Happy Sundays, Bullshit Mondays

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I rode for a little over an hour Sunday morning with Brinky on my single speed two-niner. It’s the only bike that seems to be worth a shit at the moment. Well, not counting the road bikes. Most of them are always on point. All they ever need is some air in the tires.

I think that’s why I like the single speed so much. The last mountain bike I sold for nothing (we’ve all done it) was a dually with five different air chambers I had to check/pay attention to/adjust/think about each time before I rode the damn thing. Two positive chambers up front, and one negative. One of each in the rear. In a word: Tedious. If any of ’em (or two or three) were off a few psi, bad things would happen.

And I hate bad things. Unless they’re strippers. Then I love bad things.

So, about the single speed – I’ve always really liked the fact I can squeeze the front tire and say, well, maybe she needs a few strokes and I’m out the door. I hate fucking around with my bike for twenty minutes before I go ride. I’m more of a “find my helmet and find the door” kind of guy.

And twenty minutes is thirty percent of my total ride time these days.

Go figure.

The following is an email I wrote HD last week. (And Mort is yet another alias for our dear beloved Bacardi Marti)

From: big jonny
Subject: Re: DAMAGE!
Mort is going to go bye-bye on the climb to Bisbee and end up laying
on his back in a Dairy Queen parking lot somewhere cursing Jesus’
name…That’s what my money says.

You will win for the seventeenth time.

I was right on one count at least. HD won again. He makes it look easy.

I got this email from Bacardi Boy yesterday regarding my Ride Clean cleans up post:

From: Bacardi Marti
Subject: thanks
Hey nice shout out for the team and for hammy and HD —

….and I could be pissed about the DQ comment…

…except for the fact that I would have placed a bet on myself for just that….sucking down a blizzard and looking for suds…

Good thing he’s got thick skin.

A little background on this one: Ten years ago when even seven hundred time winner HD himself was new to the event, I helped crew for him. Me and Iron Schott drove around all night in a VW van with no heat, leap frogging HD, taking his clothing & lights, and feeding him bottles. Cochise is 252 miles longs, starts at 2:00 am, and it sucks.

Iron Schott and I ended up crewing together two years, just him and me, in a van, with no heat, down by the river.

It was fun as hell.

Anyway, one of those first two years, there was this guy in the race, I can’t remember his name, a cat maybe a few years younger than me who came into the bike shop I worked at. He was over at Sky Harbor airport working as a baggage handler, and he rode an old mountain bike to work. A real salt of the earth type guy. Nice guy too.

He rode Cochise that year, on the same clapped out mountain bike with slick tires. I don’t know if he owned a stitch of lycra, I think he rode in sweatpants. His parents crewed for him. It was the first time he had done anything like that race. I guess he read about it somewhere and thought it’d be fun. I read about it somewhere and thought it’d be hell. That said, I will have to do that event one year before I die or get hit by another drunk driver and can’t do it. It’s always out there, getting stronger, while I’m in here, getting weaker.

So it goes.

Back to the mountain bike cat: He was at the awards ceremony in the lobby of the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Arizona, the morning after the race. He stands up to accept his finishers trophy and say a few words about how it went for him out on the race course. The ride was very hard, he was proud to have finished, his parents were troopers and saw to him throughout the night, couldn’t have done it without them and the like. At some point his father had suggested he ride behind the van as to benefit from the draft, without realizing of course that that just wouldn’t be cricket. Everyone shared a laugh, and he continued on.

At some point in the night he ended up in the despair many of us have faced head on in ultra endurance events. He was in a Dairy Queen parking lot somewhere off I-10, laying flat on his pack on a picnic table, staring at the sky and wondering just why in the hell he had ever undertaken such an endeavor.

We’ve all been there, that dark personal moment were we ask “Why the fuck am I doing this to myself?”

He said what he really wished at that moment, more than anything, was that Dairy Queen was open and he could buy himself an ice cream.

The place erupted in heartfelt applause.

I was bust’n on ‘ol Bacardi, calling out a “dark personal moment” at some point during the night. He’s due. His first 24 hour race was last February at the Old Pueblo, and this was his second big one. I thought he’d at least have an “I really want a fucking ice cream about now” moment. I figured he’d finish the thing, no problem there. Just that it would be zero fun. Cochise is nothing to fuck with. Unless you’re Jackass. Then you do it with a bunch of water bottles on a rear rack and stashed gallon bottles of water you put in the bushes the day before the race and still finish second place. To HD no less.

That reminds me: Jackass needs a new nickname. I’m getting sick of calling him “Jackass”. He seems to actually enjoy it. And I can’t be having that. Not on my watch.

Please post your suggestions in the comment section. There are no wrong answers, only stupid kids.

Bacardi Marti the Cabana Boy pulled it out. Good on ya, Marty. Good on ya.

Link dump and I’m out:

[fresh, fly and ultra] static.iftk.com.br
[credit when due] cjr.org
[eyesore of the month] kunstler.com
[clusterfuck nation] kunstler.com
[prime time] howtoavoidthebummerlife.com

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About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

12 Replies to “Happy Sundays, Bullshit Mondays”

  1. had a taste of crewing for an ultrarunning event last weekend at the Arkansas traveler 100 mile trail running race. the heat and humidity were sick and some motherfer from oregon won it in like 18hours, full metal.

    giant tarantulas, copperheads, rattlers. this is bat country! is that a stick? no it’s just a venomous snake. over half the field dropped or were pulled out of the race.

    I watched and sipped on shitty miller ‘chill beers’ best thing since zima. suprisingly if you can FIND a liquor store in AR chances are they will have fat tire ale, go fig.

  2. Thought I’d throw in my 2 cents for a new nickname for Jackass. I’ve always been fond of Dingleberry. It’s got a nice ring to it.

  3. I like to keep the alliteration going, it helps jonny keep things straight. How ’bout “jerkoff”? I have crewed the 24 in the OP, and ridden it (remember the year the water bottles froze?, how about all the mud the next year?), you need those people, DQ or not.

  4. “That reminds me: Jackass needs a new nickname. I’m getting sick of calling him “Jackass”. He seems to actually enjoy it. And I can’t be having that. Not on my watch.”

    Learn to enjoy him enjoying it and he’ll probably start hating it.

  5. maybe try douch-ass or jack-bag, or bag-ass, or douch-jack. Any of which will likely get a response of some kind.

  6. “how bout Douchbag!

    Seems to be popular with the girls here in Tucson!”

    — cwbyker

    “Wait, Jackass is popular or the name Douchbag is popular?

    Or, both?”

    — big jonny

    …i think he meant that DOUCHBAGS are popular with the girls in tucson, right? Gotta love those CLEAN Tucson girls.

    I gotta name for Jackass — how about the Marinater? Marenator? Mareneater?

    oops. too dirty? sorry.

    By the way — thank you Juan Grande for the kind kind words. Mom was never so generous. that may be why i have this pathological need for approval. if i was a girl i think i’d be a slut.

    B