On June 13th, 2007, I started a bicycle blog called “Bike Snob NYC.”
I had no idea what would happen when I launched that first post into what we then called the “blogosphere.” (When I say “we” I don’t include myself, the term “blogosphere” makes me dry-heave, I’m not sure how I just managed to use it twice in the same paragraph after avoiding it for almost 20 years.) Most likely I figured I’d put up a few posts, nobody would ever read them, and I’d go back to my existence as a low-level publishing industry functionary and sub-mediocre amateur bike racer.
Instead, my wildest dreams came true and the blog became popular. Each post seemed to attract more and more comments. I heard from everyone from Lance Armstrong to Grant Petersen. I published multiple books and toured the world. And, most importantly, I assembled a mighty fleet of bicycles–a veritable armada from which I choose each morning with the insouciance of a sultan deciding which of concubines to adjourn to the bedroom with after dinner.
Certainly since those heady days I’ve fallen quite a bit from those dizzying heights, but I still have you, my loyal readers, and of course I still have the bicycles. And since this whole thing was just a stroke of luck from the beginning, I really never gave much thought to how it would all end, since even one reader is more than I started out with, which was zero.
However, I may finally give up once and for all after today, because I don’t see how I can even go on anymore in the face of this:
I wish I could laugh. I wish I could parry with some witty retort to SRAM for foisting this upon us. Sadly, I can do neither. This just makes me want to give up. It knocks my legs out from under me, takes the wind out of my sails, and evokes every other trite for depletion and surrender you could possibly think of. My fight is over, my race is run, my zeppelin lies limp and flaccid upon the tarmac. How do I keep blogging in a world where this exists? How do I keep cycling in a world where this exists? How do I retain my faith in humanity when we are apparently no longer even able to SQUEEZE A FUCKING TIRE with the most sophisticated tire pressure gauge ever created? You know, the one the [insert your deity of choice] put at the end of our wrists?
And worst of all, it’s even “woke!”
You know, because it’s “non-binary,”
Get it?
And yet, like the cuckold who is perversely compelled by the lurid details of his spouse’s extramarital liaisons, I somehow find myself seeking out more information about this abomination. It’s a form of exquisite torture. So I turned to YouTube, where an endless parade of fitness influencers make bukkake all over the latest products:
I don’t know who this guy is–I don’t know who any of these people are–but I did learn from him that the they’re like $2,000 but they’re for “all of us looking for every advantage that we can get:”
I dunno, it seems like if he’s looking for an advantage he might try raising his saddle a bit first.*
*[I generally don’t believe in lazy Internet saddle height critique, but what can I say, it’s an act of desperation on my part, like going for the eyes or groin when you have no other chance against your opponent.]
Hey, look, what do you want from me? I tried. I made fun of all the goofy trends, I looked askance at all the “upgrades,” I did my best to uphold the twin virtues of simplicity and reliability…for EIGHTEEN YEARS. But it now appears all that was to no avail, and that this is what people want–wireless bikes with five million batteries and idiot lights to tell them when to add air to their semen-filled tubeless tires. Oh, sure, people will laugh at it now, but in a few years every rim will have an integrated pressure sensor. Even Velo Orange will offer one, though the indicator light will be suitably “retro:”
Perhaps one day we’ll look back and mark 2025 as the year cycling finally became nothing more than an endless feedback loop of meaningless data: your crank talking to your rims talking to your shifters talking to your derailleurs talking to the scranial pressure monitor in the perineal patch of your saddle so it can add or subtract just the right amount of air pressure to your tires and your suspension system and your inflatable self-lubricating chamois. And perhaps the greatest tragedy in all of this is that not a single rider will hear what this data is actually saying–and what it’s telling them with increasing accuracy is that they suck. Or maybe they are listening; maybe like the aforementioned cuckold they’re turned on by the humiliation. And I suppose all this is an accomplishment of sorts, because ever before in human history have the metrics of mediocrity been available to us at such dazzlingly high resolution.
Okay, that’s it, I’m going for a ride. Please accept my most sincere Memorial Day well-wishings. I’ll see you back here on Tuesday. Maybe. (Okay, probably. Fine, almost certainly.)
Yours, etc.
–Tan Tenovo
