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Friday's foaming rant: A tale told by an idiot
I’ve got all of my fingers and all of my toes
I’m pretty well off, I guess, I suppose
So how come I feel bad so much of the time?
A man ain’t an island... John Donne wasn’t lyin’
---“Hard Day On the Planet,” Loudon Wainwright III“You gonna rant this Friday?” the editor asked. “You gotta be mean; we don’t want people thinking we’re reining you in.”
Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Like, with a couple hundred e-mails running 95 percent in favor of my continuing to act the fool - including a number of readers who think pretty much everything under my byline is as wrong as Dura-Ace on a DeRosa - I’m suddenly going to start soft-pedaling to keep from shelling a handful of hypertensives who wear XXXS helmets, buy their bib shorts three sizes too small, and use Preparation H for chamois cream.
Let ’em get their cycling coverage from Fox News, is what I say. Or would say, if there weren’t a web editor standing right behind me. He has a gun.
There is something about the Irish and literature that invites the external application of restraint. The obstreperousness of Randle Patrick McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”; the cynicism of Oscar Wilde; the unwillingness to accept one’s place of Mick Stewart in “Freedom,” by Frank O’Connor.
Let others posit a silver lining; we Micks point out the dark cloud. Some people view the glass as half full, others as half empty – me, I see it as a scattering of shards on the shoulder that will give me a double flat with only one spare tube in the saddlebag. Thirty miles from home. With all the phones out, because of the tornadoes. In cannibal country.
But it’s impossible to keep this torrent of acid flowing without a little reflux from time to time. I don’t always feel foamy, or rantish, particularly when it’s a sunny 70 degrees, I’ve just finished a three-hour road ride with a couple of old pals, and my server at Jack Quinn’s Irish Pub bought me a Harp because she could tell I was sunburnt and parched and desperately needed the fluid.
I suppose I could wax acerbic about the troubles at Sea Otter, libel the pro men’s field as a tea party of nancy-boys mincing about in Redwood City, or charge Rick Sutton with attempted velocide for attacking them with a blunt instrument of a course that you wouldn’t wish on a platoon of Republican Guards trying to bicycle away from the Third Infantry Division.
But I wasn’t there to cast my jaundiced eye on the scene of the crime, so I don’t have a feel for who, if anyone, was guilty - though I suspect that a course which made Gord Fraser nervous would have me peeing down my leg and squealing for mommy. Then again, so would telling Rick that I’d rather ride a wild boar into an oil-well fire than do a few go-rounds in his hometown for American money.
I could compose a sardonic sonnet about not being assigned to cover Sea Otter, but from the sound of things it seems a good year to stay home, helping the IRS with its annual pledge drive and setting up that offshore subsidiary in the Caribbean. Between us, I’d rather pay taxes – mine, yours and Michael Moore’s - than cover another mountain cross, even in Monterey.
The hints and whispers about the costly and complex 2004 whiz-bangs from SRAM and Shimano offer a chance to demonstrate my fabled disregard for business as usual, I suppose (sure must be fun selling the “old” 2003 stuff at the local bike shop, huh?).
But having failed to evolve past eight-speed anything yet, I’d feel a bit like a Neanderthal sneering at the new Boxster because it doesn’t come with a brace of dead antelope in the luggage compartments. Plus there is an advertising salesman standing behind me. He has a gun.
There’s always the helmet debate, a bit of bad noise that, like Eminem, shows no sign of going away anytime soon. But it’s tough to get all worked up over a gaggle of lemmings who consider a few grams of plastic, foam and webbing to be a violation of their God-given right to self-immolation.
I strap on my Giro whenever I get out of bed, especially after a few Harps, because on a hairless scalp, huge divots, bloody scabs and brain-surgery scars stand out like a topo map of Dummyville. But I could care less whether you wear yours. Just don’t expect me to perform CPR when you do a face dab and drive your dental work through your duodenum. I’ll be too busy rifling your pockets for gel packets, energy bars and cash, and stripping your bike for parts.
Hmm. We seem to be well short of a rant here, though the words themselves appear to be piling up like Belgians at a spring classic. I could slip in an abrupt left turn here at the end, deliver a quick antiwar sucker punch, see if I can get the 7dogs.com mail server to catch fire again. But there is an IT guy standing behind me. He has a gun, too. And so does the circulation manager standing behind him.
Just kidding. The First Amendment remains in effect, even in the People’s Republic of Boulder. I just don’t feel like exercising it right now, having spent a few pleasant hours climbing some long-ignored high-country roads with friends, sipping a couple of cold beers afterward, and – for this week, at least – taking a vacation from a world full of angry people with guns.
Okay, okay... by now you know the drill. You write us at WebLetters@7Dogs.com and tell us how much of a total jerk this guy is. We, of course, will post your letter. Then you wait 24 hours and his countless fans and supporters (mostly a bunch of guys in Iowa who own "Fat Guy" jerseys) write in and tell us how much of a jerk you are. Then all of your friends write in and tell us that those guys who just wrote in should be turned in to the ministry of homeland security... then the guys in Iowa write back. Of course we publish all of it, usually accompanied by pithy remarks by our letters editor who, when he gets buried in work, sends his stuff to O'Grady anyway, who will then make an even more obnoxious pithy remark under the guise of the letters editor, prompting another round of letters and... and ... and... through it all, we get free content.
