From DC to Baja

So there’s bit of a tangle here and I’m not going to dwell too much on format and images and all that for the minute while I get this going again. This may take a few posts. Backstory time:

Seems the last time I was really on DC was 2012. 12 years ago. Mind blowing if I think about it.

Frontstory time: As a cyclist I have kept myself in perpetual simple-machine servitude and therefore poor for those years since 1996 the first time when I dedicated to MTB racing. It actually goes back to about 86 maybe when I tasted the sweet nectar of suffering on a bike and realized it was all I would do for decades to come. That is a prestory. This truthful dedicated pursuit was declared/formalized in my move to Flagstaff in 1996; and meeting the tribe there that I would train and suffer with as I chased that racing goal was essential: Snake, Benson, the NAU crew. Moving there ostensibly set my family structure for the years to come. That family structure formed into drunkcyclist beginning informally with my friendship originating with Big Jonny in 98 while we worked at Domenic’s Cycling in Tempe, AZ.

I had moved back to PHX temporarily to pursue more road racing with Domenic’s road team. I subsequently worked in the shop, and that is where I met BJ and Snake Hawk aka Champagne Rodman aka Casey Robertson. We would take those formative years at Domenic’s and I would parlay them into life in Flagstaff as I escamped the hell that was/is Phoenix, AZ for the second time.

I digress. A predecessor – AZ Bikes – in flagstaff began hustling soft-good meme-stock (way before meme’s were a thing) out of Bryce’s shop there in downtown Flagstaff was about the exact same time that DC was really blasting off – Actually, the blogging genere of social media was the thing that was blasting off. DC happened to be the ORIGINAL cycling blog back then. That lead into about the year 2000 and then things about bikes and the subculture of DC and other’s REALLY began to take off. Affiliates like AHTBM, CRC, and many others came online in later years. Now we have the crop of dominates of the format like radavist and prolly’s shit. and all those other rade nache commandos.

Comprise within that pursuit of professional racing the need to feed myself and I therefore had odd jobs. These were mostly coffee shop and bike shop jobs, but DC was this little computer thing and interesting. Especially with the porn. So, quickly, as I burned out on competitive cycling and I burned out on customer service, I began to take my website building skills and my original degree in graphic design and I made way using DC at the platform. I was the dude that killed the porn. I put the site on a blogging platform and I made the logo that is still the stalwart emblem of the downtrodden cyclist. And then I killed the blog some with my tangent on sad living. And then Dirty arrived just in the nick of time before I alienated absolutely everyone. I’ll talk about my estrangement with society-en-large sometime later.

And then, computers broke me. I ascended those first years of DC and spend more than a decade pursuing computer programming and then, one day, I shut my computer down and I simply walked away from my career. When I walked away from my career, it was 2020. When I walked away from my career, I then sold all my posessions and I got on my bicycle, and I pedaled to La Paz.

That is how I got to Alaska. More on that in the next post.