Cars cause climate change, and of course climate change causes earthquakes:
It’s all that lube, you see:
Marsellos formed this hypothesis after watching “The Human Tornado” starring Rudy Ray Moore:
All of this is to say I take full responsibility for any future earthquakes in the New York City metropolitan area, for I leaned heavily on THE CAR THAT I OWN this past weekend. Firstly, my younger son was attending a birthday party at the mall behind which The Trails Behind The Mall lie, so I said “Fuck it,” threw a bike on the roof, and rode while he partied:
This was my second day in a row of riding said trails, and I felt remarkably comfortable on the cheap singlespeed, which I attribute largely to the leather saddle:
And the bamboo handlebars:
Indeed, in many ways it rivaled its much more expensive though virtually identical counterpart:
Oh, wait, wrong photo:
Even I get confused:
Really, my only quibble (apart from some intermittent frontal brake squeal I attribute to the pads and rims not being fully acquainted yet since I stole them from the Softride) is that the front end feels a bit steep. The upshot of this is that, while most of the time the bike feels nimble and playful, it does not inspire a tremendous amount of confidence on steep descents and at times I worry that it might administer a piledriver:
Then again, I’ve grown increasingly cautious when it comes to offroad riding. At first I figured I must be getting rusty, but now I realize I’m simply getting old, and it occurred to me that at this point there are probably sections of trail I’ll probably never ride again. Speaking of finality, deep in the park, I was surprised to come across a ghost bike:
I’ve only ever seen ghost bikes along roadways in the spot where a cyclist has been killed by a driver, so I have no idea if this one memorializes a rider who died on these trails:
I’d imagine if that were the case I’d have heard or read about it somewhere, so maybe this was just a place he liked to ride so it seemed a fitting place for his memorial. Either way, nobody ever regretted walking an obstacle.
In any case, later that day I was back in the car again, this time to Jersey City Heights, where I stopped in to see Jerzyluca and the good people at Jersey Cycles. Foolishly I forgot to take a picture of the storefront, so you’ll have to imagine a cozy storefront on an early January evening as the first snowflakes of 2024 dance in the streetlight. But here are some pictures of bikes:
It makes sense that crabon has taken over as the material of choice for professional riders, since it’s light and they can form it into all sorts of wind-cheating shapes. However, it’s absolutely astounding to me that everyone else also buys crabon when, in a world that made any kind of sense, a modern road bicycle would look like this:
It’s got the threadless stem and the integrated shifters and all the other creature comforts, and yet it also looks fantastic. I mean why save a few grams your fat ass won’t miss anyway when you can have a chrome bottom bracket shell instead?
Best of all it’s far less prone to puncture wounds:
Of course that’s a modern iteration of a classic, while this is just a classic:
As I’m determined to pare down my holdings I didn’t leave with a bike. In fact, I left with one fewer bike, which is now the property of Jerzyluca. But I also left with Italian road bikes on the brain, and so the next day I summoned the Faggin…
…and returned it to its natural state:
I have yet to take it for a proper ride, but I’m looking forward to it.