Our displaced by fire, seething with grump, mile churning, bike with too much travel riding, tobacco chewing, born again redneck family man Mark Weir checked in Yesterday with a brief pair of emails:

Just had a malfunctioning fire alarm go off in our house we are staying in.

Talk about a heart stopper. 5am early bird special 7 fire alarms went off at the same time.

I was so disoriented that when I came out of the haze I was almost more pissed that there was no fire.

You should do yourself a favor and try it sometime.

Hating my new life.

Followed by:

Start drinking early today I think…

Ironically, minutes after receiving that email, this showed up from Chris Duncan:

We’ve got a lot of comments on our (albeit skeletal) support of Chris. Some are confused, some are hate filled. Some think we are really doing ourselves a lot of damage. And every time we spread any of his art (I like to think of it as art anyway. I mean, it’s not really marketing. And it is creative, and it does spark controversy, and provoke thought, so why the hell not?) out into the world, I get a barrage of phone calls and emails from Chris hisself. Truth be told, the dude makes me nervous, and I don’t always answer the phone. But I remain curiously fascinated with his efforts. Fascinated, but still sometimes totally confounded. As with the above video. So it is with art. My girlfriend likes to point out that I have “no emotional connection” to art. I prefer to think of it as a “limited emotional range,” usually wavering between confusion, joy and sorrow. Chris Duncan’s videos inspire all three limited emotions at once, speaking for myself.

Maybe it’s the limited emotional range that stunts me as a writer. I can spin a good yarn about bicycles, but I’m no Sy Safransky. Sy Safransky is the founder of a magazine called The Sun, which any word geek should be regularly ingesting, because it is always filled with words that make you think. And in my case, be confused, filled with joy, and saddened. Which are all good things. Here are a couple gems from his notebook in the January 2010 issue:

THE FIRST DECADE of the twenty-first century is nearly over. If I’d read that sentence fifty years ago, when I was a fourteen-year-old boy, I would have imagined atomic-powered flying cars and world government, not traffic jams and global warming, and not cities that looked more or less the same, and not people who still wear dresses and high heels (high heels!) and suits and ties. Ties! In 2009!

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY it took six months to cross the country by covered wagon. At the start of the twentieth century it took six days to make the trip by train. Yesterday I flew from North Carolina to California in a little more than six hours. The engineering marvel of a modern jetliner borders on the miraculous, yet how mundane flying has become. There I was, soaring through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, fulfilling one of humanity’s age-old dreams, and all I could think about was how little legroom I had and when the couple behind me was going to shut up.

IF I PRAY DURING TAKEOFF, why not pray at the start of each day? What distinction do I make between the gods of the earth and the gods of the sky?

Check the full notebook here, and spend some time reading some of his other columns, too. Then pick a back issue, and read some of them cover to cover. Good writing, lots of it, stuff that makes you think. Me? I’ve got my limited emotional range and my hamstrung, hamfisted way with words where even I can’t tell if the words and I are dancing or wrestling. At least I still gots my day job.

Yep, that’s Seb Kemp, the Englishman who isn’t from New Zealand, ripping trails on a TALLBOY. He’s been making ominous noises about entering the big wheel bike in some slalom races. Seems he really likes it, and the video above should go some distance to shedding some of the “big wheels are for clumsy old retards who can’t really corner” baggage. The trails in that video are “somewhere” down in Mexico on a piece of property that you and I will never be fortunate enough to set wheels on. Sucks for us, but we haven’t been the ones down there for the past three or four months digging into jackhammer-worthy dirt to carve out those sweet trails. Seb should be rolling through here in the near future, so we hope to get a bit more insight into the whole what and how behind his labors. Meanwhile, here’s a post from his colorful and entertaining blog on the relative uselessness of pockets.

All that dusty shredding and tanned manflesh only serves to cast the recent and current Santa Cruz weather in an even more dreary light…

So, that poopy brown sludge carrying large trees out into the Pacific Ocean beneath the bridge featured in the Lost Boys is the San Lorenzo River doing what it does, about five days ago. It has rained plenty since then, and the river is still high and brown. The brown, while including a good degree of poop (scary to note the linked data is from before the storm really ramped up. Gonna be a shitshow, literally, once the new data comes in), is mainly soil. Soil that was until recently happily sitting on the ground up in the Santa Cruz mountains, before the hillsides turned to soup and slid into the river. Happens all the time. And when it happens, considerate local cyclists take note of the conditions and sigh, knowing that there will be downed trees and thrashed trails aplenty to be cleared out once the rains stop and the ground has had a bit of breathing time. Considerate locals resign themselves to riding the road bike for a while. Or watching a lot of tv.

Strangely enough, while riding road bike and walking dog and generally doing my bit to be a considerate local and not totally destroy my bike’s drivetrain, I couldn’t help but notice how many people were out on the trails this weekend. Shuttle dorks were in full effect not only at the usual campus and highway 9 “hey, lookit me, I’m too lame to ride my bike uphill” locations, as well as several other highly sensitive trail ins and outs where any local with half a brain knows way too fucking well not to park anywhere near – even when the weather is good and the trail isn’t likely to get hammered beyond belief by several truckloads of gonads on wheels. The local trails are getting abso-fucking-lutely thrashed. Excuse my language. Actually, don’t. Get as pissed off as you want that I said “the local trails are getting abso-fucking-lutely thrashed.” Then maybe you’ll get a fractional sense of how pissed off it makes me to see that people can’t just chill the fuck out for a few days and let the soil firm up a bit, and instead have to skid down every single fucking steep in the county, especially all the ones that used to be discrete word of mouth low-key deals. Seriously, go find something else to do for a couple days. Attempt to exhibit some restraint. Deal with it. If you’re from out of town, go skid down the mudslides wherever you live for a while. If you’re local, you should know better.

Lookit, there are places around here that you could ride in a tsunami and the worst that would happen would be your bike would get ground to pieces. Fine, go right ahead. But there are other places that can’t weather the combined assault of a good storm and an army of skidders at the same time. It should be pretty easy to figure out which is which. Ahhhh, shit, I must be getting old…

Besides, there’s a time and a place for ingesting all kinds of fecal coliform, and that time and place is called Cyclocross, dammit!

Say, isn't that the new County Singlespeed 'cross champion, AND SCB employee, AND country music star Scott Chapin? Why yes, yes it is... photo stolen from Steve Anderson.

For reasons that escape me, this blog template won’t let me link any words used in captions, which really puts a damper on the fun times. Anyway, Steve Anderson shot a whole mess of the carnage at the closing event of the Santa Cruz cyclocross season down at the County fairgrounds yesterday. It wasn’t pretty, which is beautiful. Speaking of the beauty that is cyclocross, World Champs go down in Tabor, Czech Republic in six more days. Gonna be a tough one to call this year, but I might just put my money on the local boy. He’s coming on strong. Hell, why not even throw some coin down on the displaced local girl? She’s ready… And the weather, by the looks of things, is gonna favor those familiar with icy goodness (click there if you want to see some pretty bleak and frozen cross course in the making photos. Envision the emptiness being filled with several thousand drunken Czechs come Sunday, and a couple huge tents firing out tons of hot dogs and gallon upon gallon of beer. Sigh… looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking).

Count ‘em down!