Compelled to post this because:

“Sometimes the cosmic tumblers turn just right and the universe opens to possibilities never before imagined.”

So I met some of the kids from Outlier on Friday, then I found out they sponsor the blog Prolly is Not Probably, that has a weekly “Merckx Monday” post. Just seemed like a lot of coincidences related to a tiny little niche that my life is in.

Relatedly, it feels great to be back on my Merckx, getting “nice bike, man” hollar’d at me in the street again.

plus they found someone who did one better than my broken and repaired record rear mech:

anyway, lets rectify!  on friday evening.  s24o, leaving from the casbah johnson.  you me and the bottle makes 3…  anyway.

details?  oh those!  meet @ 6.30, outta here by 7ish.  bring a headlamp, so we can gather forthly fire sticks and cook hot dogs to a carbon-y finish.  wheres to meet?  new address, near giant eagle: 632 wilson place.  google it, slacker.  back off the mountain sat AM, for breaking the fast at isabellas.

]]> http://ridelugged.com/2009/09/10/not-posting-is-depressing/feed/ 2 http://ridelugged.com/2009/05/22/rapha-continental-centre-ramble-write-up/ http://ridelugged.com/2009/05/22/rapha-continental-centre-ramble-write-up/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 14:02:47 +0000 Johnson http://ridelugged.com/?p=1775

I helped put together a Rapha Continental Ride, as the spoke card below denotes.  Some editors from Bicycling magazine showed up and rode it as well, and wrote it up, and gave a shout out to not only this humble, dust cover’d blog, but also to the neglected but viable dirt road database.  We thank them for that!  Here is a link to the main article by David L’Heureux aka Laroo, some quotes, and I will have links to the Rapha imagery as soon as its up, and mine, ditto.  I am developing the B&W in my kitchen as we speak. Wait! I got some scanned in.  Here is a link to the bikely map and cue sheet for the whole shebang.  Find more delicious dirt roads @ the dirt road database wiki.

“Speeds on the descent were almost scary as we tip toed the line between in control and over cooked. At the bottom we patched flats and egos, then turned around to ride back up to the ridge for and even longer and more hair-raising descent back into the valley.”

“I’d never ridden here, so word of mouth was the only thing to go on. I’d been told the ride would be stunning. It was.”

“We were riding by horse-drawn buggies through picturesque farmland almost instantly.”

Colour shots as soon as the get developed, to tide you over here (and here) are some colour shots from past Centre Rambles.

More soonish!  Flickr set, including images above, here.

For the photo dorks:  fuji neo pan 1600, yashica electro gsn 35, red filter.

Not the driving snow, but the fact that as I ride home from work, the beer distributor is pumping fresh beer into the pubs from a tanker truck the same size as the ones they deliver fuel in to the city center stations. I think that guys is there like 2 or 3 times a week.

a really big czech keg

i finished my roll of film in my 1935 agfa plenax.  while i do dishes tonite i will develop it, see what comes out.

(note, it was full of light leaks from the bellows)

i spent friday wandering baltimore, where i used to live, these slums, this white trash lower section of town, which was really blue collar when i was living there, but now of course my old house has been transformed into some sort of mini-shit mansion, with ornamental grasses where there used to be concrete, cracked and stained.  a brick walkway, a deck on the roof, but peeling paint on the trim.  its quite an effect.  it looks out on the train tracks.  which are maybe 25 from the front door.  so a train really did practice parking there, and it was less noisy/shaking than this wind, which is just tearing thru the town, making trashcans disgorge thier contents like drunks in an alley and spin thru the streets like new years revelers the wrong side of sober.

but back to baltimore.  these back alleys i used to travel, on foot, with camera, 8 years ago, ages ago, the alleys are maybe 2 feet wide, covered in trash, backyards butting up with chainlink fences and worn out tired toothless wooden fence slats with huge dogs so mean they dont even bark restrained by the concept of the fence but clearly not its actual structural properties.  backyards piled high with random cast offs from a plastic consumer society, broken childrens slides, rusted grills, broken bikes, disassembled mopeds, kites, rolls of astroturf, broken lawn ornaments.  its rich in texture and decay.  i grew up in dusty antique shops and going to yard sales and stealing from junkyards with my dad, and this is just an extension, instead of buying or borrowing i just take photographs of these backyards with my vintage camera.

the alleys twist for miles, you basically just emerge to cross a street, and are back in this warren of undulating passageways, forgotten and neglected and disused except by stray dogs and bums, who both use it for the same purpose, scat strewn over the refuse and broken concrete.  i round a corner and suprize a bum pissing on a brick wall, the urine running around his foot, deep yellow.  around the next corner i look around futively and do the same.  3 cups of coffee…

the air is clear and clouds are scattered, the wind has whipped away the smog like an old lady shooes a cat.   i wind my way back to a lunch counter of the old school, neon sign, abrupt waitresses.  i met an old guy, tom something, with a beret and long fingernails and a faded jean jacket.  before he speaks i peg him: old photographer.  he sees my yashica.  names the model just by seeing the back of it.  i try to keep the conversation short but get pulled in, and soon am in a 20 minute conversation about photography, art, art school, we both went to the same place, albeit 30 years apart…  we parted on good terms, my wallet is .3 grams heavier due to his business card.

a brief car trip north of the city brought me to hamden, a street of shops and foodie places interspersed with antique shops.  i got a hot tip on a vintage camera store, knock and enter and up some dusty steps and casper, 18 years old in 1941, bombing of pearl harbor and a draft notice as an 18th birthday present, stands there with infinite knowledge of movie and still image cameras, definately almost blind with cracked yellow fingernails and a worn red cardigan over a red plaid shirt, he holds my(starmers actually) rolleicord from 1950 and without even looking down knows what lens it has, what its aperture is…  we talk about the war, about how to dispose of vintage film (which turns into nitrate, powdered dust, explosive on contact with air, so he would take excess/cut movie footage and dump it into the river at midnight), how 35mm was invented, tube amplifiers, white people in advertising, and wood paneling.

i buy a 7 dollar vintage dark room timer from him.  it works beautifully and has a much nicer alarm ring than my soulless digital timer..beep beep beep beepppp… which makes you feel like you are dying in a hospital everytime you change the chemicals.

Veronika and I will be driving from Prague to Copenhagen, then ferrying over to Sweden; will drive to Stockholm; then either drive or take a train either up Sweden or Finland, depending on which is more effective. It should be a kinda long drive but we are excited for some good scenery through the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. Our new diesel Hyundai wagon gets about 60mpg highway with a roof rack and plenty of trunk space, so we should be able to accommodate 3(+?) more inhabitants.

We can pick up stragglers at all major airports along the way: Prague(PRG), Berlin(BER, SXF, TXL, THF), Copenhagen(CPH, RKE), Stockholm(ARN, BMA, NYO, VST), Helsinki(HEM, HEL), Kittila(KTT)

The race is in Eastern European Time (EEST) at UTC+3. That’s 7hours ahead of the east coast, 10 ahead of AZ, and 1 ahead of most of mainland Europe and the western two fingers of north Europe.

170km north of the Arctic Circle it is daylight for months on end, so no need for lights and a COMPLETELY different experience on the 24 hour race. I am quite curious how it would feel to never get dark?! Plus the race is only 50eur and includes 24 hrs of sauna and camping.

Only 9 guys and 2 women in solo last year, so we are going to kick ass!!
(the women’s winner only got 108km! ha! Veronika has only done like 3 rides in the last year less than that!
She is gonna rip those Finns a new one! She did 156k at old pueblo last year and had been so sick for the previous 2 days that she didn’t eat anything and had to pull over to either puke or shit behind every other cactus! Even my pedestrian 182k last year would have got me 4th.)

Czech out another great video at http://www.av-lappi.com/levi24/24.html

And more images from last year at http://www.laplandfoto.com/store/gallery.php?gid=55