This is me around 1993. The magic of social networking and the internet brings long-lost people and photos back from obscurity.

I must have been 40 or 50 lbs lighter here. I had just bought this bike, I rode it everywhere. I would hear

people scream out PEE WEE! or the song from that movie. It was a little annoying, but I knew it came with the territory. At the time I really believed I was on the cusp of a huge biking revolution with my recumbent. I thought once everyone tried it, they'd never want to go back to a regular bike. It's so comfortable and fast, you don't get any of the neck or hand pain from being hunched over.

I let quite a few people ride it and almost all of them did it wrong, and killed my handlebars. They'd instinctively YANK up on them trying to support themselves. I tried being patient, I figured revolution takes time.

Well 14 years later, obviously it never worked out like that. It still gets looks, I still hear 'PEE WEE.' At least people know what it's called now. I still love riding it.

The biggest problem is locking it up in the city. You can't. People will sit on it or abuse it somehow. SO now I can only ride it when I know I'll be riding all day. This is from the 5 boro bike tour 2011:

Years before I had a car I used to carry groceries home on it, cases of catfood, and at one point my first air conditioner. This bike grew up with me. The company that made it stopped making them 10 years ago. So thanks to Google I found several more online.

I'll be riding it in the Boston-to-NYC ride in September.

And then....

...On Saturday I bought yet another Cannondale. The price was about the same.

Photos to come at some point.

I must be friggin nuts.

sometimes....

Just to prove there's some sanity left on Craigslist, I needed to buy a bike.

When I was a kid my mom used to take me to garage sales and flea markets. She would spend friday night circling the ads in the local paper (we lived in Clifton NJ, a suburb 1/2 an hour west of NYC, which was firmly middle-class when I lived there in 1974 but has since become very upper middle class. When I lived there, we were literally down the hill from Montclair State College, which is now Montclair State University.)

Anyway in the mid 70s, there were no cookie-cutter furniture places like IKEA. People's houses were very unique and it was always interesting to go to other people's houses and see how they lived. It was always different and unusual, so when people had garage sales and sold their stuff, it was always an enormous range of tastes and eras and styles.

It was also a big influence on why I went into photography. When I worked in 1 hour labs, I thought I would get to see all these great places, unusual homes without even having to go inside.

But by the time I started working in 1-hour labs in the late 1980s, I quickly found out everyone's homes now look the same and so do people's pictures.

Anyway at these garage sales, my mom went for the really OLD crap. Remember this was the 70s, so 'old' meant 1920s and earlier. For years she was into daguerrotypes, these photos that were printed on metal plates and looked more like negatives than photos. Later she got into old photo albums, and when I say old I mean OLD, they were these 100-year-old velvet-covered affairs with THICK pages that weren't even paper, they were like solid laminated cardboard. The albums were as thick as Manhattan phone books.

The photos were so old the people weren't even smiling. It was like people were always depressed 100 years ago.

My mom ended up with literally hundreds of these albums, anonymous families and people she never even knew, stacked ten-high in the living room collecting dust and soot. The albums were so old and brittle the spines would crack when you opened them, so you really didn't want to look through them for fear of breaking them.

ANYWAY. I don't really know where I was going with this. Oh yeah. At these garage sales and flea markets of my youth, things were always plentiful and cheap and fun, and then the internet came along with eBay and Craigslist and I thought, 'what a great way to have these virtual flea markets 24 hours a day 365 days a year reaching millions of people instead of every weekend reaching a few dozen. '

But then I didn't account for crazy.

I browse the bike listings on Craigslist every so often and almost all I see are these horrible crappy bikes that weren't even sold in actual bike shops when I was a kid, they were sold in like, auto parts stores for $50 in the 1970's and 1980's. HEAVY steel bikes made with parts no one had used in 20 years combined with Chinese components that were probably rejected by the Chinese themselves.

I swear, they were so crappy that given the choice, you would rather walk.

Criaglslist sellers use words like 'vintage' to describe them, and then have the gall to post prices like $175, $200 for this junk. It's not just a few either, it's like 70-80% of the postings.

It's driven me so crazy that I sometimes post ads with links to NEW bikes from Walmart and Target for $99 to try and drive the prices down.

I don't know why it bothers me so much. I just feel that out of all the capitalism and corporate greed in life, at least bicycles and inexpensive transportation should be accessible to the masses.

But then I realize another truth: Theres always going to be DUMB people in life.

Dumb is the reason Britney Spears, Black Eyed Peas and Miley Cyrus are popular. Dumb is the reason a show like 2 1/2 Men stays on the air while Fringe is about to be cancelled.

I spend my life trying to educate people, trying to help them help themselves. If their computer breaks, I try and teach them how to fix it. But then they don't want to. They would rather just pay me and let me do it.

I can't complain, it keeps me employed.

But I guess I have to break down and admit there's always going to be dumbasses that are going to buy overpriced crappy bikes. Even if it's 40 years old, weighs 40 lbs and has been stripped of all components to turn it into that detestable hipster trend known as a 'fixie.'

So anyway I saw a Cannondale on Craigslist for a reasonable price and I had to buy it, partly just to reassure myself that there's still rational people in the world and good bargains to be had.

Also to say to all the Craigslist idiot sellers, "LOOK, dumbasses, I can buy a REAL bike here for what you're trying to charge for shit."

Cannondales are reknown for their lightness and superior componentry.

Like an idiot, I drove up to Stamford CT to buy it too. What am I trying to prove by all this anyway?

Jeez I have 27 bikes, when am I going to open a bike shop already.

I read an article last week about how Kenyans, who previously had no electricity, are buying small solar panels to charge their cellphones (??) and light their huts using low-power LEDs.
In Kenya there is no grid to go off.

Think about that for a moment: Kenyans, who are literally dirt-poor, can afford solar panels for unlimited electricity, and have no dependence on power companies because there. are. no. power. companies.

Now translate that to our over-consumptive American terms. We as a nation are ridiculous shoppers, yet almost no one will make an investment in alternative energy sources such as solar panels, that will LITERALLY free them from a dependence of a massive, vulnerable and expensive power grid.

But can you imagine if even a fraction of the population got a clue and went off the grid using solar panels and installed low-power fluorescent and LED bulbs?

It's never going to happen. People are creatures of habit. Like using landline telephones. Of TALKING on telephones instead of texting. It took 15 years for people to learn to shop on the internet.

We as a nation are so far behind in terms of technology and progress it's laughable. Kenyans are now more advanced than we are.

This brings me to my bicycling point. This country is an auto-centric nation. Even I was raised on cars. The Batmobile, Speed Racer, the Monkeemobile, anything George Barris ever made, the musclecars of the late 60's and early 70's, (I actually own a 1972 Mercury Comet) and the culture that went with it.

We are raised on cars.

Do you know the company I work for prohibits me from bicycling to clients? I can drive one of the company vans if I want, but I can't bike. I've been told it's an 'insurance' issue.

When did it become more of a liability to drive a bicycle as opposed to a car?
What has this country devolved into when bicycling is DISCOURAGED?
As I write this, gas is $3.33 a gallon. Gasoline is subsidized on every level in the good ol' USA. And yet bicycling is an afterthought. A novelty.
Ask any car driver about bicycles, and they will complain that bikes should ride on sidewalks. (which is against the law for anyone over 14.) Drivers have a deluded sense of entitlement. Bikes are 'too slow' for them and are 'in the way.'
Meanwhile people drive enormous SUVs that waste gas like water, and the only way that will change is if the price of gas becomes prohibitively expensive.

THIS is the size of a typical Japanese pickup truck. That's because gasoline everywhere else is at market value, meaning DOUBLE what it costs here. And bicycling in every other country is accepted and encouraged.


Even though I also drive a car, I hope the price of gasoline hits $6 a gallon or higher. I would love nothing better than to see people bankrupted by their antiquated habits and lack of creativity, and hopefully forced to examine their lifestyle to consider alternative means of transportation.

Like bicycles.

Does that make me naive and idealistic?

Biking?

My first bike I got when I was 5. The chain kept falling off. I couldn't bike 20 feet without the damn chain coming off. That was also my first bike mechanic story. Too bad neither me or my mom knew enough to straighten the chainring to fix it.
My mom and me moved to Clifton, NJ when I was 9. All the kids in school had those Schwinn Krate bikes that are collectors items today. 5 speeds, big phallic shifter in the middle... It was the closest thing a 9 year old got to a motorcycle.

But this wasn't my bike. I was ghetto and my mom bought me a single-speed Iverson. It looked alot like this:

Even when you're young, you know the difference.
My mom worked all day in the city, she would take the bus and get home around 7pm. Instead of doing my homework, I

would either ride my bike or work on it in the garage. Sometimes until 10pm, which was late when you're in 5th grade.
i
When I was 6, my mom bought a 3-speed Pony folding bike. She had a child seat installed, rode me home from the bike shop, and then never rode it again. We took it to NJ when we moved, where it gathered dust in the garage. It looked alot like this:


Now, my bike had no speeds. So the first thing I tried doing was pretty ambitious for a 10 year old. I tried to swap the rear wheel (her bike had an internal 3-speed hub) and the shifter, because that way my mom's bike would LOOK the same, and since she never rode it since the day she bought

it I figured she'd never know the difference anyway.
The one thing I didn't count on was the hub being too wide to fit my bike. I also didn't realize if I took the wheel I needed to take the rear brake too, because mine was a coaster brake.
So I gave up and tried to put it back together the way it was, but my mom found out and screamed a blue streak at me. I still didn't understand because she never once used it. "That's not the point!" she yelled. My bike I got back together, but hers was a lost cause.

So I was left with my single-speed bike, and I used to ride it everywhere. I rode to the end of Valley Road, which was about 4 miles. (I was 10.) I rode it down Grove Street. I even once rode it on the side of route 46 (an almost-highway) to get to a Dairy Queen.
Looking back, that was pretty hardcore of me.
So we only lasted 3 years in NJ and moved back to NYC.
I had some no-name 5 speed yellow bike that I customized with orange fenders. I loved that bike.

It was also the first bike of mine that got stolen. Naive stupidity, I left it leaning unattended on the side of my building.
Man was I crushed. I was 12 I think.
I cried like a baby, I went to the police station and cried to them, and was shocked in disbelief when their jaded indifference slowly dawned on me.
There was nothing they could do, and nothing they were going to do.

And yet it was one of many bikes that got stolen in the course of my lifetime.

There was the 10-speed I locked up outside Bloomingdales with my friend Doug, (we went to play videogames on the ColecoVision we couldn't afford) and when we came out, my bike was gone and his was still there, the cheap chain swinging from the handlebars.

There was a blue musclebike that I leaned against a wall in Central Park, to get through a crowd and look down and stare at the man who fell over the side and plunged 20 feet to his death, blood leaking from his cracked skull, face-up, his eyes wide open.
I had never seen a dead man before, and as I was deep in contemplation about life and death and trying to picture how he must have fell backwards, I looked and my bike was gone. 'Cursed by the dead man' I thought.

Why do I love biking? Because when you are too young to drive, it's the only means you have to get around. Biking is freedom. Biking is exhilarating. Biking is empowering.

Fixing bikes is art to me. It's being able to ride something you made, the sense of accomplishment.
Whenever I build a bike, I have a really hard time selling it. It's somehow a piece of me. I would rather give them to friends where I can know of their appreciation and be proud when I hear them brag to their friends, "My friend Ross built this bike for me!"

My next-door neighbor

...Comes back from his weeklong family trip.
Before he left, he was gushing about a girl he was dating for the past three weeks. 'She's the one,' he kept telling me, in a dozen different alliterations. 'Oh, she's a businesswoman, she's starting her own restaurant, etc etc talking her up to me. He even shows me a photo. Busty Brazilian Brunette, she was definitely a looker.
'I've waited 15 years to meet her, and I just know she's the one.' he says with animated enthusiasm.

After three weeks, you know how much is wrong with that statement.
He is 67 years old. She was 23.

Of course I can't do anything but warn him, 'I'm happy for you but...'
Aww christ, you know, I couldn't even tell him. What could I possibly say.

Well, he comes back deflated, tells me it's over, his family talked him out of it.
The week before, he neglected to divulge one crucial detail:
She was a stripper.
Now not to be judgmental, being a stripper is not a dealbreaker, but it was combined with the rest of the story he had told me about her ruined the math.

He was bummed but lucky. He got out before he got burned too bad.

I wasn't so lucky in my day.

the classics

I was never a book reader. Back in high school I never read anything besides People magazine, and maybe Readers Digest that my dad gave me a subscription to as a Christmas present. (Thanks, Dad.)
I never expressed one iota of interest in Readers Digest either.

On top of that, having no discipline, I was awful at doing book reports. In prep school we had six weeks to do them from the time they were assigned to us.
So in 9th grade, Russian Roulette-style, I ended up with To Kill A Mockingbird.
Right off the bat I judged it by the title and immediately took a disliking to it. Part of the fact I was 'forced' to read it also made me not want to read it. You know how that is?
I looked at most Kurt Vonnegut books that way too. Everyone around me always had a dog-eared copy of some Vonnegut book for one reason or another. And me with my anti-establishment mentality, in a way I saw my classmates as mindless sheep being programmed by society by all reading the same narrow list of authors, the same books.
So just the fact of being assigned to me, To Kill A Mockingbird became the 'programmed' reading I was trying to avoid. Yeah I was so smart, I could see through their evil subliminal plan of trying to teach me some lesson that I already thought I knew.
And yet like an albatross it still somehow hung over my shoulder.

Six weeks came and went, and I never did that book report. I never even opened the book. My teacher threatened me with failure of English class if I didn't hand it in, so I said I was working on it to placate her. But I never did. I graduated without doing it, so I felt absolved.

But in the back of my mind, every so often I would think about that book.

It's funny because when I was that young my mind still wasn't emotionally developed at all. I took everything at face value for years and I couldn't see anyone's ulterior motives or read body language or read between the lines. I wouldn't have understood that book if I had read it anyway.

It took me years to realize it was mostly because I was such a loner and my parents were never around to raise me or teach me the subtleties of people's words or actions. My mom never taught me anything about people, she kinda stayed back and let me develop my own opinions. It's good in one sense because your mind doesn't get poisoned with prejudice, but at the same time it's like being thrown in the ocean with just a rowboat and a pair of oars, not knowing how to fish or how to navigate. That was my level of social skills.

I remember once in my early 20s when I was hanging out with my close friend Lisa, I met a girl that I took a liking to and was talking to for a while, and after we parted ways and I felt pretty good about myself and my chances with her, Lisa turned and said to me,
"She doesn't like you."
"What do you mean?" I just couldn't understand it. I thought I totally hit it off with this girl. I considered in my 20 year old mind that maybe Lisa was jealous, but then we never had that kind of relationship.
"She just doesn't like you, couldn't you tell?"
"Really?" I said, slightly crestfallen at this point. Again, I didn't see it.
Lisa started to explain to me all the signals this girl was putting out that I was totally not picking up on. At all.
It was also at that moment Lisa became the Mystical Decoder Of All Things I Didn't Understand.
Only later in life does one completely comprehend the weight and gravity of such a person in one's life.
Consider yourself truly blessed if you ever have a friend willing to be patient enough to teach you stuff you have no clue about, in a way that isn't condescending and insulting to your (perceived) intelligence. My infantile mind until that point just could not see the nuances of things.
She taught me to read between the lines.

So anyway, fast forward to the present, over 30 years later. Consider that for the past 16 years I have been umbilically tethered to the internet. I have a shelf of books I never touch. Some Vonnegut too. "One day I'll read them," I halfheartedly promise to myself when I'm cleaning and forced to confront whether to keep them or donate them to the local Salvation Army.
Usually, while I'm surfing the internet, Leslie reads voraciously next to me. Harry Potter series. Vampires. Some fluffy stuff sometimes. But always reading. I tell her she should do book reviews because of her unbiased and razor-sharp critiques.

But then one day it hits her to read The Classics, meaning basically, 'all that stuff from school.'
And the stigma that hung over me about that time, and those books and what they represented has faded and replaced with a genuine curiosity.

Yeah, OK, I honestly feel like an idiot writing it like that, I can see how you're reading it, like with an, "Are you kidding, what took you so long?" Like I never knew what velvet or silk felt like.

But yeah. It's a great book. I admit it. I missed out, OK?
Watching the movie always helps me visualize things too.
It was also completely fascinating when Leslie found out and told me Dill was Truman Capote.
That just adds a whole 'nother layer of interesting. Need to download Breakfast At Tiffanys and In Cold Blood, and of course read those too.
In the movie, they downplayed him but in the book you can tell she's really fond of Dill, waiting the entire year for him to come back. I did think it was really cute and affectionate in the movie when there's a shot of Dill passed out leaning on the Reverend as everyone else was riveted to the trial.
I also loved reading about how everyone who made the movie stayed close for the rest of their lives. Gregory Peck was very close with the girl who played Scout, as well as the actor who played the accused man Tom Robinson, Brock Peters.

Anyway, there's something more valuable to me in 'borrowed' books. I appreciate them more knowing I have to give them back at some point. (god, why is my head so fucked up sometimes?)
But it's really fun to share the experiences with Leslie. Kinda like biking together.

Next up is Catch-22. I think we're gonna need the movie first.