Mysterious singlespeed, joyful toad-handlers, Zebrano, bad dads, hope

If you do not want to read about a bicycle I have assembled, scroll until you see a picture of an earthworm. Spare yourself. 

As my esteemed readers are aware I have a proclivity for loving on landfill-bound bicycles.  One, a mystery bike frame, moved with me a couple years ago, straight from one basement to another. It’s a beautiful lugged steel frame with no branding whatsoever and a sparkly green paint job. It was put out for trash collection on my old route in 2022 or thereabouts. It had been “upgraded” to a carbon fork fitted in a 1” threadless headset. Used carbon forks scare me even when not trash-picked so I swapped out the headset for an inexpensive Tange then slammed the crown race onto a Columbus fork I’d gotten years earlier from the thrift store for six dollars. Do I have a crown race installation tool? I have a PVC pipe. It does the job. 

The front got a nice Shimano Dura-Ace brake caliper. The rear got a Campagnolo. Why do I have a Campagnolo brake caliper in my big tub labeled “brakes and brake levers” that’s almost entirely unbranded shitbrakes I’ve pulled off built-to-fail department store bikes? No clue. But there it is. May as well use it. This mysteryframe deserves to be decked in fine apparel. 

See below for some close-ups of various lugs shared in the unlikely hope that someone can shed light on the origins of this frame.

It has wide tire clearance for an eighties/nineties road bike and longish chain stays. 130mm rear dropouts that might have been 126 originally. I shoved a 135 in there at one point so maybe I cold set it to 130 by being a big dumb brute. Forceful oaf. 

I popped an old road wheel in there, the second cog on the freewheel that was on there made a straight-enough chainline with the New Albion single speed crankset I bolted onto the buttery smooth cup-n-cone bottom bracket that was already installed when I trash-picked it. If the sharpie marks on the crankset’s box are to be believed I paid $48 for this crank when Merry Sales was doing one of their big clearance sales. These are identical to the old Sugino XD-2 cranks.

The one bolt being located behind the crank arm bugs me but aside from that they are perfectly visually balanced. Understated and elegant. I don’t know why I got 165mm length. I’ve experimented with various crank lengths and come to no conclusions about my preferences.

The bullmoose bars are from a Schwinn High Sierra. They’re the first stem/bars I fitted after installing the headset/fork. They look cool so they stayed. Levers were $2 at a bike swap long ago. Dia-Compe knock-offs. They do the job. I think they’re missing a part to hold the cable ferrules in place. Whatever. 

I rode it to the bar and back. It is a fully-functional bicycle. I will be slightly saddened to give it away, but also relieved. It is a project that is done. It's weird but I like it. 

I have a 130mm single speed flip-flop hub I could build a wheel out of but I think good enough is good enough. Let's call it done. 

•••

Took a little ramble in the Wissahickon with the lover and offspring this Sunday. It was nice. We splashed around at “dog beach.” Francis and I tunneled in the sand to make islands and rivers. We collected little shells and saw how far we could throw rocks. After some good hangs we biked to PaperTrail Cafe. I got an espresso. Francis got a snickerdoodle cookie. Naomi got a latte. Mary snatched some of Francis’s cookie. We caught a toad which self-emancipated. Mary is brave. If she sees Francis do something she believes she can do it. He was squeamish about holding an earthworm. Once he did it Mary did it and she loved it. Imagine you’ve never felt those sensations before— the sliminess but also the cold and hint of prickliness and pinch as it contracts to move. It’s all new to her and she’s so full of wonder. Seeing their wonder at the world has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life. 

•••

The world is a beautiful place and that beauty must be defended from murderers and rapists and plunderers of the future like ICE, the Department of War, your local police department, the fossil fuel extraction profiteers, surveillance and imprisonment profiteers, etc. You don’t love peace and beauty if you’re not outraged by oppression. Your outrage cannot be pure if you forget how to experience love and wonder. 

ICE is evil and must be completely destroyed. If you can’t easily name some institutions that must be abolished immediately I don’t believe you know what it is to love.

We are not doomed. If all was lost I would simply kill myself. As it is I believe that everything that makes life joyful and wondrous can and must be defended and celebrated. The things that steal freedom, life, and joy from the defenseless can be destroyed. We can win and that's why we have to fight. 

•••

It’s coming out that one of the recent ICE murderers has worked as a violence worker at various violence institutions. Two ex-wives say he’s violent. He was in the army then a prison guard then a VA police officer all before becoming an ICE goon. Aside from all the professional for-hire violence he was violent at home to the point of multiple exes filing for restraining orders. 

There are people who say cops have a place in the labor movement, that they are workers. This is just another way to say we live in a society so morally inverted that you can get paid real money to terrorize, kill, and cage other people. Some of us are so incapable of imagination or of empathizing with the victims of state and family violence that we think the main problem here is that the working conditions at the violence factories aren’t good enough for the violence workers. 

Get a real job, pigs. 

Violence workers are workers in one sense, sure, if you’re a pedantic shit. Urinal cakes are cakes. If you hear that there’s someone who has to hit up food pantries even after a backbreaking shift at the toddler-disemboweling-factory and your first thought is “Geez, what a sad world we’ve made where even hardworking toddler-discembowelers can’t make the payments on their Chevy Silverado or their child support payments so the solution must better pay and working conditions at Toddler Disembowelers Incorporated. I would love to affiliate my union with theirs,” then your brain has been poisoned by copaganda. Please walk into the woods and do not return until you have fixed your heart.

•••

This was on a bus shelter. 

Fixed it.

•••

Whatever my cause of death I want it in my obituary. If I slip on a banana peel so I fall down and bonk my brain so hard I die I want it to say “he slipped on a banana peel so he fell down and bonked his brain so hard he died.”

•••

OK here’s another bike I’ve been working on. If you’re sick of bikes maybe read a different blog. I started building this one for my coworker Leo who might opt to take the single-speed instead. Their call. Just get one of these Frankenbicycles out of my living room. 

The real monster in Frankenstein is Frankenstein’s monster because he’s made out of sewn-together bits of dead people instead of the normal way people are made. 

I found this bike abandoned in a vacant lot near Emerald & Allegheny. It was covered in blue electrical tape which had hardened and was difficult to pick off. There are still blue bits. Weird. It had a wacky suspension stem called the Girvin Flexstem. Into the stems bin it went. Attached to that was what in the early and mid nineties passed as a handlebar. It was a straight pipe. Ugly and uncomfortable. It had twistgrip gripshifters which are ugly, unrepairable, unrecyclable, unpleasant to use, shoddily made, difficult to service. I hate them. I put a curvy bar and pretty stem on. 

No brakes, no wheels, but it had the fork/stem/handlebars, two derailers, and the bottom bracket/crankset/pedals. Was this frame worth my time? Behold, under the tape and gunk I found a Made-in-USA mid-range Gary Fisher hybrid. Not bad. Frame can fit big tires, and has braze-ons for fenders and racks. Let’s not let the Gary Fisher Zebrano go to a landfill. Never waste a steel bicycle frame.

The bit I’m most proud of on this build is the stem-shifter-shimmed-to-be-left-handed-thumb-shifter. I have a few Suntour Power Ratchet stem shifters in the Shifters And Derailers tub in the basement. I love these shifters. They’re perfect. Unfortunately for thumb-shifter-preferrers like myself, stems are fatter than handlebars so thumbies and stemmies are not interchangeable. Unless you use some cut-up beer cans to shim it. Voila. It’s a thumbie now. Rotated the cable exit angle ninety degrees. Looks good. What about the vestigial threaded post where the other shifter oughta go? I took a stem-mounted Crane brass bell, the finest brass bell on the market, and threaded it on there. Best bell, best shifter, both within left thumb-reaching distance.

Ding ding.

Smooth, easy, quiet, intuitive, ergonomic shifting over a huge range. SRAM you should hire me and put me in charge of the left-handed thumb-shifter department. My salary should start in the hundreds of thousands please and thank you. 

I set it up to be 1x9, one of my favorite ways to set up a city commuter bike. It’s simple. I’ve found that most normies (friends and neighbors who ride bicycles but aren’t “into bikes”) are mystified or annoyed by front derailers. They usually tell me sheepishly, “I don’t really mess with that one. I just shift this one.” When you have a single shifter with one direction making it faster/harder and the other slower/easier it’s no big deal to get over the learning curve of friction shifting. The Shimano M310 rear derailer is magnificent. It is inexpensive. It shifts up to a 38 tooth cog. Disregard what the packaging says. I put an 11 to 36 cassette on there. With a 38t front chainring that’s every gear you need in Philly. Wish there was a higher gear? Pedal faster. It’s good for you. Wish there was a lower gear? Take your bicycle for a walk up whatever cliff wall you’re scaling. 

I got these wheels from my friend Erik years ago. I forget why he gave them to me. 36 spokes and spinning true. They were briefly on a couple other bikes. Putting a matching wheelset with fancy Velocity Atlas rims on a trash-picked entry-level hybrid felt a bit like throwing pearls before swine but hey I’ve got nothing against swine and pearls are no good if nobody wears ‘em so here we are. Lipstick for every pig. Thank you Erik. 

Sixteen dollars a pair for the Shimano Altus cantilevers. They never disappoint. A pulley and a lever make wheel go stop.

Thirty dollars per Vittoria Randonneur tire. 

I also had to buy the seatpost. $21. Free bikes are like free kittens: expensive.

So we’re $113 in. Plus little incidentals and the bits from the basement stockpile. I’m even less of an accountant that I am a mechanic. Money is pretend. Bicycles are real. 

It rides great. I would commute on it. If I was a businessman I’d start a bicycle business and sell bicycles just like this.

••• 

My aforebloggedabout book club read Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality and ye olde Chicagopope’s encyclical about human dignity and “artificial intelligence” recently. This led to good conversation about technology/God/bicycles/power which is apparently also what this blog is about. I recommend you also enlist some friends to read these texts with you. A book club is like college but with no tests or grades or crippling debt. 

Next month we are reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Exhalation. The first two stories, which is all I’ve read so far, are goooood. Run to your local library and snag you a copy. We are also reading his essay about the alleged consciousness of artificial “intelligence” recently published in that rag The Atlantic. Go ask two friends to read the stories and essay then hang out and talk about it. Congrats. You’re now an anarchist book club. Maybe you’ll face RICO charges soon.

••••

Here’s a sad story about Pentecostal fanaticism causing the deaths of innocent children. 

What are the lessons of a tragedy like this? I’ve been ruminating on the relationships of parents and states to children for years. I don’t think children’s liberation can helpfully be framed as a conflict of parents vs state. Anti-science parents kill their children by refusing basic medical interventions like vaccines and it seems the best we allow ourselves to imagine is the state saves the children from their parents. 

There are certainly times I wish the state had interfered in my parents’ choices about how to raise me and I imagine if you think about it hard you'll think of some times you'd have been better off with your parents having less power over you. It's good when a nation makes spanking children illegal. No matter the “progressive” arguments I hear for homeschooling/deschooling/unschooling I still see it as basically a parents' rights movement. Who do people think they are that they get to make that call for their kids? Children have a right to be members of society, to explore who they are outside the repressive environments of their own homes, meet people with different belief systems and points of view than their families of origin. I don’t trust anyone who would take that away from their children. I get that public schools raise kids to serve the flag they fly and that’s a problem. I don't like the thought of my children being asked to pledge allegiance to a God-damned flag. I have a say in how public schools work though. I don’t have a say in how homeschoolers do and don’t abuse/educate/indoctrinate their children. The fact we allow kids to be educationally and socially neglected and isolated is something we should be ashamed of as a society. Education has to be public to be safe. 

I don’t think antivaxers are fit to raise children. I also don’t think most antivaxers’ children would be better off separated from their parents. Some would though. The ones that are dead from measles would have been better off in foster care. We need better solutions to people unable to safely care for their offspring and it’s not the violently authoritarian hierarchical institutions of the family or state. What then? I don’t know.

We can critique the way the state or the family treats children without the failure of imagination that says the other is the solution. We are allowed to dream of a world better than we've seen. 

•••

I believe that good can triumph over evil. I actually believe that. 

•••

I've said it before but my most basic driving political belief is that I am committed to a world that is safe for children. Everything else is details. 

•••

Thanks for doing whatever you did today that made the future a nicer place to be. What was it? Have you expressed gratitude to yourself for doing it?