The many trials of M. Vandeman

I dredged up one of my old signature files from the 1990s recently, while searching through archived alt.mountain-bike Usenet threads. Always liked this one, felt it was worth preservation:

Looking around this old online group, I was fascinated to find Mike Vandeman still posting daily vitriol to the forum about the dangers and destructiveness of mountain biking. After all these years, alt.mountain-bike looks to have become his solitary domain, a forgotten corner of the Internet that he's somehow become entrapped within, a kind of cartoon criminal imprisoned within the Phantom Zone, which has become nothing more than his very own bleak solitary repository of hate going on for page after page, amounting to literally hundreds of posts bearing his now-infamous name and a simple note: 0 views.

Overwinter

Fall was nice.  Winter was great.  Spring has been amazing.

Life is good. #BLE

Equinoctes

I walked to school as a child, it was the simple and sensible thing to do, a few blocks north from our house in Scottsdale's Arcadia neighborhood, to Kaibab Elementary School. Now razed to the ground, the school was shuttered long ago due to declining enrollment which naturally occurred when the children of the breeders in the neighborhood grew up and moved away, leaving their aging parents behind, well-rooted in their mid-century ranch-style homes, safely ensconced beneath a canopy of big old and forevermore unclimbed grapefruit trees.

Our backyard

Like all public schools, despite the extent to which the neighborhoods that surround them might be more or less gentrified, Kaibab was a mixed bag of students.  Admittedly, in my case, all of us were white, all of us were by all appearances able-bodied, and all of us were the offspring of privileged parents to one degree or another. And yet some of us quite obviously were nevertheless battling the largely undiagnosed demons of OCD, ADD, ADHD, depression, suicidal ideation, and a host of other social, emotional and learning disorders, just like any other school.

Our homes were all built on large well-shaded lots, carved out of what had once been a massive citrus orchard. Each had ample square footage to house nuclear-sized families of five or six members and, without exception, each had a swimming pool.  Moms rarely worked.  Dads were gone long hours doing whatever they were called to do: lawyering, engineering, doctoring, professional things like that.  And we had lots of friends, for blocks and blocks in every direction, most of whom were pretty normal.  I had many an outdoor birthday party, all of which ended in a brawl or fight, or an overt theft of candy or party favors, or with one of the guests dropping trou and pissing into the oleander hedges, or worse, dropping a big stinky brown turd to the ground while perched, ass hanging out into space, from high above on one of the upper levels of my treefort.

Ride on!

Late summer and early fall have been good to me, lots of love, lots of happiness, lots of time riding bikes with my kid, her friends, and a few of my own, too.

Also: new puppy!

Color me blessed.  Ride on! #BLE

The stoke goes ever on

Summer's over, at least by my reckoning it is.  Was a good one.

The stoke goes ever on. #BLE

Just about a bike: Surly Cross-Check [UPDATED]

Early in the summer of 2001, about six months after I bought my first Surly, a Steamroller, I bought my second, a Cross-Check.

I had visions in my head back then of trying my hand at cyclocross racing.  At the time I thought I might excel in the format.  But to this day, I've yet to enter such a race and don't think I ever will.  That ship has surely sailed.

Just about a bike: Surly Steamroller [UPDATED]

4.8:1 gain ratio, 65.6 gear inches

Long before I got my Pugsley (which of all my Surly bikes ride most often these days) I got a Steamroller (and then, a little later on, I ordered a Cross Check, too). 

Mud brown, the first-generation (circa 2000) Steamroller was only sold in that color and, likewise, only as a frame-set.  

I like to imagine that I was an early-adopter of the whole fixed-gear thing.  Not true by a century or two, I know.  But still, in these parts, when I bought it way back when, there weren't very many of us riding fixed gear bikes, that's for sure.