Last on the Bus

I've ridden out to the local bike shops the past few days looking at everything but looking for nothing. Maybe a canvas bag or something to sling over the handlebars, but mostly just to see what's available and to look at gears and sprockets and other mechanical goodies.

Fortunately I was saved spending money by obnoxious staff. I have to admit I'm one of those shoppers who ask for assistance if I can't find something but who otherwise just like to check things out. What I'm not is someone who takes kindly to being repeatedly asked if I need some help. As I just pointed out to you, and did to the sales people, if I want help I'll ask for it.

I have yet to determine why so many people think it's helpful to offer advice. In the shopping situation I guess it makes sense because they're commission whores, but that hardly justifies it in real life. I'm constantly surprised, and annoyed, by people who offer advice when I tell them about my problems. Do they think I'm too dumb to know how to do things? It's the problem I want to talk about, not the solution! Solving problems is the easy part and doesn't interest me in the slightest.

But I digress.

I'm officially the last person on the planet to realize that the bike riding population is composed of health nuts. I'm pretty much taken in by the mechanics of it, but I've always enjoyed the freedom it affords. I like the slow pace, too, where you get a chance to see the world and don't care much about my cardio stats or even how fast or slowly I'm riding. Still, if I cared to, I could spend hundreds of dollars getting all sorts of measuring things.

What suprised me, though, and led to my realization that I had better change my attitude was looking over the maintenance products. Bikes can be dirty, greasy machines that require much cleaning and primping, and every one of the products does everything it can to outdo the others as far as being organic and bio-degradable and "natural." All except the teflon lubes, that is.

It's not unlike camping soap.

Call me a pragmatist, but the meager quantities used to maintain a bike (as opposed to, say, a human body, home, or car) aren't even worth talking about. Yet, it seems no one can clean their bike with anything other than orange peel oil.

I guess it makes sense that bike riders would be all about the environment, but it just strikes me as lame. The gears clean just fine with no more than two or three drops of dishwashing soap. A few more squirts and the whole bike's clean.

It's always this way: the people who are doing the least damage worry the most about doing any at all.