Falling Back

How was everybody’s Halloween?

This guy probably had a rough one:

[Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Cheater]

Mine, however, was quite lovely, and I’m pleased to report my Ilhan Omar’s Alleged Brother-Husband costume went over extremely well:

It also works equally well as an Alt Cyclist costume. In fact he looks like he’s ready for the Nutmeg Nor’easter. In the photo on the left he’s posting to the Reddit “xbiking” forum about how Rivendells are overpriced and how he simply put $3,000 worth of White Industries and Paul components on an ’88 RockHopper instead.

The Halloweather was ideal, too, and the autumn we’re having this year is so downright autumnal it almost borders on caricature:

It’s enough to make you suspect that some other season is masquerading as autumn and trying a little too hard.

Once again I had to do the whole “Drive A Kid Somewhere and Wait Around” thing, so once again I put the Anti-Riv on the roof of THE CAR THAT I OWN and did what we used to call “mountain biking” while I waited:

As the Classic Cycle Old Crap Test Pilot I’m ostensibly testing the bikes:

But this weekend I had a revelation and and realized I’m not testing the bikes at all:

I’m actually testing…myself.

Or, to put it another way:

So what is this bike teaching me? Well, basically the same lesson the George Plimpton’s Wife Oil did…

…which is that I can find a bike aesthetically objectionable if not downright grotesque, and it can be the very antithesis of all the velocipedal values I espouse, and yet after spending enough time with it I will eventually grow quite fond of it.

What I’m still trying to figure out is why this is true. Is it because humans have a remarkable capacity for getting used to horrible things? (Adversity, oppression, eating at Arby’s…) Is it because they’re not horrible at all, and in fact the cutting-edge (for the time) technology behind them worked well and they’re really good bikes.? Or is it because it’s actually really hard to make a genuinely bad bike and as hard as both these companies tried they just couldn’t quite pull it off? Perhaps it’s because my own love of cycling is so pure that I enjoy it no matter what monstrosity I’m riding. Or maybe it’s the opposite and I’m the cycling equivalent of a porn addict who can only get off on the most depraved and objectionable subject matter, like Y-Foils and vintage suspension mountain bikes.

All of the above is probably true to a certain extent, but I do think both the bikes and I deserve the benefit of the doubt. The GT i-Drive bikes were generally well-regarded at the time, and people seem to forget that a mountain bike that was fun to ride in 1999 is just as fun to ride today–more fun if you’re not the original owner and you didn’t take that initial depreciation hit. As for the Y-Foil, all I’ll say about that is don’t knock it ’til you try it. And c’mon, give me a little credit for getting over my personal prejudices regarding suspension and bikes that look like something a Vulcan would use to administer a rectal exam respectively.

But sure, frames without shocks are more in line with my own sensibilities:

As are road bikes that don’t require a crabon beam in order to ride smoothly:

And the Roadini is riding very smoothly indeed now that I’ve added the Brooks I recently removed from the Jones.

But I now find myself faced with a very difficult choice, for after installing the saddle I realized I had this:

Do I dare ride a bicycle with a leather saddle and leather bar tape? I fear in so doing I might cross some sort of cowhide Rubicon and become irretrievably twee. Also, the tape that’s already on there feels really good, plus I actually managed to wrap it without leaving a visible gap by the levers, which never happens: