My friend and neighbor Alison recently alerted me to a couple of bicycles left out on the curb. I guess someone was moving out in a hurry and ditched their bikes.
Some fresh tubes and cables and an exhausting battle with one of the brifters et voila that’s a fancy go-fast bicycle. I don’t care if a bicycle is lightweight but it’s cool these frames were made here in Pennsylvania. Secondhand carbon fiber forks scare me. And why would we ride around on pizza-cutter wheels when we could have big fat comfy tires? Oh well. A guy bought it from me for $300 which is $300 more than I paid for it and $260 more than I spent fixing it. Look at me, good at businessman shit. Hope he has fun going fast on it. Weeee!
The other bike was a bizarre mishmash of bits that together formed a functioning bicycle. Carbon fiber fork on an aluminum GT frame. Those awful levers that have the drop bar brake levers integrated with the lever you can pull from the tops. Absolutely beautiful Shimano Dura-Ace rear derailer and elegant Dura-Ace crank so I stripped it for parts. I love disassembling a bicycle.
My friend Grant, who lives within walkie-talkie distance, was in the market for a new get-around-town bike so I decided to transplant most of the components to a Trek 420 frame. Made in Wisconsin. My friends Greg and Kristen moved away recently (Boo!) and let me dig through all their basement bike components. I never leave a lugged steel frame without a rider if I can help it, so to my basement it went.
Slapped some rusty mystery fork on it. Steel forever! Canti in the front, caliper in the back. It’s fine.
I hung a Paul Components moon unit on because why not. It’s jewelry in the jewelry box that I never wear. May as well pass it along.
This bar-end shifter says “Not Compatible with Dura-Ace rear derailleur” which I could think of no reason for being true. Didn’t all those eighties and nineties Shimano derailers have the same pull ratio? So I disobeyed. It indexes flawlessly. Some parts-bin front derailer. It works. It looks nice.
I like the funky ergonomic reverse curve on these drop bars. 3ttt Forma. Made in Italy. Never heard of ‘em. Bars and stem also came off the trash-picked GT. Should have routed the canti cable behind the bar/ over the stem. Oh well. It works.
It’s a pretty bike. I’m happy it’s clamped betwixt Grant’s thighs now spiriting him about town.
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There’s an Osprey nest on this old tower by Graffiti Pier. I’m gonna go get some better pics soon.
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They should call it Erection Day the way the ballots are always full of huge dicks.
•••
It was Election Day yesterday.
My wife is a politician now I guess.
I voted for her. I wrote in “DEEZ NUTS” for Senator in the 2nd District because one time Christina Tartaglione told the cops to handcuff me because I kept interrupting her when she claimed Narcan has no effect on fentanyl overdoses. She’s a jerk running unopposed. That happens a lot. I wrote in “FREE PALESTINE” for governor because I don’t vote for genocide apologists.
Unicorn Riot article about the ward takeover.
Inquirer article from a couple days ago about the Wards That Work project
I’m proud of my filthy commie immigrant wife holding elected office to try to make the Democratic Party a less undemocratic institution. A bunch of weirdos are going to make the 25th Ward an open ward that votes on its own political endorsements in defiance of the top-down structure of the Philadelphia Democratic Committee. What did I do while this coup was strategized at my kitchen table? I played in the sprinkler outside with the kids and stocked the coolers with ice and seltzer.
Regarding Chris Rabb’s win The Inquirer wrote “The win represented a major blow to leaders of Philadelphia’s Democratic Party.” Love to see leaders of Philadelphia’s Democratic Party suffering major blows.
You and your friends can make the world a little bit less harsh and cruel. That’s nice.
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Mary loves slides and swings. She points at them and says, “Wee! Wee! Wee!” Playgrounds are called “wee” because we say “wee” when we go down the slide. An excavator is called “whoa” because she says “whoa!” when it picks up rubble and dumps it in the dump truck.
I remarked that she sounds like an enthusiastic hog farmer going “wee! Wee wee wee weeee!” Naomi had no idea what I was talking about so maybe I’m making up that big farmers yell, “so wee wee weeweeweeee!”
I’m descended from some hog farmers. My great great uncle used to call the pigs “Porks P. Pig” and/or “Pigs P. Pork” or variations thereof. He also christened my maternal great grandmother “Grams P. Grams.” It stuck. I only ever called her “Grams” or “Grams P. Grams.” One time Grams and I were watching a Rockies game on the TV and she said she couldn’t remember if I was a boy or girl. She nodded gently after I answered which means she didn’t hear and was bullshitting her way through it. I didn’t feel like shouting and she didn’t feel like admitting she couldn’t hear my answer. Getting old is weird. I think I’d like to grow old.
Here’s how Grams P Grams liked to watch baseball: TV on but muted with a boom box on her lap with the volume cranked full blast. The radio announcers are more thorough. You get more cues of what’s going on. Plus they’re a couple seconds ahead of the TV. You get the calls as they happen, not right after they happen. Also the commercial breaks are hilarious that way. You’ve got grams’ ghettoblaster going on about injury lawyers but the TV is playing close-ups of grilled shrimp. The ads themselves become an art installation about the absurdity of advertising. In her later years she switched to over-the-ears studio headphones cranked full blast.
Back to pigs. “Oink” is not what pigs say. Pigs sound nothing like that. They say “stop resisting arrest! *bang bang bang*”
I like learning what animal sounds are in other languages. Mary calls cats “Nyeeow” which is very cute and accurate. In almost every language that’s more or less what people say cats say
There’s a Wikipedia page of cross-linguistic onomatopoeias.
In Bengali the pig sound is “ghnot ghnot.” It’s a guttural deep in the throat “gh.” Pretty good. Grok grok, nuff nuff, grunz grunz. All better than “oink oink.”
I like piggies. Ghungh khrungh ungh. The average feral hog has more problem-solving skills and pattern-recognition abilities than the average Senator. Feral Hog for President.
slaughterhouse for [redacted]
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Here’s a free horror story prompt: slaughterhouse worker keeps putting his human victims through machinery of a major meat packing facility where he works and doesn’t get found out until a good 5% of the US population has engaged in cannibalism. We’re talking Senator tendons in your sausages and President bones in your sour candy via gelatin.
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Two of Mary’s favorite activities are removing objects from a container and placing objects in a container. I sat and drank beer while she repeatedly loaded and unloaded all this beer.
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A nice long essay I might never write but would write if your publication paid me a few hundred bucks: Union Stewardship as Pastoral Care. Here follow some blog-level thoughts without good segues or a thought to the overall structure of the essay. But seriously, any editors reading the bloggity blog, I will make this a good essay if you pay me. I would interview other shop stewards. I’ve got the major depression and I read poetry so you know I can write good if I try. Or maybe the following bloggy essay is just good enough:
“This is our Bible,” my union local’s president says as he waves the 700 page annotated version of our contract.
I cite articles of the National Agreement and related arbitration cases like a zealous evangelical teenager who cites chapter and verse to win theological debates. Fundamentalist legalistic upbringing is a surprisingly good preparation for rank-and-file union advocacy.
There are of course lots of ways to approach this role. Our local’s chief steward says he thinks of himself as a defense lawyer. Some see themselves as diplomats bringing harmony to contentious work installations, others as enforcers eager to make management pay for every contractual violation.
I’ve come to think of it as a pastoral role. A pastor speaks life to a congregation beaten down from their merciless nine-to-fives with word of the unconditional inexhaustible grace of God. A shop steward stands between workers and the forces of evil that, unimpeded by labor laws and the Union, would bleed dry every ounce of life from every worker and leave them dead on the workroom floor.
I teach new workers to invoke their Weingarten rights like a Sunday School teacher drilling the week’s memory verse into the kids’ heads in hopes they’ll be able to recite it perfectly the next week.
“If this conversation could lead to discipline I respectfully demand union representation. Say it back to me.” The new hire looks at me incredulously. I ask them to do it until they’re comfortable saying it. I encourage them to practice in front of the mirror. “Just try saying it. Pretend I’m the manager and I just said I need to talk to you in the office.”
Solidarity is unconditional. I am on the side of every one of my fellow workers against those who would discipline, punish, steal from, insult, or in any way violate their hard-won rights. There are few other contexts in which you are institutionally bound with dozens or hundreds of other people of wildly varying personalities, education levels, personal values, etc. in a way that you are committed to not simply walking away from if the going gets tough.
I recently heard a pastor say that being in the church has taught her that it’s possible to love people she doesn’t even like. This is a lesson born of accepting the disciplines of community over the disciplines of our resentments. Organizing, whether in the context of religion or labor, involves a great deal of getting to know lots of people and to know someone is either to love or resent them. To experience mercy or solidarity is to know the one going to bat for you sees you as you are and not some idealized projected version of yourself. With our eyes on the horizon of the Utopian visions of the eschaton or general strike we can set aside petty differences. All really can be made whole. Workers can win the world. Faith is the substance of the abolition of the wage system which we hope for, the evidence of the just society we cannot yet see.
We do not hope and labor in vain.
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