on this day my brother wrote to me:
You left my bike where??? Outside and unlocked?!!
Jesus Christ, I’m stuck in Europe with a piece of crap, 15kg, $100 mountain bike. Yeah, it’s full suspension and red, which just means that it’s going to get stolen first thing, and I’ve owned it less than two weeks and the rear wheel is already dished out and it makes a clacking noise every time it goes around. I bought it because Laura is too short to get on a regular bike. With a tail-wind I average about 18km/hr, all while looking like an adult riding a kid’s BMX.
And you left my good bike outside. Unprotected. Unloved.
I’m quite pleased to see the bike get the riding it oh-so-deserves. Keep up the good work.
–Kenn
and here is what I said back:
oh, the bicycle is loved. Especially the bicycle seat. It smells like love.
(*this yahoo is my brother, by the way. Ignore him — he’s French, and will eventually turn moldy and crumbly).
Nobody steals stuff. This is America!
I went down that stupid mountain that I spent all that trouble getting up, and then I went to Graham, Texas, and there I saw….A TACO BELL! JEHOSAPHAT! I GOTS TO GET ME SOME OF THAT!
I got a small soda and sat there drinking refills for, like, two hours, and made a mockery of the capitalist system and drew pretty pictures. Then I had all this surplus energy for some reason, so I rode north for seventy miles without stopping, which took four hours and made me want to die. Scotland Texas sucks and here is why. For the first thing it is dark. And there are so many bugs in Scotland Texas that it feels like riding into a rainstorm. And there are many yappy dogs and they all chase you, because to a dog a bicycle is like a car except it goes real slow and the person’s on the outside where they can get to them. If evil dogs ran the world that’s exactly how they’d make cars. I would hate to be torn apart by a rampaging band of scotch-texan yappy dogs — I do not think that would be fun or cool.
Now I’m at Midwestern University, which has an all-night computer lab. This supercool Japanese lady named Yae cooked fried pork for me, and also gave me a donut and some pina colada Almond Joys. I did not know such things existed. But they do and they are delicious. Yae digs the sketchgroup very much and wants us to design her album cover. I told her, “Hi-yah! Now you must witness my Xiaolin Graphic Design! KA-POW!”
Now I should sleep but I probably won’t.
I averaged 19 mph in the last hour of my trek, by the way.
19 miles is equal to approximately 100.32 kilofeet.
Do the math, metric-boy.