A long day out there in the big city can be tough, but there’s nothing that washes your cares away and refreshes your spirit like being greeted at the train station by a Platypus:
By the way, I put “A commuter being greeted at the train station by a Platypus” into the AI and I got this:
The “commuter” looks more like a railway worker, and the “platypus” looks like some sort of disgustingly nightmarish dino-weasel.
Or is the image from the point of view of the commuter and the guy in the safety vest is just the dino-weasel’s handler?
I have no idea.
Equally invigorating is a ride on a vintage road bicycle on a warm spring day so bursting with new life that it feels almost pornographic:
I don’t really ride the Cervino in winter so this is the first time I’ve been on it in awhile and it felt better even than I remembered–so good in fact that I caught myself thinking perhaps I should equip it with clincher wheels and lower gears and different pedals and maybe even move the shifters to the ends of the bars to make it even more comfortable and convenient, until I remembered that I have that bike already, duh:
Also, what’s the point of modernizing a vintage road bike, anyway?
Let it be what it wants to be. We all know that when you mess around with the classics things are liable to go horribly awry:
Fortunately, the top-mounted shifters on the Cervino help keep me honest, since I don’t think there’s a great way to replace them with cable stops:
I mean I’m sure it could be done, but it would be weird and ugly.
You know, like the Faggin.
Or like this thing:
As for switching to clinchers, if you’re going to tie your feet to your pedals with a leather strap and push the sorts of gears that put hair on your chest you might as well also glue your tires to your rims–and when they ride as delightfully as these it’s almost worth the hassle:
Thank you again to the reader who gifted me these tires. Between people abandoning tubulars and sending me their Vittoria tires and people abandoning mechanical shifting and sending me their Super Record drivetrains I hope to live in the slipstream of obsolescence forevermore.
The bike feels fast, too:
Even standing still it’s ready to spring into action, just like that overgrown rabbit or bill-less platypus or whatever that weird creature is in the background:
And yet as fast as I felt I was passed innumerable times on the bike path by other riders. I don’t know what’s more frustrating: all these fair-weather riders who were nowhere to be seen all winter long while I was out there putting in the miles in the cold, or the fact that every one of them is faster than me anyway and I have nothing to show for my dedication and consistency. I tell myself they were probably all Zwifting or something, but the fact of the matter is I’m just old and slow and feeble–even when I have an advantage so unfair that it’s been banned by the UCI:
By the way, the Wife Oil is still available, though I grow more and more tempted to acquire it myself. Maybe I’ll lean into the whole “Spring Classics” theme by complementing the suspension fork with some 32-spoke wheels and some wider tires so I can really float over rough terrain.
Oh, wait, I have that bike already, duh:
By the way, if you’re considering the bike, I could be persuaded to throw in a pair of Spinergy Rev-X wheels of questionable structural integrity:
Wait. How the hell have I not tried these out on the Y-Foil yet?
I should probably do something about that…
