Here's an idea I came up with when struggling to learn the ins and outs of sew-ups. Put oil on your fingers before manipulating the adhesive tape so you don't get all sticky with the adhesive.

Why does this fact not surprise me.

Would you like to add anything?

Okay, I guess you have nothing to add. Here is what I have to say about your comment: I survived homelessness and am here to tell you about it. You obviously have no respect for those who are unfortunate enough to land in that condition, for whatever reason. Believe me, there are all types of homeless people, just as there are all types of people. A lot of people have learned a great deal from wandering. I am giving you an opportunity to expound on your opinion of homelessness. Please, fill me in on the niceties of your motive for making such a comment. I really don't want to be upset if there is no reason to be upset. Maybe you have a jovial view of me, and are simply making light of the whole idea of someone being homeless. That's harmless enough. Or maybe you have nothing at stake in this thread and just had a thought you felt would add to the discussion. I don't mind that. In fact, I don't mind anything that anyone says about anything. I'm really trying to understand your comment in a positive vein. Should I consider homelessness some sort of second-class citizenship? Please, enlighten me. Make your assumptions audible. Be a good communicator. I'm willing to listen. But while you're getting around to posting here again, I'm not going to sit around with baited breath. There's a lot of positive things to be said. We're all cyclists, whether we were homeless at one time or not. Let's live for the moment, enjoy life, and engage in some sensible debate. Ughh... I'm getting slap-happy...

Man that's gotta be the best anti-trolling post i've ever seen without comign across as anti-troll.

You're my hero enrmouslock.

Thanks, Operator. I didn't know these things had a name. "Trolling," you say? Seems apt, and there does seem to be a lot of things like that said.

Wow this was an intresting post made me check to make sure of what I put in my pipe .. But it was VERY well written and abit enlightening :beer:

Man, this whole thread is way too deep for my little peabrain. But if I ever see some fella standing on the side of the road posed like a starfish, I'll know to keep my mouth shut and watch out for swerving automobiles.

I was homeless for a while, purely by choice. It was very nice. I lived for a while in a van (yes, down by a river!) with a friend. We rode our bikes whenever we wanted, we made a few bucks fixing bikes and things, and ate lavishly with donations from the farmer's market. After a while, we started getting other opportunities, and our time of freedom ended when we went back to the default world. But I still remember it with fondness, not always easy, but our situation meant we were able to be happy.

Nice stories. If I ever see a fully-faired cyclist on an empty road, I'll splay myself out like a starfish as well. :)

peace,
sam

Warm thanks to both phidauex and PurpleK for their remarks.

And here I thought this post was about his Acura.

Today I went to a cast-call for 5000 extras for the Jenifer Aniston movie, "The Break-Up" being shot here in Chicago and in Hollywood. On the questionaire they asked if you have a bicycle. Unfortunately, I sold mine a few weeks ago. But I was booked for at least one day's work without the bike. (I thought about borrowing a bike, but I have phiilosophical issues with that.) I've done extra work on Home Alone 2 and The Chamber. It's a blast and the catered lunch is always great.

I saw your post in the 'alt bike' section and came here to read your thread. Thank you, sir, for being here and openly sharing your stories and responding to the replys without animosity. I don't pretend to know what all of your stories mean, but they are a refreshing breath of fresh air on a forum where many have strong opinions and politeness is sometimes in short supply.

I am glad that you have passed through your phase of homelessness. The homeless recieve precious little support from those fortunate enough to be considered successful, despite the vast material wealth of our country, and they are often vilified through no fault of their own. That makes me very sad. I try to help the homeless as much as I personally can, sometimes with 50 cents, sometimes with a $20 bill, sometimes by providing them with recyclables they can turn into cash, and sometimes with a meal. It lightens my heart to do so.

Dear Randya,

I am most gratified by your post and I hope I continue to be worthy of it in the future. Your conduct toward the homeless marks you as not a pushover for the downtrodden, but someone who thinks about this issue a great deal and knows what lies beneath the surface in life.

Sincerely,

enormouslock

I know this may sound a little strange, but instead of being sad for the homeless, I admire their strength. These wonderful people have to deal with the judgement of others, the strategies of survival, they have a strong support system amongst themselves, and they become stronger every day. Of course, I too try to help them with clothing and such necessary items such as sleeping bags but there are actually a few people who turn down offers of a free meal. They instead wanted to earn it. In case you were wondering how I have become acquainted with these wanderers, they live next to the building that I work at. They keep the area clean, are welcome to use our facilities to clean up and are not drunks or druggies. Occaisionally a friend of theirs who is inebriated will visit, but will not stay. It is a matter of respect. And sometimes on our lunch hour we will visit and hear some neat stories! My only concern is their health, for we did have one man die on Thanksgiving where he camps out.

I'm not sad for the homeless, but for the way our society often treats people in this situation.

Randya, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I had a co-worker ask me why I was out there talking to "that bum". Boy, I was the wrong person to say that to. Angrily but tactfully I simply replied that I was having a conversation not with a bum but with a person who was quite knowlegdeable of the world around him and that I was learning something from him. Then I suggested he might like to learn someday, too.

Wow, this has got to be the most surreal, yet comforting, thread in a while. It's actually made me feel calm and relaxed. Thanks a lot, all of you.

Having decided during my sophomore year at Yale to try distance cycling solo, I set my immediate goal to commute during the summer between home in Glen Ellyn, IL and Batavia, IL, where I was going to be in my second summer working at Fermilab as an electronics technician. The trip is about 10 miles one-way. To start it off I wanted to taste a small two day ride to Wisconsin and back. I purchased a Raleigh Record for about $60. (This was in 1971.) Then I worked on assembling everything I felt necessary for the trip and was up until about 3 am. I felt that a 6 am departure would be prudent considering I had no idea how long it would take me as a total neophyte to reach WI. Then I realized I didn't have an alarm clock and didn't know when my mother would be getting up and so couldn't see my way to interupting her sleep to ask her to wake me up in three hours. I knew from school what toll staying up all night takes, and the value of every minute in slumber when you must perform the next day. I decided I simply would wake up in three hours by creating some sort of subconscious imperitive and surrendering my fate to it. It was not complicated. It was simply the net consequence of a host of prior decisions.

I woke up at 6 and took off.

I chose to travel by the only north-south state highway passing through our area. I didn't know how long it remained north-going. I just knew it went north from town. I don't remember if I had a map. In any case, I decided just for the experience of learning to reckon with my senses rather than with the more intellectual faculty of map-reading. If I did have a map, I didn't use it.

The route was not scenic. Traffic was fast. I tried to keep up a good pace, estimating my mileage against my estimate of the distance to WI. I don't recall seeing any mileage signs.

About an hour into my trip I suddenly got the feeling I was off-course, traveling more north-westerly than north. Again, if I had a map, I didn't use it. I just decided to make a 180 degree turn and find a place where I might have had an alternative route heading due north.

I found a route I believed would take me north again and turned onto it.

A little later, I started to have trouble with my rear derailleur, brand of Simplex. I had no choice but to disassemble it and learn how it worked. It soon became obvious I had unleashed a monster. The spring in the thing had one end that was manufactured bent out so that it could fit in a little hole in the body and load with force when you assembled it. Getting the right tension on the screw inside the spring turned out to be touchy, and it slipped out of allignment time and time again as my fledgling bike-mechanical impatience became a burden. At least I had made the right decision to take allen wrenches with me. I applied a little sweet-talking both to the bike and myself and somehow it came out all right and stayed that way for the rest of the trip, and the summer too for that matter.

I realized I would eventually have to separate from the bike for appreciable lengths of time and found a motorcycle shop where I was able to buy a motorcycle chain and lock. I had never seen a lock and chain that big. Thus my username, enormouslock. The security I got kept the bike with me through two summers of commuting to Fermilab and two 1800 mile trips. I let my guard down when I lost my apartment to fire and left the bike unlocked and unattended on the porch of the girl whose love I was sick over causing me to be negligent and cause the fire to begin with. Then my advisor dropped his objections to my major coursework plan, just before graduation, because I appealed to his sympathy with the story about the fire and the bike. Had I not had that excuse I might have had to spend another semester to get my degree. What is fortune; what is misfortune?

When I got to Wisconsin my bottom began to hurt badly. I figured it would go away so I learned to live with it. It was a Brooks leather saddle.

I had always been a stickler for language propriety but when I got to a point where there didn't seem to be anyone around for miles I decided there was something, what I didn't know, demanding me to swear at the top of my voice, which I did with some sheepishness, if that is possible. It was a transition. Later, a station wagon was traveling ahead of me with some fellows on the tailgate and they shouted out some fraternal idioms at me. I had never used idioms, as weird as that sounds. But on this occasion I was sufficiently beyond any world I had previously thought I would travel that I felt I needed to return in kind, so I shouted out, "right on!" It was my first descent into counter-culture and opened up new avenues of social give-and-take for me. It doesn't sound like much, but for someone who would refrain from saying, "heck", it was a clear departure. I had been the managing editor of my high school newspaper and I always considered my audience.

I got to Lake Geneva and somehow discovered I had traveled 60 miles, by map or other means I don't recall. I found out there was a big name band playing nearby that night and went there and joined the crowd, I remember walking around feeling very Illinoisan among Wisconsiners, but not unwelcome. There were about a thousand kids there. That night I camped out on some road in the bushes and the next day started out feeling more confident of making the 60-mile trip in one day. I don't remember details of the trip back, which I suppose is strange, considering how much of the trip up I remember. Maybe I went up on the strength of uncertainty, if there is such a thing, and came back in the arms of certainty missing anything that might have marred the trip, or worse.

I don't remember the moment I arrived back at my house. When I cycled between Seattle and Chicago at a later date, and came bombing into town on a wave of ebullience full of the swell of places and atmospheres, especially the rocky mountains, I will always remember the way my mother had no greeting for me of any consequence, and the way I accepted that token of passage into an uncharted region of experience, beyond the ability of old habits of speech to communicate, even to your own mother.

But as for my Wisconsin trip, it was formative. What perhaps amazed me most was the sensation, somewhere along the way, that my body had grown more muscled, despite the knowledge that that was quite improbable. I also started to appreciate food, but not water, yet.

My commute to Fermilab was pleasurable all summer long and I repeated it the next summer, but not before going to Europe to cycle from Stockholm to Nice, and not before going to Seattle to cycle most of the way back to Chicago, just as long a distance as in Europe. (I got tendenitis because my crankarm got bent. I hitched for a while. One ride I got was in the back of a pick-up truck where I found an old pipe six feet long and with the owner's permission I used it to bend my crankarm back. When my tendenitis healed in a few days my bike was back in good shape, like me.)

But that's another story.

Clarifying, it was the chain and lock that lasted through all those rides. I gave my Raleigh after that first summer's commute to a friend from high school, named Jane Hulseberg by the way, and bought a Swedish bike in Stockholm that lasted through the European and American Western trips until it got stolen as I described above.

Welcome, enormouslock. I, too have been homeless, more times than I can count, and I've always enjoyed the crap out of it. I don't mind if you're our king, like Emperor Norton, it beats another carbon fiber kickstand-thread.

Oh my, this is a treat. I thought I was alone when I saw something more in cycling than the bicycle or the exercise, and through your posts I see a lot of it comes off as true, real life adventure.

I do a lot of writing about my journeys on a bicycle at www.thisendlessroad.com and I enjoy it, but I often have to tell what’s interesting and entertaining to other people, or, in other words, things that I have already completed (physical and mental tense). I’ll treat myself and stand up here on the soapbox with you, but with no intention of touching the metaphysical aspects like you do.


Life doesn’t happen like a story, an episode of anime, or whatever fictional medium that floats your boat. I’m not talking about canons, plot devices, the love interest, or anything like that. I’m talking about how these things start, those small details about the characters that are overlooked for sake of an interesting story. I don’t know about most people, but my favorite stories start with a friendship made, a companion gained, from a complete stranger under the simplest of meetings.

I was riding in Northern California on 101, and ten miles south from that wild unexpected travel stop of Garberville and the massive, looming redwood forest that followed it, two cyclists heading the other direction waved me over. Two German brothers, with eyes passionate like fire, and voices that boomed loud as thunder with bodies that shuddered with energy that would explode if held down and restrained. In the persona, the way the waved me over, and the warmth and brotherhood I felt just talking to them, I knew that these were the cyclists that I wanted to be. They ignored my rare, legendary Bridgestone RB-T, just like I ignored their bicycles, and we talked about not those things that one would worry about before going on a tour, but the things that actually mattered. This was so refreshing after hearing bull**** after bull**** from the Californian Racer, who usually thinks them the same as me, when completely different.

One would jump, scream, holler, all with a bicycle between his legs, bending the very laws of physics to himself and his companion would turn every now and then, hold a hand up and wave him down, whispering as he looked around “Too loud, brother, too loud.” They talked vivaciously of two girls on bicycles that they had heard about two days ahead of them, and when our conversation came to a close, the loud brother screamed, “What the hell are we waiting here for! To the women!” and they blasted off down the road.

This tore me open as I rode. I had fallen in love with the way these two guys had lived, and they seemed just like the people in my books, my anime, and those movies. If I had a chance to go back, I would of left with them, and we would of traveled to the ends of the earth and adventure together. For the rest of the trip, I wondered in my mind, deep down and pushed aside, what it would have been like with those two brothers. What was it like with them when things went bad, when that energy went out, when anger replaced joy, and what was it that they really rode for. This is my tribute, to another couple of good friends lost to the will of my own desires.

krispistoferson,
I treat each person as sacred, and I thank you humbly for your endorsement. But who is Emperor Norton?

Dio Rallen,
You, sir, have character.

Dio Rallen & enormouslock~

Thank you for sharing your words. Since picking up a bike almost exactly a year ago, after not having rode for 20 years, I have found myself spiritually again. It's refreshing to hear from others who find riding a gateway to the soul. I always knew there was an adventurer inside, I just had to find it, and the people I have met are all a part of it. I have been encouraged more by strangers than my own family, which is surprising to me, but I'll take it as it comes and from whomever it comes from. One who rides a top notch racer or a piece of cr@p, barely held together junker bike can experience who they truly are on a bike. I was locked away in my home for 20 years and it feels so great to be alive again.

I've been out with a useless computer. It took a while to get a new one.

Culture is like turbulence. You never know when it will appear. Emperor Norton keeps someone happy and that's all I need to know he's ok.

As Lance puts on speed and claims the yellow jersey, I say "say nothing and be confident in your preparations."

I like to fart.

OooOOo a Wookie...

dude though i think you're a bit loopy you're right that any of us riding long and lonely tours could be viewed that way so...
the 'legend' is a bit odd too, but i've seen riders do week long tours on a Schwinn Stingray, on a tandem with an inflatable gumby doll on the back and wierder just to draw attention or get a laugh.

Ride on...

Most folks never take the time to contemplate their position in the trip we call Life. Most seem content to just get through the day, then the next, and then the next. Often this is because of the demands placed on them by others or by themselves. Not many have had the luxury or interest in understanding the why of anything around them. Dealing with the physical demands of living without considering the needs of their souls. I am guilty of this also.

You, apparently, have spent a sizable portion of your life doing what most of us should be doing. Attempting to understand the small connections of people and events that end up making us what we are. Your words were well received here in Acton, Maine. Thank you.