Hello.

Hi, I still write. So you can shut up now, stupid Robot, with your doom and gloom IMs "So you've quit the blog?" I've been crazy busy the last few weeks. But I also did some interesting bike things. Namely made my Swobo into a fixie. When I say "made", I mean flipping the wheel and throwing on a 17 tooth ring, but for a second there it sounded like I was handy with a wrench. Which is cool.

My take on the fixie? I hated it. All the things I liked about my commute were pretty much negated by riding fixie. I like to coast. I like futz with my jacket. I like to reach into my pockets and pull out my phone and look shit up while I ride (I'm a retard). I like to screw up getting my feet in the clips and then coast while I flip the peddle over and slide in. These are things that do not occur with the fixie.

The fixie is always "on". You're either pedaling, skidding, or falling. Any other activity you want to be doing must include one of these. That didn't work for me (see things I like listed above). I feel I gave the fixie a good shot tho. I got pretty competent on the riding fixie. I even stopped trying to coast (don't do this) out of habit and got pretty good at controlling my decent speeds with leg muscles. Actually, I need to stop and relate to you an episode that occurred on the first day I rode fixie.

I was coming down this huge hill and and immediately got going super fast and my legs were just being yanked out from under me as I tried to use my leg muscles to control the speed of the bike. Things were going south fast, so I let instinct take over and I took my feet off the pedals. This is a bad idea. To get my feet back on the pedals, well it was like trying to jump out of a moving car and into a instant sprint to match the speed. I can't do that. (I tried. You just fall flat on your face and it hurts really bad.) So I just went down the hill with my feet sticking out in the air. When I got to the bottom of the hill I was all "Phew! That was crazy!" Never once did it occur to me to actually use my BRAKES to modulate speed. Ugh. Like I said fixie isn't for me. My brain just isn't wired up for it.

So last night I switched my bike back to it's original form. Then I rode it to the bus stop this morning. I coasted down the big hill over looking the ocean, scratched my nuts, and started fucking with my phone trying to see what time it was. This I like.