board track, sidetrack, singletrack, and a whole heap 'o rubbish

No surfing this weekend and our new Neilson board shipment has been stuck at Canada Customs for over a week now. The shipping guy assures me that the paperwork error is not my fault, nor the shippers fault. Says it’s a problem with Customs. Whatever it’s flat and the 6’6” Bonzer will need at least chest high surf before I forgo the Green Machine.

Been bike crazy lately and fixin in more ways than one. I recently acquired an 80’s 10 speed with the heavy steel wheels and shitty shifters. First thing I did was strip it down and dash away the crap parts –what a heap of rubbish.

Sidetrack: this next paragraph is mostly flawed thinking and worse writing but it’s blog eh -and I thought “hey what the fuck let’s just leave it in.” You can skip it if you want.

I find that one major flaw in our consumer culture (yeah I know there’s shitloads of flaws) is that items that are specked at different price levels, like bicycles for example, have varying degrees of disposability. If you buy an “entry level” hard tail mountain bike for $500 and actually attempt to ride trails with it the wheels, drive train, and front suspension will last a few weeks before they’re trashed. I don’t understand why this happens (rationally). I know that they just wann give you a taste and make you feel all “core” because your first ride couldn’t handle your extremeness so you are forced to go back to the shop and acquire a new rig that will be able to handle your abuse. The kicker is that the level of quality you get in a bike is not truly based on your skills but rather your wallet. I just read a review of several road bikes and they had them split up into funnily named categories. There was entry level ($1000 - $1500), enthusiast ($3000), racing($12,000), comfort ($4000), and dream bike category ($8000 to $10,000). Are they kidding me? What kind of enthusiast has over $3000 to spend on a bicycle that can only be used to ride with spandex (no fender or rack mounts here people)? I like what Matt Chester says –ride your bike because you can.

Anyway, after stripping and discarding the old parts I cut and filed the top tube cable routing. I re-greased everything and reassembled the bike as a single speed using the old wheels (for now) and the chain on the two most in-line rings front and back. I inverted an old three speed bar and now have the beginnings of what will eventually be a fixed board track style bike. It will look like a turn of the century bike with one fixed gear as they had then, the only exception being lighter alloy wheels and a front brake. Once it’s completed I’ll disassemble again, paint, rebuild and it’s going on Craigslist (drop me a line if you’re interested in it, I ship anywhere in the world and buy carbon credits to offset the air I breathe out while I’m hustling the bike box to the shippers).

Meanwhile, the opposition in Bolivia is sneakily trying to create their own government, 10,000 people or more have died over the weekend from a cyclone in Burma, and the Darfur conflict is still an ongoing genocide.