Dress like a Starving Student

I drop the bike from my shoulder to the ground. I hop on and clip in my right shoe. I wonder why they call these pedals ‘clipless’ when they ‘clip’. Then there’s a trick to get my foot in the right position for the start. I lock the front brake and push forward on the bars. This lifts the rear wheel and I rotate the crank until my right foot is high at the front.

Taking off on a fixie is about being quick and efficient. I push off and hop on the seat and get my left foot on its pedal for its push. It is easy until you take too long and miss the left foot push and the bike slows down and you have to pull up with the right to keep going.

Today I’m riding to the Ballard Locks. Each time I go there I tell myself to go there more often. It combines many things I like. The water looks wonderful. There is a park with plenty of grass to sit on and trees to lean against with views across the locks and canal. Geese will visit. There are big salmon swimming in the fish ladders. Sometimes you see a Sea Lion feasting on the fresh fish. This is accompanied by the sounds of locals whining about the loss of salmon and wondering if someone has a rifle so they can shoot the mammal.

I see boats go by and watch them futz with ropes. There is a diversity of boats – a single guy on his little cruiser or a 747-load of tourists in an Argosy Cruise boat with accompanying commentary. “Hands up if you think these locks use pumps! No, they use gravity!”

I love the way the locks are designed. They were built by the military back in the twenties and have a style that says, “You ain’t nothing! You ain’t nothing! Heavy artillery? Bring it on!” The structures are blunt and brutal. Any boat that hits them will come out broken. They show of the might of the US engineers of that time. When the Soviets attack and Seattle is the first city to go those locks will be all that is left.

The ride back goes through Ballard and pas the Salmon Bay café there’s no bike lane so I share the road with the faster traffic. I’m confident on the streets, although I take care to be aware of what’s behind me. Your ears are excellent help with this, unless someone is driving one of those Priuses when they can sneak up in silence. Everyone gives me lots of room. I think there are a number of factors involved in this.

• I ride so it is hard to share my lane. If cars see that they could squeeze past in the same lane, they will. So I ride so that they can’t share and since they have to cross the centerline of the road to get past me they take more care and give me more room. Crazy but it works (and it isn’t my idea – I read it in Urban Cycling Tips and Tricks).
  
• My bike is tall and I sit high, giving me more presence on the road.
  
• I’m unshaven and I dress like starving student. I look like I’ve had a heavy night at the pub. People avoid the unpleasant.
  

I am tempting fate by writing this, but if I can control fate then like, wow.

Poorest Table in the House - with Dale Barlow and Bu Baca

Maurice Diop lived in the little terrace house across the street from me. On Ada Place there were some larger terraces, but Maurice’s and mine were tiny. About ten feet across. But we were renters, Ultimo was cheap and only a ten minute walk from Town Hall Station. The local school had bilingual signs in English/Chinese. It was a damn cool place to live in 1990.

Maurice was Senegalese. He was so tall you couldn’t judge his height. He was way taller than me. I’d guess his height at six foot nine. We used to say hello, as neighbours do. I’m a chatty type so we’d end up in longer conversations. He was learning English fast but was clearly smart and persistent and keen to learn more.

We were friendly on Ada Place. Next to me lived a record-collecting guitar-playing geek. His house had an outside bathroom and you had to walk out the back door and on to the patio to get there. If I was upstairs in the morning I could see him wander out in his bathrobe to take his morning shower.

Next to Maurice lived a New Zealand bikie couple. Their house was directly across from mine. I remember waking up too early one morning, about 5am. The day was just beginning to get light. I was still dreamy and dozy. It was January in Sydney, and very hot. My bedroom window was open to let air in. At the house across the bedroom window was open too. I looked in to see the two of sleeping on their bed. As I was looking the girl sat up. She looked at me staring at her. She was naked.

There was a footbridge over Darling Harbour that ended at Ada Place so we’d often pass each other on the footbridge. I did not know where to look. I had got an illicit view of my neighbour and was caught out. I think she enjoyed my discomfort.

Then the day came when they moved out. I saw several of their friends arrive and start moving furniture so I offered to help. There were four Maori guys helping them move, and me. At the end of the work they gave us gifts as a thank you. The others each received a Marijuana plant in a pot and since I didn’t smoke pot I got a box of doughnuts.

We were all walking out the door when someone figured out they’d look suspicious walking down the street with a marijuana plant in their arms. So they put the pots in plastic shopping bags. Off they walked down the street, each holding a plastic bag with two feet of plant sticking out the top.

Maurice invited me to watch him play. He was a percussionist in Dale Barlow’s jazz band. They were playing at some fancy club at Circular Quay. He’d put me on the door. So I went down there with my girlfriend. I had no money and we were going to fancy club. At least I didn’t drink.

There’s always a little thrill when the doorman checks his list and lets you in. We walk in to the club. All the tables are in use. People are standing around the walls. This isn’t a beer drinking crowd. They drank their vodka in a martini rather than from a bottle. I walk in to the tables to make sure there’s no space and while I am looking a couple decides to get up and leave. A table opens up right at the center of the stage. It is the best table in the house.

I’d seen Dale Barlow before and I was eager to see him again. He would blaze on the saxophone. He could play hot solos and tone it down and play it cool. Jazz reviewers write flowery prose. One quote I read about Dale went something like “He plays like a steel nugget with a lava core.” He’d played with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers on a couple of albums. This was as much cred as Australian Jazz gets. We do better at whiny pop singers or Country.

I sip my lemonade. Dale Barlow is on fire. At his right is Maurice, using his Senegalese name of Bu-Baca. I always thought a percussionist was one of those dorky mustachioed guys who tap bongo drums in Seventies videos. Maurice is different. He is way taller than everyone else in the band. His instrument set dominates one side of the stage. And the instruments are an array of African drums and metal bells and objects I’ve never seen before. Maurice dances and moves with the music. My six foot nine neighbour was the star of the band. His solos get louder cheers than everyone else, except for Dale’s.

The first set ends. The crowd applauds. In the midst of the cheers Maurice jumps off the front of the stage. He walks across the floor with everyone watching. He gets to our table and sits down for his break. We might have been poorest table in the house that night but we were certainly the coolest.

My Record for Loud

I just listened to The Church singing "Unguarded Moment". It reminded me of seeing them live at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney when I was a teen. They were supporting Dire Straits. (No idea why I was there, you have to be a baby boomer to see Dire Straits.) But Unguarded Moment was the best song of the set.

For Dire Straits I was right up the front wedged by a speaker. My memory of every single concert is similar - It was loud. Did everyone have their amps up to 11 in the 80s or was my hearing more sensitive?

I saw the Jimmy Barnes band in Dee Why (non-Australians - yes, the suburb is called Dee Why and is occasionally shortened to DY). Jimmy Barnes is an old school Oz Rocker, I had his Cold Chisel records and his Working Class Man song is my vote for the music to the Australian National Anthem.

So there I am at the Dee Why Hotel. I get in free. There's extra fun when you don't pay and you are under age and you know someone in the band. Bruce Howe is the bass player and he is a good friend of my Father. There's a ton of material from my childhood that might crop up from time to time but everything with Bruce in it is good.

I'm standing in the audience near the front. The pub wasn't big, you couldn't get far away from the stage. Nonetheless I push my way close to the front to get a better view. A theme song comes on. Bands choose a theme song to play before they go on stage to get the audience in the mood. Often this is a bizarre piece of music and definitely something designed to show off the weird taste of the band. They wouldn’t play Abba as a warm up. You know it is a theme song because it is a low quality recording from a tape player played over the PA by the sound guy who is deaf from being a sound guy for months. You hear a low-fi weird song and you know the band is coming.

The theme song is playing. We all know the band is coming. The cheers get louder – Jimmy Barnes is popular. There’s movement at the side of the stage. The cheering has turned to yelling. There’s no music yet and it’s loud.

The band gets to their positions. Jimmy runs straight to the mic. He talks to it. I hear something like, “wellvermetchmsmnnntt fuckin vssit.”

Words burst at the microphone again. All I can make out are ‘Fuck’ and ‘Fuckin’ dotting his sentences. Let’s get to the singing. Jimmy turns to the band and yells. The audience is screaming with hysteria. The song starts with the drummer. The rest of the band kicks in. I hear the sound volume shoot up, just bursting with its intensity. Then I look around. Something is not right. I see the musicians playing their instruments. I see people yelling. But I don’t hear anything. The music has become so loud that there’s no distinguishable noise. My ears no longer register anything. I am temporarily deaf.

Now the intro has finished and Jimmy is about to sing. He sucks the microphone. He starts yelling in to it. I can’t hear him and I start laughing. Jimmy is moving his mouth and there's no sound. I look around at the people around me. They are all watching Jimmy, singing along to the words that I know he is singing but that I can’t hear. Is this a practical joke? I’ve come out to see the Jimmy Barnes Band and all I can do is look at them.

The song ends. My hearing returns. I turn to the person standing next to me, my friend Damian.

“Can you hear them? I can’t hear a thing?”
“You what?”

Jimmy talks to the audience. I manage to understand a ‘fuck’ or two. The next song starts. The music goes loud again and I reenter my quiet space. This continues for the whole night.

After the show I talk to Bruce the bass player.

“You know the band was so loud I couldn’t hear the music? Jimmy started to sing it made no difference. It was all noise. My ears are half deaf now.”
“How do you think I feel? I’m on the bloody stage. I stand by the bass amp.” Bruce takes earplugs out of his ears. Smart.

Next morning my ears were still ringing. But that had happened many times before. Monday morning my ears were still ringing. That’s my record for loud. A two morning eardrum buzz.

You are what you do

In America you are your job. When people ask “What do you do?” they want to know what you do to make money. I don’t make any money right now. So I’m waffling with my answers, picking from the following:

• Unemployed (accurate, but I’m not looking for a job)
• On leave (accurate, but it implies I’m going back after the leave is up - I’m not)
• I read and write (sounds like I’m in Kindergarten)
• Starting something up (true of anybody really)
• A gentleman (old school answer)
• Not working in Corporate America (too insulting)

I need something better.

Sometimes I feel like I am nothing. A lazy bastard, a slacker, wasting my life. Some of the time I feel like I’m engaged, driven and doing what’s important to me. I think my life is good. I am getting a lot of time with my family and more time with Jean than ever before.

There’s some decompression happening as I start to lose all the corporate reflexes and explore what I want to do. I get more excited each day. I want to spend each hour wisely and get annoyed at myself when I don’t.

At work I’d be happy when the week was over, except I’d be left with the feeling that another week of my life had passed without me doing anything I considered worthwhile.

How do you spell KMFDM?

I walk into Lucy’s daycare class to pick her up. One of the kids asks me what my t-shirt is. I say “It is a KMFDM t-shirt. You can read the letters: K-M-F-D-M. See?”
Later I figure out that the kid wasn’t pointing to the letters but to the picture on my t-shirt. It’s the Hau Ruck album cover with a stabbed, bleeding dude and a woman holding a bloody knife. Oh.

Pigeon walks across street

I’m standing with Jean outside her work. In my hand is a little voice recorder. I talk into it, leaving the note, “Why I like my black bike and take photos of it dirty.”
Jean laughs. She’s not just laughter because the scene is funny, but more because she is embarrassed to be seen with someone who talks into a voice recorder. We walk down towards Fremont for lunch. A bird walks across our path. Jean talks into her hand in her secret agent voice: “Pigeon walks across street.” Smartarse.

I got a voice recorder from Amazon (an Olympus DS-2). I use it to make notes of stuff I want to write about. Otherwise I’d forget. Since I can’t rely on my memory I am forced to write down all the details in my mind. This helps me manage projects. When accosted by some random request I tell people “send it to me in email” or “if it isn’t written down I will forget it” and I mean it.

Yesterday morning was grey and damp. I rode up to Kenmore and changed the routine a bit by crossing the main street there and going into the little mall at Lake Forest Park. I found Third Place books. I’d heard of it, written up in a book about the ‘Third Place’, the place that isn’t work or home but where you can have social interactions with peers. The British use the pub for this. Other places use cafes. I’m not sure what Americans use. Pubs like Cheers are the exception.

Someone decided to build a bookstore that serves the purpose. Inside it is a little tattier than a hospital-clean Barnes and Noble but there is a food court and a lot of seating, both at tables and on sofas. Any bookstore with a food court has got my vote. And there was a quieter area where you could sit and read for ages. I don’t normally go for bookstores as a place to read but there’s no Bubba’s BBQ in the library.

I went to the bakery and they had no milkshakes. So I went to the BBQ place and stood there for a few minutes while the guy was making some baked potato dish. I got bored and wandered out. I guess service isn’t going to be top notch when you are a smelly and unshaven cyclist with a funny accent.

I’m riding back to Seattle and the road is still damp. I’m riding my black Gunnar because it has mudguards. The riding position is comfortable even though it has drops. The long fork tube is long and the stem raises the bars a little more. I could ride that bike all day, if I only had somewhere to ride to that was a day away.

I’m zooming under the trees and riding through the puddles and flying through stop signs when I ask myself - why do I disobey all these traffic signs? I have stopped at a stop sign twice. Both times I could see an officer nearby, watching. I do pause and look around, which is no defence in court but does make life safer. I ignore all sorts of signs. I go the wrong way down one way streets, go through no entry signs (at least 4 on a day’s commute). I enjoy going down the concrete ramp in the work car park that says “No Cyclists”.

I’m not alone in this rule breaking. There’s a hundred meters on the bike track at Elliot Bay that tells cyclists to dismount and walk. I’ve seen about three cyclists do that in the last year. And several hundred ride through. Still I’m one of the more conservative cyclists – I stop at red lights. Most of the time. It would feel off to obey all the signs. I’d get thrown out of the bikers union.

I think cyclist habituate with all these stop signs on the burke-gilman trail. There are a pile of them and rarely do you see a moving car. If you put too many of these stop signs in then cyclists learn to pay them less attention.

At one point in yesterday’s ride the path emerged from the trees just as the sky brightened and my mood lifted. It felt magic to be in the open on a bike, with the air all humid and warm and the sun trying to break through. I looked over Lake Washington at mist on the far bank. My voice recorded has the line “It looks like a cloud embedded in the trees.”

I pass the Skansonia. It is an old small Seattle car ferry that is now used as a function space. Jean and I were married there. Each time I ride by I am reminded how we picked the only sunny day in January. A good omen. It was our second wedding, the formal white one with all the family. The first wedding was the legal one and it was a few months earlier on October 31st. We crossed dressed for the Hallowedding. I’m the only guy I know who walked down the aisle in a little black dress, fishnets and high heels to Michael Jackson singing “She’s Out of My Life”. I can’t believe we did that but this is what happens when you marry a performer.

When we get to the pub I make Jean record her pigeon comment on the recorder. This is what she says: “Is this thing on? A pigeon walks across the street. Reminds me of an essay I should write. Hundred words.”

Pedal like a Motherfucker

I get on my bike, clip in and head out downtown. The quickest way to get to downtown from my house is via Dexter Avenue. From my house I go across the hill then ride down a little gravel road, through a cheap plastic gate on a strong spring and into the old folks home. I have to be careful or the gate swings back into the bike. I go around the old folks’ home and on to Dexter, halfway up the hill. I don’t know if this is faster or easier than just riding down to the Fremont Bridge then up Dexter but it feels fun to use the short cut. I’m misbehaving in a little way. I’m so pathetic.

Dexter is main bike commuter road. It has bike lanes, although they aren’t the best. I see a rider ahead of me cycling in the lane such that if someone in a parked car opened their door they’d take him out. In that situation he would be rather hurt. As I ride I can’t help but think about how it would feel to be taken out by a car door.

I ride on the white line at the edge of the lane, balancing the threat of moving car and parked car. I look over my shoulder as I hear a car approaching so the driver knows I am here, I see them and I am human. I wear a helmet to make my wife happy, although I am not sure that is a good thing (Wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely. Great.)

I crest the hill on Dexter and see downtown sitting ahead. Now I am getting comfortable on this bike I try to descend with more speed. Since the bike has a fixed gear, the faster I descend the more my feet spin. At first it feels like a loosening massage, as gravity makes the bike go faster and forces my feet around but as my speed increases I start to panic. I bounce in the saddle. I feel like I am shuffling my toes back and forth across a floor rather than tracing circles.

I ride back on my old commuter route, along the waterfront and the railway line. I get to the pathway between the railway depot and the school bus parking lot and stop to take notes on my voice recorder. These include:

1. It takes about fifteen minutes of cycling to get all the junk out of my head. For the first fifteen minutes my mind is all over the place. After that time I start thinking. It is worth cycling just to get that clear head.
   
2. I am spinning so fast when I go downhill. Would my friend Johnny say “pedal like a motherfucker” or “spin like a motherfucker”?
   
3. I’m fast. I don’t know why I feel so strong. This bike is so much fun to ride. Then I note that I have a tailwind. Ah.

The Hills are Alive with the sound of Fixies

As you ride over the Fremont bridge there are these steel plates on the ground. I’m lifting the front wheel as I go over them, as you would if you were mountain biking or climbing a kerb. The plates are only about an inch thick so there’s no real need for this, but I need the practice. When you lift the front on a regular bike you can freewheel with the crank horizontal and just lift when the time is right. On a fixie you have to lift whatever position the crank happens to be in. At first this is strange, you try to freewheel and bike tries to throw you off. Then you start rewiring your brain so that it can lift the bars in any crank position. My brain is still rewiring.

Challenging myself with this weird bike is causing a lot of rewiring. I think it is a good thing. It is a little like learning to ride a bike in the first place. Or when you first play hours of Quake or Halo and you find yourself wanting to throw grenades before you walk around a corner.

Fremont bring is a traffic hotspot. Forget the cars, it is the bikes and pedestrians that have the challenges. The bridge is a commuter route so at the peak times there are a lot of bikes piloted by people impatient to get to their destination. They often speed through a narrow gap and buzz pedestrians. No “On your left!”

There are big signs saying bicycles must give way to pedestrians, and bikes have to give way on every sidewalk in Seattle. Still, most pedestrians are nice enough to move to one side to let the bikes go past. I go slow overtaking pedestrians. I piss off the cyclists behind me.

The next fixie challenge is riding off a high kerb. (Yes, that’s how I spell “curb” when it applies to roads.) This is another situation where I usually freewheel and have to learn a new method.

I ate lunch at Dad Watson’s. Lunch was good – a nice chicken salad. Dad’s has good food for a pub, maybe the best among Fremont’s 10+ pubs. I drank a nitro stout. I don’t drink at lunchtime, it seems unprofessional to me. But it was a sunny day and I felt like it. Here I am, 39 years old, drinking a beer at lunch and feeling guilty about it. I grew up in a place where people would regularly drink at lunch. Perhaps this is still the case, just not in high tech Seattle.

When I was 19 I was a roof tiler. I couldn’t actually do any real tiling so I was more like the roof tiler’s assistant. Today you’d call me his be-atch. Twenty years ago we’d go to the pub for lunch and drink a beer with out food. The weather was usually hot (we were in Sydney) so the beer was welcome. It felt like the heat burned the beer out of us. Its effects didn’t last long.
We wore these khaki shorts called “King Gee” (see “Cotton Drill Utility Short” on the King Gee site). They had little straps on the side so you could tighten the waistband. You would slip your work hammer in there while doing other things. My hammer was a well used Estwing. Before it was mine it belonged to the boss. When he replaced it with a new model gave me his old one. I liked it a lot. It had a stack leather strips for handles. The strips were separating with all the use and had become soft. The boss’s new Estwing had a hard lacquered shine (like the one in this photo).

One day we were in the pub for lunch when the boss pointed out that Chinese Brent had brought his hammer with him. He laughed and teased me that I was looking for trouble. Bringing your hammer to lunch was a major roofie faux pas. It explained the dirty looks I was getting from the other bar patrons.

A day or two later we were working on a house that was constructed ‘double brick’. This is when there are two layers of brick wall with an air gap between them, the space and extra masonry making a better insulated, quieter and more solid house. Most good old houses were built this way. I was amazed when I moved to Seattle to find all these wooden houses, but I think wood is much cheaper to build with when there’s plenty of it around. Also brick doesn’t work too well in earthquake country.

I was on the roof, we had stripped off some of the old tiles. Most Sydney roofs have red clay tiles, which is why the city looks red when you fly in. Nowadays houses are built with concrete tiles, which come in a range of modern colours so you can get blues and greens and tiles that fake their patina. They’re also much heavier and the cause of the scarring to my carrying shoulder. There’s none of this composite roof material that is the vernacular in Seattle.

I was working at the edge of the roof. I was hammering in battens, the thin strips of wood you hang the tiles off. I put my hammer down and it fell in the gap between the two brick walls. Those walls are good for insulation and good for losing your hammer. The boss yelled at me – I had only had that hammer a few days. I had to use a tatty and stained vinyl-handled hammer for the rest of the day. My status was lower.

Next morning the boss hands me my old hammer. He’d got some fishing line and a hook and had retrieved it from the wall. A replacement hammer was expensive – he wasn’t going to let that one go. That was twenty years ago. The boss still talks about me and my hammer whenever I see him. Nothing changes.

I left the pub and headed north, up Fremont Avenue. As I ride up I figure it is a bit like climbing Dexter but longer, and not as steep as climbing Queen Anne. On the whole it is relatively easy, I don’t get too worked up climbing. My picture of cycling in Seattle is a map of the hills I have to navigate. I’ll go on a sixty mile ride on the fixie and I’m more worried about the climb halfway up a hill to get to my house than cycling the 60 miles on a hard track frame. The more I ride the more I complete my mental picture of the hills of Seattle.

I wandered through the back streets of Fremont, zigzagging up and down wherever a street looked good to ride on. Fremont has a lot of cyclists. The traffic and bridgework make a bike the fastest way to get in and out of the neighbourhood. There are a fleet of them parked outside the library. When I used to work at Amazon the bike cage would be full of road bikes and lots of racing bikes, some with their racing numbers attached. Outside the Fremont Library there are a number of hybrids, commuter bikes that are way more practical for riding around town than a skinny-tyred racer. I park my skinny-tyred racer fixie and go in.

The library was again fun, I read a bit of Ellen Langer’s “Mindfulness” which is looking fascinating. She starts by talking about experiments she ran at old folks’ homes where she gives one set of old dudes a plant each to look after and a choice of daily meals and the choice over how to structure their day, while the a ‘control group’ just runs as normal. After some time, not only are the group who have power over their day healthier, there are significantly more of them alive. Those poor people in the 'control' group. They had no control over their day. They sacrificed their lives so that we could get smarter about aging. Maybe this is another reason I don’t want to work in corporations. I want to live longer.

In Fremont we Scissor Truss

My computer is called 'The Escalade' because it is huge. It is fat and heavy and has a big power supply. Right now I took the 'sclade upstairs so I could type this while hanging out with Lucy as she watches The Red Shoes with Jean. Is this going to make Lucy want to be a dancer?

The trouble with taking the 'sclade anywhere is although it is a laptop it chews through power and the battery doesn't last long. So I have to get my point down fast. Please excuse typos and grammatical errors.

Today I took my bike out for a ride. I didn't know where I was going to go, but I had a bike lock, my ipod, notepad, pen and a couple of books to read. I carried the fixie down the stairs and thought West looked appealing so I headed that way. I climbed a few blocks up Queen Anne Hill. It is a muscle workout climbing Queen Anne. My bike has one gear. But there's something that is addictive about it. The bike has no derailleurs and no freewheel so your legs become part of the bike. There is a direct connection between me and the road. I read on http://sheldonbrown.com/fixed/index.html that this makes fixies good for riding in the snow. There's little chance of me riding in the snow.

So I push up the hill and feel larger than normal. Just pushing that tall gear up a hill like Queen Anne is an accomplishment for me. The Tour de France guys can push up hills like that for ten miles at a time but I take it easy between blocks. If you work at it you can slow right down and get a breather as the road flattens out for the cross street.

As I get to the top of the hill I change my mind. I want to go to the Fremont Library. I haven't been in there for years. Wikipedia tells me Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the basement of UCLA library so I figure libraries must have something going for them when it comes to books.

I turn the bike around. Low speed manouevers work well on a fixie. I have good control since there's no freewheel. I slow my pedalling to slow the bike down. I can't stand motionless like those unshaven bike couriers at Seattle city lights. My friend Zach practiced standing stationary on his bike on the carpet at his work until he could do it. I don't want to practice in my lounge room. Perhaps I could practice in the park. It would feel a bit silly, like a politician practicing a smile.

I head down the hill. The bike wants to spin faster. My legs want to maintain a steady pace. I am not comfortable enough to go flying down the hill so I 'proceed with caution'. Crossing the Fremont Bridge is a joy as the road work keeps traffic moving at walking pace and I fly by the drivers. There a bike rack outside the library (thank you Seattle) and I park next to a touring bike. The bike is well used. It has both a front and a rear rack. To carry even more it has a baby trailer. This outfit could cross america. It looks like it comes from a more practical world than my sparse fixie.

The library is busy. All the regular desks have people at them, although there are spare chairs here and there between the people. Thre are a lot of laptop users here. There are several library computers here and they are fully used. Some other people are wandering around the shelves looking at DVDs and books. There are two rows of armchairs facing each other. They are empty. I seem the be the only person who is going to read in the library.

The armchair has cushions that are stff and straight. It doesn't match well to the slouching posture I use to read. The arms are wooden, giving the chair a look like it was designed a hundred years ago. I look around the library. It was funded by Carnegie (Andrew, the oil overlord rather than Dale, the person you read when you want to win friends). It has a mediterranean style, with white walls and a tiled roof. The best thing about it are the trusses. I think they are scissor trusses but I'm no architect. They are built with large wooden beams, the kind that makes me think of a ship's mast. This was built when there was plenty of old growth forest to cut down.

And so I read 'If You Want to Write' by Brenda Ueland. It was written in 1938 so you can find old copies for a cent on Amazon (plus $3.50 shipping). I read this old book in this old library for an hour or more. While reading I made myself three notes - stories I need to write up, whether they are a chapter or a sentence. Here they are:

Swedish Cultural Training - I need to tell the story of how my American company acquired a mch smaller Swedish company from the point of view of how the cultures differed. This includes the 'Swedish Cultural Training' we did to learn the differences in behaviour. (Short version of the training, without charge - Swedes hate to stand out and Americans love to.)

Chinese Brent - I spent several months working 'on the roof' as a roof tiler. Everyone on the roof had a nickname. Mine was "Chinese Brent". To the boss my eyes looked Chinese. I have scars on my right shoulder from the damage caused by carrying stacks of tiles up a ladder. This is proof that I have done manual labour and proof that my body is too delicate for such work.

Bedroom over Long Reef - When I used to live by Long Reef Beach in Sydney my bedroom had huge windows. I would watch the ships line up outside Sydney Heads waiting for their turn to unload their cargo. I could see the lightning when storms were out at sea. I sat on my bed and watched the rain.

The Escalade is about to run out of power. Later.

The Boss of Motorhead

I was sitting in my house watching an interview with Lemmy Kilmister on a 25th anniversary Motorhead concert DVD. Lemmy is the singer, bass player and head honcho of Motorhead. Most of the interview was what you expect when Lemmy was touched by genius.

It went something like this:

Interviewer: You've been in other successful bands like Hawkwind but it only lasted a year or so. What it is that made Motorhead last 25 years?

Lemmy: Well I kept getting fired from other bands. So I thought I'd start my own. They can't fire me then.

I sat a changed man. I have only been fired twice in my career, about a 20% firing rate. I wasn't fired from Amazon. But listening to Lemmy I decided it was better to be boss of Motorhead than bass player of Hawkwind.

Am I scared by this? A little. Am I excited? Totally. Enough people have hassled me to blog my struggles so for now I will write the meta thoughts here on blogspot.