From the Archives - Cockroaches at La Loma

Introduction

Here’s another blog post from way before there were blogs. As with so many other random essays from my college days, I’d printed this, photocopied it, sent copies around to my friends and family, and then just waited for the accolades and admiration to come flooding in. I’m still waiting, actually. See? Proto-blog!

Cockroaches at La Loma – March 18, 1989

Before I came to California, I had never seen a cockroach. I had read about them in books (e.g., how they’d be the only survivors of a nuclear war) but only recently have I become acquainted with these foul creatures. Ironically, we never had a roach problem at La Loma until just after they fumigated our apartment for the first time. Now the kitchen is literally crawling with them.

Roaches aren’t like other insects. When you squash an ant, for example, or at least when you squash many dozens at once, you can hear a tiny crushing sound, as the exoskeletons are shattered. But roaches seem to lack body armor; they’re just smushed into a greasy spot on your finger. But even more interesting is their flight instinct, which I think is unique for an insect. Unless ants take over a man’s kitchen, you see, they’re generally safe from mass slaughter because they just aren’t very much fun to kill. They never run; they just amble about carrying crumbs of food back to their anthills, completely unaware of their impending doom. And actually, a random ant can feel reasonably assured of being left alone. I myself don’t have much visceral negative reaction to seeing an ant. They can be kind of fun to watch as they purposefully move about, carrying an object many times their own size. We can even respect them, since they have sophisticated colonies and so forth. I don’t tend to bother killing them unless I have a full invasion, in which case I might take drastic measures like creaming them with a dish sponge.

Look, I know this essay is supposed to be about cockroaches, and I promise to get back to that. But I realize I have more to say about ants. When I lived in Colorado, it was very rare to have an infestation. Maybe ants weren’t as copious there due to the harsh winters or something, who knows. (I never said I was an entomologist.) But the downside of Colorado is that at high altitude it’s hard to bake. Cakes in particular disappoint. So during a family visit to my grandpa’s place in St. Helena a couple years back, my mom baked a gorgeous chocolate layer cake. We knew it would be moister and denser and more delicious than the airy, dry cakes we’d get in Boulder, so we went for a long walk to work up an appetite. The cake was waiting in one of those cake thingies old people have, with the pedestal and the tall glass cover. Upon our return we lifted the cover to discover that the cake was absolutely swarming with ants. Where the hell had they come from? They were stuck in the frosting and struggling to even move. We couldn’t face the loss of that cake—it was just too huge a disappointment—so we decided to just eat it anyway. I loved the thought of these intruders being literally eaten alive, sliding down our throats with no hope of escape. The cake was still great; the ants gave it a little piquancy.

But normally, there’s no sport in killing ants; it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. And I think we all know how easy that is. Because we all have friends who call us up and are like, “Hey, I have a bunch of guns, and my uncle just delivered a big barrel full of live fish. You wanna come over and shoot some? Just for sport?” And of course you head right over, because it’s not disgusting at all, the way they bleed and bleed until the water is basically red and you start to wonder if a fish can feel terror, until you remember watching your high school friend’s piranhas chasing goldfish, and it was obvious the goldfish were fleeing, and so in that barrel the more selfish fish are diving for the bottom, squirming past others and hoping the spree ends soon, and oh my God, why are automatic weapons legal in this country?

Gosh, sorry, I got a little distracted there. I had been saying how ants go about their business blithely and never flee, whereas cockroaches must know that they’re the most hated insect on planet Earth, because they always run for it. Once you surprise them by turning on the kitchen light, they take off helter-skelter (or is it pell-mell?) for the nearest place to hide. If you’re lucky, you can kill one or two before they’ve all escaped. Strategy really comes into play here; if you can anticipate their escape route, you can head ‘em off at the pass. But when you do kill one, it’s not so much fun because you get that oily black smear on your thumb. I think it’s a kamikaze defense mechanism.

My roommate really hates roaches. It’s not that I don’t; I just respect their survivalist tendencies and their lightning speed. But he behaves as though their existence is a personal insult to him. I doubt he’s self-aware enough to realize that he’s probably the reason we still have them; he’s easily the biggest slob of our trio here. For example, if he doesn’t feel like washing a pan, and fears I might prompt him to do it because it’s my pan, he’ll actually hide it behind the fridge. So if anybody deserves to be angry around here, that’d be me. But who gets angry at a damn insect? Answer: my roommate. (And you thought that was a rhetorical question!) He totally lost it the other night after failing to kill a roach, and actually punched the fridge. I was secretly kind of pleased about this because that fridge had it coming. It sucks. It’s the loudest fridge I’ve ever heard and it runs constantly. Its noise is so annoying, when I sit down to eat in the kitchen I often reach around back and unplug it. (That’s typically how I end up finding my pan.)

Well, after feeling like the jackass that he is over his bruised hand, my roommate finally bit the bullet and laid out some cash for two Roach Motels. I’ve only seen these devices in advertisements and “Far Side” books, and was kind of surprised to learn they still exist (as do Ginsu steak knives, which I’d thought were mythical). I always wondered how Roach Motels “kill roaches dead” without being toxic. I mean, after all, I don’t want any deadly chemicals in my kitchen (besides the ones in my food, of course). Well, therein lies the biggest advertising fraud in commercial history. Roach Motels don’t even kill roaches once, so the redundant slogan is misleading twice over. They actually work on the same principle as the Eagles’ celebrated Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. It’s basically a box with ramps leading into it, and a sticky floor that smells, to the roach, like a tasty treat. The unsuspecting roach walks up the ramp, falls into the goo, and spends the rest of his life trying to un-stick himself. He eventually dies either of old age or exhaustion.

It’s really kind of sad looking into the Roach Motel at all the little black bodies, often stacked on each other, desperately trying to escape this horrible doom. Roaches never give up, either. From the moment they drop in, they pull frantically with one leg at a time, but the leg snaps back again as the sticky goo proves superior even to the roach’s proportional insect strength. Entertaining a fanciful notion that perhaps I could hear them screaming, I put my ear really close to the Motel. What did I expect to hear? I remembered the scene of Johnny the Boy desperately begging Max Max for mercy: “What are you doing? I wanna know … what you’re doing! You think I’m silly don’t you. Don’t do this to me!”

I have fairly large feet, and I wear these cool Nike Team Conference basketball shoes, which are black and white, and which I like to call my Shamus. I think they’d do a great job of stomping these Roach Motels flat, and putting all those poor roaches out of their misery. You see, I never thought I’d say this, but I kind of feel bad for those roaches, working themselves to death in there. But the motels don’t belong to me, and still have vacancy. My dippy roommate probably thinks he could extract the existing roaches somehow and use the motels again and again. So, I dare not mess with them. I guess my best bet is just to go hide my pan.

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A Cure for Holiday Consumerist Bloat

Introduction

Do you ever feel glutted around The Holidays?   Not just by food, but by stuff?  I always do, whether I receive many gifts or not.  The sheer spectacle of all that commerce gets to me, and I know I’m part of the problem.  I try not to spoil my kids … I really do.  So does my wife.  And yet somehow, every year, the consumer habit runs away with us and we overdo it.

This year, I enjoyed a strong sense of catharsis, which came from a rather surprising source.  What was this source?  Here’s a hint.

The reluctant consumer

I hate Christmas shopping mainly because I hate shopping.  I guess it’s how I was raised.  My brothers and I never knew the value of the dollar—in the sense that we greatly overvalued it.  You know that famous L’Oréal slogan, “Because I’m Worth It”?  It would be a slight exaggeration to say my family’s version was “Because I’m Not Worth It.”  Our version (had it been verbalized) was more like “Because It’s Not Worth It.”  The “It’s” in this context meant “whatever you were considering buying.”  Nothing, it seemed, was worth its price. 

Buying gifts is, to me, the worst form of shopping because chances are you’re going to guess wrong and buy somebody something he doesn’t even want.  When I open a gift, I’m practically wincing because I can’t stand such misfires. As a kid I once bought my dad a mirror for his bike.  He tried to seem pleased with it but clearly wasn’t.  A few years later, when I was a racer, a guy on my team got a sheepskin saddle cover from his grandma, and would have to remember to put it on his bike whenever she came to visit.  And then there’s the colleague who shows up at work with his new canary yellow fleece vest, which he wears exactly one time (as a gesture toward his wife), before it disappears forever.  The whole process is so inefficient.

But that’s not even the worst part.  I can totally handle buying birthday presents for people, because then I have time to think.  In the weeks before Christmas, especially with the economy back on track, everybody is out there shopping together, clogging up the system.  My wife and I got stuck in a mall in Fremont this year (long, boring story) and when—due to gradual suffocation amidst the rest of the human cattle—we decided to bail, we were horrified to realize we couldn’t find the exit.  Honestly, I’ve had a better time getting a cavity filled.  (And don’t even get me started on the holiday-themed music.)

The next day I headed out to a local mall for stocking stuffers.  I pulled in to the parking lot and it was pure gridlock in there.  Nobody could even move, and they were just sitting in their cars, waiting for somebody to leave—but the way the cars were lined up, it seemed you could be waiting hours.  I drove out of there, parked a few blocks away, and walked.  After I got home, realized I’d been overcharged almost $20, and started to drive back.  The street traffic was completely jammed and I realized I was too angry to drive.  I drove home, got my bike, and rode there instead.  Even though the rain was coming down in sheets, I was much less miserable.

What about e-commerce?  Yeah, I did a lot of that, too.  I used to hoard boxes all year so I’d have them to wrap gifts in at Christmas time.  Now, I get so much crap mail-order, my tiny garage is overflowing with cardboard.  I feel like a cog in this runaway retail machine, or like human grist for the retail mill.  Disgusting.

A few non-solutions

Would it help if I paused for a moment and reflected on what Christmas is really all about?  No, because when I look around me, I don’t see a lot of people praying and going to mass—I see a lot of people shopping.  Practically speaking, giving and getting is what Christmas is about.  This is mainly true in the modern era, but don’t forget about the Magi who gave gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  As a present, gold is alive and well (in its modern configuration, the gift card), but you have to wonder how well the second two gifts were received.  (This was before gift receipts, after all.)

On a bike ride this morning I passed a church with one of those little marquees, which read, “THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE AREN’T THINGS.”  As platitudes go, this falls a bit flat.  (I don’t like it as much as “He who dies with the most toys STILL DIES.”)  And though the sentiment is probably true, it’s not really that useful.  Am I supposed to tell my kids, “Instead of exchanging gifts this year, we’re all just going to hug a bit more”?  Yeah, right.  Should I tell them their Christmas wish lists have to include at least three items that aren’t physical objects?  (They’d dodge by asking for “shopping spree” or “trip to Hawaii.”)

Life experiences are a nice counterbalance to egregious buying.  What about a lovely, sunny day, or a beautiful sunset?  I enjoyed both on Christmas day, when I went for a long, slow ride in the Berkeley hills.  Check it out:

But those still l didn’t reverse the self-disgust I felt after all that commerce.  After all, between the shopping trips, the trip to Office Depot to buy more packing tape, the parking lot incident, all the time I spent wrapping gifts, and two afternoons of braving the long line at the post office, I figure I missed out on at least three or four rides, and as many sunsets.  This one ride wasn’t a Christmas gift so much as the end of my precious time being stolen.

The catharsis

My catharsis came in the form of some Me Time, which I spend building a Me Thing:  specifically, a replacement for my dearly departed commuter bike, Full Slab.  Its frame broke last summer after five years of loyal service (and a few years as my road bike before that).  For the last five months I’ve been commuting on the Arseless, which is very cool old English 3-speed which I do love, but which I hate to ride:  not because I’m keeping it nice or something, but because it rides like crap.  It’s heavy, the bearings are pretty much shot, and it routinely slips out of second gear (not for lack of adjustment but because an internal part has rounded-off bits that are supposed to be sharp).  On top of that, the fenders rattle so loudly I can’t hear myself think.  Could I try to fix these things?  Yeah, but painful experience tells me that when a bike is fifty years old and has never been properly maintained, it’s best not to go anywhere near it with a wrench.

Why not just buy myself a nice commuting bike for Christmas?  In general I consider that a fine idea, and something I’d recommend to anybody with an income.  A good bicycle is about as virtuous a purchase as I can think of.  But as a really bike-y person with a bicycle shop background, I’m way beyond traditional retail.  Buying something stock would be polluting my pure bike experience by blending it with that same consumerist spirit I’ve been deriding throughout this essay.

You see, part of what kills me about being stuck in traffic, or in a parking lot, or at the mall, is the anonymity of the experience:  the sense of being swept up in some mob, immersed in a mindless group activity.  Within that shopping mall is a finite variety of things to buy, with a seemingly infinite number of people buying them, and each item carefully calibrated to appeal to the highest number of consumers.  (The king of that effort must be Apple, who sold 75.5 million iPhone 6 units in one quarter.)  I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that many people actually care what the most popular gifts are, and will purposefully seek them out.  American consumers start to seem so much alike, I start to forget which one of us I am.

So for me, to imagine buying a new bike at the Christmas sale is to imagine hundreds and hundreds of these bikes being churned out on an assembly line.  This train of thought brings me to “Pink Floyd The Wall” and those school kids going down the conveyor belt to the meat grinder.  I don’t want something marketed to the buying public; what I want is a bike that is not only fast and light and cheap, but unusual and cool.

Think of the new car Max gets in Mad Max.  Remember the scene in which his cop buddies are unveiling the car to him, singing its praises, to lure him back to the force?

      “You can shut the gate on this one.”  “It's the duck's guts.”  “Yeah, she's the last of the V8s.”  “Sucks nitro.”  “Phase 4 heads.”  “Twin overhead cam.”  “Tell him about the blower.  The blower, man!”  “She's meanness put to music and the bitch is born to run!”
      “How the hell did you get all this together?”
      “It just happened, Max, you know?  A piece from here and a piece from there.”
      “So easy?”
      “Yeah.”

Except it’s not easy, not with my bike at least.  I procured the frame months ago (online, Chinese, about $120 which—given the biking circles I run in—is practically nothing).  The problem was, this frame wasn’t compatible with most of the components from Full Slab, so instead of a bike I had a Project.  And I just didn’t have the time or energy to fight with the thing.  Months ago, I got as far as sanding off the thick powder coat paint that, due to a programming error, some robot neglected to mask during the frame’s construction:

Finally, this week, with some time off from my job, I managed to log some serious hours out in the garage, figuring out what old parts to use (“a piece from here and a piece from there”), fighting with the wacky French steerer tube springy thingy, looking for half an hour for a cable housing ferrule I dropped on the floor (costs maybe 25 cents, but of course the bike shop’s closed for the holiday), and basically making glacial progress—until, amazingly, the whole menagerie of donor organs suddenly turned into a real bicycle, with a smooth clean look that largely belies its Frankenbike heritage:

It’s kind of the bicycle equivalent of decorator crab:  you just use what’s available, and in the process achieve total uniqueness.  The fork on this bike is from a friend who traded it for a lunch—he refused to take money for it because it flexed like crazy and gave him the willies.  (It was on my rain bike for a while before something better came along).  The bars and stem came with my older daughter’s mountain bike (it was the spare set I got when I bought the bike used from a friend).  The crankset and bottom bracket are hand-me-downs from my backup road bike (which got an upgrade due to compatibility issues with my current race frame).  The seat post is from an old (dearly departed) Orbea.  The saddle is one that I got ages ago from a friend to put on my younger daughter’s mountain bike; I reclaimed the saddle before passing the bike along to my niece.  The rear derailleur—freakin’ Dura-Ace, baby!—is from like six road bikes ago.  The brakes are from my older daughter’s new road bike (off-brand Tektro, which work fine but which on principle I had to replace right off the bat).  The shifters, bottle cage, and freewheel seem to have been spontaneously generated by The Box.  (“I can't remember where I got 'em, but I got 'em, know what I mean?”)

There’s a long tradition of recycling your old junk to make a cool, weird, serviceable bike out of it.  I believe this is the basis for the fixie culture that has become so popular.  That’s part of the joy of bikes:  they’re easy to work on (compared to a car, anyway) so almost anybody can cobble something together.  On his latest album, Eminem raps about doing this as a kid:  “I bike ride through the neighborhood of my apartment complex on a ten speed which I've acquired parts that I find in the garbage, a frame, then put tires on it.”

Of course it was only a matter of time before the bike industry rose up to capitalize on the fixie thing, offering brand new stock fixies (like these or these) which—don’t get me wrong—have a right to exist, but don’t satisfy my yearning for a bike that’s cool, weird, and cheap—like the one I just built. 

Yeah, my bike has got gears.  I’m not into fixies, because I like cogs and shifters and derailleurs, and I like being able to go up hills, and I like the basic process of shifting.  A single-speed drivetrain would give me about as much enjoyment as my car’s automatic transmission—that is, no enjoyment at all.

Check out the finishing touch:  a head badge a friend made me like ten years ago, when my kids still looked like this.  I’ve been storing this badge all this time, just waiting for a worthy bike to put it on.

To sum up, this bike is what’s given me great relief and satisfaction after the predictable, perennial, and bankable excess of The Holidays.  All that quality time in the garage, messing about with tools, solving little problems, sighing with pleasure when stumbling on cool stuff that had lain dormant in The Box for like two decades, and ending up with the flyest, dopest commuter I’ve ever had … it all gives me such a gratifying feeling of redemption.  Despite having added to my possessions, I feel I’ve thrown off the shameful mantle of passive consumer and—in this instance, anyway—become more of a designer or creator.  Ah, the goodness of bikes!
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