Charlie Cunningham, bicycle builder and celebrator of humane technology, has died. Here's a thing he said:
The bicycle is a way for people to gain contact with something that has been misplaced. Mountain bikes are a perfect way to combine technology and nature in a way that is friendly to life. They can be an alternative to the abuse of technology that is so widespread in our world today. The more one uses a bicycle, especially in a natural environment, the more sympathetic and understanding one becomes of oneself and the planet.
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Piece of shit judge wants to send a message to antifascists everywhere that if you protest fascism they will lock you in a cage for decades. The Prairieland Defenders who, as near as I can tell, did nothing wrong, have been sentenced to hundreds of years in prison.
Here’s a statement from defendant Benjamin “Champagne” Song.
When peaceful legal protest and free association is punished with hundreds of years of prison sentences, why protest legally?
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Provocatively titled but very good essay: A Better World Is Not Possible.
The Weather Underground was onto some good things and their methods don’t merit blanket condemnation. One of my most central core moral beliefs is that all people are more valuable than any property. This is not a commonly held belief if the actions of society are any indication. Destroy property to protect life if you must. That’s a good and moral thing to do. No thing is worth more than any life.
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Why?
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I enjoy reading Sophie Lewis's work. She calls herself an "ex-academic" which I respect. She writes carefully like an academic but she's fun to read and her work seems important, unlike a whole lot of "academic" texts.
This is from her newest book, Femmephilia, which I am enjoying. There's a fun essay about Marilyn Monroe, a person I'd never previously spent any time thinking about.
She’s clear-eyed and precise but funny and also a pure-hearted hater. “Just because Mary Daley is my enemy does not mean she is wrong.” I love that sort of shit.
There’s a joyful urgency to her writing you could carelessly miss amidst thorough citations and historical contextualizations. She writes like a prophet who’s glimpsed the promised land and wants you to know we can get there.
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Nifty website: photopea.com It’s a free browser-based Photoshop clone.
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I’ve been into wheel-building for a few years. Let me rephrase that: I’ve built one or two wheels per year for the last few years. Like many hobbies of mine, I’m not sure if I love it or hate it. It’s tedious and infuriating, meditative and satisfying.
I’ve been doing this without a good truing stand. For a couple years I just used zip ties cut to size as calipers on an old frame I would ratchet-strap to a bar stool or if I was just truing a wheel already built up on a bicycle I’d flip the bike upside down and use zip ties on the fork blades or seat stays as indicators of the lateral wobble. Then my friend Ian gave me an awful AliExpress truing stand that wobbles. I would use it because it was less of a disaster for my kitchen table and/or living room than the cobbled-together jigs but with the unpleasant side effect of cursing Ian for giving me this piece of shit. Damn you Ian. That thing sucks. I finally bought a Park Tool truing stand on eBay for the same reason I recently got a tattoo of a soft pretzel: I had the money and nobody stopped me. Following the sinking feeling in my gut after seeing the “Congratulations! You are the winning bidder!” email (Regret? Excitement? Let them who has not drunk-purchased eBay treats for future sober them cast the first stone.)
It’s a treat to use a good tool. My wheels are true to the same extent that this statement is true: I’m a good mechanic.
There are whole books about bicycle wheels and they’re great. I could not have come up with the bicycle wheel. Like the horseshoe crab, there is no room for noteworthy improvement in the bicycle wheel. We’ve done it. We’ve made a perfect technology. I love spokes. I love rims. I love hubs. I love tires and tubes and tubeless sealants.
The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt is a good read. I prefer the building method from Gerd Schraner.
Have too much time and money? Start here: The Sheldon Brown wheelbuilding page. There are less pleasurable ways to fritter away your time.
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I occasionally call myself a luddite (laudably) and occasionally get called a luddite (derisively). The luddites were right. You should smash machines that smash you. If we find ourselves serving machines instead of being served by machines then we should break the machines. To be a luddite is not to be anti-technology. To be a luddite is to understand that technology is worthy of both scrutiny and celebration. What does it do for me? What does it do to me? Ease for whom? More leisure time for whom? Will it make me stupider? Kinder? A good luddite celebrates technology that makes it easier to be neighborly, gives you more time with the people you love, brings pleasure where once there was drudgery or misery, that beautifies the earth, makes its user healthier and draws them closer to themselves, their environment, the workers whose hands crafted the technology.
Ol’ Ned Ludd was onto something good. Destroy what destroys you so you can build something beautiful.
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I recently learned of Dieter Rams from the blog of Grant Petersen. “Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.” I watched the documentary. I recommend it. His list of ten design principles is a fun thing to mull over. To be commercially successful and also repulsed at consumerist waste is a hard place to be and anyone selling anything has to grapple with it some.
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One of the cofounders of Wikipedia is a right-wing numbskull. He’s not allowed to edit Wikipedia articles anymore. Wikipedia is better at protecting itself from fascist influence than Ivy League universities.
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The Guardian: Five American die every hour from car emissions
It’s not great that we mostly arrange society around cars. I’m over them.
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I remember once as a kid explaining what a garage was and what carpet was to some men who had never encountered either.
We’d just moved to Papua New Guinea. I was a sad preteen. I did not want to do the Pacific Orientation Course, formerly known as Jungle Camp, which was required by the missionary organization my parents had joined. One part of the Pacific Orientation Course, henceforth referred to as POC, was “Village Living.” After a couple months of language and culture lessons, the directors of the program drove each family out to a village where they had arranged to have a host family provide housing for us in exchange for a bit of money and goods. Then they just left you there for six weeks. Our family's host was named “Brus,” pronounced just like the English name Bruce but with a little trill on the R, but that wasn’t his given name. “Brus” just means “tobacco.” He smoked a lot. That’s not relevant to this story. Our village was called Bulal.
There was this single guy from the US also enrolled in POC and he had to do Village Living without any waitskin companions. It feels weird to type that word now. I referred to myself and other foreign nationals as “whiteskins” all the time though. Less problematic than “expat” frankly. I thought doing Village Living alone sounded better than with my family. I told him as much. You remember the adults who actually listened to you when you were a kid. I do at least. His name was Andrew. He had a giant beard and always wore a bandanna around his head and had cool knives. He was a motorcycle mechanic. He was not thrilled about village living because he was already good at bushcraft stuff and living without comforts and thought it would be boring and tedious. He said maybe I should come visit him during the six weeks if our assigned villages weren’t too far apart. As if an eleven-year-old can make those sort of plans.
Somehow it was arranged that my family would hike from our assigned village to his assigned village for a visit and my older brother and I would stay with him for a few nights. It was probably only ten miles or so of hiking but it was over rudimentary roads with sharp rocks and I was alternating between bare feet and flip flops depending on if the blisters or the pointy rocks were more painful. I remember observing that this was the 100% humidity I’d heard about. You could feel the wind on your wet face but it didn’t evaporate the sweat off of you. Hot wet wind. Long wet hot walk. I was walking way ahead, my little brother a little behind me, and my older brother and both parents farther back chatting. I turned around because I heard a cracking sound and saw a palm tree falling right onto my family. My lungs emptied silently and I couldn't yell to warn them. As it fell I was like, “Oh shit. This is it. This is how one of them dies. Bonked on the head by a giant coconut tree in Madang.” It landed between my little brother and the other three. Kaboom! No injuries. It was so loud. I laughed and said “Whooaa!” My mother hyperventilated for a couple seconds then lifted her skirt, dropped her underwear, and urinated right there under the bright sky in the middle of the road under the burning white-hot sun. I laughed some more. The whole thing was beyond funny to me.
On we traveled. We arrived at Andrew’s host village eventually. They’d learned he was an auto mechanic and he’d been set to work on shells of probably-irreparable old Hiluxes. When he wanted to be alone he’d tell them he had work to do and journal. He got bored and wrote whole book reports.
I was chatting with his friendly hosts about cars. “In your country every village has a car and asphalt roads?” one asked. I was like, “Buddy, there are so many cars you wouldn’t believe it. Families have two cars. My father and mother each drove a different car for many years,” I told him every house I could see from the house I had lived in had a family that had at least one car and that the houses were so big that they had a room with a giant door that opened from the bottom to the top using electricity when you pressed a radio button from your car. They thought I was fucking with them and Andrew was like, Yeah that’s all true I guess. Cars inside of houses? Why? So I had to explain in a language I was just getting comfortable in that I and one brother had shared one room, my other brother had his own room, my parents had a room, and the car had a room. We all spent the night separate from each other. It makes no sense frankly. No wonder they were perplexed. I told them how in the house there was another room that was a cook house with a hard slippery floor and an electric oven instead of a fire and a room for sitting and relaxing that had a floor made of a sort of fake grass but like made of pieces of yarn. I didn’t know how else to explain carpets. Andrew, who had seen plenty of carpet, looked at me like, "What the hell are you talking about?" I said, "Carpets." He said, "Oh. Yeah. It is short grass made of yarn. That's true. And people have machines that use electricity to suck the dirt off of it so it's soft on your toes." That house is sold and gone, occupied by some other family and their vehicle(s) in the suburban sprawl of Boulder county. Probably for the best I didn’t grow up there but as a kid I was pissed at being told by my parents that we had to abandon the lives we knew to go live in a country I’d never heard of. Back to the story. We are not in a large suburban home just East of the Rocky Mountains. We are in a village on the Northern coast of Papua New Guinea, in Madang province, somewhere west of Madang town and a few miles up the hills from the coast. There’s a temperamental hog named Grile scratching himself aggressively on the posts of the house Andrew, my brother, and I are sleeping in. This house is smaller than an American one-car garage.
I’ve forgotten why I’m telling this story. This blog is free. Read at your own peril.
We slaughtered Grile a couple days later. It kind of fucked me up and I pretended it didn’t bother me. It’s really something to kill a big smart animal. I think we all push something down and don’t acknowledge it when we kill animals or just eat animals that other people killed. I didn’t go vegetarian or anything. I ate the premium fatty cut of Grile’s muscle I was served— I came from a land of unimaginable wealth and was treated deferentially even as I sometimes made the hosts feel like asses. I feel some shame about that even now when I think about it. They gave me food and led me to the spring to fill my canteen, and to the other spring to bathe, and gave me shelter, and what did I give them? I was like a leeching vampire.
One night we were out talking by the fire and looking up at the stars. One man looked up, pointed at a slowly-moving white spot. “Satellite” he said in perfect English. Andrew said something like, “Y’all know about satellites?” The man was defensive. Of course we know all about satellites. Silence for a bit. “Did people put them up there or God?”
You and I are no less ignorant than this man. You know what you know. But at the time I thought thoughts that are frankly racist. I thought, These people don’t know anything. Well, they know how to survive and thrive without running water and electricity and they have tons of leisure time and when they die they will be surrounded by people who love them. Who’s the idiot now?
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Moss is more like carpet than grass isn't it? Oh well.
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OK here’s another story from Village Living. We're back in Bulal village, where my family had been plopped. Kids liked to go hunting for birds with slingshots and go spearfishing in the river. I loved that stuff. So I’d made a slingshot and a number of the fishing spears. We would make barbs out of the struts from busted umbrellas and lash them to the end of a sturdy straight smooth branch, then use the rubber surgical tubing like you use for slingshots to make what is apparently properly called a “Hawaiian sling.” You wrap a loop of the rubber around your wrist and the other end is lashed to the back of the spear. It’s cocked back in a way that you are holding the spear near the barbed tip with the rubber taut then you loosen your grip a bit and the spear shoots forward and stabs a little fish/eel/prawn. Lunch! I was much better at spear fishing than sling shot hunting.
So we were out hunting for birds. This mostly involves repairing slingshots and firing rocks that miss the bird by so much that the bird doesn’t notice. So like I said it rules. Then this one kid hit this beautiful blue Kingfisher in the wing. It fell to the ground and we all rushed it. It was in pain. I could see it was scared. It was panicking. They started shouting about who was going to kill it. I couldn’t take it. I said no. It was terrified. It was out of breath and hurt and couldn’t flap or run anymore. I picked it up. I said that birds are our friends. We should not hurt this bird. They laughed and laughed. They thought that was funny. I said I was taking him back to my house and I will feed him fish until he gets better. They laughed some more. One kid wove a basket from a single palm branch. It was Poro’s first birdcage. “Poro” means “friend” and that’s what I kept saying the bird was. So that became his name. I took him back to our place and sourced some scraps of chicken wire and meticulously wove them together into a bulbous cage and fashioned a hook to hang it from the porch ceiling’s bamboo beams. I laid a thick bed of grass on the bottom and shoved some branches through it for perches.
I caught minnows using the soda bottle trap trick. Here’s how you make one of those: Beg your parents for a few Kina for an ice cold Coca-Cola. Walk a couple miles to the nearest refrigerator, in this case a little convenience stall at Dylup Station, down by the coast. Drink that refreshing cold beverage. Chop off the top of the bottle just above the label, turn the top upside down and shove it back in. Voila. That’s a fish trap. Sprinkle any ol’ bait in there if you like but really you don’t need to because the important thing is you wedge that bottle between and under some rocks with the opening facing downstream so the minnows swimming upstream along the bottom of river swim right into the big opening then never figure out how to escape. I would get like five minnows overnight with no bait. Then I’d smash them up on a log and put them in the syringe from the first aid kit. I fed Poro like I was his mother. There was a learning curve for both of us. After a couple days he had the hang of it. He opened his little beak for me to squirt mashed fish in. His wing seemed to be healing. I came to believe he was soothed by my presence. I was certainly soothed by him. It was a spectacle, the whiteskin boy feeding mashed fishes to the bird multiple times per day.
One morning I came out and his head was stuck in one of the neck-sized holes of all the overlapping meticulously twisted-together scraps of chicken wire. He was unresponsive. I screamed that Poro was dead. I didn’t know how else to react. What did I want? A tiny bird ambulance? I held Poro’s body. Rigor mortise had set in. I was petting his soft feathers, trying my hardest not to cry. He must have been dead a while. I managed to get out the words. “Poro i dai pinis.” Our neighbor Appolonia grabbed him from my hands and flopped him around by his legs. “Em I dai pinis!” she announced, laughing, her mouth oozing the red paste of Betelnut. He’s all the way dead. No shit. She went on about how dead he was, speculated on the possible causes. I held back tears and snatched his body back. She laughed again. I dug a hole behind the house and buried him and lashed two sticks together and jammed it in the ground, a cross grave marker. I cried alone in the river, throwing water on my face each time I was worried someone would see. I'd learned I could stop myself from crying by jumping in cold water. I was a crier and that was not OK in my family.
Days later I was invited out to go bird-hunting again. A kid clipped a sparrow and down it fell to earth. One handed it to me asking if I’d befriend this bird or eat it.
I wrung its neck.
The breast of a sparrow is maybe three or four centimeters across, less than a centimeter thick even in the middle. We seasoned it with salt and pepper, cooked it in a banana leaf on the coals.
“Em wankain long kakaruk.” It tastes just like chicken.
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Life’s hard and the world is mean but it doesn’t mean we have to be.
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Some premium cycling video content:
Graeme Obree documentary. I don’t care about pro sports but I like freaks and weirdos and DIYers.
Speaking of freaks and weirdos, here's a 1985 CBS video about a reckless and agile bike messenger.
Klunking is best away from cars, cops, and concrete.
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Good autobiographical piece in Harper’s. The author ruminates on Simone Weil’s writings and I think put into words something that I’ve tried to say about mindfulness/attention and the unambitious anti-spirituality of Weil:
Weil often speaks of attention as a form of patience. It’s the ability to seek the good and the beautiful even when you hear nothing on the other end of the line but the silence of the void. It’s a willingness to remain at the doorstep of truth without consolation or reward, to ignore the voice that is constantly whispering in your ear that there’s something better around the corner. All my attempts at a spiritual life have failed because I could not remain on that doorstep. I became dazzled by the possibility of learning new things and forgot what I already knew.
The author seems to see “focus” and “attention” as separate and distinct which I’m not entirely convinced of. If you can’t focus then I don’t think you can practice attention in the sense Weil describes. It’s not to will yourself to pay attention but to surrender your attention— to give up— and you can’t give up if you’re focusing hard on giving up. I still think the loss of the ability to focus may indeed be a societal disease that keeps us from loving, from sharing and receiving grace. We have to train ourselves to sit still, to do nothing, because doing nothing, grasping for nothing, is where you find the abyss of Grace.
It’s a good read.
Autobiography is, or should be, an impossible form. Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living.
So good.
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We have made a tradition of going away for the week of Juneteenth to the delightful but affordable cabin at Tohickon Valley Park in Bucks County with friends. It’s nice. It's accessible by train+bike, the finest multimodal transport option ever. In this event I rented a minivan because traveling with kids is a pain in the butt and they need so much ding-dang STUFF. Fret not, there were a couple bicycles strapped to that minivan. I’ve showed you pictures of bike rides from the area before. You’re about to see some more. First a picture of Stephen playing Twister with Francis while Mary runs interference:
I said to Stephen one morning, “I could go for a twenty-miler with lots of hills and unpaved creek crossings. He successfully mapped out a very inefficient beer run with lots of unpaved creek crossings and lots of hills. It wound up being just over twenty miles.
This left me in the mood to go bike-riding the next day. Leave long rides to athletes.
Early on in the ride we saw this Thrasher. I saw the flash of rust color and thought it was a female cardinal. I creeped closer and it’s a Brown Thrasher eating a worm. Snagged an OK pic. I’ve got this little digital camera my friend Liz gave me when I wanted a camera for photographing birds n stuff but didn’t want to always have my phone on me. I’m finally getting OK at taking non-fuzzy pictures of fuzzy critters.
Or sometimes fuzzy pictures of smooth critters, like this green frog.
We saw a crushed turtle carcass being eaten by some vultures. Failed to get in-focus pic.
Cars kill turtles. That's reason enough to ban cars honestly. Here's a not-crushed turtle I photographed:
Here's the clean-up crew, annoyed at my interruption of a lunch of turtle soup.
Blue Jay waaaaay up there.
Robin eating worm.
Now you’ve seen some creatures I’ve seen.
I’ve been riding the Atlantis a lot lately. It’s such a wonderful machine.
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Remember when I said I wouldn’t post about Platner again? Who could have guessed that the misogynist who worked as a mercenary is also a rapist. Really fucking bleak how many supposed progressive men seem to have learned nothing from this fiasco. Here’s an OK blog post by Rebecca Solnit on the topic. Also, my thing about just not trusting military men is still valid. It's not good or praiseworthy to have held a job in any nation's army, especially the US armies. Lots of them murder women, even their own co-workers in the killing-people organization we call a national army. Not a good institution! Armies are bad! Now I’m really done posting about him. May his name be forgotten.
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Some other pictures:
He loves picking his daily outfits. He often also dresses Mary.
This spider was on the inside of a slide at a playground. I got my phone really close and the picture came out super clear.
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Hate what is evil. Cling to what is good.