Ask an O.G.

Dear O.G.,

I think driving a stick shift is a total O.G. move and should be respected. My wife says that for me to prefer this “outdated technology” is an “affectation” (her words). What do you think?

John A, Seattle, WA

Dear John,

I have both kinds of car. It’s useful to know how to handle a manual transmission if you ever plan to rent a car in Europe. I also happen to think driving a stick shift is more fun, but it’d be hard to cite that as an advantage to someone disinclined to learn. The important thing is that you mansplain the manual gearshift process to your wife, using terms like “synchromesh” and “double-clutch.” That should get her off the subject so she’ll stop insulting you about your “affectation.”

Dear O.G.,

How are you, a middle-aged white man, gangsta? I can’t believe you call yourself that.

Leslie H, Dallas, TX

Dear Leslie,

The “G” does not necessarily mean gangsta, or even gangster. I wouldn’t even say the “O” is necessarily for “Original.” And the name wasn’t my idea … you should talk to my publisher. (If you can get him to listen to you, I’d love to hear how you accomplished that.) By the way, this is by far the most common question I get. My eyes are rolling as much as yours, believe me.

Dear O.G.,

I’m guessing you’re a vinyl guy, huh?

Amanda T, Los Angeles, CA

Dear Amanda,

Actually—and I hope this doesn’t destroy my O.G. cred—I’ve never owned a record player. I remember a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the ‘70s (outdated even then) that my brothers let me mess around with, but for playing music I had nothing but cassette tapes until I was an adult. CDs came out when I was in high school. The first one I encountered was in my school locker; I was turning the jewel case over and over in my hands trying to figure out what the hell it was when my locker partner happened upon me and burst out laughing. I did buy a CD player when I was in college, but it was to replace the one I borrowed from a pal (so I could play borrowed CDs) which I unfortunately broke. I didn’t start buying my own CDs until my early twenties, but again, that’s not because I ever had records. (Well, I had one: the John Williams score to “Star Wars,” which my parents bought me to play on their stereo.)

Now, if a music lover still has the record player he bought as a teenager, and all his original records, plus perhaps a few select purchases to round out his collection, I’d consider that O.G. But when wealthy people buy modern turntables with multi-layer plinths, decoupled motor systems, and carbon fiber tonearms, and painstakingly replace their CD or MP3 collections with pricey records, that’s more of an epicurean thing than O.G. (Not saying it’s bad, mind you. Just not O.G.)

By the way, if you meant something else by “vinyl guy,” such as attire, you’ve got the wrong guy!

Dear O.G.,

Nothing says O.G. more than a real appreciation for a good wine vintage … am I right? As the oenophile I imagine you to be, what are your favorite harvests?

Terrence H, New Haven, CT

Notwithstanding my very sincere insistence that the G in “O.G” doesn’t exactly mean “gangsta,” I’m really not sure how a fine wine aficionado could be called O.G., even though a respect for tradition is inarguably O. In any case, I’m sorry to disappoint … I don’t know the first thing about wine (though I have tried my level best to fake it).

I’m guessing there’s pretty good overlap between wine and coffee lovers, so I will go ahead and share my opinion about O.G. coffee (even though nobody’s asked). First of all, its polar opposite is the Keurig, which ought to carry as much stigma as chicken nuggets. I consider pour-over to be the best way to make coffee. Until the 1950s it was the main method, but then instant coffee became hugely popular during the convenience-addicted post-war era. That lasted until the ‘70s when cheap electric drip coffee makers became available. Pour-over is becoming more popular, maybe even hip, but I think I can make the case that it’s pre-‘50s O.G. I grind my beans by hand (so I don’t wake up the whole family with the earsplitting noise of an electric grinder), and I use a cone made of porous stone, which isn’t an old technology but sure feels old.

Dear O.G.,

What is your absolute favorite O.G. move, and why?

Far and away the most satisfying O.G. realm for me is using—exclusively—a traditional double-edged razor. This is a product that’s far cheaper than its modern equivalent, does a better job, is better made, looks nicer, and is produced by companies that clearly have no interest in glib, glossy marketing. I’m so fond of my O.G. razor, I wrote an ode to it which you can read here. Thanks for asking!

Dear O.G.,

Getting back to an earlier reader’s question, about music on vinyl: for someone who doesn’t own a record player you sure seem knowledgeable about the modern technology. Do you know whereof you speak?

Keith W, Chicago, IL

Dear Keith,

Not at all, actually. You caught me … I’m a total poseur.

Dear O.G.,

What’s more O.G.: classical art (e.g., Old Masters) or pop (e.g., Warhol, Lichtenstein)? Obviously Leonardo da Vinci was a rockstar, but then, that’s so long ago. Is there an expiration date on O.G.?

Tricia P, San Francisco

Dear Tricia,

I think an endless debate could be had among those two art schools, not to mention all the other ones (e.g., modern, postmodern, contemporary) that would claim they’re the most O.G. I do not want to venture into that fracas. But I think the more important distinction, particularly because so much art isn’t seen in museums, is between human art and A.I. “art” as the latter starts to replace more and more real work, from street fair posters to advertisements to crap you can buy on Etsy. I’m sure you can already sense my position on this; for a full discussion, replete with a drawing challenge I issued to both ChatGPT and my daughter, click here. Suffice to say, A.I. can never be O.G. It’s the antithesis.

Dear O.G.,

I happen to know you’re a veteran cyclist. How does this mesh with your O.G. approach? Do e-bikes, electronic shifting, and disc brakes make you throw up in your mouth?

Robert S, Thousand Oaks, CA

Dear Robert,

I’ll start with your specific examples and then address the bigger picture. I think e-bikes are not only just fine, but probably inevitable for most of us … they may well extend the number of years (and hopefully decades) I can continue to ride. I’m also completely in favor of non-cyclists buying e-bikes for transportation, because even if e-bikes don’t honor the purity of traditional cycling (can you sense my “blah blah blah” here?), they do mean fewer cars on the road. Sure, go on all you want about what a menace these unskilled but fairly high-speed e-bikers present, but I’ll take a 15 mph impact from a 40-pound e-bike over a 25+ mph impact from a two-ton car. (It’s not like e-bikers have cornered the market on roadway incompetence and inattentiveness, after all.) But I will assert two caveats: 1) no kid should ever ride an e-bike (details here), and 2) e-bikes shouldn’t be allowed on nature trails (see here).

Moving on to electronic shifting, I do think it’s a solution looking for a problem, and though I’ve given it two solid auditions (click here and here) the earth didn’t move for me either time. But my next bike will surely have it (it being the new normal), and people seem to like it well enough. Same with disc brakes: I love them on my mountain bike, you can run carbon rims, blah blah blah damn, I’ve even boring myself here.

All this being said, these new road handlebars that flare out, and the goofy brake levers that stick out like chicken wings … they’re hideous. And what’s with the weird fork crowns on BMC road bikes? They look like the fork on a cheap mountain bike! Aesthetics are being sacrificed at the altar of performance and that’s just anti-O.G. So many modern road bikes so dorky, they can even make a guy like Julian Alaphilippe look like a dweeb.

You know who was the O.G. road racer, with a perfect bike to match? Bernard Hinault.

(Don’t even get me started on Jonas Vingegaard’s aerodynamic helmet.)

Dear O.G.,

I think part of being O.G. is just sticking to your guns and not following along with the status quo, like how Eminem won’t use Auto-Tune. Do you live by this kind of credo?

Wanda R, New York City

Dear Wanda,

I think there are two fundamental ways to buck the status quo. You can either observe the conventional wisdom, evaluate it, and decide to reject it—like Eminem—or you can be oblivious to modern trends and just bumble your way along doing whatever seems to work. My favorite example of the latter is my dad, who—despite having been a college instructor in Boulder, Colorado during the late ‘60s—was totally unaware of Birkenstock sandals and, decades later, after failing to observe three huge surges in their popularity, totally thought he discovered them, like they were some obscure thing.

Often I do stubbornly defy the status quo. I think I was the only teenager in Boulder in the ‘80s who didn’t have an earring; I never used Biopace chainrings on any of my bikes; and I eschew all social media (except, begrudgingly, LinkedIn), all in defiance of the norm. But other times I’m willing to follow the status quo but only after considerable delay, out of sheer ignorance. For example, in matters of music, I’ll be barely aware of a band or singer for many years until finally I start to wonder who it is I’ve been hearing, and hearing about, for so long, and then I’ll investigate. I discovered Eminem in 2003 (four years late), Sublime in 2011 (fifteen years late), and The Black Keys in 2023 (twenty-one years late). In the latter cases, I wasn’t defying the zeitgeist … I’d just fallen behind. You might say I was O.G. in the sense of “Oblivious Guy.” (Of course it’s hard to remain ignorant now that we have Spotify. I have a love/hate relationship with it … the ad hoc selections it plays after the end of an album often trick me into listening to really anodyne, soulless stuff for oddly long periods before I suddenly think, “What is this crap!?”)

I wouldn’t say I consider this late-or-never tradition a credo, but it does affect my life. Probably the biggest single effect of finding my own way, without regard to conventional wisdom, was choosing to major in English despite everyone around me (even then) assuring me that with that lowly degree I’d never get a real job. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, as I discuss at length here. (My younger daughter is currently earning her English degree, with minors in Art and Philosophy, and I couldn’t be more pleased.)

As for the day-to-day effects of this approach, a big one is how much I use the public library. I just looked at my loan history from the Berkeley library, and in the last 144 weeks I’ve checked out 289 items (books, movies, CDs), for an average of two items a week. That doesn’t even include what I get digitally through Kanopy, Libby, and Hoopla (details here) and from the Albany Library. In a society that’s thoroughly embraced Amazon, streaming platforms, and video games, I think libraries are 100% O.G. And yet I know plenty of adults who don’t even have a library card.

Dear O.G.,

What’s the point of clinging to all these established ways when A.I. is obviously going to change everything over the next decade or so? Preferences that might seem old school and noble now will just become outdated, outmoded, outmaneuvered, and over. Not to be a dick about it, but I think this has to be said.

Ron B, Atlanta, GA

Dear Ron,

You sound like the blowhards gleefully predicting the demise of printed books based on competition from e-books like the Kindle. Society needs a term for people like you … technophiliac, or maybe digitopian. Look, I won’t deny that A.I. is a powerful tool for making many tasks more efficient, but that’s not a purely good thing. I’m all for ChatGPT helping me with HTML scripting or making DNS routing changes, but its essays are a) inferior to a real writer’s, and b) dumbing people down. The very word “essay” is from the French essai meaning a trial, attempt, or test, deriving from the Latin exagium, a weighing or examination. The point of writing an essay is to explore an idea, create and test hypotheses, and ideally learn from the effort even as you’re crafting something others can read. The point of a teacher assigning an essay isn’t to educate herself on a topic via her students’ papers; it’s for the students to grapple with the difficulty of writing and improve their brains. At least, that’s my O.G. perspective. In a shocking New Yorker article I read recently, a college professor interviewed several students at top universities about their blatant use of A.I. to write papers for them, and the success they’ve had (at least, from a grade perspective) in doing this. Here’s a crazy example:

A sophomore at Columbia studying computer science told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so I just put it in [to an A.I. platform] and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

These students might think they’re pulling a fast one, but what happens when they graduate and still don’t know how to think? How are they going to impress anyone during a face-to-face dialogue—whether it’s a job interview or a cocktail party—when they don’t have ChatGPT to generate insights and pretty sentences for them? No less an O.G. than the rapper Ice-T (whose fourth studio album, “O.G. Original Gangster” helped popularize the term), rapped about the problem of school dropouts trying to sound impressive:

How you gonna drop science? You’re dumb
Stupid ignorant, don’t even talk to me
In school you dropped Math, Science, and History
And then you get on the mic and try to act smart
Well let me tell you one thing, you got heart
To perpetrate, you’re bait, so just wait
Till the press shove a mic in your face…
And they ask you about the game you claim you got
Drop science now, why not?

Notably, he wrote that song in 1989, before an A.I. existed that could enable a useless student to fake his way through school. Sure, modern A.I. can help you get a degree, or program a computer, or write a basic email, but it’s not going to make you an interesting person. Ultimately, thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move.

Dear O.G.,

That last response? And your conclusion, “Thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move”? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s pretty much the cheesiest thing I’ve ever read. I think in your case O.G. stands for “Old Geezer.”

Dana A, Albany, CA

Dear Dana,

I know. You’re right. You got me. I’m tired. I should really edit my stuff before I post. Looks like that pompous, overblown sentiment slipped past my publisher,  too. Sheesh.

An O.G. is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an O.G.,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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The Day I Unplugged

Introduction

Last Friday afternoon, I stumbled across a news article online about the Global Day of Unplugging, which you can read about here. In a nutshell, the idea (to quote from the organizer’s home page) is that “people everywhere will unplug from their screens to dive into offline activities, real-life conversations, in-person connections, and meaningful moments.” I decided, on a whim, to participate. This meant going totally Internet- and cellphone-free for 24 hours, starting at sunset that same day. This I did, as recounted below.

(Picture by ChatGPT. That is why the phone is taller than the laptop.)

Trigger warning

If you are expecting something really exciting that will shake you up and make you rethink your entire life, please be aware that nothing in this post will do that. (Does such a disclosure really merit a trigger warning? Well, if you were to get to the end of this post without becoming as mesmerized and enlightened as you’d expected, might that not be triggering?)

Battening down the hatches

Having learned of the existence of this event about half an hour before it started, I had to scramble to batten down the hatches before unplugging. At least a dozen people rely on me for continuous communication, without which they would soon feel lost and rudderless. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha! Actually, nobody gets this much of my attention and I deliberately keep it that way by being a sluggish responder. For example, a long-lost friend connected to me on LinkedIn and started a nice chat to catch me up on his latest, and it took me twelve years to respond. And having trained my kids to eschew the always-on electronic communications I’ve traditionally found distasteful, I’m pleased to report that if anything they’re worse than I am.

Still, I thought I’d let a few people know. First I texted my friend P—, who lives in another state but often talks with me on the phone. (So old school, right?) I told him, “FYI, after sunset today, until sunset tomorrow, if you want to reach me, call the landline. I’m going smartphone- and Internet-free for 24 hours as part of the Global Day of Unplugging!” He replied, “Dude, you’re a douche.” Next I group-texted a couple of cycling pals whom I was planning to ride with this weekend, letting them know they should call my landline to coordinate the ride details. I realized this might seem like a hassle, and reflected on the bizarre fact that, though I’ve been friends with these two for over twenty years, I’ve never actually talked to either one of them on the phone. Not once! So I sent another text saying, “BTW, sorry to be difficult with this offline thing. I have already been called a ‘douche’ over this.” C— texted back, “Oh no worries! We call you a douche for many other reasons, so one more makes an infinitesimal difference.”

Rules of engagement

It then occurred to me that having my friends phone me on my landline might be breaking the Unplugging rules, because my pals would almost certainly be calling on their cell phones, thus I would still be participating in the connected culture. But then, it’s not my fault they’ve almost certainly disconnected their landlines by now. Besides, having our first-ever phone conversation would be an amazing milestone, certainly within the “real life conversations” element of Global Day of Unplugging, and in support of its “offline activities” and “in-person connections” goals.

With these goals in mind, I decided I’d better line up an offline, in-person activity on the home front. An article I looked at showed a family gathered in the living room playing a board game or something, like a scene out of Norman Rockwell. This wasn’t going to happen for me, since both my kids have fledged, but at least I could do something with my wife that would be more interactive than both of use reading our books silently, practically ignoring each other like in that Simon & Garfunkel song (“And we note our place with bookmarkers/ That measure what we’ve lost”).

One of our go-to activities is Netflix, but that was off the table. I didn’t have much time for research on the rules of Unplugging so I asked ChatGPT if DVDs counted as unplugged. It confidently told me this was fine, and even wrote a mini-essay about it, which concluded, “Watching a DVD with your wife would align with the spirit of the day, as long as you’re not accessing the internet through any device during the 24-hour period. Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear. Don’t be alarmed.” Yeah, I made up that last part. (Well, I stole it.) Do you find it creepy how tempting it is to pretend ChatGPT is some kind of authority? And yet I took its advice and raced over to the library. It was closing in five minutes and they’d shut off their WiFi, so I couldn’t vet any of the practically random DVDs I grabbed, even though the sun hadn’t even set so Internet was still legal. I was flying blind, no IMDB, no Metacritic!

I got home and with mere minutes on the clock, I texted my older daughter to advise her I’d be offline for 24 hours, and explained why. About all she had to say was, “You use cookies now?” (referring to my last blog post), and “Enjoy your 24 hours off the grid.” And just like that, I was all-in. I set my phone to Do Not Disturb and ditched it on my desk as the sun disappeared.

Friday

Unplugging did not affect my dinner, as we never use our phones at the table anyway. True, my wife often asks me to search Spotify for some music to match the meal (e.g., “How about some mellow Japanese jazz?”) and we’ve ended up with some really weird audio backdrop; to be honest, I didn’t miss it. After dinner and a bunch of chores we settled in to our DVD movie, “Saturday Fiction,” a foreign film about spies in China in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. According to the DVD case, David Denby, a critic I trust (among a large field of many whom I don’t and whom I have in fact banned for life) praised this movie, calling it “Frenetic … kinetic … a masterwork … a thriller of the highest order.” OMG. I haven’t been this bored, and lost, in a movie since “Andrei Rublev.” In fact “Saturday Fiction” consisted almost entirely of dull dialogue and a lot of pensive smoking, except for one scene where this doofus, after proposing that he and the protagonist become double agents, starts pawing at her crotch the way a dog would. After at least five seconds she slaps him. Five seconds? Really? Was she making up her mind? Or did the actor playing her forget what she was supposed to do? My wife and I both fell asleep before the halfway point. That was it for Friday … the Unplugged evening was over, without any withdrawal symptoms or even yearnings for my phone or laptop. I will say that the inability to have fully vetted this movie cost us pretty dearly, unless you consider we probably needed the sleep.

Saturday

Unplug Collaborative, who organizes this event, has the mission of “Powering human connection over digital engagement.” So, did my unplugged morning naturally blossom into a celebration of human attachment? Well, no. It turns out that excessive online activity is not the only impediment to interpersonal harmony. Another is the tendency of marriage partners to squabble. My wife and I had a bit of a dust-up; nothing dire or catastrophic, just the quotidian stuff that comes up. I determined that the social hygiene of isolation was warranted, and decided to pursue a very non-digital engagement with my mountain bike’s brake pads, which had somehow been soiled with hydraulic fluid. 

Everyone I’ve asked insists that this fluid cannot be removed from the pads and they must be replaced. I would prove these doubters wrong! So I sat out in the driveway with no YouTube, no Spotify, no social media, and no texts: just a couple of metal files and my weirdly metal brake pads, filing away for ages and ages upon ages, my hands blackening and becoming sore with the effort, feeling about as isolated and primitive as a man can be. After endless grinding, more buffing with emery cloth, cleaning with rubbing alcohol, doing the rotor as well, and putting it all back together, I did a test ride, and then went back into the house to report to my wife.

“You know how they all said it couldn’t be done?!” I challenged her. “Well—they were right.” Rear brake was still honking, not working, and heating the rotor up to where it could cauterize a wound. Went back out, replaced the pads, and felt the entire morning must be shot. But amazingly, it was only like 9:30. Time had slowed to a crawl. Is this what offline life is like? OMG, the non-digital life could be so productive!

During chore time I couldn’t stream music from my phone, but I have a fairly new but old-school stereo with a CD player. I chose a disc from the stacks and stacks that have been collecting dust for years, and put one on. It skipped. I tried another. It skipped too. The stereo is defective but surely out of warranty. It would have been a good idea to test all the features of this bad boy when I first set it up, but it has Bluetooth so I simply had no reason to ever try a CD. Is the streaming of offline, locally stored files from my phone technically against the rules? Well, yeah … because once you unlock a smartphone all hell breaks loose. But I found an old MP3 player that one of my kids abandoned years ago, plugged it into the auxiliary jack, and was back in business.

Look, I’m probably boring you. I’ll try to go faster. The bike ride never happened (maybe my pals just couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call?). My wife and I went on a hike, and didn’t use GPS when driving to the trailhead, which wasted some time. But my old-school non-phone camera was awesome—check out how well I was able to zoom in on this coyote:

I got some nice landscape photos as well. Here’s one now:

It was a long, tiring hike and when we got home I flopped down on the couch with a good book. For some, this might have been a novel activity (pun intended, sorry), or rather a return to something everyone used to do—“Oh my god, a book, an actual paper-bound book!”—but actually, I read all the time anyway. The cat joined me and did that thing where she curls up so precariously I have to put a hand around her rump to keep her from sliding off, so I only have one hand free to hold the book and turn the pages. (I put up with it because she’s a rescue cat and really needs this.) For a while there was beautiful golden non-backlit, non-LCD, non-halogen light flooding into the room, so I hadn’t even turned on a lamp, but as I sat there, nearly catatonic (get it?), the light gradually diminished until I was reading almost in the dark. And then it dawned on me: the sun had set! The Day of Unplugging was over! To sum up its effect on my day:

• Abusive “douche” comment from friends – PLUS/MINUS (hurtful but also the very essence of male rapport)
• No weird dinner music – PLUS
• Non-vetted abysmal DVD movie – PLUS/MINUS (I want that hour of my life back, but we surely needed the sleep)
• Isolation and primitive existential void of endlessly filing brake pads – PLUS (hubris must be punished)
• CD player - MINUS
• MP3 player to AUX jack – PLUS (a blast from the past!)
• Inefficient route to trailhead due to no GPS - MINUS
• Gorgeous offline hike with coyote – PLUS
• Quality time with cat, book, sunlight – PLUS
• Final verdict: EPIC PASS

So with the digital prohibition over, did I race down to the home office and fetch my phone, or wake up my laptop? Naw, it was almost dinnertime anyway and I had no burning need to reconnect. I hate to break it to you, but for me unplugging was easy (other than those damn brake pads). My question for you is: would you also find this easy? Or at least doable? Are you going to do it next year? Mark your calendar … it’s the first Friday in March, starts at sunset.

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From the Archives - Old School Cyclist

Introduction

This little essay captures what may have been my attempt to sound like a magazine writer. (I did send it to the Rivendell Reader, as a letter to the editor, and they were nice enough to print it.) Looking back, what I find most striking in this essay is that its conclusion is completely untrue. I highly doubt I believed it even then.

Old-school - January 13, 1989

He’s in my French class. One of the traditional, seventies‑style cyclists. Incredibly long hair, capped by the black Campagnolo cap, bill turned up, worn high on the head, towards the back. Red jersey, blank save for some racy stripes‑‑ wool. He also sports the first‑generation lycra cycling shorts. They’re dull, lackluster, somewhat threadbare, and openly display the bulge of his reproductive equipment. His bare feet are shockingly white beneath his barely tan, shaven legs; his black Detto Pietro cleats, which had hung over his shoulders by their laces on the trip up to the classroom, are now on display on the floor where books normally go. Of course, he waited until he got to class to remove the old knit cycling gloves. During class he will frequently nurse off of his La Vie Claire water bottle, to wash down the banana and bran muffin. He brought the bike into class with him ‑‑ a daring feat since we’re on the second floor, and the stairs are a zoo between classes.

The guy’s got guts. The last fella I saw who showed that kind of effrontery was my brother Max, back when those wretched cleats with the toes curling (actually, curdling) up in front, and that red wool jersey that came down to his knees ‑‑ they didn’t make jerseys for kids back then ‑‑ made up his entire wardrobe. I used to sport a cap of the Campagnolo or Cinelli persuasion, bill up, myself, but that was the extent of my indoor cycling regalia ‑‑ just enough to get some recognition without risking the brutal gibe of my peers.

The bike is as old as his uniform. No stickers ‑‑ an obvious sign of weak heritage. I suppose I could ask him about the make, but I can guess his response: “She was built by an Italian framebuilder. I can’t tell you more than that, except to say that she’s very fast.” In other words, a Univega. Perhaps the affordable Viva Sport, as Max had. (He, too, expounded on its rich Italian origin with little provocation.) All the same, only a heartless fink would leave his mighty steed outside, to brave the fierce elements or the jeopardy of theft. I dare anybody to challenge this hardcore cyclophile about bringing the bike to class.

I almost feel irresponsible in this era of sleek, trendy apparel which has no respect for tradition. My shoes fasten with velcro, of all things, and are made in Korea, not Italy. There’s not a fiber of wool left in my cycling wardrobe, and my shorts and jerseys alike are billboards for sponsorship, forsaking the simplicity of blank jerseys that said no more than “I am a cyclist.” No longer is the bike a constant companion; in today’s cycling world, it’s a mere fitness tool, with no more personality than a Nautilus machine. Most importantly, even the best riders of today refuse to tie up their identity in the sport. They not only look like everybody else, but they are everybody else. They just happen to ride a bike, that’s all.

I have an urge to turn to this old world cyclist and say, “Power, brother!” But I would be out of place. I’m not one of him, and never again could be. I belong to the new generation of racers, who attend clinics and belong to clubs. It’s become trendy to be a nouveau‑cyclist, to ride a quick, sporty bike with a “cream teal” paint job, and to wear sleek, fashionable pastel clothing and a lavender helmet with a name like “Brava.” We attempt to keep training diaries, recording pulse rate, diet, and our performance during today’s “training session.” We throw around terms like “paceline”, “repetitions”, and “technique” and combine our riding with circuit training to maximize our “fitness potential.” Gone are the days of aimless, carefree riding for riding’s sake. The technology has raged out of control, too; many new‑ generation riders never knew life before step‑in pedals or shifters that clicked, or brakes with a “light, snappy” feel.

Most of all, the perpetrators of this stylish new breed of cycling aren’t rebels. Their conduct is met with complete acceptance, even admiration, from the layman. They need not explain their shaven legs. They have never known the scorn and mockery that cyclists received, and even accepted. To them, cycling is just another way to fill in the time.

Only the guy in my French class deserves to call himself a cyclist. The rest of us gave up that right when we left our cleats at home and started dressing like everybody else.

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