Féile Shamhna
The first of the harvest festivals (not counting Canada’s) is upon us, setting the cogs of holiday unrelenting towards Christmas. It’s great to have an excuse for celebration and all, but I find the demand for spirit by some of the celebrants of these second-tier holidays to be a little unsettling. Y’all know that there’s a whole holiday season coming soon, right? You really ought to pace yourselves. Halloween can be fun, but it’s used as an excuse to hide the celebration of your fantasies, the parade of costume, behind the screen of the costumed crowd, making unusual behavior acceptable. You can dress in costume any day you want. Try it! Go against the flow. We have booze to erode inhibitions; we don’t need a holiday for it.
Perhaps my uncertainty towards Halloween in relation to other holidays stems from the food. On Thanksgiving you have a turkey, on Christmas you have some kind of feast, maybe a ham or something, but Halloween just has candy corn. My sentiments toward candy corn are similar to those of Lewis Black, though I’m a lot less angry about it, and I have a habit of making it through the whole bag before remembering that I don’t really like candy corn that much and that it makes me sick. I did manage to keep away from candy corn this year, but that was the only thing in the smörgåsbord of candy that I think of as a tradition. I can’t get excited about candy corn. Turkey and dressing, on the other hand, is going to be delicious, and I can hardly wait.
Enough about holidays: you probably see that lonely little category tag down there, and you know that what I really want to talk about is the bike. I did end up horizontal recently, but no one was hurt. It was raining a couple of weeks ago, and while racing down Mansell Road to catch the bus, I thought it wise to try to stop at a light instead of playing chicken with the guy turning left. I didn’t really count on my brakes locking up. Locked brakes was rather a new sensation for me, so my reaction was to get ready to fall instead of easing up a bit and pumping them. My landing was beautifully executed, all of the skidding motion happening on my gloves instead of on exposed fleshy parts, and I managed to move with the skidding, falling bike to avoid spraining anything on the foot I keep strapped in, but the handlebar hit a little hard, bending it down on the left side. This bike is made of aluminum instead of an alloy of steel and the heart of Mt. Doom, but I still can’t bend the damn thing back by hand. My solution is not to care, since it really isn’t bent very much. I guess I’ll buy a new handlebar eventually.
On a more recent disastrous note, I totally screwed up my tires on Sunday. I had known that they were getting a bit worn, but it took a definite failure to get me to replace them. I spent a good part of Sunday tooling around the metro Atlanta Northside, buying groceries, looking at books and deciding that I’m not ready to spend a hundred freaking dollars on waterproof pants to go over my ten dollar jeans. Contributing to the failure was my maladjusted fenders: they would rub the tire from time to time, but I usually just readjusted them at a stop light, making a note to tighten everything up later. I guess this wore a thin spot on the cheap tire I used to replace the one I killed on a particularly mean nail, since late in the Sunday afternoon I ran over some glass which left a huge gaping hole in what had apparently been a slightly bulgy part of the rear tire. I really wish that all these people drinking while driving would switch to cans. I came prepared, though, but while replacing the tube found that my previous hatred for Performance store brand tubes was really my own fault. The pump I use has a tendency to grab onto the valve which can end up pulling it off the tube if I’m not careful, which I wasn’t. It was all quite educational. The final result of this is that I now have two new tires (the front tire had an unsettling gouge and was starting to go square, so I figured I may as well replace that, too). I decided not to get the kevlar banded tires that were available, since the non-kevlar parts looked kind of crappy, opting for the same Italian brand that came with bike. The maximum recommended pressure is 10psi lower for some reason, and they have some tiny little treads where my original tires were basically bald, but I’m still ridin’ 25’s, and it’s all pretty much the same.
As far as other parts that need replacing, the brakes are mighty close to the wear lines now, and the chain, which I had thought about replacing a little while ago, is now definitely—according to some overpriced tool—at the 0.75% wear mark, which means it’s time for a new one. I’m not terribly worried about the brakes since replacing them is just a matter of positioning, but the chain requires a special tool, which makes me a little nervous. I have a funky-looking chain tool, but I’m not really sure how to use it. I guess I’ll find out this weekend. Wish me luck.