A Quick Ode to My Truck

The Legend

Alright blog. It’s been a while, I know. Clearly I don’t spend time pushing words around the computer screen like I used to. I prioritize other things now, and my lifestyle has changed a lot since 2012. I no longer race bicycles for a living, which means I’m no longer graced with a never-ending parade of amusing cycling-based stories to share. More impactfully, I’m no longer graced with the huge swaths of time required to carefully (and often not so carefully) whittle and polish my experiences into blog-sized pieces of writing. I’m not a fast writer, but it’s a free activity — the words in this blog clearly capture a period of my life where I had more time than money. 

And yet, here I am, bloggin’ away! Why? What occasion might inspire me to dust off my fingers, you might ask? Well, something took place recently that I feel is best processed (both personally and cosmically) through a few words on the ol’ Gliderbison blog. Dear readers, I have some bittersweet news. 

It’s time, at long last, to say goodbye to a most cherished presence here at the Gliderbsion Blog: my trusty 1990 Nissan Pickup. That’s right, I’m selling the Gliderbison itself. Few people know that my truck and this blog shared a name, but it’s true. Like the eternal question of the chicken and the egg, nobody knows who’s named after who. 

In an effort to do justice to the cumulative contribution this lovable hunk of junk has made to my life, please allow me the indulgence of stringing together a few words, for old time’s sake.

If my life towards the end of college was a primordial soup, just an unsorted mix of raw materials and potential energy, this truck served as the lightning bolt that gave birth to a strange new life-form (or more accurately, a form of life): that of a vagabond bicycle racer. A huge percentage of the trials and triumphs captured in this blog wouldn’t have been possible without my truck. It gave me freedom and independence, both spatially and financially. It allowed me to criss-cross the Pacific Northwest at will, gallivanting from race to race, from festival to festivity, like a drunken tailor stitching a mighty buttonhole. It was reliable and cheap, allowing me to chase my cycling dreams for years while averaging an income well below the poverty line. Most of all, my truck filled my life with character, and in many ways became part of my identity, serving as both comic relief and trusty sidekick for most of the last fourteen years. For all that time the interior and exterior steadily degraded to the point where the vehicle more resembled a rotting haystack made of roofing shingles and cabbage. All of the original paint had rusted off or been covered up with random scrap vinyl decals, and every plastic piece found on the vehicle had broken or flaked into dust -- but the thing ran beautifully, roaring into life with the flick of the key (or the fork, or cotter pin, or...).

My truck made many appearances here on this blog, at times featured, while times simply acting as an extra in the background. Here are a few classic posts, featuring the ol’ bucket of bolts:

One of my first posts back in 2007 about the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic included some descriptions and photos of the Gliderbison. 

Later that year, I posted about cracking my tail lights (and nearly getting beat-up as a result)

In 2010, I wrote about how returning from Seattle required defibrillating my truck. It sat in a driveway and rusted for two straight years, and then started up like a top!

In the years following my cycling (and blogging) days, the Gliderbison has been hard at work as the primary workhorse for the Colossal Collective. Since 2012, it’s helped me cart both puppets and puppeteers to dozens of festivals. It made it to Burning Man (and back!) six times, most recently surviving a trip down the dreaded Jungo road (and only losing a small chunk of the tail-pipe along the way). 

In case you’re wondering the Gliderbison’s fate, NO, I didn’t roll it off a cliff into a reservoir. In fact, I sold it to a friend (for actual American dollars). It’s in good hands, and its new owner is taking great care of it, giving it a fresh coat of primer, and replacing a few of the cracked tail-lights. I have no doubt that 1,000 years from now, when everyone I know and love is long dead and forgotten (or long since merged into the hive mind), the Gliderbison will still be trundling across the northwest like a post apocalyptic tumbleweed, unphased by the passing of time. 

Thanks Gliderbison -- you shall be missed. 

Gliderbison, hauling a giant puppet across Oregon

TESTING....THIS THING STILL WORK???

HELLO FELLOW CAVEMAN AND CAVEWOMAN -- KROGG HERE! 

KROGG AWAKEN FROM LONG SLUMBER IN ICE! 

YES KROGG KNOW IT BEEN MANY MOONS SINCE LAST POST. KROGG "TECHNICALLY" RETIRE FROM RACING BACK IN 2012, AND STOP POSTING ON BLOG VERY SHORTLY THEREAFTER. 

MANY THINGS CHANGE SINCE. HERE SHORT LIST: 

• KROGG GET SLOW AND FAT
• WORLD CHANGE IN COUNTLESS WAYS BIG AND SMALL. FOR INSTANCE: BITCOIN HAPPENED
• AMERICA CONFUSE KROGG. IN CAVEMAN SOCIETY, TRUMP WOULD BE INSTANTLY BANISHED FROM TRIBE FOR COUNTLESS REASONS. IN AMERICA? AMERICA ELECT DONALD TRUMP PRESIDENT. 
• KROGG START MAKING GIANT PUPPETS. THIS SUIT KROGG SENSIBILITIES QUITE WELL. 
• KROGG GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND GET GRADUATE DEGREE. THIS DEGREE CALLED "MBA" WHICH STAND FOR "MASTODON BULLSHIT ARTIST." [DON'T REFLECT ON THIS TOO LONG -- JUST RUN WITH IT -- YES, MASTODON CAN MAKE BULLSHIT, OK?]
• MORE RECENTLY, KROGG SIGN UP FOR GIANT CRAZY MOUNTAIN BIKE RACE CALLED LEADVILLE 100. THIS REEEEEEALLY DUMB IDEA. KROGG HAVE NO BUSINESS LINING UP AT RACE LIKE THAT. THAT RACE KICK KROGG CAVEMAN-ASS EVEN AT PEAK OF CAVEMAN FITNESS -- NOW, KROGG DEEPLY SKEPTICAL OF ABILITY TO FINISH WITHOUT ***GASP*** ACTUAL TRAINING!

FOR THIS REASON, KROGG PARTNER WITH WONDERFUL PLACE CALLED UpCycle Boise, AND ORGANIZE THREE-MONTH TRAINING PROGRAM -- MOSTLY TO FORCE KROGG TO ACTUALLY GET CAVEMAN-REAR IN MAMMOTH-GEAR! 

SO, IT WITH GREAT EXCITEMENT THAT KROGG ANNOUNCE: 

LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS PROGRAM ON WEBSITE. 

COME TRAIN WITH KROGG!

[ALSO, YES, THIS MIGHT MEAN KROGG TAKE METAPHORICAL PEN TO DIGITAL PAPER FROM TIME TO TIME. DON'T GET YOUR HOPES UP TOO HIGH. KROGG TYPING BRAIN FEEL RUSTY AND AWKWARD, LIKE CAVE-PAINTER WHO GET HANDS BITTEN OFF BY WILD-CAT.] 

A Career in Cycling, Visualized

Here they are: (almost) all the jerseys I wore from 2003 through 2012. Pretty good decade if you ask me.

Loop Pedal + Genius = Magic Zombies?

So I briefly worked alongside a guy. Let's call him Vince for the purposes of this blog post. Vince and I had several conversations about music, brief ones. One day we were listening to a Seattle radio show called Expansions, and we had the following exchange:

Vince: So I don't know about all this new stuff, but do you like old school shit? 
Sam: I mean sure...what do you mean by old school shit?  
Vince: You know—like real music. Ever hear of a guy named Jimmy Hendrix?
Sam: [purses lips, squints eyes, and massages temples with fingers]

Or this:

Vince: In my opinion man, music died in the nineties. Hey, you like Nirvana?
Sam: [glassy-eyed gaze into the distance, followed by flexing of jaw muscles]

I said nothing, because that's what I do when I'm truly and utterly at a loss—when someone says something so outrageously divergent from what I believe, that clearly it's not just our music tastes that are misaligned—it's our whole perception of reality. To Vince, "music" consisted of a list of about 175 songs all written between the years 1972 and 1994, all owned by the same four record companies, and all played on the same classic rock station.

If music is dead, then here's one of my favorite forms of reanimated zombified flesh: loop-pedal based magic. It's a whole art form, a stunning fusion of technology and musical vision. It's a marvelous, exciting world of musical creation out there, and I suspect this is only the beginning. Check out these guys:

Ok Fine, I'll Post Something (About Cats)

What better way to emerge from my blog hibernation than to craft a post featuring all my favorite cat videos from the last few months!?! Most cats on the internet are cute, but I'm less into cute cats as I am into fucking awesome ones:

 


I'm also impressed with how slow-motion can make just about anything look fucking awesome. Like kittens for instance. Normally cute, kittens, when slowed down enough, look like terrifying alien predators with the ability to fly:




Next, here are some of the strangest cats I've ever seen. I'm not even sure what kind of cats these are, but they're really cool. Once again, I'm stunned by how different things look when captured at 1000 frames per second. I think they're Persian cats, but I'm not sure. Check it out:




Lastly, if you think cats look cool at 1000 frames per second, wait til you see them at 1,000,000,000,000 frames per second! (Please, inventors of this technology, point your camera at cats ASAP!)

KROGG MAKE GIF

KROGG HAVE FRIEND. FRIEND HAVE PUG. PUG SILLY BEAST. KROGG CAPTURE SILLY BEAST ON CELL PHONE, TRANSFORM TO GIF, AND SHARE WITH INTERNET. BEHOLD:  MOGLEY AND BINDY!

Let Me Be Exceedingly Clear

Unless you've had your head under a rock this week, you'll know by now that the sponsor of our team, Exergy Development Group, has chosen to end their financial support of the Team Exergy for 2013. This news was not unexpected, but the finality of the announcement came as a surprise. I'd been carefully guarding a faint glimmer of hope that everything would be OK (Read: sticking my head in the sand, hoping the situation would just go away. It's called denial folks, and it's not a river in Egypt.). When I read the news that the team was without a sponsor, and that I was without a job -- I was crushed.

The internet has gone totally bonkers over this news. Reactions have ranged from the dismissive and pessimistic  to the vitriolic and asinine  Personally, I've had trouble refraining from being more vocal over social media. This is something that affected me deeply and profoundly. A large hunk of who I am, and how I think about myself is tied up in my job as a cyclist --  and the prospect of suddenly not being a racer any more is painful. I'd grown rather fond of what my next year was shaping up to be. Getting the rug pulled out from under me like this feels a bit like getting dumped by a girlfriend. It stings. I've said things over Facebook and Twitter that I probably shouldn't have -- comments that, while they've all been centered around me and my personal situation, aren't really the message I want to broadcast. 

So what do I want to broadcast? It's simply this: I am SO grateful for the chance to race my bike these last two years -- and most of that gratitude is directed towards James Carkulis and the Exergy Development Group. Anyone who knows me from my Hagens Berman days remembers how close I was to not becoming a pro racer. At the end of 2010 I'd been "chasing the dream" for five years. I was satisfied with my career as an amateur, but (provided I didn't get a shot at the next level of racing) was ready to move on to other things. I'd reached the conclusion that I was good enough to be a pro, but that much more goes into getting a pro contract than simply having the legs to do the job. Luck, timing, and connections were all part of the equation, and I didn't feel like I failed as a racer just because those other factors weren't on my side. Then, in October, I was offered a spot on Exergy. I felt like I'd won the lottery! It was only because of the management team of Escalera racing, and the insane generosity of our sponsor that I was offered the chance to keep racing. Like I told Cyclingnews, I feel like I was able to hit the snooze button, fall back asleep, and continue dreaming this ridiculously fabulous dream where I get paid to race bicycles. 

You can say many things about James Carkulis, and Exergy Development Group. Yes, he has outstanding bills. Yes, he had to make the difficult decision to withdraw sponsorship of my team. But to imply that he harmed us or betrayed us is just stupid. He enabled us, and the sport of cycling, to a fantastic degree. 

James, it's been a wild ride. 

Nothing lasts forever, but this was gooooood while it lasted. 

Thank you so much.