“No comment.”
November 21, 2017 Comments Off on “No comment.”
I was going to make a list of the great things that have happened since kicking #socmed to the curb and returning to my real and rather strange life as opposed to drowning in the fake and manicured lives of others on Facebag, Stravver, and the Twitter.
Part of taking back my mind has also meant disabling the comments on my world infamous blog, the one you’re reading right now. Countless readers have emailed to ask about the fact that they can no longer comment. To each of these three concerned citizens I have said something like, “It was taking up too much time and it was too distracting.”
They have asked if it’s a temporary thing or if it’s permanent.
“Permanent.”
And they’ve said that reading the comments was half the fun of the blog, to which I can only say (to non-subscribers), “Losing half of $0.00 is still zero,” (and to my $2.99 subscribers) “You’re only getting ripped off $1.4950 a month, which isn’t too bad when you compare it to a venti pumpkin spice latte.”
Also, over the lifetime of this blog there have been exactly 35,608 comments posted, and since I’ve been pretty faithful responding to each one, well, that’s a lot of time. Let me rephrase that: It’s a colossal amount of time. The hashtag for that would be #enough. Even more time has been lost deleting spam and emptying all of the unread troll posts from trash, orphan bytes that have easily tripled or quadrupled the number of comments that actually made it through the filters.
One person was curious enough about this change to reach out and say, “Let’s go for a ride,” one of those funny instances where ditching virtual reality led immediately to real reality. It was a friend who I don’t see very often, a real friend, someone who I’d not hesitate to ask a favor from and who I’d not hesitate to help. We met up this morning at Malaga Cove and did a few loops around the golf course, during which time we talked about the #socmed plague, about how much was #enough, about whether #socmed killed people or people killed people, and about the Latigo hillclimb.
This conversation was nothing like any conversation I’ve ever had on #socmed. It involved sound waves, reflected and refracted light that revealed the changing contours of a real human, the faint scent of sweat, and the touch of a fist bump. My friend said a few things I disagreed with but after responding I couldn’t delete anything I said, and I couldn’t unfollow the parts of what he said that I didn’t like. Since it was just us, I didn’t think it was appropriate to share the conversation with anyone, even my wife, something made easier by the absence of a “share” button. We didn’t take any pictures of each other, and although no promises were made and no particularly intimate secrets were exchanged, I’m pretty sure the conversation and its contents will remain private, the way mundane things between friends used to always be, and therefore, through privacy, they became a strand that strengthened the bond of friendship. No matter what Facebook says, friendship isn’t strengthened by publicity, it’s destroyed by it.
The things we said to each other weren’t linked to any other platforms. They weren’t copied and pasted, and no third party was able to record and store those things we talked about for purposes of determining our future purchasing decisions. During the conversation no one popped in and asked us to buy something, and none of our other friends dropped by to unload upon us a news story about something we felt strongly about. Most peacefully, there wasn’t an endless string of side conversations between other friends that we had to listen to while carrying on our own. There was a kind of freedom in knowing that after the ride there wasn’t going to be anything to review, analyze, compare, dissect, kudo, or critique.
And when our conversation finished, there was silence, which, I once read somewhere, is golden.
END
For $2.99 per month you can subscribe to this blog and pay to support what you might otherwise take for free. Click here and select the “subscribe” link in the upper right-hand corner. Thank you!
Performance enhancing equipment
August 3, 2016 § 25 Comments
Or “PEE” as I like to call it.
A couple of months ago I ordered the new SRAM electric wireless shifter thingies from my ace mechanic, Boozy P. One day he called. “Yo, Wanky, you still want that stuff?”
“Bring it,” I said. “It’s about time for me to crack the top 10 out at Telo, and what’s a couple grand if it guarantees me a placing or two?”
A week later there was a family car crisis which led to the purchase of a Chevy Volt. It was the most awesome car in the world for seven days, but after one full week of flawlessness it quit working and it’s been in the shop ever since. “Part’s on back order,” Service Dude said.
That was July 18.
So I called Boozy P. “Dude,” I said, “I bought a new broken Chevy Volt and we have some financial issues and I have to choose between the SRAM electrothingies or food.”
He waited, wondering what the problem was. “Yeah?”
“So I’m going to have to pass on that stuff I ordered unless it puts you in a bind, in which case I’ll take it and lose that last 35 pounds.”
“Nah,” he said, “I can return it; actually I got a great deal and several people have been asking about it. No worries.”
Shortly thereafter I got 2nd or 3rd in the Great Disputed Telo Training Crit Finish Controversy of 2016, which is the best I’ve ever done there in eight years but who’s counting? About that time Boozy P. stopped answering my phone calls and texts which was disturbing because he’s super responsive. Unbeknownst to me he had taken a five-day trip to the Sierras, going up to 12,000 feet with nothing but beer to sustain him.
I had no idea he’d gone Jeremiah Johnson on me. I thought he was mad because I’d crawfished on the PEE or perhaps somehow because of the Great Disputed Telo Training Crit Finish Controversy of 2016 in which I got 2nd or 3rd, the best I’ve ever done in eight years but who’s counting?
I interrupted Manslaughter’s vacation in Hawai’i to see if he could intervene. “Boozy P. isn’t mad,” Manslaughter assured me. “He’s never mad. Take a Xanax.”
Then I called EA Sports, Inc., who was excited to hear from me but not that excited. “Dude, it’s 2:00 AM and you woke up the whole family. What’s up?” I told him the sad story about how I’d crawfished on the PEE and Boozy was not taking my calls or texts because of the Great Disputed Telo Training Crit Finish Controversy of 2016 in which I got 2nd or 3rd, the best I’ve ever done in eight years but who’s counting?
EA Sports, Inc. advised me to get some sleep. “Boozy probably dropped his phone in the toilet. He’ll get back to you once he gets a new one.”
Finally I called Dawg. “Don’t ever call me at 3:00 AM again,” he said. “Even if you’re in jail. Especially if you’re in jail.” He hung up and I didn’t even get a chance to tell him about how I’d crawfished on the PEE and how maybe Boozy wasn’t taking my calls or texts because of the Great Disputed Telo Training Crit Finish Controversy of 2016 in which I got 2nd or 3rd, the best I’ve ever done in eight years but who’s counting?
After I’d given up all hope, Boozy P. returned from the Sierras. “Yo, Wanky,” he said. “I saw you called me 473 times and left a thousand text messages. What’s up?”
I went over to the shop and apologized for crawfishing and for the 2nd or 3rd Place Controversy (my best Telo finish ever, btw). “No worries,” he said. “You still want the SRAM wireless? I was going to take it back today.”
I thought about the Chevy Volt which was still in the shop at Martin Chevrolet and how the part was on back order indefinitely although they’d promised to speak with the subcontractor factory in Vietnam to find out when the part might be manufactured and how Mrs. WM was going to kill me when she found out I’d bought something that I couldn’t even explain what it was or what it did. That’s when I looked at the SRAM electrothingy box.
.
“You know,” I said, “my PEE has been grossly exceeding my dedication since I swapped a SunTour derailleur, Sugino cranks, and Dia-Compe brakes for Campy Super Record back in 1984. And I can’t possibly afford it but that box is so sweet so yeah, put that shit on.”
For all you tech heads out there, the first key performance difference between SRAM electrothingy and Dura-Ace mechanical is overwhelming, dominating, extraordinary beyond words: The second you post a picture of the cool boxes on Facegag, it breaks your fuggin’ timeline.
If you’ve always been in the running for awesome Facebag posts but have never been able to crack the podium, SRAM electro is the real deal. You gain, on average, 150 extra likes, 50-ish smiley faces, and envious posts from Ol’ Grizzles that don’t even mention guns or how our great nation was built on easy access to suicide and firearm accidents in the home.
The SRAM electro interfaces incredibly well with FB and is easily uploaded to your timeline, where it simply outperforms any other PEE, even wheelsets that are full carbon with extra carbon and photos of Charon. I’ll admit that it’s a costly Facebag upgrade but it’s worth it for the hour or two that you eclipse all of the stories about Trump until he beats up another squalling infant, calls the mother of a dead soldier a fat cow, or urinates on a TV interviewer.
When I actually got to ride the new electrothingy stuff, it was better than watching the ads in my timeline that said “Batshit Crazy Republicans So Fucking Terrified of Trump That We’re Voting for Hillary.”
Less importantly, I also got to use the electrothingies while actually riding, and got to test the PEE out at Telo last night, which kind of broke the rule of “Never try new stuff out for the first time on race day.” After 50 minutes of an amazingly brutal race, Headdown James attacked for the 25th time into the wind after Dawg had brought the break to within view. Everyone was screaming friendly advice to me.
“Pull through, you bastard!”
“You fucker!”
“You wheelsucking piece of shit!”
“Damn you, Wanky, you asshole, pull through!”
However, in addition to being really tired I am a really bad person, so I hunkered down until Headdown James launched. He is really tiny and accelerates like a gnat but I managed to latch on. He glanced back and saw that it was Sir Deadweight. He knew better than to flick his elbow, and not just because Heavy D., who was up the road in the break, had admonished me the week before.
“What is wrong with you, you nut?” he had asked.
“What do you mean?” I fake answered.
“You chased me down ten times during the race!”
“I did?” I fake said.
“Hell yes, you did. Every time I looked back you were driving the front with ten guys on your wheel!”
“Really?” I fake said. “I thought I was bridging,” I fake excusified.
“You were, with everyone else. Please don’t do that next week. It’s bad racing and bad etiquette. I’m your teammate, dude.”
“I won’t,” I fake promised. Heavy D. didn’t know that I love nothing more than chasing teammates. It’s not out of hostility, it’s because I like them and want to BE with them and if they’re up the road the only way I can be with them is to chase.
However, with my new PEE I had sworn not to chase and I didn’t. Headdown James rode like a demon and got us to the break. I was so tired and happy to see my friends that I cried. Heavy D. had been monitoring the situation and knew that I hadn’t dragged up the field. “Good work, Wanky,” he said. “For once.”
Out of the six-man break I put in an amazing effort and convincingly beat everyone in the chase group for an impressive 6th, which was three or four placings less than the 2nd or 3rd I’d gotten the week before in the Great Controversy when I was using the D/A mechanical.
“How’d you like it?” asked Boozy P. after the race, who had gotten second and scorched me on a bike and components that had, frankly, zero Facegag performance edge.
“Its Facebag game is strong,” I said. “But its on-the-road performance hasn’t translated into a Wanky training crit victory yet.” I watched as Emily pulled on the winner’s tunic, an awesome StageOne production given to the women’s weekly winner at Telo.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you need some new wheels?”
My stomach rumbled as I thought about facing the next couple of weeks eating nothing but water washed down with H20. “You’re right.”
END
————————
Subscribe to this blog now! Special offer ends never! For $2.99 per month you can get super excellent tech reviews on new PEE! Click here and select the “subscribe” link in the upper right-hand corner. Thank you!
Something to love about Mark Zuckerberg. Finally.
October 29, 2015 § 14 Comments
When the Great History of Bad People is written, Mark Zuckerberg will get a chapter, if not his own page. The hypocrisy of making billions by scraping people’s personal information via social media while fanatically protecting his own private life is terrible, let alone his bare knuckled and successful assault on the mostly dead U.S. right of privacy. The unfettered access that business and government has to us all the time is in large part thanks to him.
Bad Mark Zuckerberg. Bad, bad, bad Mark Zuckerberg.
And then Mark exploded last year on the stage at Tsinghua University, dazzling the crowd with his beginning Chinese in a performance that recalled a spoiled child mangling a novice piano piece for the indulgent relatives. Zuckerberg was so pleased with himself in this performance, and so doted upon by his audience, that to the non-Chinese speaker you might actually think he sounded good.
Alas, he doesn’t. His raw combination of misplaced confidence, horrible pronunciation, and supreme pride at being able to butcher a simple conversation, most of which had been thoroughly rehearsed, shows the gaping cultural chasm between America and China. When Jack Ma of Alibaba speaks in perfect English, no one bats an eye. How the hell else are you gonna make money here if you can’t speak English? When Harvard drop-out Zuckerberg hacks elementary Chinese to pieces with a claw hammer, the audience cheers and acts like they’ve been given a golden calf, or treated to the most amazing mental wizardry since Einstein figured out the universe.
Surfing the Jaws of his Chinese debut, Mark grabbed the rail and dropped deep into the hole a couple of days ago when he doubled down, giving a full-length speech, again at Tsinghua and again in Chinese. This time the pronunciation was still horrible, the overweening pride was still oozing out of his pallid face, and the sad picture of a billionaire practicing Chinese on a forced audience was still there.
But …
The content was deeper. The fluency was greater. And this time the gap between confidence and ability, though massive, was much less than his first foray.
All of this is part of Zuckerberg’s charm offensive to try and get Facebook out from behind the Great Firewall of China. In addition to stomping through the Chinese language with heavy steps, he met with President Xi Jinping and made the horrendous cultural gaffe of asking him to suggest a name for Zuckerberg’s first child. Xi declined, and hopefully someone advised Mark that asking the most powerful man in the world to name your kid is like asking the top surgeon giving a speech at a conference to please take a look at this funny lump you have growing on your butthole.
But …
Despite the bad pronunciation, and despite the naked self interest, and despite the bold faced lie of wanting to learn Chinese so he could “communicate with his wife’s grandmother”–which sounds lots nicer than “I want to scrape the shit out of Chinese computer users’ data and make billions there, too,”–despite all that, Mark has struck a blow for America in the 21st Century. We finally have the CEO of a big ass company who believes that the best weapon for business is actually understanding the target market in its language, in the context of its culture, and meeting the competitive challenges by putting himself in their shoes, and understanding it from the very top of the corporate hierarchy.
Because that’s what speaking in a foreign language does. Zuckerberg may have looked and sounded foolish at times, but you know what? He also looked incredibly nervous and exposed and vulnerable. It was the most intimate view of him you’ll ever have. You could even say that he pissed away all his privacy protections in a pair of twenty-minute videos. He was up there naked. Anyone who’s tried to fumble a few phrases of French to an impatient Parisian waiter knows that when you’re speaking their language YOU’RE ON THEIR TURF.
You think public speaking is hard? Try it in a foreign language that you’re not very good at in front of a global audience. The criticisms poured in, of course, how could they not? “Glad there were English subtitles for his Chinese,” wrote one Chinese commentator. Well, fuck those commentators. Zuckerberg will never be anywhere close to native pronunciation, but so what? He already knows more about China and the Chinese with five years of language study than many entire U.S. corporations who are actively seeking to do business in China.
The rest of the world takes it as a given that if they want to compete in the U.S. market they must master English first. As a result, not only has the world mastered English, it has mastered us. We still send out ambassadors who can’t speak the language of the country they’re assigned to, we still have military brass running wars in the Middle East for more than a decade who can’t speak any version of Arabic, and we still have presidents whose sum total of fluently spoken languages is one, and if Trump gets elected, it will be zero.
Whatever else Zuckerberg is, he’s a realist, and he’s exposed the lie that “Everyone speaks English” so commonly used by lazy Americans to avoid doing the heavy lifting that’s required if you really want to have a chance in war, business, politics, or diplomacy. When the guy at the top is a monolingual clod, so is the organization. He’s put himself out there, arrogant, self-satisfied, and shrewdly manipulative perhaps, but he’s clearly doing the hard work that it takes to speak a foreign language, hard work whether you’re trying to give a speech in Mexico City or in Beijing–and he’s offering himself up to a billion Chinese critics, each one of whom is supremely qualified to tear his language skills apart.
The beauty of it is, of course, that they don’t. People appreciate it when you make the effort, and they respect the hell out of the courage it takes to speak in public in a foreign language. Mark may scramble his tones, but the only message he really cares about is coming across loud and clear: YOU MATTER TO ME.
Hats off to the sorry-assed scoundrel. In this regard at least, I wish him the very best, and hope that more Americans in every walk of life follow his lead.
END
The strange pull of cycling
November 19, 2014 § 20 Comments
I first saw the old elephant about three years ago. He was gray-headed and busting out at the seams as we flew past him on the Donut Ride. He’d gotten a good ten-minute head start but we overhauled him long before the first big climb. He huffed and puffed and mashed for about ten pedal strokes, trying to hang on before he was blown out the back.
As we passed him someone said, “Good job, Bill,” and then we were gone.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s Backintheday Bill,” the other rider said as he filled me in on Bill’s career as a top local pro and general two-wheeled wrecking ball.
“He looks terrible,” I said. “He’s gotta weigh over 250.”
“Yeah, I haven’t seen him in fifteen years, maybe more. His race weight was 140.” From that Saturday on I saw Bill every weekend and always said hello when we passed. Over time he stopped taking head starts and began rolling out with the group. And he was getting smaller.
At the beginning of the year I noticed that he was sticking with us up the first hard surge, and although he was still a pretty big fella, he was certainly under 200, and his kits didn’t look like they were about to unravel and kill someone with the force of the exploding seams. Now he’s visibly getting thinner by the month, and sticks with a much younger grupetto all the way over the first big climb. All of his kits are new because the old ones flat out don’t fit anymore.
Bill’s one of many, many riders who come and go and then come back. They leave for all the right reasons — racing is dumb, cycling is costly, pedaling is dangerous. Some leave for all the wrong reasons, too. My buddy J.C. had found Miss Right through cycling.
“Can you imagine anything better?” he had said. “A girlfriend who loves to bike?”
I didn’t say anything, because I could imagine a lot of things better, like a girlfriend who loves to cook, who earns seven figures, and who loves you to bike while she perfects her home brewing recipe. But I didn’t say anything except “Nope.”
They married and six months later she quit cycling. Then six more months later she told him to quit cycling. Then six more months later he was single again, and back, of course, on his bike.
Some dudes quit for spiritual enlightenment, like The Buddha. Tony used to be one of the most feared racers in SoCal. Then he started growing a big bushy beard, and worse, reading books, long books with hard words. They ruined him, of course, and one day he announced on Facebag that he was “done.” Now he’s a Buddhist adept, spreading love instead of dishing out the pain, but mark my words, he’ll be back. As nice as it is to make the world a better place, it’s even nicer to watch people crumble.
Sometimes when a guy sells his bikes and is “done” you’re kind of glad, but other times it’s a sinking feeling of genuine loss, like when Todd quit coming to the rides, then sold his bike, then vanished from view. Everybody loved Todd. He never had a bad word to say, he was one of the funniest guys alive, and he was always up for a beer. If you had a problem he’d give you the shirt off your back, even if what you really needed was a pair of trousers.
But as a cyclist, he was the guy who made your ride fun. You know how when someone pedals up and everyone kind of moans inwardly, as in “Why’d that buzzkill show up?” Todd was the opposite. Punctual-departure-Nazis would sit around for ten, fifteen minutes, gladly waiting for him even though he was always late and didn’t show up despite blood pacts the night before about “being there no matter what.” Todd was the brightest jewel in the crown of South Bay cycling fun, and then one day he was gone except for the occasional post on Facebag, which always made me sad.
Then yesterday Fireman texted me a photo. “Just finished our ride,” the message said, and next to the words was a picture of him and Todd draining a fermented recovery drink. There was a huge smile on Todd’s face, and I bet it was mostly from being back on his bike.
But his smile wasn’t nearly as big as mine.
————————-
For $2.99 per month you can subscribe to this blog, which is kind of a bargain. Click here and select the “subscribe” link in the upper right-hand corner. Thank you!
The anti-cyclist cyclist
November 14, 2014 § 58 Comments
It seemed pretty harmless. My fan sent me a private email and told me about a little bike-citation-trap that the LA Sheriff’s Department was running on PCH southbound. There is a shortcut that about seventy eleven billion riders take coming home on PCH, and it’s illegal because it requires you to go the wrong way down a one-lane, one-way street for about fifty feet before it becomes a two-lane, two-way street.
The reason that you break the law here is because you are tired and it’s the last 30 miles of your ride back to PV and if you go straight with your shot legs you have to “drag your wagon” as Miss Kentucky would say, all the way up Pepperdine Hill instead of sailing back to Malibu on a pancake flat, untrafficked road.
Problem is, the untrafficked road leads by Cher’s compound, and the trillionaires along the road, or at least one of them, doesn’t like it when bikers break the law to “sneak” onto “their” road. So, after getting a tip from my fan — the equivalent of someone telling you about a sobriety checkpoint — I went onto my Facebag lawyer page and gave the cycling planet a heads-up. “Don’t break the law here, and either go straight or walk your bike until the road becomes two-way.”
Pretty soon a maroon reared his ugly head, some wanker named Heath who is presumably a cyclist, and he made a couple of nasty comments about “lazy cyclists” and insinuating that the trillionaires were right to be angry at the scofflaws. I counter-posted once or twice and then deleted all of his comments, adhering to my new Facebag policy of “you gotta pay to play.”
In the past I would hunker down and engage in multi-day Facebag comment wars that were immensely entertaining to everyone but me. I realized the depth of my illness when, coming up for air, I realized that I had posted over 200 comments in a battle of the maroons between me and some wanker in upstate New York about whether or not his ‘cross skilz class would have prevented a crash. Yep. It was that weighty a topic. I engaged in this tweetle-beetle-battle-in-a-Facebag-bottle while visiting my elder son at college, ruining the weekend, and causing permanent emotional damage to the other maroon, who threatened legal action against me. (Note to reader: threatening lawyers with legal action is like threatening Bre’r Rabbit with the briar patch.)
However, it takes two maroons to have a tweetle beetle battle, and after reflection I realized that in this case I was the other one, and vowed not to do it anymore. So when Heath began tossing out the red meat I just tossed out the red delete and that was the end of it. Henceforth, I decided that if anyone wants to argue with me, they have to do it in my sandbox, here on the blog, where I not only make the rules but where I can edit everything they write or block them completely if I so choose. It’s not fair, just like life.
What struck me about Heath, though, is a common thread that runs through cycling in which cyclists themselves are extremely critical of other cyclists when it comes to obeying traffic laws. It’s a hall monitor complex, and it’s bizarre. I don’t condone scofflawing most of the time, but unless it’s egregious and puts someone else’s life at risk, I don’t much care about it, either. Cars break the laws all the time too, and when I’m motoring along and someone changes lanes without using a turn indicator (that actually happens), I don’t honk, or scream, or post a rant about it.
My motoring time is better spent driving defensively than it is screaming, cursing, flipping off, honking, or Facebagging about all the maroons out there who are trying to kill me.
Cycling is already dangerous enough without having to split my attention to whether or not someone runs a stop sign or goes the wrong way for 50 feet down Cher’s street. And in the battle between the scofflaws, it’s the motorist, not the cyclist, who is the overwhelming bad guy.
My buddy C. was dropping down Manhattan Boulevard a few days ago, traveling at the speed limit, and lawfully riding in the lane. A very busy and important manageress of a local MB optic shop came by, speeding, let out a blast on her horn, totally ignoring the new law that requires a passing motorist to give a cyclist 3-feet of clearance. C. got out of her way just in time to avoid being turned into pulp, and at the stoplight a few feet ahead, the one she had apparently been rushing to get to so she could stop, he thwacked on her window and yelled at her.
“I’m calling the police!” she screamed.
“Great,” he said. So they pulled over while she dialed 911. Unlike the LA police, where they don’t even bother to show up unless at least three shots have been fired and one person has been hit, the MB police aren’t quite as busy, and five minutes later a cop approached. To C.’s incredible joy and disbelief, it was a cop on a … bicycle. Finally, for once, justice was about to be done.
The eyeglass lady had been speeding. She had passed C. illegally. She had broken the law prohibiting unnecessary use of the horn. She had illegally crossed the double yellow line to pass. More to the point, she admitted to all of it.
So of course, the bicycle cop on the bicycle (did I mention he was riding a bike?) began to berate … the cyclist. After hearing both sides of the story, he asked C. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“You mean while she was trying to kill me as I descended at the speed limit? Kind of whip my phone out of my jersey pocket and dial 911?”
“Well, it’s illegal to hit someone’s window like you admit to having done.”
“Right. And my reaction was in response to her assaulting me. So are you going to cite her for all the things she’s admitted doing?”
“It’s your word against hers.”
“Right, except she and I both agree that she was breaking the law.”
“Well, you should have called me.”
“Look,” said C., feeling very much as if he were living the Monty Python argument clinic or descending into tweetle-beetle-battle hell, “she called you and you’re here. What are you going to do about it?”
“It’s your word against hers,” said Deppity Doofus.
And that’s pretty much how it ended: The motorist, having admitted to a plethora of violations, one of them a moving violation, got to continue on while the Manhattan Beach bicycle cop (he was riding a bicycle) blamed the cyclist.
I thought about all this as I pondered Heath’s cyclist-hating comments and it made me think of Pogo. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Facebike
September 23, 2014 § 8 Comments
One day I was pedaling home from the NPR and I saw Scrum, a buddy. “Hey, man, I tried to message you on Facebag but couldn’t find you anymore.”
“Yeah,” Scrum said. “I deleted my account.”
“How come?”
“Every time I got on there it depressed the shit out of me. Everyone has a perfect life except me, it seems.”
“Oh, that’s just PR bullshit. People only put up what they want you to see. You know, happy stuff. They still get cancer and get fired and take Prozac like everyone else.”
“At least they can fake it. Anyway, I’m a lot happier now. Back to my old self. Best thing I ever did.”
Facebag, of course, has its problems, one of which is its moniker, “social media.” When I was a kid there was one phone in the house, we got our news from newspapers, and the only way you could socialize was by being around other humans. Talking to the cat never qualified as social. Instead, it often meant having to talk to Mrs. Wint, our nosy neighbor, who would run over to the house every time someone got divorced, pregnant, busted for smoking weed, kicked out of school, or caught screwing a non-spouse.
Social, in other words, meant having to suffer through her bad breath, stupid ideas, repetitive stories, receding gums, and un-bra’ed, floppy breasts in order to get to the good stuff. It was like shelling pecans. You had to peel away the bad part with quite a bit of effort to get to the meat.
Social is the one thing that Facebag is not because you don’t have to endure the physical irritants of your “friends” that you would have to put up with if you really were face-to-face, instead of screen-to-screen. When they bore you, or share their racist rants, you simply hide their feed. Most unsocial of all, you and only you get to pick the moment of interaction. In the old days you pretty much had to deal with Mrs. Wint whenever you ran into her, which was all the time. If you were social, you stopped to talk. If not, you waved and kept going. Quickly.
How many people do you know on Facebag who, when you run into them, are completely different from their profile? The friendly Facebagger who’s an obnoxious ass. The tough-talking badass who’s a pussycat. In the old days, Mrs. Wint was always Mrs. Wint.
Like quitting big-hopped beer, I’ve never been able to stay away from Facebag. The two times I deleted my account, I returned within months. With the help of Scrum’s sage advice, though, I’ve been able to make some very positive changes. I log in when I get up and spend no more than five minutes on it. I don’t endlessly scroll through my feed. I never click “like,” and rarely comment on anything. I post occasional things about gun violence to satisfy my twin needs of tweaking my gun-nut friends and doing a bit of Internet advocacy. At the end of each month I go back and delete most of the stuff from the previous month. I subscribe to a Sunday newspaper and read books instead of cat postings and self-congratulatory photos of third place at the Olde Bumfucke Crit and Shamefest.
But most of all, I’ve tried to get out of my shell and socialize on Facebike. Facebike is that two-wheeled thing that leans up against the wall in my bedroom. It lets me get next to friends, or behind their sweaty butts, and chat with them. Yesterday Derek and Aaron and I rode out to Latigo, and a good portion of it involved an old-fashioned political argument.
Remember those? When people exchanged heated opinions in person and then somehow had to come off the passion of the moment and the differing ideas and still be friends afterwards? When you couldn’t just end an argument the Facebag way — comparing someone to Hitler and deleting all their comments? Besides, after a hundred hard miles, who wants to argue anyway? And how can you argue when you’re begging for their last gel?
Facebag is still one of the world’s greatest bulletin boards, and that’s how I use it now. But when’s the last time you called someone “social” who spends hours a day staring at a bulletin board?
END
————————-
For $2.99 per month you can subscribe to this blog, which is kind of a bargain. Click here and select the “subscribe” link in the upper right-hand corner. Thank you!
The most epic FB Tweetle Beetle paddle-battle ever
October 28, 2013 § 26 Comments
I sat in my hotel room as the warm glow of victory, or something, washed over me. I had just vanquished my foe in the longest running Facebag comment war ever. He had ignominiously ceded the field with the cowardly claim that I was a stalker, a harasser, and that he had therefore reported me to the “proper authorities.”
I couldn’t help laughing at his silly subterfuge as I savored my victory. Sure, it had lopped 27 hours off my family vacation. Sure, my wife was livid. “How come you onna Facebag alla time?”
Sure, my son who we had come to visit was disappointed that every few seconds I would blurt out “You cocksucker! Take this!” And then furiously pound the iPhone’s keyboard, cursing and spitting and rending my breast.
Sure, we got kicked out of a couple of restaurants. And three bars. And a coffee shop. But at the end of the paddle battle, only one Tweetle Beetle was the winner. Me.
The congratulatory messages poured in. “You are the best Tweetle Beetle ever.”
“You own Facebag.”
“That was such an epic paddle battle.”
“Are you off your meds?”
“We are very worried about you.”
Etc.
In other words, I was really happy, until I heard the knock on my hotel door.
Two burly men in blue uniforms and badges stood there. “Yes?” I said.
“Facebag police,” said the bigger one.
“What?”
“Violation of terms of service, paragraph 37, section 34(a), page 987. May we come in?”
Without waiting for an answer, they pushed by me. “What’s going on? What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been reported by a user for violating the terms of service I just cited.”
“Who’s ever read those? What did I do?”
“Don’t play stupid. You broke the rule against being mean to cyclocross race promoters from Schenectady.”
“This is a joke, right? I had no idea he was from Schenectady. I made that up!”
The nicer of the two cops sat me on the edge of the bed. “Look, we’ve read the entire thread. Just confess and we’ll put in a good word on your behalf to Mr. Zuckerberg.”
“But I didn’t do anything! He said I was a crashtacular fred and that I should take his skills classes. I called him a newt and a salamander. What’s the big deal? These little Tweetle Beetle paddle-battles happen all the time. It’s Facebag, for fugg’s sake.”
The bad cop grabbed me. “Look, asshole. That wasn’t your ordinary paddle-battle!”
“It wasn’t?”
“No, wise guy, it wasn’t!”
“What was it, then?”
They both shouted in unison: “It was a Tweetle Beetle paddle-battle in a muddle in a bottle!”
The room became still as death. “Oh,” I said meekly.
“See?” said the bad cop. “Shit got real enough for ya now?”
The good cop put his arm around my shoulder as I softly sobbed. “It’s okay. Just sign this confession. We’ll both tell Mark you cooperated.”
“But all I did was go over his race resume on Cycling USA and point out what a wanker he was.”
“I know,” said the good cop as he dabbed at my tears.
“And I just said that for a coach he seemed kind of thin on credentials.”
“It’s okay, pal. Sign here.”
“And he called me a fucktard and said I was whacko and called Mrs. WM a ‘mail-order bride.'”
The bad cop was reviewing the comments. “Quit trying to make yourself out as harmless. Says right here you made fun of his second place finish in a road race.”
“There were only six entries!”
“And over here you made fun of all his DNF’s.”
“But he’s a ‘cross expert. Shouldn’t he at least be able to finish?”
The nice cop looked up. “This wouldn’t have been so bad if you hadn’t involved Dr. Knoll.”
“Dr. Knoll?” asked the bad guy. “The stinky foot doctor?”
“That’s Dr. Scholl. Dr. Knoll is the shrink for cyclists. He only gets involved when it’s serious. Or when someone pays. Or when he’s really bored.”
“Look, pal,” said the bad cop. “You signing or not? We ain’t got all day.”
I sighed and took the pen. It was a short confession: “I, Wanky, do hereby admit to having made fun of a cyclocross promoter from Schenectady such that it became a Tweetle Beetle paddle-battle in a muddle in a bottle. I henceforth promise to never do this again. A second violation will result in revocation of my Facebag license and loss of all paddle-battle bottle muddle KOM’s on Strava.”
I signed, and they left. After a few minutes I checked Facebag. “Wankmeister is a douchey crashtacular fred who needs to take my skills class,” read the item in the newsfeed. The writer was a cyclocross promoter in Scranton. My pulse quickening, I opened up and began reading the terms of service.
Cycling in the South Bay 