I figure that I should probably cc: Dreamwidth on some of these letters I've been writing. So, in case you need to write a similar thing in your own community, here is a response I wrote to Redwood City's latest attempt at pretending they care about cycling infrastructure.
( every moment of inaction costs a fraction of a life )
A week ago, my beloved, accursed, Diverge walked away; I involuntarily traded it for a Facebook bike. It walked away while I was doing a bunch of things that, in theory, I shouldn't have done, and so you could say that it was all my fault that it walked away. (I do, even though I know it wasn't.)
This bike, I often said, was a pile of shit. Over the 7,400 miles I put on it, all manner of things had gone wrong. The headset, a Specialized integrated something or other, ate its spacer O-ring, and could not be tightened without the middle seal rubbing (resulting in the choice between the headset binding up, or it being intolerably loose). This issue plagued me for a thousand miles off and on, until I eventually figured out what was wrong; when I did, of course, Specialized had decided that it was no longer worth manufacturing parts for a bike scarcely four years old, and that part was not possible to find. In the midst of that, I found that it was not possible to get new headset bearings, either, except by special-ordering them from the UK. These were just two of the "god damn it, Specialized" totally-unnecessary compatibility problems that were all over the bike.
It was nearly the lowest-end model that Specialized offered of the Diverge, too. I'd considered all manner of upgrades on it, but it would never be anything but a cheap aluminum frame, transmitting 100% of any vibration in the road directly into me. No matter how good the brakes are that I'd upgrade it with, it'd always be a kind of crappy commuter that Specialized marketed as a gravel bike, despite that it wouldn't clear tires much wider than 34s and had a quick-release rear axle. I could upgrade it from Tiagra, but it'd still be the same heavy frame, and really, it'd be better if I just got stronger rather than demanding that the bike be lighter.
All the same, though, it was my piece of shit. I had put countless hours of sweat into it, and definitely some blood and even tears, too. There was something joyful, anyway, about keeping up with a group ride on an aluminum half-gravel-half-road-but-really-neither bike with a rack on the back, pulling my weight in the front of a paceline occasionally, and then still being able to trigger the traffic lights, when all the fancy carbon bikes couldn't. There was something relieving about having accidentally dropped the bike off the top of a car, and knowing that there wasn't meaningful damage, because after all, it's aluminum, not carbon. (And anyway, if it did take the hit, it would be an excuse to replace it with something better.)
Anyway. I'd still been working from my coworking space. I guess technically, I shouldn't be doing that, but realistically, it's alright, since for the past month or so now, I've been the only one going in, and after all, the problem with this whole pandemic thing isn't going to a place, the problem is seeing the people. And for the past two years that I'd been working there, I left my bike unlocked in the rack out front, which I guess I also technically shouldn't have done, since we were tucked into a little residential nook where I thought it and I were safe, and when I still had coworkers going to the space, they left their bikes unlocked too, including a nice carbon something or other. And here I was, anyway, ready to go home last week -- and maybe it was my fault, and maybe really it the fault of the guy who took it, but my Diverge wasn't there anymore, and, and...
And here I was, just me, and no bike.
I have had a lot of trip reports in the queue to write -- or, perhaps I should say, I have taken a lot of trips recently, and some of them had moments worth writing about. I have half of a trip report written about getting shut down on Mt. Shasta; after it became clear that it was a simple recounting of a day, with nothing terribly interesting to say about it in that light, I gave up on that incarnation of it. In my mind, too, was brewing a set of thoughts about a recent cycling trip to make a lap around Lake Tahoe. On my laptop is also a draft of a post about mental health -- or, really, the things that go along with the absence thereof -- that I never seemed quite satisfied with enough to post.
It seems like what I was looking to write is a synthesis of all of these. Over the past few months, I have entered a handful of experiences with expectations for how they would turn out; some of them went exactly as I'd planned, and some of them were entirely the opposite. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what my thesis is here -- is it that expectations influence outcomes? that they don't? that expectations influence experience? Regardless, here are a collection of moments of each of these.
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