Why Is Gratitude So Difficult?

Introduction

Right off the bat, I get that the title of this post probably annoys you. I’m surprised you’re even here, honestly. Something about having our capacity for gratitude challenged is just off-putting. You may well ask, who am I to position myself as some kind of authority on this?

Who am I?

I’ll freely acknowledge that in terms of managing to feel grateful, I’ve got it pretty easy, being a homeowner in the Bay Area. Worldwide, the median annual income (adjusted for local buying power) is about $5,000-$6,000 a year; something like 93-95% of the population lacks a college degree; about 26% lack safe drinking water. Compared to so many, I’ve had a very charmed life, and what suffering I do experience (e.g., via cycling) is voluntarily self-inflected, which seems the height of privilege. That said, in my  experience gratitude doesn’t always track along with good fortune, and even in my relatively upscale community I don’t have to look far to find people who are anxious or uptight.

[Art by Copilot, to try it out.] 

An example

Here is my poster child for the capacity to be tetchy or ill at ease despite advantageous circumstances. Many years ago, I won an award at work that came with a cash bonus. One of my colleagues, though he seemed happy for me, confided that his wife was pretty upset, feeling like he should have won the award. On what grounds she supposed this, being entirely absent from our workplace, I have no idea. Nevertheless, I wanted to make things right, and invited my colleague and his wife to join my wife and me at Chez Panisse, one of the fanciest restaurants in the Bay Area, on me. My colleague reciprocated by bringing a really nice bottle of wine. As the waiter fussed over the bottle, and employed a strange decanter designed to optimize it somehow, and during the long process of letting the wine breathe etc., it looked like a truly splendid evening was unfolding … but my friend’s wife was getting increasingly agitated. The problem was, she admitted, she was worried about the wine. But she didn’t really elaborate. What was this worry? Worried she wouldn’t like it? Worried that it wouldn’t live up to everyone’s expectations? Worried that everyone would like it but her? Whether she feared the wine might reflect badly on her and her husband, or threaten her epicurean cred, or she just hated to be disappointed, or some combination of these and/or something else entirely, I have no idea. But the magnificent wine had practically become a curse.

So what?

This post explores why it’s hard to focus on the positive in our lives. It turns out there are several tangible reasons that we don’t, supported by science and psychology. I’ll describe these, and then explore what we might do about it.

Reason  #1: negativity bias

If our view of the world tends to be less than rosy at times, we can somewhat blame human nature, or to be more specific, the way our species has evolved. In the essay “Negativity bias,” in the great essay collection This Idea Is Brilliant, the columnist Michael Shermer investigates how the negative packs a bigger punch. Here are a few of his examples: negative stimuli command more attention than positive; pain feels worse than no pain feels good; there are more ways to fail than succeed. He provides this theory:

Why is negativity stronger than positivity? Evolution. In the environment of our evolutionary ancestry, there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction to negative events. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good, then taking a gamble to improve them a little was not seen as worth the risk.

Obviously, biological evolution cannot keep up with societal progress. Most of us don’t live among warring tribes anymore (bickering political parties, sure, but nobody is sacking our village). It’s up to us to challenge our negative impulses, and to remind ourselves how much progress has been made and how different modern life is than the human experience over the last 300,000 years. But it doesn’t appear we’re very good at transcending our evolutionary instincts.

Reason #2: relative deprivation

Our feelings of satisfaction and happiness don’t really depend on our absolute situation—that is, whether we have basic needs met like food, shelter, and safety. As everyone knows, we evaluate ourselves and our lives based on how we’re doing compared to our neighbor. In general we don’t have to look very far to see people in our communities with nicer stuff, and coworkers who outrank us. The temptation to feel relatively deprived is always with us, and it can be hard to get over it. In the essay “Relative Deprivation” (also in This Idea Is Brilliant), Kurt Gray, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, explains this tendency:

The yearning for relative status seems irrational, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We evolved in small groups where relative status determined everything, including how much you could eat and whether you could procreate. Although most Americans can now eat and procreate adequately, we haven’t lost that gnawing sensitivity to status. If anything, our relative status is now more important. Because our basic needs are met, we have a hard time determining whether we’re doing well, so we judge ourselves based on our place in the hierarchy.

Let’s put together these two human tendencies: negativity and relativity. If we have a biological reflex to judge ourselves vs. our neighbors, that’s bad enough—but because of our negativity bias, we focus on the endless array of seemingly higher status people instead of those beneath us, and moreover instead of appreciating how well we do live and how much we’ve achieved in our own right. To put it more succinctly, we’re negative to begin with and will never lack for ways to feel inferior.

Reason #3: emotion contagion

Once again, I’ll cite an essay in This Idea Is Brilliant. (This book contains 205 brief essays, most of them concerned with scientific concepts pertaining to our daily experience.) June Gruber, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at CU Boulder, in “Emotion Contagion,” explains, “Emotions are contagious. They are rapidly, frequently, and even at times automatically transmitted from one person to the next.” She cites Charles Darwin, who pointed out that this contagion is “fundamental to the survival of humans and nonhumans alike in transmitting vital information among group members,” and points out that it’s “in the service of critical processes such as empathy, social connection, and relationship maintenance between close partners.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, when emotion contagion hops geographies and goes virtual, it is not necessarily in the service of communities anymore, and becomes a less precise social tool. Gruber goes on to say:

Faulty emotion-contagion processes have been linked to affective disturbances. With the rapid proliferation of online social networks as a main forum for emotion expression, we know, too, that emotion contagion can occur without direct interaction between people or when nonverbal emotional cues in the face and body are altogether absent.

What emotions, in our modern smartphone-addled society, would you say are the most likely to spread? I would say envy, pride, and outrage would be in my top five. Sure, some goodwill is shared as well, but remember: we humans have a negativity bias, and a tendency to compare ourselves unfavorably to others … a perfect recipe for feeling bad online. Meanwhile, the algorithms that determine what to show us are geared toward the feelings that are most likely to trigger forwards, comments, etc., so they’re not making any effort to keep things light or positive. Our reactions train the algorithm, and in time it begins to train us, in a cycle of perpetual irritation that doesn’t strike me as conducive to gratitude. Emotion contagion seems to be morphing from a largely healthy community-building trait to a way for tech companies to monetize some of our more annoying tendencies.

I guess I should acknowledge that it’s not just social media at fault here. It’s how we choose to use the Internet, and how we ourselves decide what’s important enough to share. I base this on a cursory examination of my most polemic albertnet posts and which of these have the most page views. Since I don’t imagine all that many people find my posts via Google, most of the traction my posts get is through being forwarded. Here are my top three positive and negative opinion pieces, and the number of page views they’ve notched. Notice how it’s the more negative ones that get forwarded the most:

Positive:

• Election Result: It Will Be OK - 265
• Has Any Good Come From the COVID-19 Pandemic? - 201
• 10 Reasons to Cut Barbie Some Slack - 643

Negative:

• Velominati’s “The Rules” – Brilliance or BS? - 4,145
• The Problem With Soccer - 3,890
• The Case Against Margolis & Liebowitz - 2,088

(Happily, albertnet is not primarily a platform for serious polemics. None of the above is among my top ten posts. Only the first two negative ones are in the top fifteen. None of the others is in the top thirty.)

To make matters worse…

Okay, perhaps you, gentle reader, are not some status-seeking, insecure person who wastes a lot of time on social media and frets over not getting enough likes and comments. You’re the sort of person who looks beyond himself or herself, and worries more about the state of the world and your fellow human. Perhaps you’ve grown frustrated by this essay and how ungenerous my opinion of you seems to be. Well, congratulations: you’re probably in the most difficult position of all.

How’s that? It’s because you may feel a responsibility to educate yourself about what’s going on in the world, and to try to make a difference. And that means you read a lot of news. Unfortunately, the news is not good. I almost wrote “the news right now is not good” but actually, it’s never been good. If it were good, it wouldn’t be news. “EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY” read no headline ever.

We don’t even get the headline “MANY THINGS ARE IMPROVING.” That’s the opposite of news, even if it happens to be true. In his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, a cofounder of Doctors Without Borders, points out that journalism doesn’t exist to document steady progress. It highlights the negative, exacerbating the pessimistic tendencies I’ve already discussed. Consider this observation by Rosling:

       In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine:
       “Flight BAO016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.”
       2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.

I’ve already blogged about our responsibility to defend ourselves from the onslaught of bad news, bitter perspectives, doomscrolling, etc. Now I’d like to address the growing habit of grousing to our friends and family about all that’s wrong with the world. I suppose that we feel as though we’re doing this to be responsible citizens, to show that we care, and to get the word out that we should all be doing something about these problems. But what, as mere citizens, can we do? Let’s be honest with ourselves: is our grousing always (or even usually) in the service of some specific call to action? I doubt it. I think it’s generally a result of—wait for it—1) our negativity bias, and 2) our desire to elevate our relative status by showcasing our excellent knowledge of the issues.

What is to be done?

To address the central question of this post—why gratitude is so difficult—I think we can find a way forward by having more compassion for ourselves in this realm. If you sometimes struggle to feel grateful, it’s not you—it’s us. We’re hardwired for negativity, and for making comparisons with others that often leave us feeling inadequate; meanwhile, modern vectors for emotion contagion exacerbate the problem.  Beyond compassion, let’s consider how to combat this situation and specifically address these three factors.

For this I’ll turn to yet another essayist: Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff. My favorite among his 100 micro-essays is titled “Think of What You Have Instead of What You Want,” and offers this advice:

In over a dozen years as a stress consultant, one of the most pervasive and destructive mental tendencies I’ve seen is that of focusing on what we want instead of what we have. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how much we have; we just keep expanding our list of desires, which guarantees we will remain dissatisfied.

At first blush this seems to be about material possessions, and thus about showing off with, say, a flashy new car to enhance our status. But it’s more than that, because a lot of what we want is for the world to be better, for people to be better, for more social justice, and all kinds of other things that we can never have or at least never bring about. So satisfaction seems impossible if we continue to focus on what we want. Being dissatisfied, we lack gratitude.

So what’s the secret to shifting our focus? As I see it, the critical component of wanting is the human capacity for counterfactuals, which is to say we are very good at imagining a set of circumstances that is different from reality. I mean, sure, my cat can do this, in imagining a full food bowl instead of an empty one, and thus hassles me at mealtime, but this assessment is as unsophisticated as operant conditioning. She feels hunger and knows there’s a way to satisfy it. But she doesn’t dwell on this want; once her belly is full, she’s happy as a clam and goes off to wash and nap. Suffice to say she is not preoccupied with anxious thoughts (have you ever known a cat with insomnia)? But we humans take counterfactuals much further, such that we are constantly—almost as a reflex—measuring the delta between how things are vs. how we think they ought to be.

This continuous assessment  generally does us no good, of course, because it’s informed by our negativity bias and our persistent dread of relative deprivation, and is exacerbated by how enamored our tech-driven society is with data and all the ways it can describe things: how many thumbs-ups, thumbs-downs, likes, re-posts, rankings, ratings, views, impressions, etc. The urge to measure ourselves, our lives, our personas, and our society against some hypothetical perfect version has never been stronger.

Consider dating. You used to meet a single person somewhere somehow, have a reaction to him or her (the real person, not a curated version), and might decide to get to know him or her better, gradually, via a series of dates … a non-targeted exploration. Following this path, you might be surprised to realize you could actually be attracted to a dog person who likes to play cards and eat barbecue, even if you’re a vegan cat person who reads novels. All this is to say, people used to focus on the actual person—i.e., how things are. Online dating, on the other hand, trains people to swiftly evaluate and usually reject an endless stream of candidates based on their profiles—creating a focus on counterfactuals, always imagining a (hypothetically) superior prospect. I suspect (though I’ve never dated online, having met my wife years before the Internet) that online dating is a good example of modern society taking us in the wrong direction—as if evolution hadn’t already caused enough trouble.

To wrap up, I’m proposing that, following Carlson’s “small stuff” advice about focusing on what we have, not what we want, we fight this growing impulse to compare the actual with the ideal. As negatively biased, socially insecure people susceptible to emotion contagion from every corner, we must protect ourselves from the assessment impulse. We need to recognize that negativity is a bias that no longer protects us; that social comparison is bound to cause hard feelings; that a thousand ways to measure something doesn’t always amount to a single good reason do so. So taste the wine with your tongue, not your discernment, and see if you can’t just enjoy it.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

New York City Bagels

Introduction

I think that, in general, New York City is overrated. Probably this is because of cognitive dissonance … the people who live and suffer there need to overrate everything to justify their perseverance. Granted, I’m basing this largely on the testimony of one friend, who grew up there, assumed it was the only place to be, came out to California for vacation, came to his senses, and never went back.

When several people emphatically told me that you couldn’t get a real bagel outside of NYC, I was tempted to ignore them. So often, overzealous opinions like this are an attempt to promote the speaker in some kind of epicurean hierarchy. However, I have also been inclined to trust this assertion, because these were unashamed Californians promoting NYC bagels, and ones whom I respect. So, during a recent business trip, I made a pilgrimage to a highly rated Manhattan bagel joint to see for myself. Read on for my shocking verdict.

But first…

First, let me bag on NYC some more. (This is to establish my cred as a NYC skeptic, and because most of my readers aren’t from NYC and thus might enjoy this criticism for its own sake.) The weather during my visit was perfect … for NYC. Mild, sunny, but a bit muggy, pleasant enough, but it had nothing on our everyday weather in the Bay Area. The people-watching is admittedly great in NYC, but there are far more people than you really need to see. It’s the only place I’ve been to where bad traffic isn’t just a vehicular phenomenon. The sidewalks are absolutely thronged. It’s kind of hard to move.

I went to the best-rated restaurants I could find, by searching on “best restaurant near me” across Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google and seeing what places came up on all three top-ten lists. Generally this meant places with a 30- to 60-minute wait on a weekday evening. First we had New York style pizza that was supposed to be among the best, and it was, well … fine. Good, in fact, but not actually as good as what I can get 0.6 miles from my home. Two appetizers, three drinks, and one pizza between the two of us ran $120. The next dinner was at this Zagat-rated Italian place where the food was decent but unremarkable, for even more money.

In case you want more objective input, neither place had any local beers on draft . The second place had no draft beer at all and nothing local in bottles. Beer at both places was $9 a pop. The emperor is wearing $400 jeans and a $180 t-shirt.

Planning my pilgrimage

Before heading out for bagels on the last morning of my trip, I did some research to find the best place. Here’s what I found. Thrillist, the first hit when I googled “best bagel in nyc,” says Ess-a-Bagel is the best. The next hit, Grubstreet, ranks Utopia Bagels as number one, but that’s way the hell out in Queens. Grubstreet ranks Ess-a-Bagel as 5th best, so I continued investigating that one. Ny.eater.com says Ess-a-Bagel is 3rd best. Foursquare ranks it 4th. Gothamist ranks it 2nd. Yelp is useless here because there’s a place called Best Bagels that outsmarts Yelp’s query engine. (Well played, Best Bagels.) Since Ess-a-Bagel wasn’t terribly far from my hotel, I chose it. Knowing I might face a serious wait once I reached my destination, I wasn’t about to spend more than half an hour walking anywhere.

(Of course New Yorkers could debate the topic of “best bagel in NYC” ad infinitum, and probably get in a fistfight over it, but I figured this collection of ratings—five top-5s—was good enough. If New York bagels are really all that, you should be able to pick a place practically at random and totally score. At least, that’s how it is with taquerias in San Francisco.)

Notwithstanding my skepticism toward all things NYC, I was pretty optimistic that my bagel would be worth the trip. I based this on the glowing praise of New York bagels I’d encountered in The New Yorker, particularly the article “The Magic Bagel” by Calvin Trillin (March 27, 2000). (No, I don’t carry a folded-up copy of this article around in my helmet. I’d merely held a vague recollection that a solid writer had praised NYC bagels. Only just now did I chase down the precise source.)

At the same time, I was prepared for disappointment, based on my fruitless quest to find a good cheesesteak in Philly. I was there for the better part of a week, a couple decades ago, and ate almost nothing but cheesesteaks the whole time in search of a good one. I interviewed cabbies, newsstand guys, and assorted locals for recommendations, but nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. “Yeah, you can find cheesesteaks here,” was the typical response, delivered with about as much enthusiasm as I’d have if a tourist asked me, “Can you get Oreos in Berkeley?” Every cheesesteak I had in Philly was the same: bland spongy white roll without a hint of character, like Wonder bread; greasy ribbons of uniform grey meat; a layer of Velveeta the consistency of duck shit; not a particle of vegetable matter. When I asked about peppers and onions I just got a blank stare. Ditto when I asked about getting any cheese other than Velveeta. It turns out that Philly cheesesteak sandwiches are enjoyable in inverse proportion to their authenticity. If you want a good one, I highly recommend San Francisco. With that in mind, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that the NYC bagel could be equally disappointing.

The one-star reviews of Ess-a-Bagel

Having tentatively settled on Ess-a-Bagel, I perused the one-star reviews. This wasn’t because I actually expected to change my mind (unless I came across a shocker like “this place only has whole-wheat!” or “the bagels are made once a week and come pre-packaged in plastic bags!”). It’s just that I almost can’t resist one-star reviews—they’re a guilty pleasure .

I didn’t find any real jewels among these reviews (most of them were about how rude the staff was, blah blah blah) but a few stood out. One was a long tale of how the reviewer had big important plans and thus placed her order online, only to discover when she arrived that it wasn’t ready yet (imagine!) and then they couldn’t seem to find it, and she waited and waited, and then discovered that her order had been ready for some time but they hadn’t told her, etc. Myself, I really don’t care if a bagel joint is proficient at the Internet ordering game. That’s IT stuff. (I’m sure Chipotle could handle online ordering just fine, but that doesn’t mean they know the first thing about making good burritos.)

Next, a one-star reviewer from Orange County complained, “The decor is horrible.” Décor? Who cares? Honestly, if I discovered that proper bagels had to be dug up from the dirt like potatoes, I wouldn’t care. Then, a reviewer named Kelsea titled her review “Confusing.” I love that. An entire experience distilled to one word. Her review says, “I stayed in the hotel to rest and my husband walked over to the 3rd Ave location.” Resting? Why was she so tired? Could this have compromised her experience? After all, it does take a lot of jaw energy to chew a good bagel. Anyway, what confused her is that her order was wrong. Is that actually confusing? I mean, it happens. Kelsea continued, “I did have a bagel and it was very nice and fluffy on the inside. Unfortunately, they weren't sliced, so we had to scoop the cream cheese onto it.” Um … is your lack of a knife really Ess-a-Bagel’s fault?

The Ess-a-Bagel

Okay, then, on to my own experience. First of all, in the amateur-review spirit of giving all kinds of irrelevant personal information, I must disclose that NYC blocks are really long, like a quarter mile, and I was wearing dress shoes because it’s all I brought on my trip, and after having walked for 3½ hours the evening before (highlight: Central Park has fireflies!), my feet were in a world of hurt. Each step was wince-inducing agony. It was a good half-hour walk. The line wasn’t as bad as all those one-starrers had whined about. But that didn’t matter, because the five-star reviewers had offered a little tip: if you don’t want to wait in line, you can go to the back and buy unsliced bagels, and  little tub of cream cheese, without waiting. (Aside to Kelsea: there are plastic knives there, free for the taking … your husband is just a bonehead.)

Here’s the exterior.

Here is the back counter where you don’t have to wait. 

As you can see, the décor is irrelevant because look at those glorious bagels! And look at the steam coming off that big drum. I have to say, the guy working the counter, Richard, didn’t smile or say a word to me, and that royally pissed me off. The nerve of that guy!

Naw, just kidding … I mean, who cares? I didn’t go there to socialize. I asked for two Everything, two Onion, and two Cinnamon Raisin, and he put them in a bag and handed it to me. How much more complicated does this interaction need to be? Where does customer service come in? What, did the one-star reviewers ask for gluten-free? Did they ask for a taste spoon? Did they ask all kinds of foolish questions, like which bagels had the fewest calories or which ones would appeal to an eight-year-old?

While the cashier rang me up (my order was like $12 with the cream cheese, a bargain), I leaned over the counter to peer into the bakery at a batch of boiled, but not yet baked, bagels. Why have I never gotten to see this before? Fascinating! The unbaked bagels were like little embryos.

Alas, while I was snapping the above photo I completely lost track of my transaction with the cashier, who now said, “Move along, numbnuts.” I won’t knock a single star off my review for that, by the way, because I had it coming: I was holding up the guy behind me. Also, she didn’t really say that. Actually she smiled and said, “You’re all set!”

Amazingly, a little chair and table were available. (In NYC, such simple luxuries are, I’ve found, actually amazing.) I was so relieved not to have to walk all over the city to find a peaceful place to eat. I was feeling kind of rushed, because these bagels were warm. That warmth coming through the bag was tantalizing.

The first bagel I happened to pull out was an Everything. Check this bad boy out.

That’s the underside. I don’t know about you, but I found its appearance pretty thrilling. It helped that this amazing caramelized-onion aroma was coming off of it. Here’s the topside.

Surely there are New Yorkers who would bemoan the size of this bagel, or the shape, or the fact that the hole is practically closed up, but I couldn’t care less. I was practically drooling as I sliced and slathered it.

Then finally—as  I lifted it to my mouth—came the moment of truth.

Here’s where this bagel could suddenly let me down, all the promising early signs notwithstanding. I once drove to every bakery in the vicinity of Columbus, Ohio looking for a decent baguette, and while most could be ruled out through visible inspection alone, one place did have great-looking baguettes. Only when I bit down did I realize this bakery was manned by a bunch of clowns who didn’t know the first thing about baking. Granted, I don’t know the first thing about baking either, but I know what I like. At least, now I do. For years I thought our Bay Area Semifreddi’s baguettes were da bomb, until one day my grocer was out and I tried Acme and realized with a pang that I’d been deluded all along, that this was actually what a baguette should be, how you could hear the quality—that crackling sound as the crust was compressed—before you even finished biting into it. Only when I experienced Acme did I realize Semifreddi’s was like cardboard by comparison. The height of quality cannot be predicted—only recognized after the fact.

Okay. Back to Ess-a-Bagel. What I have to report is that this NYC bagel thing is real, folks. I haven’t had a culinary epiphany of this magnitude since, well, discovering Acme. Chewing my first bite slowly, I set my bagel down and stared at it. My brain struggled to comprehend what it was encountering. “Well,” I said to myself. “It’s certainly the best bagel I’ve ever had.” I took another bite. That initial response really didn’t cover it. This was categorically different from any bagel—in fact, let’s just say it, any so-called bagel—I’d ever had. I ate some more. It was simply remarkable. Every flavor, from the little onion bits to the crystals of salt, was more powerful, more distinct, and better than anything I’d had before. And the texture: oh man. The crust was really chewy, but without being tough. The interior was soft but puffy, like a feather bed. I wasn’t merely chewing this thing; I was plunging into it.

Paradoxically, the pleasure was extremely simple—so much more basic and satisfying than, say, picking at some fussy gourmet thing, some tiny dab of truffle-infused lobster foam emulsion on a shard of tarot chip or whatever. This bagel was like comfort food, but without being lowbrow. It was clearly the result of highly enlightened craftsmanship built on a real understanding of the one right way to make this thing. It was utterly simple and yet unaccountably delicious.

Three bites in, everything fell away except the sensations I was taking in. Well, almost everything. An unrelated thought crept in, an inchoate fear, that something was going to keep me from continuing to enjoy this. It was the panic of an addict whose supply is threatened. I reassured myself that I had a whole bag of these bagels in front of me, a whole tub of cream cheese, and a table to myself, and nothing would stop me from extending this utterly pleasant experience out into the future. Upon having this realization, I started to cry. I’m not just saying my eyes teared up; I mean I was actually crying. Big tears were rolling down my cheeks as I ate.

(Perhaps the great thing about New York City is that everybody leaves you alone. Nobody noticed my absurd behavior; nobody came over and said, “Buddy, are you okay?” I could just keep eating, and keep crying, in peace.)

What was going on? Beats me. It’s not like I’d been a POW for several years, missing my hometown of NYC, who finally got released and headed straight back to the bagel shop I’d been going to for forty years. I was just a newb—but an appreciative one. The pleasure was simply overwhelming. Something about this starchy apogee was flipping switches and throwing levers deep within my brain chemistry, pleasure centers that don’t often get engaged.

I’m not saying that if you head over to Ess-a-Bagel that you, too, will cry over all the bagel-y goodness. I was probably actually crying about something else, perhaps something deep-seated that just needed to be unleashed.( I’ve heard of yoga unlocking people this way.) Whatever the case, it takes a pretty special bagel to do that. I’m now prepared to say it takes a bagel from NYC.

Look, even if you’re not trying to have a gastronomic epiphany or plumb your own emotional depths via starchy indulgence, you should try to get your hands on a New York bagel sometime. They’re really fricking good.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Beer!

Introduction

I got the idea for this post from the co-founder and CEO of Spoon University, which is a website devoted to a) educating college kids about how to “eat healthier,” and b) teaching college kids how to be online journalists. ( All Spoon content is written by students.)  The other day, the Spoon CEO said something like, “We have our most illuminating ‘moments’ when an article is shared widely, which happens when it strikes an emotional cord,” and as an example she cited a popular recent Spoon article about a beer based on Ben & Jerry’s chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream.

I want college kids to love my blog and forward my posts, so I am taking on this subject myself.  Since I’ve already been scooped, I’ll just have to do a better job with this topic than the college kids did.  Watch me try.

The existing literature

I expected the main Spoon article to read like Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, but it was fairly down-to-earth and mostly just covered the basic facts:

• New Belgium Brewing is making a beer “inspired by” Ben & Jerry’s chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream
• This is the second beer New Belgium has produced on this Ben & Jerry’s theme
• They’re donating $50,000 of the proceeds from this new beer to a nonprofit environmental organization called Protect Our Winters

When I researched the topic on mainstream news sites, I really didn’t get any more information—so these Spoon kids seem well on their way to writing like the pros.  All the stories I found read like thinly veiled press releases.  And yet, this very minor news tidbit—another new seasonal beer!—has really generated a lot of press.  How did this indifferently reported story become so popular?  My theory is that people just really, really like beer.

Case in point:  I used my smartphone to photograph a beer recently, and because I’d accidently left Location Services turned on, Google Maps asked if I wanted to share the photo with future users investigating the pizza place where I snapped the photo.  It wasn’t a great photo or anything and didn’t capture the ambience of the place, much less showcase the pizza.  It was just a photo of a glass of beer, for Beck’sting.  But I thought heck, I’ll let Google use it.  They asked for a caption.  The beer was in a glass bearing the name of the pizza place, so after deliberating for 1/100th of a second I posted the caption “Pizza and beer … am I right?”  Amazingly, this photo has had 56 views already, despite the fact that you can easily tell from the thumbnail that it’s an utterly pointless photo. 

So:  beer.  People love to think about it.  Maybe beer + ice cream is some kind of magic pairing, capturing the minds and hearts of college kids everywhere.

What can I add to the coverage?

I will go further than the available news stories on this beer by answering the following questions:

• Does drinking this beer increase one’s sex appeal?
• Is it a good beer?
• Is it a gimmick? 

As luck would have it, I’m traveling on business right now in the very locale where New Belgium is test-marketing this beer.  At an airport bar I ordered it, speaking really loudly so the attractive woman next to me would be sure to hear my bold and interesting choice.  I took a sip, and then waited.  I expected the woman next to me to say, “Well … how is it?”

After a minute or so she hadn’t said anything.  Had she not heard my daring, planet-saving order?  At this point the beer was two-thirds gone so I figured I better step up my game before it was too late.  “Hi,” I said to the woman.  This utterance didn’t come out very loud for some reason.  In fact it came out as kind of a high-pitched croak.  (Chocolate-chip-cookie-dough beer is only about 6% alcohol so it wasn’t exactly liquid courage, and I’m a shy person.)  The woman just stared at me like I was her dog and had just made a mess on the carpet.  But I wasn’t about to give up.  Summoning all my verve, I said, “Airports and beer … am I right?”  At this, the woman abruptly got up and walked away, leaving half her cocktail behind.

Conclusion:  drinking this seasonal ale does not increase one’s sex appeal.

So how was the beer itself?  Well, let me preface my commentary here by saying I don’t consider myself an expert on beer.  Honestly, I bristle at the very idea of a beer expert.  I would hate for beer drinkers to end up sounding like wine aficionados, with all their fancy language.  Unfortunately, this may already be happening. 

Official reviews of the last Ben & Jerry’s-themed beer

Consider the following highlights from the amateur reviews on beeradvocate.com for last year’s New Belgium Ben & Jerry’s-themed seasonal beer, Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale.  (Each bullet is from a different reviewer.) 

• No idea why this needed salt added
• I can't pick up on any caramel or certainly not salt
• There is some overly sweet caramel
• A little bit of sweetness
• Mostly sweet
• Despite the name, this is not sweet
• I was surprised at the lack of sweetness
• Smelled fine, but the taste was sweet without much balance
• Taste about matches the smell
• [Smell is] a barely-there whiff of metal and vague creaminess. The taste has more going for it—heavy notes of homemade vanilla vodka, macadamia nut, and cocoa butter
• Light brown, amber hues
• Clear amber brown
• Clear reddish brown
• Chestnut/mahogany brown
• Translucent brown
• It's damn near black and almost completely opaque
• Definitely tastes like a brownie
• The beer has a strong brownie flavor
• You could say there is a slight brownie flavor
• Not really a caramel brownie flavor
• Honestly, if I didn't know it was supposed to taste like salted caramel brownie ice cream, I would have thought it was just a standard brown ale 

Okay, nobody agrees on whether or not it’s salty; whether or not it’s sweet; whether or not the taste matches the smell; whether or not it tastes like a brownie. And nobody can even agree on the color. What the hell good are these beer people?

Thus emboldened by the state of the art in beer-blathering, here is my experience drinking the new flavor, Ben & Jerry’s-inspired chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ale.

My taste test

I did not start with the beer at 48 degrees, as one reviewer thoughtfully did.  This was an airport bar, remember, where all the beer is near-frigid.  But you know, had I been pouring this at home, I’m not sure what I’d have done.  On the one hand, it’s inspired by an ice cream, so perhaps it should be drunk chilled.  On the other hand, it’s kind of inspired by cookie dough, so maybe it shouldn’t be all that cold.  I would probably need to consult the brewer on this.

I did not pour it into special stemware designed for beers.  I suppose I should have asked for this, at the risk of pissing off the bartender, in order to demonstrate my sophistication to the attractive woman next to me.  But this didn’t occur to me, as I was a bit preoccupied about my upcoming flight.

I also forgot to smell the beer.  This was before I’d started researching this blog post, remember.  And I don’t know a soul who actually makes any special effort to smell his beer.  Nor do the beer drinkers I know swish it around in the glass to check the “legs” (though six beeradvocate.com reviewers mentioned “lacing,” their descriptions being variously given as “light lacing,” decent amount of lacing,” “web-like lacing,” “spotty lacing,” “no lacing,” and “some lacing”).

All of this said, I have much to report on the flavor.  My first quaff (since I’m unabashedly incapable of sipping beer) set off a major alarm in my brain, as in:

WHAT

THE

FUCK!?

Have you ever raised a glass to your lips thinking you were drinking one thing, but it turned out to be another?  Like, you think it’s water but it ends up being lemonade?  Or you think it’s orange juice but it’s grapefruit?  And for a second you’re totally freaked out, and then your brain figures out what’s going on, and you’re greatly relieved?  Well, I had that experience with this beer, big-time.

Of course I’d expected it to taste a bit like chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream, and also like a beer.  But I was completely unprepared for the actual flavor, which was—get this—not at all that of chocolate chip cookie dough, but of fully baked chocolate chip cookies.

Look, I get it that it’s difficult to match the exact flavor of an ice cream, especially from a specific manufacturer like Ben & Jerry’s.  But New Belgium Brewing Company has a reputation to protect, and there’s no other way to say it:  they really shat the bed with this beer.  Don’t get me wrong, I was able to finish it, and actually by the end—once I’d totally recalibrated my sense of what it could be—I was able to enjoy it on its own terms.  But that initial taste probably caused me to make a really bad face, like when you drink wine that’s turned to vinegar, and that’s probably why that good-looking woman at the bar dissed me so hard.  Maybe New Belgium can fix the recipe, or at least change the label to “Nestle Toll-House Chocolate Chip Cookie” or something.

Counterpoint

Look, it’s no fun bagging on an experimental beer, from a socially responsible, solar-powered brewery I happen to like.  And it’s especially bad when they’re doing something good for the environment with their new product.  In a way I feel like this has been an evil review, and that because of my harsh honesty, our oceans may warm up even faster, and many species may die.  But I have a responsibility to the truth here.

Which is a funny thing to say, actually, because so much of this blog post has actually been completely untrue.  Yes, you read that right:  within this essay I have flat-out lied.  That whole thing with the woman at the bar?  Pure fiction.  The fact is, I don’t buy beer at airports because it’s a fricking ripoff.  I also don’t try to get the attention of women, other than my wife (and I know that if I’m looking to win her favor, beer isn’t the way to do it—I’ll build the FLÜNDTRAÄG she brought home from IKEA).  Moreover, the new beer celebrated by Spoon University isn’t even out yet.  If New Belgium has a test market for this beer, I’m not aware of it.

But don’t worry, not everything you’ve just read is a lie.  All those conflicting beeradvocate.com review snippits were real.  And the bit about the that Spoon article being widely forwarded, and lauded by the CEO as having produced a strong emotional response?  That’s 100% true (though you’ll have to take my word for it).  And my implicit point about these novelty beers being a gimmick (though a harmless one) does smack of some kind of greater truth, doesn’t it, despite my beer tasting having been fictitious?  I mean, when you and I do get around to trying this beer, isn’t it inevitable that we’ll come to this “nice gimmick!” conclusion one way or another?

Why would I lie?

So why would I lie like that?  Look, let’s get down to brass tacks:  with the modern media, and the blogosphere, and this new era of journalism, and Reddit, and all the sharing and re-tweeting and recycling that goes on, there’s really only one measure of success:  how widely read something is.  So I decided I had to go well beyond the “moment” that the Spoon article created.  What’s the first thing you’d google after learning of the existence of a new seasonal beer?  You’d want to know if it’s any good, right?  I suddenly had this opportunity to scoop everyone, just by lying!  So I took it!  And I’m not sorry!  After all, if you’ve made it this far into my post, you must have gotten something out of it.  Maybe you smugly enjoyed the pathetic tale of me (supposedly) striking out at the bar.  Or maybe, like me, you dread the ascent of beer from a basic working man’s beverage to something snooty and epicurean, and appreciate the satire.

And if you’re now smarting from having been led on, maybe feeling a bit foolish at your own gullibility, here’s what to do:  immediately forward this article to all your friends and tell them how great it is.  When they get to this sentence—the one you’re reading right now—they’ll know they’ve been punked—by you—and they’ll go punk their friends, and all this will create a global “moment,” and make me famous!  So go on.  Do it.

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37 Velominati Rules You Can Ignore

Introduction

This is my second of two posts on The Rules, a set of cycling-related standards put forth by Velominati.com.  I bother to write about The Rules in part because I feel that bicycle road racing has a recruitment problem.  In the mid-‘80s when I was a junior in Colorado, turnout was great—routinely we’d get like sixty kids in a race.  Now, in many cases, there are scarcely enough juniors to have a race, even at major events like the Nevada City Bicycle Classic.  Also, the three teams I rode for during my college years had trouble recruiting women even back then.  So when popular websites like Velominati’s suggest that the roadie realm is a bunch of (adult, male) elitists, I feel like somebody ought to step up and assure the newcomer that a lot of us are actually pretty laid back.

Several Velominati fans have commented, below my first post on this topic, that I’m missing the point and that I have no sense of humor.  Well, I doubt that the point of Velominati’s site is that these Rules are entirely facetious and the entire thing is a great big spoof.  If that were the case, a seasoned cyclist like me would disagree with all of The Rules, not just 37 of them.  Moreover, if humor were the only goal of The Rules, we wouldn’t have such straightforward, clearly non-tongue-in-cheek items as Rule #18, “No baggy shorts and jerseys while riding the road bike.”

I suspect that the point of The Rules is twofold:  to inform and to entertain.  It’s evidently meant to be fun to read, while imparting a body of knowledge about the culture of road cycling.  The fact that I don’t find much of it funny doesn’t mean I have no sense of humor.  After all, I laughed out loud at the Ronnie Johns “Harden the Fuck Up” video that Rule #5 links to.  I also chuckled at Rule #34, “Mountain bike shoes and pedals have their place:  on a mountain bike.”  Beyond velominati.com, I can even enjoy a comic declaration I totally disagree with, provided it’s sufficiently funny, as in the case of George Carlan’s diatribe against guys named Todd.

The Rules list strongly resembles a similar list from many years ago, “The Official Euro Cyclist Code of Conduct,” by Dom Guiver and Mike Flavell, except that those guys seemed to be making fun of themselves, and their directives were, in many cases, obviously facetious (e.g.,  “[long] hair shall be neatly slicked back in maximum euro-styling, and helmet SHALL NOT be worn” and “a gold pendant on a very long, thin chain bearing some sort of religious icon is STRONGLY recommended for mountain races”).  In contrast, the overall effect of the Velominati rules is that of actual advice from unapologetically elitist self-declared authorities.

When I asserted this in my previous post, a few Velominati fans told me to lighten up.  Their suggestion seems to be that because The Rules are all in good fun, nobody should object to anything.  The problem is, it’s really hard to tell when a rule is meant as a joke vs. an actual directive.  If something is not obviously funny, it’s not obviously a joke, and we are entitled to think it’s meant seriously.  (It’s a bit like one of my kids insulting the other, and then, when I chastise her for it, saying, “C’mon, I was just joking.”)

This post (like my other one) is for cyclists who have read The Rules and don’t like them, and/or are feeling intimidated by a sport that, as Velominati portrays it, holds its participants to exacting standards.  This post is for cyclists who disagree with some of The Rules and might like being let off the hook.  And finally, it’s for my friend Mark, who originally sent around the link with the comment, “We need to annotate this list … Dana?”

37 Velominati Rules you can ignore

Here is the list of Velominati rules I knowingly break—not due to a rebellious streak, but because I simply think they’re wrong.  Please don’t construe my list as an endorsement of the idea that cyclists need to meet a uniform standard … as far as I’m concerned, other cyclists can do as they please (outside of obvious misbehavior like running over pedestrians as they pursue downhill Strava  records).

Rule #1, Obey the Rules.  This is needless; the idea of obedience is built-in to the notion of rule.  I think it would be an improvement to change this one to, “Take the following Rules with a grain of salt.”

Rule #3, Guide the uninitiated.  Per my previous post, other riders’ behavior is their own business and I don’t want the job of telling strangers they’re doing it all wrong.

Rule #5, Harden The Fuck Up.  This was funny in Ronnie Johns’ video.  It’s less funny when aimed at a reader whom the Velominati folks have never met, and who a) may already be plenty hard, or b) may not care to make the sport a personal pissing contest.  I went further into this in my previous post.

Rule #6, Free your mind and your legs will follow.  This is just blather.  Any good cyclist knows that this sport requires brains.  And “Do all your thinking before you start riding”?  The idea of Velominati acolytes thoughtlessly drifting along, lost in reverie (“wrapped in the sensations of the ride”), is somewhat  frightening.  Yes, much of cycling becomes instinctive and automatic, but decisions still need to be made.

Rule #7, Tan lines should be cultivated and kept razor sharp.  In my book, any behavior associated with suntans—with the notable exception of protecting your skin—is narcissistic.  And yes, narcissism is a bad thing.

Rule #9, Riding in bad weather means you’re a badass, period.  Not everybody who rides in bad weather is a badass (some do it just to show off), and conversely, not all badass cyclists are eager or even willing to ride in bad weather.

Rule #11, Family does not come first, the bike does.  I suspect this is facetious, but it’s not very funny, and certainly isn’t right.  If an amateur cyclist, such as one in the Masters, wishes to bail on his family every weekend to go race, that’s his or her business, but to mandate it is ridiculous.

Rule #12, The correct number of bikes to own is n+1.  No, that’s not always the case.  For me, five is plenty since I don’t ride track or cyclocross.  Also, what about people who can only afford one or two bikes?  Are they not allowed into this sport?

Rule #13, If you draw race number 13, turn it upside down.  As Daniel Coyle describes in his excellent book Lance Armstrong’s War, superstitions can vary from rider to rider.  I have no problem with the number 13 and would want to wear it right-side-up, to make sure the officials can read it (as opposed to giving me a DNF).  Declaring that something should be done a certain way, just because some cool athlete does it, is getting into slippery territory.  Should the Velominati guys, in accordance with Rules #2 and #3, go tell Rohan Dennis—winner of the Mount Diablo stage of the Tour of California—that he pinned his numbers on wrong?

Rule #14, Shorts should be black.  This is silly because the majority of pro teams have non-black shorts today.  Meanwhile, my club’s jerseys are orange, which I love, but which wouldn’t look good with black shorts (i.e., would be too much like Halloween).  We wear navy blue shorts.

Rule #17, Team kit is for members of the team.  In general, I don’t try to impersonate someone on another team.  But I received a sweet long-sleeve Rabobank jersey for Christmas years ago and reserve the right to wear it, with my non-Rabobank shorts. 

Rule #18, Know what to wear, don’t suffer kit confusion – No baggy shorts and jerseys while riding the road bike, no lycra when riding the  mountain bike.  Pure malarkey.  I’m not going to put on my cycling clothes just to return a video.  And mountain bikers have been wearing Lycra for at least a couple decades.

Rule #19, Introduce yourself … it is customary and courteous to announce your presence.  I have never required this of any random Joe joining our club ride, and have never been so formal in joining a random rider or group on the road.  I’ve also never witnessed such formalities, in over thirty years of club rides.  Sure, I’ve had a paceline disrupted by an unskilled interloper, but the best way to deal with that is just to ramp up the pace until he falls off.  And if he doesn’t?  Well, good on him!

Rule #23, Tuck only after reaching Escape Velocity.  Since I reserve the right to recover during descents (see my comment on Rule #93), I’ll tuck when I please.  And by the way, the velominati.com photo of the “LeMond tuck”?  That’s not even a tuck.  Look at Taylor Phinney soloing in that Tour of California stage … that’s a tuck.  There are plenty of great photos of LeMond tucking; why didn’t the Velominati guys find one?

Rule #24, Speeds and distances shall be referred to and measured in kilometers.  Look, the Americans I ride with mostly use miles, and so do I.  That doesn’t make us “Neanderthalic,” as the Velominati suggest.  (Meanwhile, “Neanderthalic” isn’t even a word.)

Rule #25, The bikes on top of your car should be worth more than the car.  This is only true for juniors in really crappy cars.  And the Velomati guys’ “relatively more expensive” caveat is slippery:  where do you draw the line?  How many bikes are we talking about?  Is a $40,000 car okay with a $3,000 bike?  Their “put your Huffy on a Rolls” example is neither funny nor helpful.  I could agree with a more definitive guideline:  “If you drive a 2010 Nissan Elantra with upgraded rims, but your bike is a 1995 Novara Trionfo, perhaps you should reassess your priorities.”

Rule #30, No frame-mounted pumps.  This is just plain stupid.  I don’t like seeing pumps poking out of pockets because I’m afraid they’ll fall out, and I don’t use CO2 canisters because they’re not eco-friendly.  Prohibiting Zéfal pumps and insisting on Silca is like requiring VHS over Betamax.  And the Velominati-sanctioned method of mounting a pump in the rear frame triangle is wrong.  You don’t prop it on the quick-release skewer, because that’s not secure enough.  You take a big file and put a notch in the pump handle that slots right over the dropout.  But of course you can’t do this on most modern frames anyway (or are we all supposed to be riding ‘80s-era steel frames too?).  One more thing:  the authors spelled “canister” wrong.

Rule #33, Shave your guns.  As a mandate, this doesn’t have much backing among the cyclists I know.  I did a blog post awhile back on leg shaving by cyclists, for which I did a survey of around 50 of my male cycling pals.  Of these, 93% either used to race or still do, and ten are (or were) Category 1 and/or professional riders.  Only 14% of these surveyed riders shave their legs year-round, and 45% never do.  (Meanwhile, 52% indicated they couldn’t care less if other cyclists shaved their own legs.)  My other issue with this rule:  calling your legs “guns” is like kissing your flexed biceps non-ironically.  Pretty sad.

Rule #39, Never ride without your eyewear.  I sometimes do a short ride at dawn.  I don’t need the UV protection, and I don’t suppose the few riders I see at that hour are scandalized from a sartorial perspective.  So who exactly is affected when I break this rule?

Rule #41, Quick-release levers are to be carefully positioned.  As I said in my previous post, I point my levers straight back because I think it looks cool.  As for how others orient theirs, I couldn’t care less and neither should you.

Rule #45, Slam your stem.  Maybe if I did yoga I could change my position to meet the maximum stack height prescribed by this rule.  A marginally cooler-looking bike isn’t worth back pain, at least for those of us who ride our bikes instead of parking them at cafés in the mistaken belief that passersby will admire them.  Meanwhile, a low-rise stem with more than 2 cm of stack height looks way cooler than a high-rise stem positioned directly on the top race of the headset, though this latter configuration would be technically permissible according to The Rules.

Rule #49, Keep the rubber side down.  Are you going to tell me a junior cyclist who can’t afford a bike stand or wheel truing stand isn’t allowed to flip his bike over to true the wheels?  Should this sport be restricted to those who can afford their own truing stands (or can afford to pay a shop to maintain their bikes for them)?

Rule #50, Facial hair is to be carefully regulated.  This rule should explicitly exclude women and juniors; because it doesn’t, I’m led to believe the Velominati folks forgot all about them.  Meanwhile, not shaving on the morning of a race doesn’t have anything to do with virility, as suggested by the Velominati writers.  As a junior I was plenty virile despite being too young to shave.  The reason you don’t shave the morning of the race, as everybody knows, is that you want to avoid the sting of sweat in razor burn (a pointless addition to the suffering you’re already doing).  As far as the prohibition of beards and moustaches, I really don’t think this has anything to do with cycling.  If I desire to grow some facial hair, even for the express purpose of looking like an idiot, that’s my business (see my previous post about the compatibility of iconoclasm with cycling).  In this photo I’m also visibly breaking Rule #14, Rule #33, Rule #45, and Rule #74.

Rule #56, Espresso or macchiato only.  This kind of epicurean fussiness has nothing to do with cycling, as I detailed in my previous post.  Prior to reading The Rules I’d never even heard of a macchiato.  I prefer NoDoz to coffee anyway.

Rule #58, Support your local bike shop—never buy bikes, parts, or accessories online.  Never?  Really?  I do support my local bike shop, by sending them business and by buying basic stuff there, but it’s ridiculous to expect a serious cyclist to do none of his or her shopping online.  Look, if you know exactly what you want, you know how to install and adjust it yourself and have the tools you need, and you don’t have a trust fund, you’d be crazy to buy all your stuff at a bike shop.  Excepting the ten years during which I worked in bike shops, I’ve bought major bike parts mail-order since about 1982 and I sleep well at night.

Rule #63, Point in the direction you’re turning.  What a pointless bit of advice.  If a car is well behind me, yeah, I’ll signal by extending my right arm.  But if a driver is creeping right up on me, he or she won’t see a right-arm turn signal (because my body will eclipse it).  So then I use the left arm bent-elbow signal.  Do these Velominati guys actually think about any of these directives before issuing them, or do they just write down whatever random idea pops into their heads?

Rule #68, Rides are to be measured by quality, not quantity … declaring “We rode 4km” would assert that 4000m were climbed during the ride with the distance being irrelevant.  I’ve never heard a ride described this way.  Why would the Velominati guys require a behavior that absolutely nobody, outside of their own weird little clique, actually does?

Rule #70, The purpose of competing is to win.  I think this was true in the case of Eddy Merckx, but most other racers use some races for training, and know they aren’t always in contention.  I think it’s perfectly fine—admirable, even—to enter a race that you know you can’t win.  How else are you going to improve?  Is the Velominati strategy to carefully select only the smallest of ponds?  This rule is just macho posturing.

Rule #73, Gear and brake cables should be cut to optimum length.  Well, isn’t this a pointless tautology?  Shouldn’t all things be done in the optimum way, by definition?  But actually my main issue is with the text of the rule, which includes “Right shifter cable should go to the left cable stop and vice versa” and the associated directive that cables should “cross under the downtube.”  Yeah, I’ve come across this before.  You occasionally see a complete moron setting up a bike that way.  It’s pointless.  As a bike shop mechanic I never encountered a colleague who did that.

Rule #74, V Meters or small computers only.  Not having heard of a V Meter, I took the bait and clicked the hyperlink.  A V Meter is a bike computer with a Velominati sticker obscuring the display.  This violates Rule #57, No stickers, and Rule #78, Remove unnecessary gear.  It’s also so precious I think I’m going to hurl.  Meanwhile, large computers (e.g., Garmins and power meters) are very common on pro racers’ bikes.

Rule #78, Remove unnecessary gear – When racing in a criterium of 60 minutes or less the second (unused) water bottle cage must be removed.  Once again, no actual cyclist would ever do this, not even a pro cyclist with a full-time mechanic.  On the other hand, at least this rule used the term “water bottle cage” instead of calling the bottle a “bidon” as the Velomati Rules website does in a dozen other places.  “Bidon” is shameless affectation of Euro-cool.  I believe it is a very small minority of English-speaking cyclists who ever say “bidon.”  (I thought this might be a British thing, but the British announcers, on Eurosport and also in the recent Tour of California coverage, all say “bottle,” as does the Brit on my bike club.)

Rule #85, Descend like a pro – all descents shall be undertaken at speeds commonly regarded as “ludicrous” or “insane” by those less talented.  This advice is irresponsible.  Descending at speed isn’t a talent—it’s a skill and should be developed gradually with no pressure from bloviating bloggers.  And the bit about “the inner leg canted” for balance and aesthetics?  I think they wanted the word “bent,” and anyway hanging your inside knee is the mark of a novice.  Once you know what you’re doing, you keep that knee in for better aerodynamics.  (I learned this from Dale Stetina, not some website.)

Rule #89, Pronounce it correctly.  Pronouncing “Tour de France” correctly is no problem.  But I think it’s best if my fellow Americans and I say “Tour of Flanders” instead of “Ronde van Vlaanderen.”  Why?  First, I dislike such showiness, and second, there’s nobody around to correct our mispronunciation.

Rule #90, Never get out of the big ring.  Okay, clearly this one is meant as a joke.  I guess I can’t fault the Velominati fans for getting a big laugh out of this, any more than I could fault a young child for laughing at “Garfield.”

Rule #91, No food on training rides under four hours.  I’m so glad I don’t have to ride with these guys and help them get home after their blood sugar crashes.  This advice is empirically bad, no matter what Johan Museeuw said.  (Besides, he was talking to an individual … perhaps that person had more fat to burn than a typical cyclist.)  It’s also curious that an exception is made for hard rides over two hours.  Well, if you’re not riding hard, aren’t you in violation of Rule #3?

Rule #92, No sprinting from the hoods.  Watch any mountaintop finish in a pro race and you’ve got a pretty good chance of seeing a guy sprinting while on the hoods.  The Rules authors could have so easily made an exception for uphill finishes, but they didn’t.  Why not?  Sheer laziness?  I think it’s also odd how they make a special exception for Saronni in the ’82 world championships.  How come when one rider, like Fabian Cancellara with Rule #13, does something that the Velominati guys like, that behavior becomes a rule, whereas when another rider does something forbidden by The Rules, like Saronni here or Pantani in Rule #50, he’s merely an exception?

Rule #93, Descents are not for recovery.  If you don’t need to recover on a descent, perhaps you didn’t go hard enough on the climb.  Moreover, this seems like irresponsible advice for these Velominati guys to give to readers of varying skill level.  A rider in my area died trying to set a downhill KOM on Strava.  “But we’re just joking, get a sense of humor!” the Rules fans might say.  I reiterate:  this excuse might work better if the rule were actually funny….
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Velominati's “The Rules” - Brilliance or BS?

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

My bike club has a group e-mail list and we often get into long chains of messages on bike-related topics.  After all, most of us have been riding and/or racing for decades and have strong opinions.  Recently my friend Mark e-mailed around a link to “The Rules” on a bike-geek website called velominati.com.  There was no message text, but the subject line read, “We need to annotate this list … Dana?”  I glanced through the list of rules and knew right away there would be much to say on this topic.  Maybe too much.

Well, too much for the e-mail list, anyway.  Some guys love the endless message cycles, at least some of the time, but others hate them at least half the time, due to Inbox bloat.  Besides, as I discovered when I delved deeper into The Rules, they need to be thoroughly rebutted, and this rebuttal should be as widely accessible as the list itself.  This isn’t a matter of a few rules needing some tweaks, but a fundamental problem of the authors’ approach, as I shall describe.

(In this post I won’t go through and annotate The Rules one-by-one, even though that’s what my teammate originally proposed.  Rather, I’ll save that for a future post.)

A quick aside about the name Velominati:  in this post I will refer to the authors of The Rules as “the Velominati guys.”  I reckon I’m supposed to just call them “the Velominati,” as I would with “illuminati,” but I refuse.

The rules at first glance

At first blush, The Rules look like fun.  There are clear-cut mandates in this list about a variety of topics that get debated on my club, such as sock color, whether cycling shorts need to be black, and whether or not the little knurled lock-ring on your inner tube valve should be discarded.  The Rules list covers aesthetic matters that deserve to be covered, like the orientation of quick-release levers and the need to keep your bars level.  There’s a decent amount of wit involved, like Rule #51, “Livestrong wristbands are cockrings for your arms.”

So I figured, okay, this is kind of like a style guide in “GQ” magazine, a compilation of little sartorial pointers.  Not the kind of thing I normally pore over, but if somebody is seeking to fit in better with the elite cycling crowd, I don’t have a problem with that.  But when I left off skimming the list randomly and started reading from the beginning, right away I had a bit of a problem with Rule #3, “Guide the uninitiated.”  Who am I to tell some novice that he or she is doing something wrong?  I don’t want that job, and probably a lot of novice riders couldn’t care less about tan lines being razor sharp or the right way to position their sunglasses.

But it wasn’t until I got to Rule #5, “Harden The Fuck Up,” that I started to get a bit riled.  Now I see that this isn’t just a list of aesthetic do’s and don’ts, but a document that’s going to cast aspersions on how hard people should ride.  Since the writers can’t know much about their potential audience, I guess they figure everybody needs to harden the fuck up.  So they’re on the brink of calling readers like me poseurs, which is a pretty bold move  when they’re giving advice about how, when hanging around a café after your ride, “having your cap skull-side tipped jauntily at a rakish angle is, one might say, de rigueur.”

Then, right after “harden the fuck up,” they get into psychobabble territory with Rule #6, “Free your mind and your legs will follow,” and how you should “wrap yourself in the sensations of the ride – the smell of the air, the sound of the tires, the feeling of flight as the bicycle rolls over the road.”  These guys need to make up their minds:  are they trying to be George Carlin, Tony Robbins, or William Wordsworth?

My friend Trevor, whose cycling credentials are impeccable (he not only won three collegiate national championships, but two in one day), responded to the Rules list by saying, “I took a lot of crap in high school for having shaved legs and being seen on my bike in ‘spandex’ pants (always black), but I was never embarrassed.  That list is an embarrassment.”

He’s onto something, and I’m going to help explain exactly what.

The poseur paradox

Consider the photo below.

That’s me with my friend Dan.  He’s got a visor on his helmet, in blatant violation of Rule #35, “No visors on the road.”  Is he ignorant, in need of the Velominati link?  No, of course he already knows most roadies would frown on the visor.  But he doesn’t care.  Look at what else he’s wearing:  a national champion jersey.  Yes, in keeping with Rule #16, “Respect the jersey,” he did win that.  Now, should any reader of The Rules, in keeping with Rule #3, feel obligated to point out the visor faux pas to Dan?  Not at all.  First of all, it’s none of any reader’s business, and two, Dan would probably rip the guys legs off, or at least could.  (Perhaps that’s why he had the visor in the first place … as a taunt.) 

What about me?  As a friend, could (should) I tell Dan to ditch the visor?  Yes, but only because a) that’s what friends are for, b) I have a matching national champion jersey (we won them together in the Team Time Trial), and c) if Dan tries to rip my legs off, at least I can give him a run for his money.  Authority is earned on the road, not through bluster and fancy prose.  (There:  I’ll make that my Rule #1.)

Not that being an accomplished cyclist gives me the ride to give pointers to just anybody.  On my bike, the quick-release levers point straight back (in violation of Rule #41, which says this is only okay for time trial bikes—never mind I’ve been doing this since before time trial bikes existed).  If anybody gazing upon my bike decides my skewer orientation looks cool and wants to copy me, great—but the fact that nobody does bothers me not at all.  Why I should I mind if my bike looks cooler than everybody else’s?  And why should I mind if some ignorant person thinks my bike looks silly, especially when, chances are, that guy is having trouble holding my wheel?  It’s kind of a “speak softly and carry a big stick” approach.

In contrast, the philosophy of the Velominati folks seems to be, “speak brashly and swing your big dick.”  They seem to think that by striking an air of authority and machismo, and employing great emphasis, they can achieve instant credibility.  Consider Rule #9:  “If you are out riding in bad weather, it means you are a badass.  Period.”  That’s completely untrue.  When I lived in Boulder (where they have real winters), it was a running joke that a certain breed of poseur only rode in bad weather, to show off.  You’d see guys on rainy or snowy days, in their fancy cold-weather gear, whom you’d somehow never see out riding when the weather was nice. 

I’ve certainly done my share of riding in miserable conditions (and have described recently in this blog what a pointless activity that is), but I’ve never had the experience described in The Rules:  “Those who ride in foul weather – be it cold, wet, or inordinately hot – are members of a special club of riders who, on the morning of a big ride, pull back the curtain to check the weather and, upon seeing rain falling from the skies, allow a wry smile to spread across their face.  This is a rider who loves the work.”

My goodness, what pretty prose!  And what a bullshit notion.  Yes, there are riders who love the work, but they’d love it more in good weather.  The rider that Velominati.com describes here loves the idea of braving the elements, and conflates the idea with the reality.  It’s self-deception born of narcissism.  Sure, any solid professional will ride in bad weather if he has to, but I’m sure he grumbles about it and he’s right to do so.  And if, say, he does better in the rain than his rival, he might be happy about that. 

Lance Armstrong wrote, of the first Tour de France mountain stage in 1999, “When I woke up that morning in Dax, was raining yet again, which I considered perfect attacking weather, mainly because I knew the others didn’t like it… ‘It’s a good day for me,’ I thought.”  This, to me, seems far more credible than what the Velominati guys have to say.  And when Lance fricking Armstrong has more credibility than you, you know you’ve got a serious problem.

What would the Velominati guys say to me about my refusal to ride in the rain?  “Harden the fuck up,” of course.  But they’d be off-base.  When it’s raining I ride the trainer because it’s a better workout, and I can suffer due to effort alone, which gives me more benefit than needlessly enduring painfully cold fingers and toes.  I’ve done trainer rides long enough that, mid-ride, I had to change not only my sweat-soaked shorts but my shoes.  For complicated reasons involving stress release, I’ve had trainer rides so hard I couldn’t stand up in the shower afterward.  So I don’t need anyone telling me to harden up.

Ironically, just about anybody could make modifications to his equipment and his behavior such that he’s in compliance with all of The Rules (especially since “Harden The Fuck Up” is pretty hard to police).  And the mix of ideological and sartorial rules would suggest that adherence to The Rules would make him not just a more stylish cyclist, but a more “real” cyclist.  But in my experience, the “real” cyclists—such as the ones who actually achieve great things—aren’t so focused on any of this trivial stuff. 

I have a friend whom I see on the road from time to time, who has great form, and rides a great bike, but who wears an off-brand helmet from the ‘90s that was a piece of crap when it was new.  I’ve actually fantasized about doing an intervention, such as asking to see his helmet for a second and smashing it on the ground (like John Belushi did with that dude’s guitar), but only because helmets have a functional lifespan and his old helmet might not provide good head protection.  If my friend doesn’t care how he looks, I shouldn’t either.  And yet—and this is the crucial point—this guy is one of the most successful cyclists I’ve known.  He rode for the 7-Eleven pro team back in the day.

I am in violation of thirty-seven of The Rules.  And yet, I know in my heart I’m plenty legit as a cyclist.  Thus, I find it absurd that this band of foppish writers, and whatever acolytes they’ve acquired, would judge me and find me lacking.  But that’s not even what bugs me.  What bugs me is that the Velominati have this idea that cyclists have to toe the line, to adhere to any code of conduct at all.  To Trevor’s point, I came up in this sport embracing the role of the rebel.  Not a cool, admired rebel like James Dean, either—cycling made me a social outcast.  In the early ‘80s, I had black shorts, a wool jersey, a single bottle cage, used a Silca pump with a Campagnolo head, and had even snapped the visor off my helmet—in short, I was obeying The Rules.  What did I get for my troubles?  A self-satisfied Velominati feeling?  Hell no.  I was mocked by my peers, who routinely cast aspersions on my masculinity due to my shaved legs, my tight shorts, and my helmet. 

I tolerated the abuse because that was just part of what it meant to be a cyclist.  (I think that experience was universal among cyclists; after all, Dave’s iconoclasm is what made “Breaking Away” such a charming movie.)  And yet now I’m supposed to let these fancy-talking Velominati guys bully me because I like my navy blue shorts, prefer expressing distance in miles to kilometers, and can’t be bothered to shave my legs?  Yeah, right.  To do as I please, without obsessing over my image, is entirely consistent with my approach to the sport for more than three decades.  (By the way, Bernard Hinault himself broke at least one rule—I’m thinking of Rule #36, regarding cycling-specific eyewear—and looked very good doing it.)

But wait, there’s more

Remarkably, the assertion of poseur-ish codes of conduct isn’t even the worst thing about The Rules.  The biggest problem is that there’s a Neanderthal sensibility lurking beneath this list.  I’m talking about the unwritten rule, both implicit in The Rules and directly suggested, that cycling is for men only.

Skeptical?  Consider this.  Within the (incorrect, pointless) rule about how to signal turns, Velominati acknowledges that the audience for The Rules is international:  “This one is, presumably, mostly for Americans.”  That is, since this rule doesn’t apply to the entire group, they go ahead and say so.  But check out Rule #50:  “Facial hair is to be carefully regulated.”  No mention is made of the women to whom this rule obviously doesn’t apply.

Of course that’s not enough to make my case on, so consider also Rule #11, “Family does not come first.  The bike does.”  Is there room to construe this as meaning a wife could put her bike before her family?  Not likely, since this rule is based on an interview in which cycling legend Sean Kelly rags on his wife for leaning on his car, and—when challenged—doesn’t deny that his bike (and his car) come before his wife.

There are other examples.  Rule #29, “No European Posterior Man-Satchels,” doesn’t mention non-man-satchels.  Rule #33, “Shave your guns,” makes no mention of the fact that most women do this anyway.  Rule #61, “Like your guns, saddles should be smooth and hard” doesn’t make any allowance for the reality that in most cases women legitimately need a bit more padding.  It really does seem as though it never occurred to the creators of The Rules that women ride bikes too.  For a group that purports to have all the answers, this omission seems remarkably unenlightened.

This isn’t just a problem for female cyclists, though.  Readers of velominati.com shouldn’t let The Rules be a bad influence.  Although male cyclists aren’t generally babe magnets, a great many of us have wives or girlfriends, and these women—who, after all, have to put up with our stick-thin bodies, our constant blathering about bike gear and race lore, and the sheer amount of time we spend out on the road—deserve our respect.  Not grudging respect, either—I mean that they’re the main people we should be worried about impressing … not our fellow cyclists.

Here’s a little story to illustrate what I’m saying.  Two of my teammates, a married couple, were doing a mountain bike tandem race together.  Mike (a very good rider who has punched my ticket almost as many times as we’ve ridden together) cramped up terribly and had to climb off the bike.  Sprawling on the ground, he apologized in advance to his wife Alyshia for losing the race.  Alyshia, though she stands about five-foot-nothing, has the kind of Command Presence I’ve always admired—she’s the kind of person you hope will take charge if there’s ever an earthquake or something.  As Mike recounted in his e-mail report to the group, “Alyshia had a very diplomatic response:  ‘The race isn’t over yet.  Please, harden the fuck up.’”  Inspired, perhaps, as much by her fighting spirit as the prospect of his wife no longer finding him studly and awesome, Mike remounted, resolved to push past the pain, and they went on to pass everybody back up and win the race!

So how does Alyshia’s exhortation match up with Rule #5?  Far, far more impressively.  When a website says to harden the fuck up, that’s just more disconnected Internet blather.  When a spouse says it, suddenly it has some teeth.  Similarly, when another of my teammates (also a darn good cyclist, one of our best) told his wife he was thinking of shaving his legs, she replied, “Please don’t.  The hair on your legs is almost the only masculine thing about you!”  (What makes this comment great is that, far from being ill-spirited, she’s actually paying him a tacit compliment:  “I know you’re secure enough to laugh at yourself.”)

Of course society is rife with retrograde macho bullshit, but cycling is supposed to be progressive.  Its image is of a modern, forward-thinking mentality.  To succeed at this sport requires a much more enlightened approach than, say, the shot-put or the hammer throw (which is why rules like Rule #93, “Descents are not for recovery,” are so annoying—if you don’t need to recover on a descent, maybe you didn’t go hard enough on the climb, and need to harden the fuck up!).  So why do these Velominati guys seem to want to embrace an Andrew Dice Clay ethos, and suggest that male chauvinism is part of the sport?

“Lighten up,” they might say.  “We were just joking!”  To which I’d say, sure, masculinity and femininity can be joked about, and sometimes walking a fine line can enhance the humor.  But you better get it right, and it better be funny, or else you’re suggesting there’s something intrinsically funny about a hierarchy that puts men at the top.

Rhetorically, the Velominati guys are like a bad group of hackey-sackers:  you see them start up, and you head over to watch, maybe you’ve even got your hopes up, but they can’t keep the damn thing up for more than a few kicks.  You keep hoping they’ll hit their stride, but they don’t, and it’s pathetic.  The Velomanti guys’ declamatory haplessness is harmless enough where stem height or tan lines are  concerned, but begins to chafe when they try to delve into the intersection of cycling and machismo.

Wait, I’m not quite done

Since I’m on the subject, I’d like to bring up a fundamental disconnect between the archetypes of the ideal cyclist and those aspiring to match them, at least in form.  It’s clear that the Velominati guys base much of their ethos on the example set by old school bike racing heroes (Merckx, Kelly, Sean Yates, and Marco Pantani are named).  These were all working-class guys who happened to get fairly rich and famous by being really, really fast.  I doubt they spent much time worrying about their image.  To the extent they achieved studliness, they did so effortlessly, not by carefully mimicking others or poring over lists of rules.

You think Merckx was caught up in macho posturing when he allowed this photo to be snapped? 

The rules about hardening up and riding in bad weather strike me as tacked on, to offset the reality that the Velominati guys are ensnared in a hipster, yuppie ethos.  They can afford n+1 bikes (Rule #12), all of which cost more than their car (Rule #25), and they actually care what angle they wear their cap at (Rule #22), use highfalutin terms like “bidon” when a simple word like “bottle” will do, and have a rule (#56) about only drinking espresso and macchiato.  They remind me of the Roger Moore James Bond, with his bow ties, his silly witticisms, and his epicurean tastes.  (The latest Bond movie reboot was wise to break with all this.  My favorite line in “Casino Royale” comes when Daniel Craig’s Bond, rattled after losing $10 million at cards, asks for a vodka martini.  “Shaken or stirred?” asks the bartender.  Bond snaps back, “Do I look like I give a damn?”)

My overall impression of The Rules is it’s all a bit too self-aware and twee, far closer to “Portlandia” than to, say, the dairy farm that Sean Kelly rose from.  The cycling giants of old wouldn’t have hung out in coffee shops drinking this:

They’d have made their own coffee, probably instant, and if anybody told them they therefore weren’t real cyclists they’d have laughed.  Drive, talent, luck, and tenacity made them great athletes, not a bunch of silly rules about what to ride, what to wear, and how to behave.

And one more thing?  Merckx, Kelly, et al wouldn’t have called their legs “guns.”  Trevor is right.  That list is an embarrassment.

Update

My second (and final) post on this topic, “37 Velominati Rules You Can Ignore,” is here.

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