From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXVI

Introduction

This is the twenty-sixth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, and Volume XXV is here. Thematically these are all over the map. Geographically they are also all over the map, come to think of it. Well, within California to be precise.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re more or less random compilations of short form prose I wrote in my youth, typically letters or emails but sometimes essays or graffiti. I post them to albertnet on the off chance that one of them will garner widespread adoration and propel me to worldwide fame, or at least notoriety. Read them in order, out of order, out of ardor, or outdoors in the arbor. Pay attention to the dates because some of these are rather old, some are just old fashioned, and others are merely passé.

October 17, 1989

I wonder how many unwanted pregnancies are caused by college kids using Trojan Magnums when they ought to be using the standard size. You know, guys aspiring for largeness, refusing to accept that their schlongs are merely average. In our school paper, an outfit called ZPG advertises wholesale condoms by mail. They offer a variety pack … I wonder what that is? Different colors? Textures? I can't understand this wholesaler advocating a variety of sizes, unless students are supposed to share, or just collect them like stamps. My roommate T— says his favorite condom is the Trojan Rough Rider. My neighbor, an exchange student from Korea, says he’s fond of leather ones. That's right, leather. If Vittoria made a CX Seta condom, I think that would be the ultimate, though I don’t have any use for such a thing, at least at the moment (sigh).

September 20, 1993

On Saturday I overhauled my Guerciotti over at the Square Wheel where I used to work back in college. (The owner is cool enough to let me use a bench there.) The bottom bracket spindle was pitted, along with the bearing races in one of the cups. The shop got swamped and I went out to the floor to help out, and actually sold a bike. Not such a big deal, of course, but it becomes more impressive when you consider I sold nothing more than a hypothetical bike. The shop didn’t have the right size GT Outback, aka Outhouse (or Compost, another fond nickname for this low-end model). Their stock is really low because business is bad and they’ve run out of credit with all their suppliers. I could’ve sold this kid and his proud parents an 18” bike, but you know how it is: he’s clearly growing like a weed and would outgrow the thing before its 300-mile tune-up. His dad, who had appropriated himself to be the boy’s official spokesman, said, “Well, he’ll be growing at least another four inches,” looking hopefully at the lad, who stared at the point two inches above his dad’s head that he would reach, if he truly did grow four inches. Hope springs eternal I guess…

Having come clean about the kid needing a different size, I faced the prospect that they’d just leave, and buy a bike from a shop that actually had one for sale, vs. ordering one that the kid wouldn’t even get to test ride. So I played up the shop’s free service plan, and how valuable that is. To emphasize the importance of proper servicing, I showed them the pitted BB cup I just pulled off my own bike. If they can’t see or touch the bike I’m trying to sell them, at least they can see this random thingie, right? Besides (I told myself) there’s nothing more impressive than the grease and grime of a real mechanic who knows what he’s talking about and handles real bicycles every day. I didn’t mention that I’m not actually even an employee of the shop. I hope when they come to pick up the bike they won’t ask for me. (“Dana who?”)

November 1, 1993

I went to a wedding where alcohol seemed to be the main theme. The venue was a winery, and each guest was required to have a glass of wine in hand during the ceremony. The bride and groom kind of slurred their way through the vows, very sentimentally, which I found kind of sweet. The drinking only accelerated at the reception, beginning with open bar before the food was even served. By the time the dancing and games had started, everyone was good and heated. One of the games was the throwing of the bouquet, and as usual, the tallest maiden won. Do you imagine that tall women in general have better chances of marrying, just like the taller presidential candidate usually wins? Anyway, following that was the male version, the tossing of the garter. I find this game especially absurd, but it was a hard-fought battle nonetheless, since drunk men tend to play full-contact, whatever the game. The garter (which was little more than a silky, frilly band) bobbed up in the air, was snatched from hand to hand, and eventually ended up on the floor where it was batted about like hockey puck. I was fighting hard, and eventually—likely due to reflexes less dulled than those of my competitors—I came up with the garter. Everybody cheered as I did a touchdown dance, and then the horrifying realization hit me: they’d all taken a dive! It’s only women who earnestly seek the prize of the soonest betrothal; men delay this as long as they can. Sure, it was a good fight, but was only fought in order to appease the woman: “Sorry, honey, I tried, but....” Had I realized this, I too would have intentionally lost. But I, of course, am a born competitor.

January 6, 1994

The Oregon trip went fine. The Landlord’s new computer, an Apple, is fun to play with. This new CD-ROM technology is pretty amazing. I went through this Great Works of Literature on Disc CD, and it’s got a huge number of stories, poems, etc. on there, and shows various pictures, all from the original works, but only in black and white. This doesn’t bother me, since the originals were in black and white, after all; the Landlo’, on the other hand, was fuming mad about something, as usual. I think it’s that I was spending too long reading individual works and not letting him show me enough different features of his Mac. And he seems to have basically given up on those discs that don’t have full-color motion graphics and probably wishes he hadn’t let me stumble upon Great Works of Literature. My best find was “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, and—I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit—I’d never really sat down and read it closely before. The CD-ROM featured a few sound samples, where you can hear stanzas read by a professional, which was fun. For some reason, I still somehow expected the recordings to be in that cheesy computer-synthesized voice, but no, they were a human voice, in digital stereo. I ended up spending over an hour reading and rereading the poem, before realizing I had lost interest in the technological wonders of the CD-ROM technology itself. I mean, I was reading a printout, for crying out loud. I highly recommend the poem. I guess CD-ROM ain’t bad either.

We also visited Grandpa, Aunt J—, Uncle W—, and [cousin] J— on the way to a New Year’s party in SoCal. I’d sent them a holiday card with a photo, taken at a recent company party. This photo apparently caused a bit of a scandal. Aunt J— gave me an ominous warning over the phone prior to our visit: “Daner, I just have to warn you: your grandfather, well . . . he’s just not the man you used to know. He’s just turned 97, and he’s, well, old-fashioned. W— and I have been harassing him all morning, but he just won’t stop grumbling about the length of your hair. Anyway, he has no tact, so I just don’t want you to be offended if he says something. We’ve tried to get him ready for you, but you know how he is. Anyway, I think your hair is gorgeous, just don’t let him offend you.” I told her I’m totally used to being hassled for my long hair, but I doubt I successfully conveyed to her the extent of my immunity to criticism. All the same, I put it back in a ponytail for the visit, just to make it a bit more tidy.

Well, at first Grandpa didn’t realize it was a ponytail, and thought I’d actually cut my hair. He said, “Aaaah, now that’s how I remember—” and at this point the game was up: he realized I hadn’t cut it. “What’s this!” he said, yanking as hard as he could on the ponytail. Ow! That was about all he said for a while. Dinner was fun: Uncle W— dragged out his legendary electric carving knife and was sawing away at the ham when I made a comment to E— that nobody was supposed to hear. I imagined I was speaking pretty quietly, but that thing makes quite a racket when you’re sitting right next to the man wielding it. I said, “The electric model is a big improvement over the earlier, more cumbersome gasoline-powered one.” J—, clear at the other end of the table, laughed and said, “Yeah, you don’t need to run an exhaust pipe out the window anymore!” I hope I didn’t offend Uncle W—. He does seem rather proud of that thing. I was pleased that E— had the opportunity to witness it in action.

April 20, 1995

Mr. Albert has received your gift of the Tom’s of Maine Natural Shaving Cream product with moisturizing glycerin. He asked me to give you his most sincere thanks, and is very enthusiastic about trying out this product.

He was, however, slightly perplexed by the statement made by Tom & Kate Chappell on the packaging; they state that they “use no animal ingredients,” and that “nature does offer wonderful and simple solutions.” Mr. Albert cannot think of anything more natural than animals, and asked me to remind you that the Genesis chapter of the Old Testament very clearly stipulates that Man has been given, by the hand of God, dominion over all the beasts of the field and has at his disposal “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”  He asked me to inform you that most toothpaste uses sponge spicules for an abrasive, and why not?

One last note: Mr. Albert expressed some concern that the coconut oil used in the Tom’s of Maine shaving cream product may be very high in saturated fats. He requests that you investigate the availability of a “Lite” version of this product. Beef tallow, he suggests, would be significantly better than coconut oil in this regard.

May 4, 1996

I’m bummed because I’m all set to “roll over” my Avocet 40 bike computer (i.e. exceed the mileage that it can display, so it shows all zeroes) but I’ve come to realize that this newer model has a far-left-hand “1” digit so it won’t roll over after 9,999 miles like the old Avocet 20s and 30s. Here I was, thinking I was just miles away from that, well, milestone, but I’m only halfway there. I’ll have to log another 10,000 to roll it over, and I can’t imagine the batteries will last that long.

May 25, 2013

My opinion of the wild turkeys in our hinterlands turned around 360 degrees today. I had considered them a nuisance until early this morning when, riding up South Park, I saw a mother turkey with her little turkey chick riding on her back. It was the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen.

But then, heading down Claremont, with the whole road to myself, I opened ‘er up a bit, enjoying the smooth, fast descent (but being ever-vigilant of course). And then suddenly there were four giant tom turkeys ahead, each with the whole peacock-like plumage disk puffed way the hell out, spaced evenly across the road like some kind of patrol, all facing me, bringing to mind a shooting gallery. If I had the Star Trek universal translator I’m sure their gobble-gobble-gobble would have been translated as, “You wanna piece of me!?” I pounded the brakes with a quickness. This was an eight-finger, full-force, Bluesmobile-style-both-feet-smashed-into-the-brake-pedal kind of braking, where I was waaaaay, waaaay back on the saddle so I wouldn’t skid or face-plant. Sure, I stopped with plenty of time to spare, but imagine if this were a month or two ago before I’d trimmed down the ol’  aero-belly, or if the road had been a bit wet! So now my opinion of turkeys has come full circle and I consider them a nuisance again.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXIV

Introduction

This is the twenty-fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, and Volume XXIII is here. The different volumes are unrelated, other than they tend to feature me, and for that I apologize. I’m not that exciting a character but I’m the only me I’ve got.

If you haven’t read the previous installments, don’t worry—this isn’t some cogent account of a life, no Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man or anything. You might as well read the other volumes at some point, but they’re not, like, required reading or anything, and none of this will be on the test. Also: there is no test.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re generally blobs of micro-literature recycled from letters to friends (with the cuss words removed) or family (with the obsequiousness removed). Read these in any order, or while drunk or disorderly, or read them aloud to an orderly, and/or all of the above. The date of each snippet is given, along with where I was living at the time.

May 27, 1990 – Santa Barbara

You might regret asking how Nationals went because it’s a long story. You know I had that bad crash like a month ago, descending Refugio Road. I was really banged up from that which really hosed my training.

Well, I finally started feeling better, and got some really good riding in, but things kept going wrong, like I had eight flat tires, all of them front (!?), in a period of like two weeks. Unbelievable. But things seemed to be turning around and despite having to drop out of all three races at the Conference Championship due to poor fitness, I felt like the form was coming back, and one afternoon I just felt so jubilant I started jumping on the bed. Next thing I know I’d smashed my hand through a glass light fixture, slicing the knuckle wide open. It was dramatic, squirting blood and everything, which really frightened my roommate, and I needed a bunch of stitches. Training after that really sucked because I could only hold on to the handlebars with two fingers and couldn’t even rest my hand there because of this stupid splint I had to wear. It really got in the way—like, I was on a descent and saw this pothole too late to steer around it, but I couldn’t bunny-hop it because I didn’t’ have a good enough grip on the bars. I hit it and totally wrecked my brand-new Mavic MA40 rim. It’s like I was cursed!

So on the Wednesday before nationals I finally sat down, grabbed the finger, and just bent it down to where it needed to go. That kind of hurt because the stitches were right on the knuckle and my whole hand was kind of frozen. But I had actually gotten pretty fit, at the expense of everything else. (I guess I’ll just sort of ramble on about this race weekend in sort of a free-association way, instead of trying to organize any thoughts, because I’m tired of form and structure and logic, having pulled an all-nighter the other night to crank out a research paper.) So we go up to Berkeley to hang out and buy some Scott clip‑on bars for my funny bike. Then we drive to Palo Alto, screw around a while, and check into the hotel. Stanford really screwed up the race this year by having only one sponsor, John Dough’s Pizza. The food was provided but it meant eating every single meal there: three days of goddam Italian food—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So, the road race was this 3‑mile loop: 1.5 miles up, 1.5 miles down. Kind of a bogus course for nationals, if you ask me. I was actually thinking I could do pretty well though, having done okay on that course earlier in the season. Well, on the descent on the first lap in the middle of the pack this guy’s wheel fell apart and he started shaking back and forth and totally losing control, at 45 miles an hour. I was passing him as this happened, going just a little faster so it took about a day to get by him, and I’m sweating the whole time. Just as I get clear of him he goes down and takes out half a dozen people. What an idiot. The rest of us, a huge pack in fact, get to the climb and I’m going along fine, and suddenly I have a flat front tire. The curse continues!

Anyhow, I’m not too stressed, I just pull over for the Mavic technical support, except then I notice it’s not really a flat tire—it feels like a broken axle or something. I pop the wheel out and the computer wire gets pulled tight and I realize I’ve got a broken fork (right dropout broken completely off)! So I look up at the support van and realize they’re not gonna have any bikes with toe-clips, least of all a 62 cm. Mitch, the tech support guy, jumps out with big grin and says, “Look or Time [pedals]?” I’m like, “Fuck.” So about four miles into the national road race, I’m out. Needless to say I was pretty pissed off. I didn’t want an excuse, I wanted a result. This brought my record of finished races up to zero in the last four. Not to mention I had to walk all the way back to where we were parked down the course, like a mile, carrying my damn bike and walking like a damn duck in my cleats. Actually, halfway there I ran into my brother Geoff [a spectator at the race and his team’s mechanic] and he threw me over his shoulder like a fireman, my bike over his other shoulder, and marched me back to the start/finish area. Anyhow, the team time trial that evening went a lot better but I’ll have to tell you about that later, this has gone on long enough.

January 19, 1991 – Berkeley

Full shift at the bike shop today. We just opened a new location, much closer to campus. I made a couple of bike sales, which I screwed up. The first one I sold at full retail because I forgot all about our Grand Opening sale. The next one I don’t know what I was thinking, but I rang it up like a mere accessory, instead of a bike, and I didn’t get the customer’s name or anything. (Except her first name, Dana, not too hard to remember. Especially since she was pretty fly.) So towards the end of the day the owner, M—, is showing bikes to this pretty fresh blonde, and I’m thinking, “Ya know, I should really be handling that sale.” As if reading my mind, he calls me over and tells me to take her on a little bike tour of the Berkeley campus. No sweat, boss! Why can’t every day be like this?

April 6, 1991 – Berkeley

Randomly I got this letter from a chick I dated for only like the last couple weeks I was in Santa Barbara [before transferring to Berkeley]. When we started hanging out I made it pretty clear this wasn’t a long-term thing, I wasn’t into long-distance romances, etc. And it’s not like we hung out 24x7, I made a point of that. Just a very low-key kind of fling, right? It carried all the emotional impact of, say, a game of miniature golf. And then I’d heard she ran off to England with some dude she met at Yosemite over the summer, and I was like, great, cool, I’m happy for her! But then her letter was just bizarre: super pissy, and larded with dramatic phrases like something from a bad romance novel: “with the intention of clearing the air between us” … “don’t want to accuse or justify either of us” … “not trying to absolve myself” … “I know that I have hurt you and for that I am sorry” (which actually made me burst out laughing), and winding up with the old classic, “If you don’t care, then fine.” And actually, I don’t care … but I’m kind of getting the impression that’s not fine.

Geez, what a pain in the ass. I guess she’s worried because we’re both going to this wedding in June, and we’ll both be in the wedding party, and she says “if we were to see each other now, we’d ignore the hell out of one another and make it difficult for everyone else.” Which is totally unfair, because she’s actually super fly, so how and why would I ignore her? Besides, I’m bringing my girlfriend to the wedding, and it’ll be fun to see them giving each other stink-eye. And how would us ignoring each other make it “difficult for everyone else”  anyway … would anyone even notice? Why can’t this chick be mellow about all this? She knew full well from our first date that there was food in her fridge that would last longer than “us” … so what’s with all the drama? I have the impression it’s not really much to do with me; I just happen to be the guy who stumbled into her maelstrom. My pal T— and I have an expression we like to use for this kind of person: a “spun chicken.” Perhaps not coincidentally, he dated her (and for a long time) before I did, and yet he’s accusing me of spinning her. I’m like, no dude, she was spun already, you did it!

August 19, 1992 – Berkeley

School’s getting ready to start, and I’m really excited. I finally triumphed over the staggering cost of books: I went to the student store to find out what I needed, and just wrote down all the titles instead of buying them. Typically, a used paperback starts at about $6 at the student store, when it’s available, and can go up to $8, $10, sometimes even more, even if it’s fifty years old and the cover price is like a buck. Well, I went down to Moe’s Books, a great new-and-used bookstore, where I found more than half of my books for dirt cheap. Used paperbacks at Moe’s are priced at half of the cover price—and the real killing is when you find an ancient one that was cheap when it was new. I found a 1960 Nikolai Gogol, originally $2.50, and got it for $1.25. A Norman Mailer from ‘68 was the same price. Some of the newer ones cost upwards of $3 but hey, I’ll take it! Another benefit of buying these books is that they haven’t been used by dirtbag students, so they have no writing in them, no various colors of highlighter, no little bracket in the margin with “symbolism!” scrawled there. I ended up with nine books for $25. My heart soars like a hawk.

November 6, 1992 – Berkeley

Three weeks ago I took the worst midterm exam of my life, in my Milton class. For me, this course realizes all the ridiculous stereotypes non-English-majors have about the English major: studying a long-dead British poet whose famous yet obscure works require enough referential “gloss” (i.e., footnotes) to sink a ship, or a student. We read out of a huge anthology with pages the scant thickness of onion skins, with practically microfiche-sized print. The professor is an old relic whose attempts to establish a link between seventeenth-century England and modern-day America instead bring us back to that long-lost era of disco dancing, bell‑bottoms, and gold medallions. The literature itself, with all due respect to this literary icon, bores me. With the exception of some of his Latin works which were translated into English and maintain a certain indescribable readability, I’m pretty unimpressed.

I guess this could just be sour grapes, because I bombed the midterm. I’d studied pretty hard and went into the exam just marginally less optimistic than usual. Turns out the exam was open-book, but this really doesn’t help when you don’t have time to peruse a thousand pages for a juicy quote. As usual, I grabbed the exam and, with a vigor something like panic, looked it over to make sure I could handle everything on it. This brief period of terror is pretty much standard for any English exam I take, but under normal circumstances I am flooded with relief and set about systematically knocking off each essay question. Well, this time—the horror! I was being asked to write an essay comparing Milton’s “Il Penseroso” to “L’Allegro” in terms of the idea of ethos—that is, how Milton creates a sense of authority through the images in his poetry. This might have been something I could tackle, except that I had never seen either of those poems in my life! I said to myself, “Self, this has got to be some kind of cruel hoax. Is this the right room? Have I been attending the wrong lectures?” With my extreme panic beginning to mingle with despair and self-pity, I grabbed my book and found the offending poems. Each of them was between 150 and 200 lines—meaning that to read and fully understand either would take hours, or even days if you count the number of times I’d surely fall asleep. Relating them to the essay topic would take even longer, assuming I could ever pull it off. When were these poems assigned? We certainly never discussed them in class, and I don’t remember seeing them on the syllabus. I looked around me and everyone else was writing furiously in their bluebooks like usual. What the hell? Five minutes past the hour, with the professor and two venomous T.A.s breathing down my neck, I finally turned in my crap-filled bluebook, and—thoroughly spent—practically crawled from the lecture hall on my hands and knees: a godforsaken wreck of a student.

I was looking for a bench to slump on and the first one I see has this naked guy sitting on it! Not just any naked guy, but The Naked Guy. He’s kind of a fixture around campus and honestly I think most people are just tired of him at this point. Seeing him there, in my already distressed state, was almost too much to take. I stormed off, found another bench, slumped on it, and dug out the course syllabus. Sure enough, those two poems weren’t on it! The next day I checked with a classmate, and he said the professor added those poems during lecture one day—the one day I was absent, on a work trip down in Anaheim, to the Bicycle Dealer Expo. Why the professor chose to test us on material we never discussed in class is a real mystery. Perhaps it’s his way of punishing students like me who cut class.

November 16, 1992 – Berkeley

I went down to Santa Barbara to visit our old friends and I’m sure you’d be interested in what they’re up to. T— and C— have shaved their heads. I arrived at C’s house at like 10:00 p.m., and she was blind drunk with this older couple. The woman was arrogant, belligerent, and (ominously) kind of burly. I don’t know what her problem was but while C— giggled in the background, this chick started arguing with me about something clearly very near to her heart, based on how heated she was. (I honestly can’t now recall what it even was.) Quite a time. Finally these two left, and the next morning (after I spent the night in the guest room, lest you get the wrong impression), we had breakfast with T—and A— (who are still a couple) and this pseudo-artsy, chain-smoking woman who cussed a lot. A friend of somebody’s, I guess, unless she was just some random person T—and A— thought was with me. A—, despite an all-black mod outfit and a hairdo somewhere between Steven Seagal and Pebbles ‘n’ Bam-Bam, is much the same sharp, funny guy. T— asked me, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” This was kind of a loaded question because in the past she was part of the chorus of people asking me, “English? What are you gonna do with that?” It never ends.

In case you’re wondering what I’m actually going to do when I graduate [in a month], I think I can get a job wearing a suit around in an office and saying “hi” to colleagues on the way to and from the water cooler. I’ve got a lot of nice dress shirts and I can get some ties. Then, the plan is, after like nine months of saving up, E— and I will go on a cross-country bike tour. Then I’ll either find a real job, go to grad school, or try to become a superhero of some kind.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXIII

Introduction

This is the twenty-third installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, and Volume XXII is here. The different volumes are unrelated, except by disposition, in the sense that they are all completed, published, and not debatable, unless you want to comment below (which would be a first). You don’t need to read the previous volumes in order, or frankly at all, for this one to make sense; in fact, it won’t make sense no matter what you do. That’s not really the point.

Which begs the question, what are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? Well, imagine you’re cooking something tasty, like spaghetti carbonara, in a big hurry, so you’re kind of trashing your kitchen in the process. Now imagine you look down on the floor and see all these tasty tidbits—bits of bacon, a few peas, maybe a few blobs of crème fraîche—and you think hey, this stuff is still good! You’re way past the five-second rule but you don’t care, and as you clean up the floor you pop these tasty morsels in your mouth. You tell yourself this is good for your immune system. Well, these Bits & Bobs posts are just the literary equivalent of that. They’re taken from letters I wrote to family and friends.

The below dispatches all date from 1990. The first three are from my UC Santa Barbara days. The rest are from when I was at Berkeley.

February 1, 1990

Tomorrow will be my second day at the Associated Students Bike Shop, where I now work 4.5 hours per week. Like me, most employees work minimal hours, just enough to enjoy the privilege of buying bike stuff wholesale. We keep track of our hours on sheets in this binder, on standardized UCSB Work Study log sheets that have, for each day, a space for “Project” in which we’re supposed to write what we did. I guess this has its applications for jobs with some variety, but at the shop it’s a joke. My friend A— had written down “Ego Stroking” for Tuesday, and I thought that was pretty funny. I said, “Hey, do we get paid time‑and‑a‑half if our project is stroking the bossman’s ego?” The boss is this really ornery guy. He overheard some of this dialogue. “What’s this I hear about time‑and‑a‑half?” he yelled. “Oh, I was just joking,” I replied. He fired back, “Hey pal, there are some things in this shop we just don’t joke about.” Then another mechanic said, “You know, that actually isn’t true.”

March 16, 1990

I was pretty excited because I finally got something from the Admissions Office at Berkeley, which I’d been expecting for some time now regarding whether or not they accepted me [as a transfer student], so needless to say I was pretty nervous opening it up, especially after the bad omen of opening the other piece of mail, which was a notification from my bank that my rent check had bounced due to my unscrupulous financial records and the fact that my parents have been totally flaking on sending me cash, the upshot of which is that had to apply for yet another Visa card, this time from the Wells Fargo bank so that if I bounce another check in the future, which is really likely to happen to be perfectly honest with you, Wells Fargo will cover the check and put the balance on my card so I can pay it off when I finally get the money, which I’ve generally been able to do eventually, even if the amount is something large like tuition, which I also just wrote a bad check for after being disenrolled from UCSB for not paying on time, so now my attendance at UCSB next quarter is in jeopardy, which of course ties in to the future plans which seemed destined to unfold before my very eyes today as I got ready to rip open the envelope, my roommates C— and T— watching in suspense as well, because as any college student knows, a small envelope like the one I was holding in my hand is rarely a good sign when you’re hearing from a college because generally if you get accepted they send a huge packet of registration materials and whatnot, instead of the small envelope which I was preparing to tear open, fearfully, as I described my apprehension which was not exactly calmed by my spectators, who were saying pessimistic things, but for no good reason it turns out because upon finally ripping the envelope open and looking at the first line the first word I saw was “Congratulations!” which seemed an obvious indication that I had been accepted and was enough reason for me to say, “Yeah, I’m in!” while C— yelled, “Yes, he’s out of this dive forever!” which really hit home but eventually turned out to be perhaps a bit premature because after I had finished reading the whole thing I discovered there are all kinds of conditions that I still have to meet and which I’m really dreading because they mean all kinds of bureaucratic hurdles and also some dumb-looking classes which I’ll probably have to take next quarter before Berkeley will formally accept me, and meanwhile the whole letter was written in a very general terms, its tone more hypothetical than actual, which has me really confused, to the point that I’ve been trying to talk to the admissions folks on the phone but in vain because I keep getting this goddam answering machine where you’re supposed to press 1 if you want information on admissions, et cetera, but it’s pissing me off because I press 1 and nothing fucking happens (which is especially annoying since it’s running up a long distance bill which means trouble because I can’t afford this month’s phone bill because T— alone ran up over $100 in long distance which he can’t pay for right now, so we’ll probably have our fucking phone disconnected again which is just typical) so with all these weird requirements and classes it looks like I’ll really be busy next quarter, which sucks because all I really want to do is race my bike. [All this is excerpted from a much longer sentence.]

May 31, 1990

I decided to write you because I am too distracted to study anyway. For one of my English classes I’m reading a book of really weird short stories written in the ‘60s. The book, which I got from the used bookstore, smells like pot. Maybe that’s what I’m missing, because I can’t understand any of these stories. Some of them have no punctuation or anything and some are nothing but dialogue and you can’t figure out who’s doing the talking. One story is about zombies. You’d think that would capture my attention, but it’s just too far out there.

July 27, 1990

The reason I’ve moved up here [to the Bay Area] is that I’ve had this lifelong ambition to have a 415 area code. I don’t really know why; it’s just a personality quirk. It’s not too bad living up here, either; I mean, they have a university that’s actually supposed to be pretty good, and plenty of jobs. I’ve hooked up with a couple of employment agencies and I’m hoping they can get me some work pretty quickly before the fall semester starts. My roommate B—, who graduated last June from UCSB, works for a chemistry lab, and he just got this neat mug (almost as neat as the thrift store “Harris Dracon” and “Lincoln Title Company” mugs you gave me) which says “I passed the SYVA drug test.” I think it would be even cooler to have a mug that says “I failed the SYVA drug test,” because I could go out and sell pencils out of it on the street.

[Picture generated by Copilot]

The lingo is a bit different up here. I hear the term “hella” quite a bit, which means “very.” I also hear “shine” a lot, which means to decline to do something. Like, “This hotshot Subaru/Montgomery rider wanted to lengthen the ride but I was going backwards [i.e., riding poorly] so I shined and went home.” But the new vocab word that really threw me was “hosed.” I haven’t heard that term since my Colorado days, when to “get hosed” meant to have sex. But out here, “getting hosed” means the same as getting clocked (i.e., drunk). So my roommate’s friend asked me, “Have you seen B— get hosed yet?” I about had a heart attack, and figured the dude had to be some kind of perv. What a relief when we ironed that out...

July 29, 1990

The Levi’s 501 jeans that I’ve had since high school finally wore out. A lot has changed since the last time I bought jeans: you may now choose among standard, stone‑washed, acid‑washed, shrink‑to‑fit, pre‑shrunk, straight-cut, student‑cut, pre‑faded, colored, and corduroy. My old jeans were standard denim (was there any other kind in 1987?), and were a size 32 waist with a 40 inseam (effectively a 31 waist by 36 inseam, according to the bizarre sizing scheme Levi’s had developed for shrink-to-fit jeans). I guess I’ve stretched those bad boys out because the new jeans I finally settled on are 34 by 36. I might have chosen a larger waist, actually, but the longest length I could find with a 36 waist was 34 inches. This seemed really strange so I asked the sales clerk about it. It’s no mistake: even though they offer eight different styles, they only make jeans for either basically fat or basically thin people—nothing for people who are just all-around big. Anyway, I wore the jeans out of the store and I’m really impressed with them because they don’t feel new. They’re stone‑washed, which means pre-broken‑in. Who ever heard of such a thing? Everyone knows new jeans are like cardboard; that’s kind of part of their charm. But these ones, in addition to being slightly faded, with the tag above the right rear pocket already soft and unreadable, aren’t stiff at all. In fact, I’d almost swear these are used jeans. But I love them because three months always seemed like too long to have to break in a new pair. I guess over the last 140 years the Levi‑Strauss company has actually made some technological advances.

July 30, 1990

Concerning that missing invoice for the 3,000 gizmotrons . . . c’mon, you remember me, your old friend from Colorado? Remember, the really skinny guy who used to eat your family out of house and home? Ah, now you remember. Gosh, it’s been so long since I’ve written you that I almost forgot your address. I should include a disclaimer with my letters: “Please allow four to six years for delivery.” Anyhow, sorry for not keeping in touch. Let me catch you up on what I’ve been up to for the last two years. There was mainly a lot of hanging out and racing bikes and wasting time with friends. Oh, yeah, I also recall there were some college courses. (I guess this girl ruined me, too, but it wasn’t anything serious. She was easily replaced by a couple other girls who also ruined me.) Now I’ve moved to the Bay Area and, facing unemployment (not for the first time), I am trying to get temp work which means basically hanging around hoping the phone rings. For the last hour I’ve been trying to fix a typewriter cassette ribbon that had stopped working. I bought several of them at once, and they’re all defective, so I decided I’d better figure out how to fix them. As soon as I pried open the casing all these springs came flying out like a jack‑in‑the‑box or one of those cans that snakes jump out of. Well. I guess that’s about it. Write me back and let me know what you’re up to. For now, I’m going to sign off by quoting my old roommate: later days and better lays! (Disclaimer: I am quoting him ironically.)

November 1, 1990

I just opened a letter from the phone company stating that my service will be disconnected unless they receive payment by November 2. That does not give me much time to act. I will have to call first thing in the morning and give them Pathetic Excuse #27: “I just stumbled across my payment envelope—my stupid roommate forgot to drop it in the mail. Can I have a one-week extension?” I once got a whole month of extensions, for excuses ranging from “I didn’t get my financial aid” to “I ran out of checks.” Of course, doing business over the phone isn’t always so easy. Once I had to get out of this travel club (which I joined to get the free Walkman), but I failed several times to cancel because for every excuse I’d give (e.g., “I just don’t travel that much”) they have some pat answer I couldn’t recover from. It’s like they always do their homework and I never did. So finally I got a bit smarter about it: I called up and said, “I was just put on probation for a year and can’t leave the state,” to which the woman replied, “Yes, Mr. Albert, but . . . oh, wait … gosh, I’m sorry. I’ll refund your membership fee immediately.”

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Old Yarn - The Cinelli Jumpsuit

Introduction

What do I mean “old yarn”? Well, I thought about using “spun yarn” in the title but that phrase has been taken and I don’t want to confuse the search engines. What I mean is a story that would be from my archives, except I’ve never written it down before. It seems as though I have enough good old yarns, I might as well write them up, and where better to put them but albertnet? (Isn’t it odd, by the way, that “write it down” and “write it up” mean the same thing?) So here is the first of what may become many old stories I’ll post here.

Cinelli jumpsuit

A cycling pal was in Italy recently and emailed our club a photo of a cool t-shirt he found at a bike shop, featuring the word “ciao” with its first letter being the classic winged “c” from the Cinelli logo. (I had a Cinelli bicycle for a while but that’s another story.) This photo got the team chattering, of course, and another pal posted a photo of his niece rocking a sweet tomato-red Cinelli jumpsuit.

I myself have a similar Cinelli jumpsuit in canary yellow, and sent around this old video of it to the team:

It’s been a while since I wore that jumpsuit, but I’ve got some fond memories of it, and you’re in luck: I’m going to share them here. (If that doesn’t seem like luck to you, click here.)

I bought the jumpsuit wholesale when I was working at the High Wheeler (aka Thigh Feeler) bike shop in Boulder, Colorado in 1989. The head mechanic, JB, had one, and as soon as my brothers and I saw it we had to have them, too. (I worked there with my oldest brothers, twins B— and G—, following in the footsteps of our brother M— who’d paved the way years before.) Summer in Boulder is hot, and the lightweight cotton was nice and breathable, but obviously that was just gravy … the real point of the jumpsuits was how awesome they looked, if you didn’t mind certain people thinking you were a complete idiot. That wasn’t much of a problem; at the Thigh Feeler, we mechanics weren’t allowed on the sales floor and in fact were encouraged to enter the store through the alley out back. We in turn tried but failed to ban the salespeople (whom we called “retail scum”) from the workshop area, where they tended to borrow but not return our tools. It was damned unfair.

I suppose part of the flair of rocking the jumpsuit is that it showed you weren’t scared of getting it dirty from greasy bike parts (vs. wearing the standard-issue shop apron). I thought frequently of the line in the classic cycling documentary “Stars & Water Carriers” (at least, I think that’s the movie) where someone says, “The Italian mechanics are so slick, they wear silk shirts.” To complete my look—and because my hair was so long it kept getting in my face—I wore a bright red bandanna with the jumpsuit. Of course, in Boulder when I’d venture out for my lunch break nobody really noticed my attire anyway, as Boulder had all kinds of exotic birds already.

(According to Thigh Feeler lore, when it got really hot some mechanics, possibly including the three Albert boys or perhaps them specifically, worked wearing absolutely nothing but an apron and shoes. I’m not going to say this legend is true, but I’m not saying it isn’t.)

When I moved to California for college of course I brought the jumpsuit, though I didn’t have much occasion to wear it. As a student at UC Santa Barbara, I worked at the Associated Students Bike Shop, but only for very short shifts arranged around my classes, and there wasn’t time to go home and change. I didn’t suppose it would be a good look for a college kid anyway, especially one like myself who was hoping to attract the ladies.

The AS Bike Shop was actually a very good place to be if you were looking for ways to chat up pretty young things, because helping customers fix their own bikes was actually part of our job. Not surprisingly, the guys never asked for help because they were too proud, but the girls often did. And they were invariably pretty. What’s more, almost all their bikes were cheap beach cruisers so the repairs were easy. One dazzling blonde brought her bike in one day and said, “Oh my god, the tire is completely flat!” I replied, “Gosh, that’s too bad. If it were just kinda flat that’d be better, because we charge by the PSI.” She said, “Oh, no! What’s a PSI?”

So what does this have to do with the Cinelli jumpsuit? Hold tight, I’m getting there. There was a supervisor on staff named Willie, who was an older guy who, it was said, had done a bit too much acid in the ‘60s. He was generally fairly grumpy, particularly (it seemed) with me, because he said I spent too much time with the coeds. I would remind him that it’s my job, and these tricky beach cruiser repairs take as long as they take, especially when a total novice is receiving patient instruction. Willie and I would go around and around on this but got nowhere, as the real issue was unspoken: he was apparently discouraged from instructing the customers himself; perhaps that opportunity was supposed to be part of the student employee experience.

The other thing Willie didn’t like about me is how I tended to squeeze in short shifts between classes. Truth be told, I didn’t have enough hours, or a high enough wage, to really earn much money at the shop. This was supposed to be a work-study job where the shop paid half my wage and the university the other half, but I didn’t qualify for work-study. My dad made too much money, you see, and declared me on his income taxes (thinking he was some kind of wise guy, since I’d lived with my mom after their divorce). So I was making half what I should have at that shop, barely over minimum wage. I mainly worked there so I could buy my bike parts wholesale (though factually the cute coeds did factor in as well). The short shifts were a problem because, being a more seasoned mechanic than most, I took on the more complicated repairs, but often didn’t have time to finish them. “Sorry, Willie, I gotta get to class!” I’d say cheerfully. Nobody likes taking over a tricky repair midway, least of all a tired-out guy like Willie, but it was what it was. One day, as I abruptly abandoned a repair, he grabbed the rag off my bench and gave it a vigorous, angry shake, only to discover that the rag was where I’d put all the eighth-inch ball bearings of the headset I was repacking. The bearings flew everywhere and I couldn’t help but laugh.

When it came to what Willie took as my poor job performance, he didn’t have much recourse because I was on great terms with the manager and the school administration. The manager liked me due to what modern corporate America calls “affinity bias”—we were both from Boulder. He’s the one who bent the rules in hiring me in the first place. The school administrator liked me for a similarly non-work-related reason. We were required to submit a daily report with our hours and a description of what we were working on. The answer—“fixing bikes”—was just too boring for me, but I was unable to wiggle out of submitting the reports. So I just made up something inane every day, according to my whim. “Cultivating raisins,” I’d write, or “Stroking my ego.” One day the administrator phoned me up and drew my attention to my highly unorthodox reports. “Am I in trouble?” I asked. She replied, “No, not at all, I just wanted to tell you to keep ‘em coming! My job is really boring and your reports are the highlight of my day.”

So what does all this have to do with the Cinelli jumpsuit? Hang on, I’m getting to that. So, every year our cycling team put on a race weekend, including a criterium on campus. The riders (when not racing) had to help in various capacities, and the AS Bike Shop chipped in, and I volunteered to help Willie with the pre-race bike inspections. The main thing we checked was that the tires were glued on properly. Most racers back then used tubulars, aka sew-up tires, which didn’t have a wire bead that hooked into the rim, but were rather glued on to the rim with this messy cement, and it was hard to get right. An improperly glued tire could roll right off the rim during hard cornering, which almost always caused a crash and frequently a pile-up. So we’d try to roll the tires off with our hands during the inspection; if we could, the bike wasn’t safe to race, and the rider was basically screwed because he’d have just a few minutes to try to find another wheel to put on his bike. Most guys got really pissed off about this, but Willie and I backed each other up. “Hey man, this guy did you a favor,” we’d say. “Better you flunk the bike inspection than cause a big crash.”

Willie seemed to really relish flunking bikes. He even wore gloves, to increase his chances of successfully rolling tires. When a wheel/tire passed inspection, we’d stick a colored sticker on the rim to indicate it was race-ready. (The color wasn’t determined until the day of the race, so riders couldn’t cheat and bring their own stickers.) Every time we flunked a bike, we’d put a sticker on Willie’s wheel truing stand, like a victory marking on the fuselage of a fighter plane. Our cooperation during the bike inspection marked the best we’d ever gotten along.

And that, finally, is where the Cinelli jumpsuit comes in. Here I must confess I’m a bit hazy on the details … either I showed up wearing it and Willie looked so totally envious that I rode back home, changed, and brought it back for him to wear; or, perhaps I just figured he’d enjoy wearing it even more than I would and brought it just for him. Suffice to say, he got to wear the jumpsuit. He had kinda long, scraggly hair, a big moustache, and wire-rimmed glasses, and those features—along with his zany personality—made the jumpsuit a perfect fit. He was so stoked to be sporting it.

Well, the next year, a day or two before the annual criterium, I was working away at the shop and Willie came over and—without the normal brash, tetchy tone he used for nagging me about the coeds—he said, “Hey, um, you’re working bike check with me at the race, right?” I assured him I would be. “So, yeah, well, I was wondering if, uh, well, like last year, if you could—”

“Sure,” I interrupted him. “I’ll bring the jumpsuit for you.” He grinned hugely (a rare sight, to be sure), and the next day he again enjoyed rocking the jumpsuit at the race, where we added many more stickers to his truing stand. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he hassled me less at work after that … but actually, when I really think back, it was no different. He was still a pretty grumpy guy.

During my second year at UCSB, I applied to transfer to UC Berkeley and was accepted. That June, after my last final exam, I made a final visit to the AS Bike Shop. “Done with your last final, huh?” Willie said. “That calls for a beer!” As he opened the mini-fridge he remembered I was transferring and said, “Wait, this was your last final ever here, right? That calls for champagne!” I kid you not, he had a bottle chilled, and popped it open. There weren’t too many guys at the shop at that moment, so I ended up drinking a fair bit of it. And then I realized, “Oh, shit! I’m supposed to meet the guys to go ride!” I raced home, changed, and met a few of my teammates for an 80-mile road ride. The first 15 miles or so were just awful, trying to get my rubbery legs and buggered motor skills to cooperate. Then my body seemed to burn through the alcohol, and everything was just fine. Kind of odd, that.

Well, I moved away, up to Berkeley, where I got a proper bike shop job, with real pay and real hours (due to the higher cost of living in the Bay Area). I wasn’t teaching the art of bike repair to customers anymore, so it wasn’t as much fun, but it paid the bills. I was still racing, now for the Cal team, and in the spring we headed down to do the races at UC Santa Barbara. Obviously I wasn’t on the hook for helping with bike checks anymore, but nevertheless I headed over first thing to say hi to Willie. He seemed legitimately glad to see me, asked how I liked Berkeley, etc. Then his expression changed and he said, “Hey, I gotta ask you something. By any chance, did you … did you—”

“Yeah, Willie,” I said. “I brought the jumpsuit.”

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume X

Introduction

This is the tenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, and Volume IX is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

As with the last few installments, these are taken from ancient emails, back when I archived them as simple text files in the mistaken belief I’d be able to keep up with the practice. It didn’t last long, but has yielded some fun finds from a bygone era. I wrote all these when I was living in San Francisco, before moving to the burbs and becoming a parent.

December 26, 1994

[Having recently finished a 9-month bike tour] I’m still interviewing for a proper corporate-type job. In the meantime I’ve been working odd shifts at the bike shop in Berkeley, just to feel like I’m not a totally hopeless unemployed person. It’s a pretty ridiculous commute, first biking up and over California Street which has got to be at least a 15% grade, and then all the way under the bay on the Bart, for the typically paltry pay you get at a bike shop. Still, it’s diverting and often fun. For example, on Christmas Eve, a bike builder named Daniel, who has been on suspension without pay until further notice for sloppy work, brought in a 12-pack of Heineken, probably as a brown-nosing move. We threw it in the fridge, and brainstormed ways to get the owner, M—, to let us drink them on the job. M— was in a holiday mood, which was good; earlier, I’d “reminded” him of a policy of always buying lunch for members of the staff who wore staff t-shirts on Christmas Eve, and he went along with it. Well, by mid-afternoon the mad Christmas crowds were getting to me and the boys, and I proposed to M— the idea of discreet alcohol consumption to carry us through. M— said, “What, there’s beers!? Cool, gimme one.” Alas, it appeared we’d have no way to open them, lacking a bottle opener, but I grabbed a Maillard Helicomatic lock-ring tool and it worked great. In fact, it soon dawned on me that one half of the tool does the lock-ring, and the other is in fact nothing else but a bottle opener. You gotta love the French. Well, M— proceeded to walk out on the sales floor, beer in hand, and sell a bike. Needless to say it was a free-for-all after that.

January 1, 1995

I guess I forgot to give you my (kinda) new street address: it’s below. I had some fun moving in here. Our street is fairly flat, but our-cross street, Filbert, is crazy steep. They don’t call our neighborhood Russian Hill for nothing; our hills are as oppressive as Russia herself. Trucks and tour buses are prohibited on Filbert but that didn’t stop me from driving up it in the 14-foot U-Haul I rented. Its diesel engine was taxed to the limit, and I had this breathtaking, terrifying, yet oddly giddy feeling of impending doom. Halfway up—and too late to turn around—my inner ear started giving me (non-verbal) warning messages that the truck was about to pitch over backwards and tumble down the hill, end over end. It was such a fearsome feat that I almost got an erection. I held my breath and reassured myself with the fact that this time, I’d bought the full insurance. Anyhow, I made it over, down the other side on compression (the engine shrieking like it was gonna throw a rod), and then, as a final flourish, proceeded to parallel-park that baby in one of the toughest neighborhoods for parking in the entire city.

March 13, 1995

I am very gratified to get your response. The kind of honesty I indulged in via my letter to you, calling you out as I did, was admittedly dangerous—the recipient of such a letter can either take the painful, self-effacing route (which you did), or delude himself and continue to hide behind the falsity of his social veneer. This latter type, like a blindfolded tyke who has yet to learn object permanence, will assume that because he can’t see the truth, that it can’t see him. Of course such behavior is completely pathological. Right now I’m thinking of J— S—, whose insatiable desire to be cooler than me back in high school took the form of dissing me, like some kind of human sacrifice to the gods of cool. I thought to myself, “J—, can’t you do better than that? It’s not hard to be cooler than me—why don’t you try to be cooler than somebody who actually is cool? Like the Fonz? I mean, seriously … cooler than me? What kind of ambition is that?” I was originally drawn to J— as a friend, back in elementary school, because he was such a bold, unapologetic nerd. Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Through what he probably thought was a social apotheosis from lowly dork into “happening dude” (his favorite phrase), I witnessed the slow, cancerous death of a personality.

May 2, 1995

Thanks for the warning about the virus! I’ve always wondered whether those anti-virus programs can detect viruses that come over e-mail. Fortunately, almost all my e-mail comes from trusted friends and relatives anyway. I did, however, receive a “junk mail” message at work. I guess business solicitations are frowned upon on the Internet, but on CompuServe [how I get and send e-mail], who knows, maybe anything goes. Anyway, I forwarded your warning message to everybody in my e-mail list (about 20 people).

So, yeah, e-mail sure is cool. It’s been wonderful to be able to write my brother Geoff without waiting for the normal three weeks or so it takes the postal service to carry physical mail to the Netherlands. Maybe I’ll get a sound card for my PC and record my actual voice, and send the recording as a binary file; Geoff could hear a reasonable computer facsimile of my voice on the other end! Of course that would be more of a parlor trick than anything useful. You know, the strangest thing about e-mail is that my dad, who by all means ought to be a master of this technology, has not actually joined up. And yet he has the computer, and the mind, for it. Bizarre.

August 6, 1995

You know what? Every time I make my Mexican rice, I think of the time I made it at your place in NYC, and scorched it. The horror! I am certain that you threw away the leftover rice, because it was, well, inedible. I only hope you didn’t have to throw away the pot since I’d blackened it so badly. I keep thinking about what a disaster that was. I say all this to my shame. I guess what I’m saying is, you should really come out to San Francisco so that I can try again with the rice, and show you that it really is good when the right ingredients and familiar kitchen equipment are on hand. I could send you back with a new pot, even. So if you get the chance, please come. Until then, I suppose you can just curse my name.

October 24, 1995

Using the formula f=mgh, and my stopwatch and altimeter data, I have calculated my power output for the climbs I biked up today: over a period of 16:30, I averaged 0.37 horsepower. But what does that mean? Does it mean I have a third of the strength of a horse? Well, not really; I don’t think horsepower applies to horses in the real world. But we do use horsepower to describe certain things. For example, my output was .0037 times the horsepower of a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, I happen to know. And it would be more than enough to power a Hoover Mighty Might vacuum cleaner. If that’s not interesting to you, consider that 0.37 horsepower translates into 272 watts. That tells us my output is enough to power one of our chandeliers and a desk lamp.

November 1, 1995

Why yes, I’ve been to House of Nanking many times, and thanks for asking. I guess I can’t really recall what my favorite dishes are there, as I try to mix it up each time. Until recently, my strategy was to spend my time in line asking everybody else what they usually get. But the last time, I was in the mood for chow fun and asked the waiter, who is also the owner, if they had it. (In my experience, you can ask for just about anything, including chili mac, at a Chinese restaurant and they’ll have it, even if it’s not on the menu. Not that I have ever actually asked for chili mac. I’m just sayin’.) Well, the owner looked at me as if I were some kind of uncultured rube (which I may well be). “No, chow fun is white-man food!” he laughed. “This your first time here?” I said, “Uh … no.” He nodded and said, “I’ll set you up.” What then transpired you can well imagine, as you described your own Nanking dining experience so well in your last epistle … I need say nothing more. I love that place. It’s always worth the wait. I like the strange vegetables that they use—yams, for example. Totally unique (plus I normally hate yams). As far as the place being greasy, sure, it’s greasy, as Chinese food tends to be, but compared to most places, it goes down (and stays down) pretty darn well. Man. Now I can’t get that place off my mind.

August 27, 1996

How cool, I just figured out how to hook the CD-ROM in my computer into my boom box. It works great—so it looks like I bought computer speakers for nothing. Oh well. Now I can play CDs, which I never could before. Only problem is, I only own two CDs and they were both freebies that E— got from her work. I guess I could check out CDs from the library and tape them. Or of course I could do like everyone else and just go to the record store and buy music, but E— and I are trying to save up for a house one day, which is no easy feat in this area. We looked at a 2-bedroom condo a few doors down and it’s $250,000! There are 1-bedroom condos on top of Russian Hill for $1 million … as if! Sausalito is probably only slightly cheaper than San Francisco, and we’d have to pay $3 a day to commute in over the Golden Gate Bridge (not to mention fighting the traffic … no thanks). So we have to be pretty frugal while we figure out where, one day, we might be able to afford a place.

December 2, 1996

Just had the stomach flu. As if in some awful parody of the three-squares-a-day rule, I deposited my Thanksgiving dinner, in three installments, into the toilet (out the front end). Damn!

December 23, 1996

In reply to your question:

>>You’re set in Internet EtheReal Estate, hottest property going 
>>(the new frontier). But still one question: where do you put 
>>the relatives when they come to visit?

Well, it’s really pretty BASIC. First, I should say that my family members aren’t exactly queuing up to visit me. But when one or two of these characters feels the need to offload, I’m happy to let them nest in any free partition in my home. I help download their luggage (we have a little cache to store any valuables they might have). If they stay the night, I have a strange kind of cot I fashioned out of a kind of braided fiber (a web, you might say) that I’ve stretched over a mainframe. I have a nice spreadsheet for the cot, and some other soft wares, to make guests as comfortable as possible. Usually I keep the bedding compressed, but sometimes I set it up just for CIX and floppy down on it myself.

I’d really like to keep my domain open, but I normally limit it to friends and family. I mean, entertaining is a real effort for me—I guess I’m just not a natural-born server. Multi-tasking is hard for me so I just can’t monitor everyone all the time. I struggle to be a good host sometimes, and some guests I don’t like the slightest bit. Most are basically OK, but many just don’t observe the proper protocol. I can handle it if they’re not PC, but I won’t tolerate bad language. In fact, the next time I get a cursor, he’d better be ready to run, because I swear I’ll boot him!

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume VI

Introduction

This is the sixth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, and Volume V is here. But the different volumes have nothing to do with one another.

Yes, it’s another slow news day. So, taking a cue from writers like David Sedaris and Lydia Davis, I’m assembling and posting some excerpts from some old letters. If I too were a famous writer, these micro-dispatches could be gathered into a handsome printed volume sold in bookstores everywhere (i.e., I could basically print my own money). Instead, since I’m an unsung blogger, you can read them for free!

These ones were all written while I was a student at Berkeley.

October 26, 1990

My schedule is so weird, I have to do my cycling indoors sometimes, even when the weather is great. I don’t ride my rollers in the basement laundry room anymore, though. Here’s why. They have this timer knob hooked up to the overhead light, to keep it from being left on. I was riding my rollers in there in the pre-dawn hours before work, and gave no thought to the timer. So I was riding along and suddenly there was this loud “DING!” and the lights went out. I crashed instantaneously. My Walkman went sailing across the room and broke into like three pieces. So now I’m keeping the rollers in the apartment and riding them there. I have this headwind accessory that makes them harder than actual riding. Good complement to all the hills around here.

February 12, 1991

I suddenly find myself in the terrifying position of going head-to-head with the most depraved, cruel band of thugs the free world has ever known. These miscreants have no regard for peace of mind; they loot solace and tranquility like a roadside gas station or liquor store. Meet Mr. First‑and‑Last‑Month Rent: wanted in six states for Financial Burden with Intent to Ruin. Mr. Damage Deposit: known to be armed and dangerous, wanted by federal authorities for Monetary Assault on a College Student. A recent stakeout found that these two are operating with an accomplice: Kid Tuition and his gang, the Three Installments. What could all this mean? Only one thing: I’m laying it all on the line by finding a new apartment. Which means raising a lot of cash in a hurry. Got any quasi-legal, or (what the hell) totally illegal hustles you can bring me in on?

July 16, 1991

Our local sales tax has been raised to 8.25%, and extended to cover snack foods. This is interesting: candy bars and potato chips are taxed, while fresh produce and wheat flour are not. It gets complicated: all crackers are taxed, except Saltines. Popped popcorn is taxed, but not un-popped. (Do you get a rebate on the un-popped “old maids” in the popped popcorn?) At the bike shop [where I work] these items present some complications. Powerbars, for example, contain 100% of the U.S. R.D.A. of most vitamins and minerals, and have only a gram of fat: hardly typical snack food. Yet, they still don’t really qualify as grocery. So today, in my capacity as shop manager, I put the following notice on the Powerbar display:

DEAR CUSTOMERS:

Recently enacted tax legislation requires us to charge the new tax rate (8.25%) on all snack foods. Since Powerbars and XL 40 bars are “great anytime as a snack” they are now taxable items. But since Exceed High Carbohydrate Source “supplies as much carbohydrate as 6 cups enriched spaghetti, 8 medium sized baked potatoes, or 11 slices of white bread,” it qualifies as a grocery item and is therefore not taxed.

September 19, 1991

Here is the opening passage of the article I was supposed to have read for today for my Honors English seminar: 

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural or structuralist thought to reduce or to suspect.

Keeping in mind that the opening sentence is supposed to lure the reader into further study, I find this beginning atrocious. But amazingly, it gets worse:

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as the episteme—that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy—and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.

For me to be reading this might suggest that I’m some kind of elite student who can grasp really complex ideas. But the sad truth of the matter is that I am no better equipped to handle this than you are. Probably less equipped, actually, given my youth and naiveté. This essay rages on for twenty-six pages, getting increasingly obtuse, and I never made it past the first five pages, with zero percent comprehension. Thus in one day I have fallen hopelessly behind, since the rest of the reading for this course (one such essay per class day) is doubtless based on this foundational essay.

So I walked into class this morning very ill prepared, and thought to myself, “Self, don’t despair, the rest of the class is probably as overwhelmed as I am.” This day I happened to be early, for—having given up my attempt to read the essay—I had nothing better to do than to make a big breakfast and leave for school well ahead of time. I ask the first fellow student I saw what he thought of the essay. “I really enjoyed it, how about you?” he said, apparently with perfect sincerity. I told him that to be perfectly honest, I had found it somewhat difficult. He frowned, as if surprised to hear that, and said, “I found it similar to Beckett, didn’t you?” I vaguely remember a Sir Thomas Becket who wrote some religious thing, maybe about people flogging themselves or something, but couldn’t make a connection. [I realized weeks after writing this my classmate meant Samuel Beckett.]

I spent the class period realizing that for perhaps the first time, I’m hopelessly outclassed by my peers. I start to fret and sweat, it gets hot, I can’t get away, the prof rolls, I’m popped. How’d I get into this spot? I played myself. But why am I facing off against this fierce foe? The faculty’s fault? No. Nobody signed me up for the course; nobody enrolled me by force. I thought I that I could excel at this big school? Fool. I played myself. [Apologies to Ice-T.]

February 27, 1992

I was studying yesterday in Sproul plaza, sitting on a bench, and an old man came and sat down by me, with nothing to occupy him but people watching. Eventually we had some conversation: he’s 85 years old (didn’t look it!) and from Russia. He didn’t seem to recognize Lolita, which I was reading, and was surprised at my choice of the English major, having studied engineering himself. He says in Russia, those with a college degree are admitted to a special grocery store that those without a degree are not. Same prices in the alumni-only store, but much vaster variety and availability of goods. He didn’t say how the store vets these people, and I didn’t ask.

During the big rains we had a week or so ago, I parked my bike under the bridge between LeConte Hall and Birge Hall, just east of Sather Tower, before going into Doe Library (through the back entrance, as a construction project has blocked the front and snarled most paths through campus). It wasn’t raining that afternoon but my precaution was well taken: when I finally left the library in the late evening, the rain had started up again. Groggy from my scholastic haze, I was shocked to find that nature and weather and the out-of-doors had all continued without me. Riding down Bancroft, I was impressed by the electrifying effect the rain had: extra-shiny reflections on the cars, and extra-black asphalt with a neon-like red reflections of taillights.

In five minutes I’ll leave go to tutor at Malcolm X school. My student, “Eddie,” is trying to imitate my out-loud reading by going as fast as he can. This means the words come out at the same pace as before, but with a tone of frantic urgency and almost no pause between words. I sometimes worry that he isn’t retaining what he has read, but last week we worked together on a book report and I found he’s getting most of it. His dopey teacher had acted like he’s a hopeless case, totally checked out, etc. but I find he works pretty hard if someone’s around to help him focus.

May 25, 1992

Doesn’t it piss you off when you get a defective band-aid? At the bike shop we have Curad. As you know, these are not the band-aids we grew up with, and I find myself somewhat hostile to them. Their lack of quality control is one of the small but nagging travesties that plague my employment at the shop. I would say about one in three Curad band-aids is defective. The little sanitary cotton pad is skewed, and sometimes has missed the center of the adhesive portion, so you get just a little triangle of pad, and the rest is free to stick to the wound. I really can’t believe the bandaging public tolerates Curads at all. At home I use Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid brand. This becomes expensive since I’m constantly washing dishes or taking my contact lenses out or something. I’m tempted to just leave the wet band-aids on and let them dry out, but I called Johnson & Johnson on their toll free number and asked about this. “You know how the box says they’re waterproof?” I asked. “Oh, yes, they certainly are,” said the lady earnestly, in her charming southern accent. “Well, does that mean I don’t need to change them once they’re wet?” I asked. “Oh, no, you should always replace them—that’s the only way to prevent bacteria from infecting the wound,” she replied. Puzzled, I asked, “Then what’s the benefit of their being waterproof?” A long pause. Finally she said, “Well, if you’re swimming you won’t lose them in the pool. And, they won’t go down the drain.”

September 12, 1992

I have purchased Lila - An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig, author of the classic Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hope this second book is good, but I have little faith that it’ll live up to its predecessor. I really loved the Motorcycle book, but the really lame Epilogue, which Pirsig attached to it like a decade later, irritated me so much that I tore it out of the book. This act was, I’ll confess, tantamount to destroying knowledge and human thought itself. Even worse, it loosened the cheap glue binding on the whole book, so that eventually all the pages started falling out—a disaster, especially since this is the one book I really wanted to pass around among my friends. It’s a really shoddy paperback to begin with, from the imprint “BANTAM NEW AGE BOOKS: A Search for Meaning, Growth, and Change.” Other Bantam New Age editions include Ecotopia, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, and The Complete Crystal Guidebook. What bothers me isn’t so much the nature of these books by themselves—although that alone is annoying—but rather the very idea that Bantam could integrate so many conflicting and discrete books into a single group, as if they could all be united as life philosophies. Like somebody is going to just go right on down the list, finding Meaning, Growth, and Change in every one of these. It’s tempting to think that when Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he would have winced at having his work co-opted into the Bantam New Age menagerie. But actually, the epilogue that he added later totally smacked of the easy, wildly speculative, faux-spiritual sentimentalism that the “NEW AGE BOOKS” line can be presumed to have. Who knows, maybe Pirsig got cocky; after all, his book sold like crazy and impressed a lot of people, many for perhaps the wrong reasons. Anyway, I still have the decrepit Motorcycle paperback, and without the Epilogue it is a work of pure genius. I’ll let you know how Lila ends up going.

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