which of course stands for “Work In Progress”. This Tibetan skull/hannya sleevage is nearly complete, just a few flowers and some butterflies to finish it all off.
the upper arm after we finished the skull and some more background.
the lower arm is healed, ill post a connected picture when we finish the top.
There were birds outside, I heard them though I couldn’t see where their song was coming from. I was aware of them, and in being aware of them it felt like somewhere, out the window, in one of the countless trees they were looking right at me and singing their songs.
Of course they were really singing to each other.
From the basement, 2 floors down came the distant rumble of the washing machine tumbling the t-shirts and underwear of one of my neighbors. Then it abruptly ended, the way only machines can end, before the spin cycle started a similar but distinctly different rumble.
Its not that the washer was particularily loud or that I was bothered by it (or the birds). I was meditating. I sat in my underpants, my belly slightly hanging over them (not as much as last month) my legs crossed in front of me on a large black cushion called a zabuton. My ass was planted on a smaller round cushion called a zafu. I tried not to control my breathe.
It was, like always, annoyingly difficult at first not to make each breath come in or out, to count them or to breathe deeply or shallowly. I was searching for my “natural” breathing, and, of course, you cant ever really look for anything and expect it to behave naturally. I once read that the very act of observing a thing changes it, we dont know whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in the forest, but we can be sure that it sounds different if we are not there to hear. So I stop trying and I stop stopping trying.
After a few minutes I forgot about breath and my chest began to rise and fall of it own, unregulated accord. Of course my body knew exactly how much breath it needed and exactly how much force to apply to my diaphragm to get it, my brain just got in the way of a cycle that had begun with that first screaming breath as a newborn and will only end with my final breath. In either case, my brain has (or had) damn little to say about it. I think that might be the deep not-so-secret of meditation, we are only trying to undo all the entanglement and confusion that that 5 pound lump of tissue creates.
Its not really his fault, you know. (I think of my brain as a him for some reason) Its only repeating patterns that have been pressed into its folds over and over and over for my whole life. So I sit here and try to teach it new lessons. Day after day I gently show my brain understand that not everything it comes up with is necessarily true, that in fact much of what it decides is going on is really just a result of all those years of patterns and training. I try to teach my brain that I am not the only thing in the universe.
I try to teach it that there isn’t really even an I to know this.
Out the window a helicopter whirs in the distance, i hear it and my brain in some shadowed corner of my head whispers “helicopter” but I’ve been sitting for enough years that my brain doesn’t follow it up with a wondering where its going or replayingthe opening scene from Apocalypse now and all its helicopters. Ive taught it at least that much so far. Its enough to note what is going on, there doesn’t always need to be a story to go along with it.
My CD player comes to the end of the 15 minute track it has been playing. 14 minutes and 59 seconds ago it played one chime of a recorded gong and I sat on the zafu and began trying to stop thinking of birds and breath and helicopters. I don’t recall where in that time period I forgot about trying to think or not think and just began being still with myself, I but I do know that a couple times my brain coughed up some bit of static or another. It tried to tell me that remembering to draw a dragon today was terribly important or that my dog really needed to get a walk before going to work. I just let it say what it had to say, just like I let it hear the birds or the washer and went back to simply sitting there.
As my CD player reaches 15 minutes on its silent track another chime sounds and I stretch my back a bit, another chime and I stand up. My knee is a little stiff. By the third and last chime I am already across the room and turn off the CD player. I don’t even hear the birds (though they are certainly still singing,) I cant hear the thrum of the washer and the helicopter is long gone, I’m pulling on my pants and trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. My brain is once again squawking a line of things to do, worry about, accomplish, remember, and plan for.
These days that squawking no longer drives me like it used to. These days I believe less and less that everything it tells me is the truth about who I really am and that everything it comes up with need to be played with and turned over and over like a worry stone.
In a small way, the lesson has been learned.
The lesson has been learned despite the thought balloons floating everywhere. Its taken years but there is inside of me a piece of that stillness. An awareness that I am connected to all this, everything. That I am, in fact, not separate from everything itself. I am as much a part of that bird as it is a part of me and we are , the bird and I, its song and the helicopter and the underwear in the washer and the dirt that gets washed out of the underwear into the drain.
And we are the drain too, dont forget.
Its in that part of me that is still and at peace with everything, because I sat for 15 minutes.
Just a quick update with some work ive gotten finished this month. First some roy lichtenstein art done on a customers tricep area. We left off the word bubble that the original had and punched up the color a bit to keep the contrast up on skin. Pop art (like catholic and hindu imagery) is easy to tattoo and always looks striking on skin.
Next up we have an owl among roses on a great customer, she has a bunch of traditional stuff that this needed to fit in to so we kept the color palette simple and old-schoolish.
My first Black Cat tattoo done at Black Cat tattoo. J had the blue waves and purple clouds alreadty on a previous tattoo that this one had to tie into but the connection was no problem.
This lovely lilly is on the inner bicep of a customer who (along with her boyfriend) get tattoos from me when they are in town to visit family from michigan. Theres a lot of talented tattooers in Michigan so im flattered thart they wait til they visit pittsburgh to get tattooed.
The shop is coming along and Im sore as a motherfucker. Real work is HARD. heh heh. . . . .
So we got the lease at the new location and I got my friend and carpenter extraordinaire, Jason H to take a look around at the work we need to do to get the place in perfect shape. We could simply half-ass things and get it open pretty quickly, but I love the location and look of this shop, I see a lot of potential for a dream shop and I plan to stay there for a while. So, Im going to try to do this right, to solve the problems that working in tattoo shops for 12 years has taught me always arise before they crop up. I want to have a place that is beautiful and after seeing what those guys at Unique Ink did with a shop, I’m definitely inspired to step it up and not be satisfied with ‘good enough’.Maybe I’ll get mink covers for the beanbag chairs. . . .
In the same vein, as my tattooing has matured so has my idea of what a ‘real’ shop looks like. Keeping that in mind there will be no flash racks full of stuff I don’t want to tattoo, no piles of angry signs, no beat ass furniture, and no collections of scary skull ashtrays. On the other hand a tattoo shop is not a doctors office so there will be art, fun wall color, inspirational designs and a look that pays homage to the old school traditional tattoo shops without trying to be a re-enactment of them. Besides, I’ve never hidden the fact that I am aspiring to be artsy fartsy, I have pretty much got the fartsy bit down, now Im hoping the new location will help the artsy bits too.
I plan on being very busy for the next little while, besides building and moving the shop we are attending the Seattle tattoo convention at the beginning of August. I thought about trying to squeeze some more stuff in this next 2 months, like maybe climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro or building a bicycle out of matchsticks but I don’t want to over extend myself. Maybe in September.
So this blog will most likely be rarely updated for the next 30 or so days, but I will post update pictures and such from time to time. Wish us luck!
A couple months back I started on Kevin’s back, his wife has been kind enough to take pictures showing the progress. Most of the time I shoot pics when the piece is finished and it was neat to see the evolution of this thing so far. Its not done yet, but we are closing in on it. Each picture represents between 2 to 4 hours of tattooing each session.
Aside from the neat time-lapse quality of these pics, its also instructive to see just how long this kind of thing takes. In traditional Japanese horimono (traditional style tattoos) the client knows that they are signing up for months (if not years) of repeat visits right from the start. Its an interesting contrast to most American customers who ask “how much longer is this going to take?” by the third session. (For the record, Kevin is not one of those customers, he is extremely patient and appreciates that quality work is often slow going)
On to the pictures.
This is what Kevin came to me with already on his back. Its about 10 years old and looks pretty good for its age. This dragonfly looks huge, but as we put the rest of the stuff around it, it keeps looking smaller and smaller. . .
So we decided to do a sort of pond/waterfall scene to incorporate the dragonfly. I stencilled on the flowers and some of the waves, drew on a bunch of the rocks. Usually I prefer to just stencil on the flowers and draw all the rest on, but this was Kevin’s first tattoo with me and he wanted to see some of the background worked out more thoroughly ahead of time. Cant say that I blame him, so with a preliminary drawing and some markers we got the outline of the lower section on.
We put a couple lotuses (loti?) and a peony/chrysanthemum and a bunch of cherry blossoms. the Cherry blossoms will be important later since we will be doing clouds and wind above the dragonfly and filling that area with blowing cherry blossoms and petals.
For the next session we began shading in the water and rocks. In this picture it all looks like black shading, but the water is all various shades of grey. When i was learning to tattoo this was the toughest part for me, greywash, because you need to trust how much the wash fill fade into its appropriatete shade in a couple weeks.
In this next picture you can see that the greywash from the previous session has faded down while the solid black in te rocks stays pretty much the same. I figured Kevin was pretty tired of watching grey slowly take over his back so we put color into the peony. it might be hard to tell here but that flower is a good 8 or 9 inches across and took an hour to color in just by itself.
More color! This time we took care of the lotuses. Anyone who knows Japanese tattoos will recognise the color scheme and style cribbed from Shige at Yellow Blaze tattoo, I still put my own spin on it but I consider Shige a teacher and mentor (though he has never met me) and am unashamed to try to reach the level of perfection his work has achieved.
You can begin to see how the color pieces ‘float’ on top of the layers of black. In Japanese tattoos its often the color that makes people catch their breath, the wonder how do these guys get it so bright!? Frankly the background is the secret, without the proper proportions of black and contrasting negative space the brightest ink in the world would fall flat. There is a good reason those guys spend twice as long on the background as they do the “main” subject.
We finally get around to re-lining the dragonfly! though you cant see it too well in this picture, most of the time on this session was spent shading the water on Kevin’s lower left rib/love handle area. We are connecting this piece to a rib panel of a koi and water he got at another shop. We did manage to get the cherry blossoms and waves all finished (except the blossoms on the right side, I like to keep the tattooed area limited to one side if possible to make sleep easier while it heals 
)
This picture I shot to show Kevin what we were about to outline. This is how most of my Japanese style stuff gets put on, with markers. I don’t do this to show off, if possible i would much rather stencil my tattoos on instead of drawing them on the skin (I like to work out the details on paper so i don’t waste the customers time) but with the flow and balance so critical to horimono tattooing there really is no better way to lay it out than drawing it on. This way you can allow for the bumps and shapes that the persons body has that a paper stencil simply cant take into account. At this point I find it much harder to draw finger waves on paper than I do on skin. We finished this outline and about a third of the shading at the top but i don’t yet have pictures of that.
I think we will have this bad boy wrapped up in a couple more sessions. Thanks to Kevin for letting me do it and the pictures his wife shot for us! Ill post a finished pic when we get there.
Amber is a petrified sap that has the unique property of hardening into a stone-like substance so strong that it can withstand millions of years of life in the environment without being destroyed. A steel beam may last 300 years but Amber lasts for millions. This fact of its nature has led us to some fun scientific finds, in the form of insects that got stuck when the sap was liquid, entombed in the amber and now, millenea later unearthed by humans. We can extract their DNA and compare the life of a million years ago with the descendants of those creatures today! So amber is pretty useful in that way.
When we turn our lives into amber, however, its not so useful. When we trap some part of our experience in sap and try to freeze it in place for all time only suffering can result. Sadly most of us do this to some degree or another. One of the harder concepts for me in Buddhism was the idea that the universe is born and extinguished in each and every moment. There isn’t any other moment you can find, you cant go to the past or future by even a millisecond. its all here and now. Some part of my mind rebelled at this idea immediately. “I know that I used to have no tattoos and now I have tattoos, so obviously there was a past.” I would think, so how could there by ‘only’ this moment. What I failed to notice for the longest time was that there was a lot of ‘I”’s in that thought. . .in most thoughts really!
Who was this “I” that had no tattoos? Is that person me? did that person think the way i do now, look the way i do now, poop as much as I did this morning? The fact is that every single cell in that persons body is different than in my body this moment. The fact is that every single thought in that persons body is different too. Jason is only Jason because I decide to call THIS momentary collection of ideas and cells “Jason”. Its easier to get along in society if we all pretend to be the same from day to day and that’s ok, we just need to remember not to get TOO hung up on the fiction!
But we do. Like Cop shoot cop said in their awesome song “Nowhere”
If your lover used to beat you with his anger
If your mother used to tie you to a rock
Observe your former life preserved in amber
Like someone pulled the power on the clock
Even if our ‘former lives’ are horrible and tragic we hat the idea of losing them! Some people, sadly, even make their entire lives the reliving and experiencing of the horrible things of their childhood or traumatic experiences. They become agitated and upset if their past isnt given the proper due by the rest of society. Their pain is real, but the experience is no longer, the pattern so fully dug into their concept of ‘who they are’ that it is impossible to dislodge. However the world is also filled with people who had the exact same experiences of abuse or horror and who have not ‘preserved it’. I don’t now what leads one survivor to cling to their pain and another to let it go, but I pray that those who cling can find the peace to leave it behind for their own sake.
Most of the time the issue isn’t as clear cut as this though, the grasping at our past is more subtle and insidious. I cant tell you how many friends and acquaintances I have that still cling to the concept of their youths. “Im still punk rock” they insist and this is then followed by all the reasons that other guy isnt really’ punk. In the same way I know TONS of tattooers who cling to the idea that their vision of tattooing is the “right one” and that anything outside of that is not just wrong, but heretical! And these guys don’t just use their own amber-bound experience to back it up, they love to trot out the frozen corpse past of even older tattooers! “Well Sailor Bobo in 1934 said that tattooers who wear gloves are fags!” as if Sailor Bobo’s experience has anything to do with what we are doing this moment.
In his amazing and inspirational (and funny as shit) book “Heft on Wheels”, Mike Magnuson describes his experience of being a 39 year old overweight alcoholic to a sober, sane and happy person by his obsession with bikes and bike racing (ha! you knew Id find a way to bring bikes into this!) As a university writing teacher he has ‘rules’ he gives his students to try to help them unlock the potential within themselves. As I read the book for the first time I got to this part and stopped.
“In order for learning to occur, a person needs to reach this understanding: Who you have been is not who you have to be. You are free to change your thinking.“
Two things immediately occurred to me when i ran across this line. First, that might be the most Zen Buddhist thing that wasn’t in a book about zen buddhism I have ever read. And Second, he didn’t say “You can change your thinking” or “you should change your thinking” he said “You are free to change your thinking.” Consider how powerful that statement is.
No really, think about it.
So you had a horrible childhood (and my sincere condolences if you have), but you are free to change your thinking. So you grew up the punkest dude ever, but you are free to change your thinking. So you hated broccoli as a kid, but you are free to change your thinking. How often do we hear that? We like to think that we ARE our thinking or that our thinking controls us, but the reality is that we are not our brains, thoughts, or feelings. Our thinking is not fact, and we are free to change it. Not clinging to your past isnt losing anything, its actually gaining freedom from dragging a dead-weight corpse around with you everywhere!
There is no amber in our lives unless we bring it. Nothing requires us to think, feel, behave, or live the way we have in the past In fact, if you want to get all Buddha-y about it, there isnt even a real past to live like. If you are an old dude, you dont need your punk rock credentials to justify your life. If you are a tattooer you dont need tradition or history to justify your way of doing things. If you are a zen dude you dont need old dead zen dudes to justify what you do. You are free.
Ive been cranking the single speed bike for a week or two and I must say I’m feeling it. (especially in my calves). I really like the simplicity and sense of mechanical unity with a bike that light and responsive. When I’m riding I often realise that Im banking a turn or swooping around a pothole without even making a conscious effort to do so. Sometimes it feels like I’m not even turning the handlebars, i just need to go left and the bike does it. Maybe that is what is so amazing about a bicycle, its a machine that (unlike a car) doesn’t separate you from the tactile presence of the world. The smell, temperature, light, the texture of the road, the sound of a car turning a block away are all present, immediate, a part , an important part, of the act of riding a bike.
On top of all that i swear i can actually feel myself getting stronger with every ride, not just in my leg muscles either. My lungs don’t feel like they are going to explode even on a climb and my heart rate doesn’t become alarming anymore, I can and do ride for hours at a time. I may be waxing poetic, but in a very real physical sense riding a bike is making me a better person.
Sick of hearing about bikes yet?
Ok then how about some BIG NEWS? Well its big to me anyway.
It is no secret that for years I have wanted to move the shop. When it was still Eye Candy, Brian and I looked at a few places, even took a few tours with landlords. Nothing ever seemed to fit the bill for us. Partly it was because the rent where we are now is really low, however every year it goes up slightly, after 10 years it has gone up to the point where it no longer feels like the insanely good deal it once was. As the rent has gone up the neighborhood has gone down. I say “neighborhood” but in reality its just the block that we are on that has slid into the shitter. One by one the ‘nice’ businesses went under leaving us with 3 shitty, drug dealer infested bars, a beer store, and various shady cellphone stores and fly by night barber shops as neighbors. The local crackhead/panhandler population is at an all time high and I’m sick of feeling nervous for my clients when they have to walk the gauntlet of cat calling shitbags and scroungers just to get to my door.
When the shop became mine I decided to put some real effort into improving the shop. We accomplished a lot in a short time but I began to realise that no matter how cozy and comfortable I made the shop itself, the area was going to drag down the enthusiasm of my clients. For all I know the neighborhood has already deterred customers.
So I began looking around for locations that would suit my artsy fartsy nature. Anyone who has had the misfortune to hear me talk about this subject knows that I have always had my heart set on South Craig street area. Its only 3 blocks from where we are currently but aesthetically it is a world away. It is home to an assortment of comic shops, art stores, coffee shops, restaurants and bookstores. In short, the kind of place we want to be. Having spent the majority of my life as poor white trash, I’m ready to make the move up to arty pretentiousness (just kidding. . .mostly). Its between CMU and Pitt universities, and I don’t feel that vague undercurrent of criminal danger when I’m there, frankly I can relax walking up and down that part of Craig without having my ‘game face’ and attitude on. After 10 years I’m tired of having to do that.
The first place we seriously asked about was huge and was $4000 a month! My heart sank, if that was the going rate, I figured, I was just going to have to be satisfied with the ghetto. However, the next place I looked was well within our budget, much smaller (which appealed to me) right in the heart of the area I had always wanted to be. Cara and I told the building manager we would take it!
But nothing is that easy.
The buildings owner is a retired Syrian who is currently living in Syria. Tattooing is completely alien to this poor guy and I’m sure this caused him some serious doubts. Fortunately the other tenets of the building know and like us and the manager of the building seemed to dig on us (and the fact that we were ready to jump on it) so he put in the good word. The Owner had the manager call the health dept to see if it was kosher and we finally got the nod.
We sign the lease on Monday.
I cant fucking wait.
There will be some work to be done before its ready, Ill have some pictures up shortly of the progress. Wish us luck!!
Our friends Kyle and Daniel invited us to their house for some amazing fish tacos yesterday. We rode over and met up with some more buddies, while we were waiting for the food to be finished Cara noticed something weird. . .
"Hey is there another bald guy with glasses over there!?"
Daniel (the one pointing) and I bore a striking resemblance to each other because of our “outfits”. This kind of freaky occurrence is usually accompanied by the revelation that both our dads were travelling sales men and end up being the same person or that we were twins and one of us was taken by a secret cult and raised by pumas. In this case it seems to be more the result of how middle age former punk rockers dress and my new found thin-ness. Believe me we have hung out before and while Daniel was always the svelte male model he appears here i looked like Jabba the hutt, no one mistook one of us for the other til yesterday.
"Look! Jason is down to 2 chins!"
The food and company were awesome! Daniel and Kyle are some of the nicest people on Earth and Cara and i adore them.
Speaking of Cara, after bathing in the glory of my new bike she felt like she needed something that weighed less than a ton as well and picked up a super sweet U-District by Torker. We went over to Thick bikes on the Southside and I was amazed. The guy working was helpful and gave off zero hipster attitude, like the awesome dudes at iron City cycles they are locals AND know whats works for a rider and what doesn’t. He stayed late and went out of his way to be accommodating as we bought what is probably the cheapest bike they sell. If you need a bike, go to these guys!
The days have been beautiful and we have been enjoying them, something about strolling with your sweetie and a miniature dog feels like heaven to me. I really think that kind of contentment and comfortableness is as close to heaven as we can get, Im a really lucky guy.
YAY!
Before the cooking and stuff yesterday i had to do a little work. A really nice customer who I have been tattooing for years was home from Iraq for a week and wanted to get a tattoo in honor of his new son. I don’t really do a lot of black and grey work but i really wanted to do this justice for a great guy. Im pretty booked up for weeks now, but since he was due to be shipped back in a week I went in on tuesday and we put 4 1/2 hours into this poor guys riblets and came up with this bad boy.The tattoo gods must have been smiling on us because not once in the whole time did the phone ring or a customer come in asking if we do piercing, nothing, just some jazz on the radio, the buzz of the machine and AJ occasionally groaning as I tore him up.
brand new, still a lil red
If the rain holds off Im gonna ride my ass off today!
This memorial day Cara and I rode our bikes over to my parents for some cook out action, Ive been thinking about getting a single speed, light bike for some time so for the whole day I left my bike in one gear to see what hitting climbs and starting from a dead stop at traffic lights would be like. Even the relatively steep cobblestone hill leading up to the street my parents live on was no real problem.
I also learned that one of my brothers reads this blog. (Hi Kevin!) Which is sort of strange in a way, mainly for the fact that I actually talk a lot more about my personal feelings and life on here than I do to my family. Lambert gatherings tend to be closer to a celebrity roast than a Hallmark moment. We are not big huggers or vocal with our affection, its more of an understood thing, but that didn’t stop me being jealous of my friends who talk openly about their love for each other with their families when I was younger. Still, we have much more fun and almost none of that family drama of most folks I know and I have yet to visit for a holiday where I’m not laughing my ass off most of the time.
For example, as we were all sitting around the backyard with various kids and dogs running around everywhere, my dad starts talking about a person he knows with different colored eyes.
“Hes got one Blue eye and one Brown Eye” and with consummate comedic timing (a Lambert genetic trait) one of my brothers calmly adds “Yea, Ive got two blue eyes and one brown eye”.
Now we were all busted up by this, including my mom who tries her best to be un-amused by everything and yet can not hide her emotions at all. At the same moment she will say something like “that’s disgusting” she also has this giant shit eating grin on her face totally negating her attempt at moral reserve.
By the way, the burgers were delicious.
Anyhow Kevin mentioned how this has been slowly turning into a bike blog. I cant really deny it, in fact I cant even really say that it wont be about making taffy or the grapefruit diet by this time next year. Like a lot of guys I tend to pick up a hobby, some small thing will spark an interest and all of the sudden I’m reading everything I can on the subject and talking about it non-stop (poor Cara. . .). I get obsessed by something for a while and then, eventually, I put it down again. . .forever.
Sometimes stuff is useless and transient, my once all consuming love for cameras is long gone and I rarely take pictures at all unless its of a tattoo. The same goes for my fascination with handmade knives or military history. But, sometimes it sticks around like my 7+year love affair with Buddhism and my 12+ year fascination with tattooing.
The jury is still out about bikes. Maybe a harsh winter will kill it, maybe a wreck, or maybe Ill just see some other newer thing that is shiny and pretty and my bike will gather dust and cobwebs while I’m off kayaking or basket weaving somewhere. However,in favor of its lasting. riding has led to some pretty incredible changes in my life.
For one thing I have lost nearly 12 pounds in 2 months and I have drastically altered my relationship to food. Instead of eating food for boredom or as a comfort, I treat food as fuel, I eat amazingly less than I did, crave almost nothing anymore, and am careful to burn more calories than I take in. Food has ceased to be a love/hate relationship and become simply a fact of life that I enjoy in moderation. When I ride a bike I don’t want cupcakes and giant bowls of cereal, I actually find myself looking hungrily at a pear or a handful or raisins instead. No one is more surprised by this than me!
When I first wanted to buy a bike this past February, I had a very specific idea about what I wanted and why. I wanted a commuter bike, with fenders and racks, I wanted to be able to haul stuff and I wanted a bike I could oaf around on, crashing pot holes and curbs without worrying about too much. In short, I wanted a beast. So I bought one.
I love the bike I bought, I commuted with it every day and on my days off I would take it on long long rides around the city. As I got closer to some form of physical fitness (still far away, but not as far these days) I realised that in some situations my bike was holding me back.
It was heavy as hell for one thing, the wide tires seemed to drag on long climbs for another, at the end of a few hours ride I literally felt like I had an anchor chain wrapped around the bike. I seldom used the gears anymore except to get a quicker start at stop lights. It was time to go lighter. I began to look online at lighter, single speed bikes.
There is something in the male mind that is obsessed with simplicity.We love nothing more than to pare every item down to utilitarian minimalism, I suppose it appeals to our macho need for effectiveness.( To this day I still cant look at a peacock without wondering if he wouldn’t just be better off with one feather and some bells rather than to lug that ornate feather duster around everywhere. I wanted a bike that simple, minimal, like if the Vulcans and Japanese got together to make a bike as functional and basic as possible. No hipster fix gear dangerous trend-monster either, I needed a functional daily ride that didn’t drag my ass down more than my own ass already did.
So on my search I went to 4 different bike shops yesterday. I may impulsive, but I am impulsive with an obsessive thoroughness that makes it OK, right? There were several contenders, one shop turned me off with the kind of hard sell bullshit we used to pull back in my camera shop days (”Yea I know you told me your upper price limit, but just look at this beauty for only a couple hundred more!”) Another apparently only had bikes for 6 foot 5inch giants with 52 inch inseams. Finally I found the right one at the right price. Here she. . .er. .I mean. . .here IT is.
Trek Soho-S
Did I mention that it was pouring down rain all day yesterday? Oh I’m not only impulsive, I’m impulsive and pig-headedly stubborn which makes it OK, right? So I rode my new baby home in the rain and It felt amazing. I think it weighs a third of my old bike, its aluminum frame can not rust and its tiny inch wide tires seem to bear up under my bulk without a complaint or a flat (yet).
How much do i like it? Well, im going to ride it right now.
bye.
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