bike riders around here!" she would declare.

If you stay home in bed, you might get bitten by a Brown Recluse spider. They love beds. And they hate people. I've heard that.