To ride, or not to ride, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler on the road to suffer
The taunts and snears of the CF wonderboys,
Or to shift gears on the downtube,
And by error crosschain? To bonk, to
crash,
No more; and by an upgrade to say we end
The nostalgia, and the thousand friction
shifts
That Campagnolo is heir to: ‘tis an end
Hardly to be wished. To bonk, to crash;
To crash, perchance to settle – ay, there’s
the rub:
For with that insurance settlement what
bike may come,
When we’ve sold our steel frame for scrap,
Must give us pause – there’s the act
That makes calamity of skilled artisans.
For who would bear the skips and clacking
of chains,
The ghost shifting, the single pivot’s
inferior braking,
The mess of tubulars glue, the cable
clamps,
The threaded headset, and the loose
ball bearings in cup and cone assemblies,
When he himself might his ease make
with modern STI? Who would fewer gears
bear,
To grunt and sweat in 42/21,
But that the dread of something after steel,
The modern LBS from whose
trip
No retrogrouch returns, with proper advice,
And makes us rather wrench on our own
bikes
Than have a BMX kid touch our ride?
Thus plastic does make skeptics of us
all,
And thus the original patina
Is spray-bombed over by a hipster,
And bosses drewed by an angle grinder,
With this act our loyalties heighten,
And forsake clipless pedals. Soft you now,
Fair Sturmey Archer! IGH, in thy pawls
Be all my miles remembered.


Oh crap, that's a soliloquy, not a monologue.