The response to yesterday's post was surprising. People reached out to ask if I was dying.
I am not dying. At least not yet, and hopefully not for awhile.
What I AM doing is simplifying my life, and letting go of the excess.
Here's what I'm keeping, and hope to ride for a long while to come.
So relax. Please.
I spent the last couple of years considering the future of my relationship with bicycle riding.
While I still enjoy it, the truth is that I don't enjoy it nearly as much since I got sick. I'm lucky if I can get out on a bike once a week now.
Between the fatigue, the dizziness and balance realities and my increasing arthritis, that fact is that I simply don't live a bicycle-centric life anymore, and I haven't in some time.
Aging will do that. Illness will speed up the process a bit.
Plus, between the two bikes I have, only one of them is actually comfortable to ride anymore.
So this afternoon, I reached out to an old bike industry friend whom I respect and trust, and asked him if he'd be interested in helping me sell my Rivendell All-Rounder. I'm not expecting a miraculous return on my investment at this point; the used bike market is in the toilet and I've had many years and miles on this good old frameset. But he and I agreed that, being a Rivendell, it will attract some interest and he sees no difficulty in finding a new home for it, especially since spring is right around the corner and it's the best time for bike sales.
I've invited him to pick a day near the end of this month to come and collect the bike, plus most of my remaining parts and shop tools. I'll keep some basics on hand for my own needs, but if I go down to one bike I won't need much more than a couple of freewheels, some chains and tubes, and a few sets of brake shoes to see me out.
I'll keep the Peugeot for as long as I'm able to keep riding a bicycle. The lower top tube, lower Q-factor and overall comfort make it a good choice for the kind of riding I'll do going forward.
I'll probably hold back the Carradice Camper LF bag awhile longer, if only to have a larger saddlebag to swap in to handle groceries. Between that and the front rack bag I ought to have enough capacity for what I choose to carry on a bike. Even if my health miraculously improves enough for me to do one more S24HO ride (with the overnight being on someone's couch), the Peugeot will be more than enough.
I can already hear friends and family saying, "Noooo!"
But the truth is that I simply don't need a really fine, fancy bike any longer. Hanging onto this one makes no sense for the kind of riding I'm able to do now, and letting this be someone else's responsibility -- and ego trip -- just feels right to me now. I've proven everything that I possibly can on and about bicycles in this life, and I feel relieved to have arrived at the right time to move this bike along.
When the bike is cleaned up and tuned up and ready for primetime, probably some time in March, I'll send up a flare about where it can be found in Portland.
(This very old photo doesn't reflect what the bike will look like when it's on consignment!)
The story about an abrupt closure of a local ebike dealer has sparked yet another discussion about how much sense ebikes make, and how the ebike revolution would be asesome if only more people would buy in, or something like that.
The problem is that ebikes are simply not as sustainable as ordinary, human-powered bikes. In our current manufacturing, recycling and fiscal landscape, they can't be.
When you can buy a cheap ordinary bike and fix it up for a fraction of the cost of buying an ebike, and the ebike market is fraught with uncertainty, why buy an ebike?
People want ebikes because they want to be able to live carfree and travel without breaking a sweat. You can't have it both ways.
Ebikes do allow you to transport more cargo, and they do allow you to travel farther and up steeper hills, but that doesn't necessarily make them a better alternative.
They cost a lot more than a regular bicycle. They cost more to maintain. Transit systems don't allow them on the bike racks of their buses because they're too heavy, and some don't allow them on trains because of the danger of a battery meltdown in close proximity to passengers.
And while you see lots of them zipping around Portland, they are mostly seen in nicer neighborhoods, closer in to town, where there are more people living who can afford to own, maintain and store them. Go east of 122nd Avenue and watch the number of ebikes on the road fall. East Multnomah County is where all the poor people got pushed when the rents went up close in 15-20 years ago. If they're working, they can barely afford the cheap, decaying apartments they live in. They sure as hell can't afford an ebike, and if they somehow manage to obtain one they can't store it securely. Few apartments have secure storage, and some ap[artments won't allow you to keep a regular bike in your apartment. Even if you get past all of these barriers, an ebike is just too damned heavy to sneak up the stairs.
Hell, you can buy a cheap used car and get it running again for less than the price of some ebikes.
People in the comments section of the article linked above are complaining about the sudden closure of an ebike shop, and some are lamenting that they'd expected to see an ebike "revolution" by now.
I don't think such a revolution is coming. Certainly not here in the US.
Most urban areas of US cities are too big and spread out for even the most efficient ebikes to make sense. Public transit has never been as popular or well-supported here as it is in smaller, more dense European cities. Bicycle infrastructure barely exists at all in many big US cities, and if the current regime has its way that won't change.
How do we live with an unfavorable reality? We adapt.
We adjust our expectations and find ways to live within the limitations set by other forces.
That is what I have done for over fifty years, living as I have in a city with steep hills (dead volcanoes, mostly) and limitations on where public transit goes.
I still ride an "analog" bike. I don't ride it as often, as fast or as fast as I used to, and I've had to adjust accordingly with age. But when I become too old and infirm to ride it anymore, I will not switch to an ebike. In the US, trying to build a life around ebiking is a Faustian bargain. Even if you can afford all of the costs of purchase and maintenance (and let's be honest -- for most people, that means paying someone else to fix it), there's still the longer-term question of supply of ebikes and batteries, and the sustainability of the entire enterprise.
At least I live in a city with better public transit than most (though with the present round of budget cuts and fiscal re-prioritizing, that could change).
Maybe things will improve enough that ebikes become ubiquitous one day, but I don't we'll see that anytime soon, at least here in the US.
Ebikes are cool and interesting and they can even be fun, but they won't revolutionize transportation in this country.
(Photo: me, in my younger, more heroic days. I rode this Surly Big Dummy eleven miles round trip twice a week with my guitar, battling bad bike infrstructure and entitled motorists the whole way. After a few years, I decided my rattled nerves and excessive fatigue simply weren't worth the risk, especially during Portland's rainy season. I sold the Big Dummy and took my guitar on transit. I got over my sadness, and carried on.)
While many applauded his vision and his goals of making life more affordable, I hung back.
Why?
I wasn’t quite sure at first. On paper, his goals of free child care and free public transit, stronger rent controls and renters’ protections, ticked a lot of boxes on my personal checklist of Making The World More Fair. His history of antisemitic statements and postures, easy to spot if you knew where to look, was made murkier by a spin machine designed to get him elected. Pure politics, nothing to see here, blah blah blah.
Even some of my Jewish friends — mostly leaning farther to the left than I do — thought he’d be a breath of fresh air for NYC. I remained silent, because I didn’t know enough and because I live three thousand miles away, well beyond his reach.
And then, in his inauguration speech, he said the thing that brought it all back, that made me feel the betrayal all over again: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
The warmth of collectivism.
It was the promise held out to me when I signed on to join the staff of a collectively run bicycle business back in 1995. A promise of transparency, mutual support, honesty and equality. A promise that everyone’s contribution would be equally important and equally valued. A promise of a workplace that would not be hostile to difference, but open to learning, personal and collective growth, and respect.
I believed in that promise, and stayed on for nearly twenty years.
I stayed on through endless committee and board meetings, worker reviews and shop floor dynamics that showed me again and again that I could not possibly work hard enough or well enough to feel fully embraced by the mutual support, respect or acceptance of difference that had been held out to me as a carrot. I was too different from too many other co-workers, who were uncomfortable with my Jewishness, my direct communication style and my avoidance of alcohol and recreational drugs. My articulate, thoughtful demeanor was no match for the bullying tactics of the women who thought I somehow betrayed their very selective form of feminism, and the bullying tactics of men who simply brandished their force of personality like a bludgeon to get their way in questions of policy and functional operations.
I stayed because I loved my work. I stayed because I loved bicycles, and I loved getting customers excited about riding them. I stayed because I liked not having to cower in front of a boss — indeed, the length of time it took for most decisions to be reached by consensus assured everyone’s job security well past any reasonable point and allowed everyone (including me) to find their own ways to game an overly permissive and dismissive system.
In the end, though, when I most needed the mutual support promised by the cooperative structure, I was effectively shut out from that support in favor of the biggest bully on the board. Because his bone of contention reeked of antiZionism, which is often a slippery slope to antisemitism, it was simply easier for my coworkers to refuse to censor his shop floor speech and off-schedule actions and wait for me to get up and leave. I read the room, instantly knew that it could not be any other way, turned in my keys and quit on the spot. While I was downstairs cashing out my parts credit page, one of my coworkers came to me in tears and begged me to stay.
“Why?” I asked her. “You didn’t beg me in the meeting, in front of everyone else. I don’t need that kind of support.” And I left.
Although I have moved on and even healed from my personal experience of that time and place, Mamdani brought back the memory of it all in an instant with his statement.
The ugly truth is that the “warmth of
collectivism” is still a lie. Beneath the facade of pure socialism, some
people are still more valuable than others, and some people will never
be welcome for one reason or another. Beneath the protests and chants
and the performative poverty of a few charismatic, photogenic leaders,
socialism is a costume hanging on the backs of human beings who are just
as flawed and self-interested as you and I are.
You want to protest in the streets, fine.
But how far will you go?
Are
you willing to chain yourself to a government building, or break
windows, and demand the the government restore mental health services
and drug treatment for everyone who needs it?
Would you hijack a Safeway truck, or a fleet of them, and divert the contents to feed those in greatest need?
Are
you willing to bring a homeless person in off the street, house and
clothe and feed them and help them get on their feet? Are you willing to
personally help them get clean and sober?
Are you
just as willing to take in an illegal immigrant to protect them from
ICE, even if it means getting arrested yourself for aiding and abetting?
..::cue crickets::..
My Jewish tradition teaches me that human beings contain within them a combination of good and bad inclinations. We have both, we need both, and we need to figure out how to navigate a balance between them that will allow us to be decent human beings. No collectivist — or me-first — movement will honor that striving for balance. Maybe that’s part of the reason why Jews remain suspect in the larger society. I don’t know.
Sooner or later, people who speak out against Mamdani and his favorites will find themselves shut out of his warm collective. And no matter our values and intentions, some of us will never belong. In fact, some of us won’t belong in any identifiable group a great deal of the time. So we practice moderated, shifting levels of self-reliance -- and when necessary, societal camouflage -- and learn how to balance those with some degree of thoughtful socialization. In the messy middle, there is only a messy balance to be struggled for.
Meet me in the middle. Let’s talk over a cup of coffee and see what we can learn together. But let’s not be blinded by promises of things which aren’t humanly possible. Let’s be real.
“Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate. ”
— Vance Packard, The Waste Makers, 1960
After two weeks of feeling awful, achy and creaky, and not really into riding my bike, the weather mellowed out and gave my body and mind a break. I woke up yesterday morning and felt an absence of arthritis pain. I walked across the living room and didn’t bump into anything. And I decided that it was a sign that I ought to go for a ride.
Coffee Outside PDX was meeting at Willamette Park, quite a distance from where I live. However, I could ride the two miles to the !AX satiation, take MAX to OHSU at South Waterfront, and ride the rest of the way to the park, on the winding MUP that runs alongside the river. So I made a thermos of coffee, dressed and hopped on my bike.
The morning was cloudy but warm for November. It hadn’t gotten below 50F the night before, and by the time I got to the MAX station it was in the mid 50s. The train ride was mostly uneventful, except for a half dozen homeless folks with all their worldly goods in tow — sleeping bags, shopping bags, a couple of dogs — that sometimes blocked the aisles of the train car. I stuck to one end, hung my bike on the hook and stood with my bike. (If you don’t stand right next to your bike, chances are someone might try to make off with it at the next stop. That’s an ugly side effect of the spike in Portland’s homeless population over the last seven years. Don’t ask for my opinion on where and how city government has gotten it wrong so many times.)
The train arrived at OHSU — the medical center where I go at least once a week for physical and speech therapy — and I threaded my way through the network of one-way streets to the beginning of the Multi-Use Path of the Willamette Greenway. The water was calm, and I enjoyed the sights and sounds of waterfowl on the docks and the riverbank below. This MUP is a combination of public and private property, with the private sections allowing public access by way of an agreed upon easement. The private parts of the path have lots of bumps and holes in the ashphalt, marked with wide stripes of yellow paint. The paint was obscured by all the fallen leaves, making it hard to see some of them until I was right on top of them. I took my time and rang my bell to warn folks on foot of my approach. The air was balmy, and I ended up not needing my vest about halfway to the park.
I pulled into the covered picnic area at the park and found lots of Coffee Outside regulars. It was lovely to hang out with them and catch up on the two weeks I’d missed, while sipping coffee and snacking on whatever treats had been brought to share. A young couple at one of the picnic tables had brought a miniature, tabletop camp stove, basically a tiny version of the drum from a washing machine on little feet. They fed newspaper and then small pieces of wood into the top, and soon there was an impressively warm fire that we could gather around.
They’d also made up a bunch of spoke cards to give away. Some featured the frog suits that have recently made the news, being worn by protestors at the ICE facility. Others commemorated the recent anniversary of Oregon’s famous exploding whale. I found these especially funny, since the couple who’d made them hadn’t been born yet when it happened. I giggled at the sweet absurdity and helped myself to a couple of whale spoke cards. I’ll probably gift one to a friend, and stick the other on my Peugeot.
I was starting to feel my energy fall off a bit, and I still had to get home. So after a lovely ninety minutes of bike-fueled socializing I said my goodbyes and headed home. The sun was beginning to peek out a little bit between the clouds as I retraced my route, and I was thrilled to spot a great blue heron atop a pole at one of the little boat piers, near a flock of cormorants showing off their wings. I heard a bird cry I couldn’t identify, but which sounded high and piercing like a raptor.
Once on the MAX train, I saw that every bike hook was in use, but I managed to find a spot where I could park my bike in a wheelchair space and sit next to it in one of the fold-down seats. I didn’t have to move the whole way back to NE Portland, which was good because the fatigue was really beginning to set in. Two miles back to the house, and a much-needed afternoon nap marked the end of the journey.
Total ridden, about 8 miles.
Premier Tech, the second title sponsor of the team formerly known as Israel Premier Tech, has dropped its sponsorship of the team, following in the footsteps of the other major sponsor, Factor Bikes (which pulled out last week).
Although the team had dropped the word “Israel” from its name and the majority owner of the team, Canadian-Israeli Sylvain Adams, agreed to step back from day-to-day operations, the damage had already been done and showed no signs of slowing down. Organizers of next year’s Tour de France Grand Depart (opening stage) in Barecelona, Spain made it clear that an Israeli team would not be welcome in Spain unless the team moved its base of operations and registry outside of Israel. Other race organizers have said that they do not want any Israeli team racing in their events because the mere presence of such a team would spark more violent protests similar to those that halted the Vuelta de Espana in September.
I add to that the news that Premier Tech’s star rider has been trying to end his contract early and leave the team for weeks, and clearly the writing is on the wall. There is no word of anyone stepping forward with an offer to buy and move the team, and it’s strong Israel-identified history may be too much for another prospective owner to take on.
If you read the comments at the various cycling news websites, you’ll find that the commentators are running five to one in favor of disbanding the team entirely. A few even suggest that no new elite pro cycling team be allowed to take out a UCI racing license if they are based in Israel or majority-owned by an Israeli.
All of this effectively spells the end of the team that began as Israel Cycling Academy over a decade ago.
(If you click on the Google link for Israel Premier Tech, you’ll discover that the link now goes nowhere. The team’s Facebook page is still up, but has not been updated since November 5.)
Interestingly, another country, United Arab Emirates, serves as a home base for another pro cycling team and also hosts a stage race each year. Color me cynical, but I suspect that nothing will be done or even said about this parallel reality. After all, the UAE team is profitable and so is the UAE Tour. Plus, they’re oil-rich. Plus, they’re not Jewish.
..::ducks to avoid flying debris::..
For the foreseeable future, people will find any number of ways and reasons to make non-political things selectively political, and it will continue to be hard to be openly Jewish in many, many places around the world. And there is not a thing I can do about that.
Proud to be a member of the Tarik Saleh Bike Club.
Ride Bikes.
Try not to be an ass.
