Fix A Flat?
Volume 5, Issue 5, June 1998
This trip backward through time feels every once in a while a little like looking through a telescope in the wrong direction; details seem to get lost here, scale and meaningful context disappear there. It’s part ego death, part archeological dig, and at times I feel like I am examining the words of a stranger.
Not this one, though. Even if the bread and butter shop income of fixing flats has turned into a long conversation about the relative merits of sealants and going tubeless, the flat bicycle tire is still ubiquitous and still frustrates bicyclists the world over. And those frustrated cyclists still come to shops with flat tires, still need someone to fix them, and just might still balk at what are hopefully still loss-leading repair rates.
A couple clarifications are in order first:
One, I attributed “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light” to William Blake, not Dylan Thomas. Got rightfully called to the mat about that in letters to the editor in subsequent issues. My defense at the time still stands - I was never great at remembering poets in school, and had just watched the Jim Jarmusch movie Dead Man. While it was embarrassing for me to screw up this badly, I took some small consolation in the fact that nobody else at the editorial helm back then caught it, either.
Two, my mother probably wouldn’t have washed my mouth out with soap for using the word “motherfucker” in either a column or in discourse with a customer. For her 94th birthday a few years ago, someone brought some Don Julio 1942 to the party. She was poured a celebratory shot in her honor, having just risen from her week-long sickbed with some kind of virus that had flattened half the town of Loreto. Rather than sip the shot demurely, she slugged it back like any good college kid on Spring Break, clanked the glass upside down on the table, looked around the room at everyone assembled and said slowly but with great conviction; “Im Ninety Fucking Four Years Old.”
All the rest of this, I still stand behind.
The image here is not from the column, but was a Tom Moran-shot collage elsewhere in the same issue as part of an article I wrote about the trials and tribulations of life as a World Cup Mechanic. Huge props to Ian Moore, Dennis Pettys and Chris Shotwell for helping make that article happen.
