Global Gutz Friday 13th July 2007: The Movie!

Even though I crashed and lost my awesome lead-out, this remains my favorite racing memory of 2007 - a worldwide simulaneous race in a dozen different cities, with the local winner getting a free round-trip ticket to the Worlds in Dublin (which was total crap by all accounts, but that's another story).
This was filmed in-race by Smitty and posted a short time afterwards. You can barely tell its me, because I'm so faaar ahead... from High Park til around Bay street. Those are the fastest couriers in all Hogtown chasing after me. He cut the crash out of his helmet-cam footage for some reason. Enjoy a tiny piece of history. In part two, I am featured at the finish line looking extremely skinny and showing off my bloody knee.

Happy new year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os6cXdSmp_I

I live in an urban paradise.

Photos: S.Wheldrake

Vuelta a Scarborough, August.

THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN, SCOTLAND.

I walked under this bridge in 2007, and took this photo.

Nuts Roasting on an Open Fire

What a snow storm!

We had 25 cm drop on the city yesterday. Marlena and I went for a long hike into HIgh Park where branches hung low with snowy boughs and redbirds dallied in sorties hither and yon above our heads in a hollow by Grenadier Pond. I made a point of stopping there as I had noticed the fine cardinals standing out against the snow last winter. Its a magical little spot removed from the wind, where the birds flutter and skirl above you onto the snowy sumach boughs.

My feet ended up good and wet from t he deep cracks in my Columbia boots - after seven years they've had it. Not that it will make me stop wearing them - bit of shoe goo and they'll be right enough.

Still, it was epic stuff for this town. I rode to work today in the sunny aftermath of it all - and the snowplows working all night. It was slushy but my deep experience in bad weather on my fixed wheel machine had me passing cars on the right without trouble. Ah, winter.

Three Thousand Dollars and 1/2 a race.

Saturday 20 November:

Finally I had my bike ready and it worked perfectly during the now infamous race: a ninety km, fourteen checkpoint hurter in still two degree Celcius air. Nadir had hooked up the Red Bull sponsorship to the tune of an off-the-scales $3000 winner-take-all. I went into it with sore ribs from an idiot slamming into me on his mountain bike last Monday; sore ribs really last, I assure you.
I wasn't over-excited about the whole affair (just very, very excited), as I haven't been training for months and knew a long, cool-weather sufferfest was in order.


Even before the first checkpoint, the police were on us, chasing the race on Wellesley East en route to Jet Fuel Cafe. Kuz took one for the team like the grand old man he is, by pulling over and admitting that "a little race" was underway. I hopped the curb and passed by them on the sidewalk (he ended up flatting twice over on top of this). From the Fuel, it was to the very end of Leslie Street Spit, a good three flat straight and dark km's out to the lighthouse, where I found some very pissed off racers from the front group, who'd been waiting for five minutes. JP was there with a car and started signing manifests, barking out directions to Fallingbrook Road deep to the east of us at the very end of Queen street east.

I teamed up with Panama Jack and rode out of the Spit and along the Waterfront Trail to my childhood stomping ground the Beaches, then back onto Queen street, each taking pulls and grinding along at 31 km/hr or so. Then I picked up Ernesto at Fallingbrook (that is, we wasted a minute looking for the actual checkpoint and E. cruised in with Jody from my work doing her first race ever), where we had to stop halfway up the steep hill. That was a mere prelude for the deep push into Scarbourough and the near-bottom of Brimly road, a truly steep, winding dive down towards the bottom of the Bloughs.
I pulled a banana out of my vest pocket to find it massively smushed and threw it away, then ascended marking Ernesto. Overtaking E. ( who'd dropped out of 'cross season after hurting his back) on Kingston Rd, I noticed he stayed back. Onwards I drove it over the rollers of Danforth Ave in the deep dark suburban wasteland, one of those beautiful moments of serenity and speed. But the mind was working, taking in the state of my post-Brimly legs and I could only think of the adjacent subway line. 'Guatamalan rules' Nadir had said at the start-line, and my conscience was clear. I rode to Main station where I knew access would be perfect and cruised inside the bus exit, clattering downstairs. My train came promptly and I chatted with a guy while downing a gel I'd found in my bag. Things were improving.

At Yonge I clattered to the surface and rolled over to Keith MacDonald who looked surprized to see me and declared I was "rocking" four minutes behind fourth place. I was still out of it enough that I kept looking for my manifest after I had already given it to Keith - then I headed to Dundas Square, the leg pains coming sharply. I never get leg cramps but the cold and my lazy days were taking their toll in the chill. Nonetheless the race was back in familiar territory and it was time to step it up with half the distance to go. At Dundas Square I received directions to City Hall, having caught back Charlie, who'd lost his manifest completely. I rode through the Eaton Centre mall towards Bay Street and onto Nathan Phillips Square, spotting Charlie and riding up to JP who announced that the whole thing was over, called off due to massive, cascading organizational failure. (My words, not his.)
Nadir held a post-mess meeting outside his shop to decide what to do, offering us all our race fee + $20. But the guy who'd been winning (apparently 1o minutes ahead) threw a stomping fit about only getting half the prize money for winning half the race. I knew he was one of Nadir's 'boys', and I could see what was happening. Nadir wasn't about to say no to him, as there was egg all over his face; he'd organized the most high-profile messenger race in years and hadn't had enough volunteers to man every checkpoint. Rule number one: never leave your checkpoint during a race. Yet people had to leave to get to another one and disaster struck again and again.

It was a sad end to a potentially great race. Nadir I only felt bad for. He's like the paterfamilias of the messenger scene, giving so much time and energy and now it was a gross embarassment. The party continued with A Man Called Warwick spinning, the specially-painted-by-Futura 2000 Colnogos shone brightly, and the swag was piled high behind a counter. I ended up with a container of massage creme for all my pains. Knappy didn't even race but got a bunch of new Italian tires: there's no justice.
Then it was time for drinks and forgetting.

A Night of Sprints

Last night I made a new twist in my short racing career: match sprints. I am not a track sprinter, though this was well known to me beforehand, I confess.

Upon a darkening service road alongside the major arterial known to locals as Lakeshore Boulevard West, I spotted them. They were few in number but visible slightly with their blinking white and red lights against the darkness of the November night. Having spend forty-five minutes doing warm-up laps around the fairgrounds on the other side of Lakeshore, I felt as ready as my rusted old Paulie bike would ever be. Nadir saw me head to toe in lycra and slapped my hand with a laugh.
I had made my preparations: switched out my old French toeclip pedals for new French roadies, my heavy front track wheel for my twenty spoke road wheel and GP Attack 22C tire, and removed the rear fender. Lycra was applied in club-style layers. All wrong for this underground-style messenger sprinting event, but I thought it best anyway. Everyone else was in jeans and black hoodies, faces pierced and riser bars chopped, as per current styles. Some even raced converted road frames or freewheel bikes; the best time of the night was put down by a guy in street clothes riding something that vaguely resembled the first proper road bike I ever owned, a chipped and scratched Miata with a sagging chain.
I chose to race Daniel, who I used to work with at the Path. A good young guy. He broke his collarbone getting doored in Berlin this past summer. Hey, if you're going to get f#$ed up, best to do it somewhere stylish. I was hoping he wasn't yet fully healed as I too am nursing a bike- related wound. A young twit on a mountain bike plowed into me last Monday evening as I made my way carefully home in the dark and the rain of rush hour. I was just careful enough to slow up at a green-turning yellow where a car was turning into my path in the streetcar-tracked intersection, when Idiot slams right into me, handlebar into ribs. Never mind my two blinking red turtle lights and reflective tape on my courier bag, this young fool saw nothing.

Point is, Daniel had me in the first and second round rematch. My spinney gear ratio, tight chain, bruised ribs (and therefore reduced core strength) were all major marks against me. A loose chain reduces rolling resistance at the start, I learned. I canvassed him for a third chance but boredom/distaste had set in, and I had to make do with a much bigger, younger and faster opponent who dropped me at the start line. Oh well.

A two hundred metre standing-start track sprint really has no subtlety. There is no psychological element around who gets the jump on who - in this case it was about overall times for the night. The guy who won did it time-trialing (14.79 sec.), with no opponent to race against. He beat the guy who showed up in a minivan with a lovely white Cinelli and a $2000+ Zipp disc wheel that made a popping sound when he started, as though it had cracked at first pedalstroke. High tech and light weight = extreme brittleness.
I got closer in the re-match but still got smoked - didn't really even know where the finish was and surged past after it. We actually bumped right after the start, that's how close it was.

Track or Treat

Last night I did my first messenger race since the Bike Film Fest back in August. I felt like crap then but did it just to get my body in gear. This time I felt good, and rode the track bike as it was a fixed gear machine exclusive situation. Costumes were also in order. I made a last minute decision to go as a commuting office worker, a kind of joke on myself. Jacket, tie, dress pants and pink T-Mobile cap plus old black steel track bike with many a paint chip and 'new' (to me that is) steel pedals made in France the last century (Atom).

The air was cool and calm, the sky clear, and the mood positive as the couriers gathered on the blasted heath of Trinity Bellwoods park. Toby was the organizer, and kept delaying the start time as people sipped their pre-race beers on the hockey rink. Finally the Red Bull girls appeared in their Mini and dosed the racers with their hideous poison; I declined but took a bottled water. Victory is in the details.
Toby had us lay the bikes down and do a Le Mans running start from inside the yet-to-be-iced rink. We piled through the narrow rink door and I jumped on the iron horse which I'd carefully placed facing southward. I had decided to defy my initial plan and do the 'core' waypoints first: two Queens and a Richmond, then off to the Necropolis in Cabbagetown. At each stop we were handed those little candies that come in a row and turn to powder when you eat them. I kept stuffing them in my jacket pocket. I caught back a guy with a death mask on the east side and we marked each other heading up Parliament to the cemetary.

Because of the popularity of track bikes with young hip kids these days, there's a crossover effect into courier races and I must say, I like it. Instead of nothing but real competition, there are all these "kids" as they call themselves, who know nothing about racing/aren't too quick. It does my 35 year old heart good to hammer these Kids into the ground. In this case, the two of us rode together till Yonge street and the St Clair Hill on the way to cemetary II: Mt Pleasant, where I dropped Death Mask by 10 seconds or so, then tore off to Casa Loma to whip a raw egg off the hill and stumble down the 8-10 flights of stairs.

From then on I felt better and better as the natural tilt of the landscape declined toward the lake. Death Mask caught me back on College street after I right-turned against the red light at Bloor and weaved my way through traffic navigating my way to a coffee shop called Manic. He overrode it and I jumped in ahead to snatch a candy from the counter and tear off again. From there it was to the final two: Toby's house (a block from me! no route problems there) and the final leg to Trinity Bellwoods.
There's nothing so fine as knowing a city you're racing through like the back of your hand, not stressing over navigation at all, just flowing it smooth and fast through darkened back streets. The whole second half I felt more and more comfortable with it all, and started to fantasize that things could really be shaping up ideally. The thing about a messenger race is that you never really know exactly what's happening - most everybody does it slightly differently and most you're alone or with one or two others.
In the end I took third place, a good five minutes back of Charlie, who was a rookie at the Path when I came on there last year, and Chris 50, a seasoned pro who I figured would beat me. Ironically, Charlie and I were devising the same plan as we studied the manifest pre-race, but I decided to switch my whole routing strategy just beforehand. Charlie's a great kid, always excited about things, and was pretty damned humble in victory. He won a giant receipt for a pair of Adidas. 50 won a nice bag, and I got my pick of touques and a large yellow T-shirt that says FUCK OFF! IT'S MY LANE TOO! in gigantic black letters.

I'm really liking the messenger racing scene this whole year long - nothing but good feelings and fun on top of the adrenilin adventures. Its a powerful community-builder. The respect I get from those guys even now that I'm riding a desk is remarkable, and much of it is due to the races. Well, Wednesday sprints are tonight at the CNE...

Happy Hallow's Eve!

From Fixed Gear to Fast Fridays

What is going on here?

The place is NYC, Fall of '07. What you see is a crossover phenomenon that's been in full swing for a couple of years at least: people turning fixed wheel bicycles into trick machines in the style of bmx street-riding. Muscular bikes for muscular tricks.

First it was skids and trackstands and reverse circles. Then one-footed skids with a leg up and over the handlebar with a 180 degree powerslide thrown in for good measure. And now its turned into this madness. Banks and jumps, with barspins close behind no doubt. These young punks are building their track bikes with super-tight riser handlebars, incredibly tight bmx-like geometry and even neon magwheels and platform pedals. I know a kid named Toby whose NYC bike is so small (47cm say) and tight that it feels just like a bmx.

Its no more about racing on a track than freestyle bmx street is. These people are out for style and rip-it-out street trickery. They say it's on the subcultural margins where the innovations occur and I would have to agree. Its starting to feel like a trip to New York for an alley cat race might find no drop bars to be found on a 'track' bike. This past summer I watched an Ottawa courier in town for bike polo produce a hacksaw from nowhere and pare down his riser handlebars to about 10" across in between bike polo games. Or was it even less?

As for me, a track machine built for keiran racing would suit fine. My old steel paulie has fresh tape on the bars and gleaming toeclips on the pedals for the first time. Its good. I took her out to some match-sprints last night under the arch of the Prince's Gate, as the autumn winds howled. Nobody showed except a very baggy camoflaged kid on a weatherbeaten road bike with a traffic safety vest and flat pedals. We waited a couple of minutes and then hit it.

As we left I suggested we might as well do one match sprint to make it official - we were both headed west anyhow. He agreed and I let him charge towards the traffic light/finish line 600m away. I got onto his wheel for a bit, then surged past him. He had no answer and I thought he'd simply turned off at the intersection, but no, he reappeared finally. An easy victory, but somehow they're the best kind these days.

These citizens want something.

Air-conditioned Nightmares

The chicken has come home to roost.

That is not a reference to Michael Rasmussen, ex-Rabobank professional and Maillot Jaune nightmare. That is a reference to myself, longtime organizational neurotic now behind a bureau guiding the affairs of a few quiet bike lockers, a monthly e-newsletter, and other little odds and ends. The sheen of this desk-riding, air-conditioned whirligig is disappearing.
The point is that the prospect of what I'm forgetting is so nerve-wracking that I waste energy in useless handwringing that's makes the whole mess a fait accompli. Last Friday was the supreme example, or was it Thursday? All this pseudo-productivity of email sending and meeting attending, spastic rule-following and rule-assaulting of members of the public is wearing goddamned thin by August when one would rather be canoeing gently across the waterways of rural Ontario or getting drunk in Galicia or out-of-control in Amsterdam.

Must get the damned newletter out before another subscriber dies off or I die off or you do.

My Cat Rasmussen

First, a happy tale:

On what happened to be my birthday, three ladies from the maintenance committee at my co-op apartment building knocked on the door and offered me a cat. The cat had been abandoned by some evictees, who left the cat but stole their front door. I surveyed the animal and decided to take it. Eventually I named him for the Yellow Jersey of the day, Michael Rasmussen of Denmark.

Admission of bias: I like Rasmussen. I like his style of racing - a strategic, pure climber with two mountains points jerseys to his credit already and here he was about to triumph in the crucial overall category. In fact, he'd just won the final stage in the Pyrenees by over twenty seconds from his nearest competitor, giving him a possibly unassailable three minute lead going into the closing days of the race. It was his hour of triumph and it did not last. In fact, you could hear booing from the crowd as he rolled over the line giving the victory salute. Rumours had been swirling around Rasmussen for days about missed doping tests before the Tour, and about really being home in Italy training when his whereabouts forms (yes, out-of-competition testing demands ProTour racers state their future locations at all times) said he would be in Mexico visiting his wife's family. He was caught in a lie by an Italian ex-racer and broadcaster, who called Danish TV and busted him (proof?) during the Pyrenees stages.

So on the eve of triumph, Rasmussen was called into the team bus and fired. The race organizers reserve the right to bar anyone from entering the race even if suspected of that great evil, performance-doping. Once the race is on, any rider can be chucked if caught out with the wrong blood oxygen values, etc. But in Rasmussen's case, he was caught in a kind of lie, and in came the behind-the-scenes pressure either from the sponsor, Rabobank, or the Tour organizers or both. Only Denis Menchov had the balls to quit in solidarity, no other rider had the nerve to protest for a moment.

If the top five overall riders behind Rasmussen had refused to ride, the whole putsch would have failed miserably, becoming a P.R. fiasco of epic proportions. But of course no one could see past their own nose and team manager as per usual, Menchov excepted.

Now you could argue that it was all true, that Rasmussen was caught lieing to avoid being tested and that could have only meant he was doping, and that his team firing him represents a great leap forward for 'drug-free sport'. Except for the fact that the team had begun by defending Rasmussen and then flipped; and further, that he had just been 'kicked off' a national team (for missing their doping tests) that he had not even been a member of (as national selections for the Worlds are normally made after August).

No, it was all done in the hallowed name of the Tour of France and in the wake of the Floyd Landis fiasco that has yet to be resolved. And in the wake of the Bjarne Riis (hmm, another Dane and '96 Tour winner) confession, the Vinokourov testosterone busting only days before, and others too numerous to name. Rasmussen was made an example of to protect the already tarnished brandname and symbol (Maillot Jaune) of the most prestigious bike race in the world.

It all makes me sick.

Rasmussen was having the Tour of his life, fighting off young Contador's relentless attacks in the mountain stages and making for the most exciting racing I've witnessed in years, and his team was controlling the race perfectly with Menchov, Dekker, Boogerd, and even Fleche all killing themselves everyday for the man called Chicken. I couldn't even watch the day I heard the news, and I'm NOT sorry I missed the final time trial because I was up at the farm. What a pack of lies.

Rasmussen my cat is a good climber and loyal.

Global Gutz All Over the Road

And the results are in.
Friday the 13th turned out to be less than lucky for me, as per my prediction - I prepared perfectly for the 10pm race, slamming a can of Coke an hour beforehand. Yes, I also checked the bike and topped up the air pressure with Hayward's leaky pump. Even better, I nipped by the Co-op and snapped up a Grand Prix Attack front tire (handmade in Germany!) 22mm of 370 (!) threads-per-inch advantage. A cool eighty dollars. I was ready.
Perhaps I had more speed than I was entirely ready for. We lit out from the darkness of High Park (from the lawn and around a stump no less!). Once into the Bloor/Keele down-and-up I accelerated away with Tofu and Jim Kuz. We were hammering at over forty km/hour and it was clear that this would be the selection. I beat them at one small intersection and re-accelerated.

Through my racing brain ran a couple of key thoughts. The first being: Great, I'm right where I want to be, with the main field of thirty already dropped behind us. Second: I'm racing Kuz, a man with over a decade of alley cat-winning knowledge and he's got gears for a change. Plus Tofu, who I used to work with at the Path, and who goes to the Worlds every year and does quite well on his brakeless track machine, strapped in old-school styles (kitted out w. vintage 7-11 team cap and jersey no less). Two deeply talented competitors, with serious abilities in the cats, ie, blasting through city traffic steadily and fearlessly in the late-night hours. I was breaking away, leading out the sprint for the first checkpoint.
I knew I was going harder than I should have been as those who go 110% in the first part of race have a way of being swallowed up towards the end part, but the adrenaline got the better of me. There's nothing like that feeling of strength in the legs and lungs when you're going really hard and still feel like its sustainable. And there my troubles began. Going the speed of traffic or slightly faster or slower is fine but when you're going more than twice the speed (or even three times) you can get into real trouble. There are three lines you can take: the curb lane/to the right of parked cars; the yellow line dividing the road; or between the two lanes of traffic on your side, which is what I was doing. It feels safer than the curb lane because you needn't worry about pedestrians or getting doored, so there I attacked. But the best line is ultimately the yellow line because there you will find no pedestrians, no doors opening, and no cars changing lanes to your left, and with maxium cheating room to charge four way reds. But I wasn' t there and suddenly a cabbie decided to start pushing into the left lane (as they're forever trying to switch into the faster lane after picking up a fare) even though there was no opening.
I was forced to swerve left in my narrow lane-within-a-lane, doing it pinball style against cabs that were barely moving, using a free hand to push off the first car, careen to the second and push away again. By the third one I was starting to lose control and hit the right side mirror, apparently severing it completely. I didn't notice being too busy crashing to the ground in front of the stopped cab in the left lane, grinding in with both knees as Kuz and Tofu shot by on either side asking if I was okay. 'I'm okay', I called, even as I continued sliding along on the shins. For a second I was worried I'd broken my Look pedals and wouldn't be able to re-clip in, but in fact the bike had no damage due to my finely executed controlled wipeout, and I continued on with the knees crying out their shock and disgust, seeing red you might say.
Adrenalin prevailed over dismay at my lost advantage and I picked up speed again, heading for Parliamen and making mental note not to stop too soon, which I then proceeded to do anyway. That desperate mental state is the racer's greatest enemy, proven once again as I decided Sherbourne was Parliament and watched four more zip past me, not to be seen again. Ultimately, I took a respectable eighth place (though Hoffman didn't bother submitting it to the overall global standings).
Perhaps it was just - Tofu (currently on the road) won in 30.5 minutes over 21 km, about 40/km an hour. With my form I knew I could have been right there, but it wasn't to be. Kuz (currently on the road) hung on for third about forty seconds off Tofu's winning pace and so the bald-headed vegan gets his free trip to the Worlds in Dublin this August. I should go just to race against him once more.
And the knees? Still a bit sore on Monday with the scabs holding out nicely, eitherwise fine. Couldn't upload the picture I took of them, sorry.

There are races to race.

Oftentimes life is made dull by the web-log. As I creep back into the whole business I wonder just how to keep it compelling.

Choices and decisions have oft made me nervous in this life, much to my regret. This weekend has loomed with several choices hanging upon me:

1. Go to the farm w M & her band.

2. Go past the farm to Ottawa and race the Ontario Crit Champs + OBC Road Race.

3. Race Global Gutz messenger race Friday the 13th to win a free plane ticket to Ireland for the Worlds in August.

4. Forget it all and go birdwatching.

I've decided to go with Global Gutz. A worldwide simultaneous courier race with similar courses and a local prize. It should be high excitement to say the least. Just writing about it sends a shiver of energy through my gurgling veins, seeing as I was the winner of the last courier race in this town. Just because I'm an ex-courier doesn't mean I can't still race the race,

I'll have you know. It occurred to me in passing, more than a month (nearly two) after retiring from that line of work that I might very well have been one of the five fastest couriers in town, out of maybe 200 or so; or maybe 100. No one really seems to know how many there are any more, though once upon a time there were 500 or so (when I started last century). Those were the days, days when I didn't race at all, being too green and with too crappy a bike. I've gotten older and much more daring.

My courier racing career is pretty short: The first one was called Blood Bath a few years back, and my goals were to finish and not be last. Accomplished both. Then this past spring I did the Friday the 13th treasure hunt, 'Lucky 13'. 3rd place. Then a hastily organized post-polo Saturday night 'cat where I prevailed against a field of seven. Forty bucks and a baseball practice jersey were mine.

A pretty decent record so far.

On the legitimate racing side, I've done alright this year. Fifth in a short points race at the club (which I now dispise), and seventh overall and fifth in my category (Senior 4) at the CHIN International Races, in a field of over 70. That was really my best going.

So I'm primed for a top finish this Friday the 13th at Global Gutz. Did I just massively jinx myself? Yes, yes I did. Who cares really, courier races are a big adventure where we transform the whole city into our adventure playground, which is the size of playground you want to have when you're my age. Its a wholely different deal than 'proper' racing, and vastly more entertaining, involving on-the-fly orienteering skills, historical plaque facts, waypoint approaches like subway escalators and turnstiles, and finishes that sometimes involve postsprint multi-story stairclimbs with the bike in one hand. And of course open traffic all night along. A mad, bad business only for the maddest and baddest.

Like me.

From the Office

Attention Management Team Cluster 'BB' Members,

Be advised that after a five month hiatus this blog is now in operation once again.

Certain changes have occurred. Pappy is now an office worker and commuter having left Bike Messenger-ing behind in time for spring and summer.

Now I ride a desk. The desk is inside the office with its own locked door. There are filing cabinets, intranet, and multiple email addresses. Do not email any of them. I administer storage units for use by the public. Do not vandalize.

Please carry on with your work.

Fucko and Dean

Another day on the job. A couple of months ago one sunny Saturday I was hailed by a fellow cyclist, lycra-clad astride a Cervelo, no less, who turned out to be an ex-messenger working at Cervelo. He had a flat tire and needed a pump, and I sorted him out.

As we rode off together we started into the inevitable courier vs off the road jobs debate.

"Couriering is the perfect job, you get paid to ride your bike", said Dave Lycraman, who quit only to "become a faster cyclist" as he was a young racer. (In fact I'd seen him dominate the messenger criterium race at Downsview in the fall of 2005.) I found the comment incredible when I heard it. Its the perfect job when a) the sun's shining b) hot calls are flowing your way, and c) you arrive at a six storey building on Spadina to deliver on the sixth floor to find an 'Out of Order' sign on the elevator door and twenty pounds of evelopes in your bag as you turn to run up the stairwell in your cloglike bike shoes, swearing a blue streak the whole way.

Yes, the perfect job except for the long hours, low pay, zero benefits or employment standards, and no infrastructure to support you in your work beyond pavement and elevators.

But today, as I hauled my track bike hither and yon along the east-west corridors, with and against the westerly wind, the words of Fucko (aka Dave Lycraman) rang in my brain. A powerful voice of positivity, shall we say, because if you can't enjoy the fact that you're riding then the whole thing is for naught, and the bike messenger only lives to suffer and die. And I was enjoying it, treating the whole experience as a privilege - I may not be a pro racer but I am certainly a professional cyclist and not so many can say that.

It all makes me think of Dean. Dean is a longtime messenger here in town, though I only met him this fall when both of us were on the road. The thing about Dean is his look. Another Lycraman, Dean never fails to astound me - does his brother own a high-end bike shop? How, on the salary (if we can call it that) of a bicycle messenger does Dean manage to dress like a sponsored pro, from the Gortex shoe covers to the Oakley sunglasses and everything in between? And not just dress the part. When I first talked to Dean in the good weather of September he rode a Time Machine, a full-carbon frame from France that complete-bike would run you a good oh, $8000 or so. Maybe he got it on sale. His bad weather bike was a Ridley cyclo-crosser, full-carbon as well. I remember asking him, as it was the season, if he was riding 'cross races. "Oh no, its enough eh?, Its enough eh?" he kept saying to me over his shoulder. Enough meaning the job. I agreed.

Still the issue of Dean continues to haunt me. His winter bike is a gleaming red Trek (carbon fork) track bike, that he cruises about on, shielded from the Arctic winds by an Assos vest. I've never seen the man with one normal piece of clothing yet. Maybe a tuque.

And here's the gossipy bit about Dean: he rides never faster than 20km/hr. Yes, that's right, this fiend of carbon fibre never in my dozens of sightings have I seen going fast or anything approaching fast. Dean just cruises about like a grazing llama of lycra, pedalling placidly forward.

It used to amaze me. I concluded that Dean (who was always amazed at my occasional B.O.B. trailer use - so unstreamlined) was a big poser - slow as snot, only looked fast. But now I see it, after months on the road, my thirtysomething body in perpetual neck muscle agony, the Epsom salt recovery baths every other night, the multiple applications of Deep Cold after and before work. Now I see it. Dean is really a Jedi master, a Yoda-taught disciple of the old saw 'Steady wins the race', which in fact was the first thing I ever learned when I fell into this game years back.

Instead of being all caught up like me in meeting urgent delivery times and the racy, breathless challenges they demand, Dean just cruises everywhere because he knows his thirtysomething body, and he knows that he's got the perfect job. Steady wins the race, the long, long race of time that is the only race a messenger ultimately is in.

So good for Dean, the lycra-machine.

$10/hour!

Tonight a community meeting - raise the minimum wage to $10/hr. At the moment the new member of provincial parliament for my riding, Cheri de Novo, has a private member's bill to that effect that's made it through second reading.

The federal M.P. for the riding, Peggy Nash, has the same bill before federal parliament, and they were both at the meeting. This meeting was filled with energy, all the good Torontonians talking about how a living wage is what everybody deserves. It was one of those moments where I felt kind of proud to be a Torontonian (not something easy to achieve), with a 150 people of all different ethnic backgrounds, unionists, new immigrants, old and young all listening to each other in roundtable discussions and all sorts of enthusiasm for this new political campaign.

Well, I guess it makes sense: all the cynics stay home. The people who want to do something come out. It had this interesting, people-telling-politicians-what-to-do and not the usual other way around business. Good for you, Cheri.

Track bike!

Have you seen my black track bike around town, the one with the blue anodized rims and Michee hubs? Well, if you did, its because I've been riding it as of today. I've been trying to get that bike up and running for months now, and good for me, because it finally happened and boy was it fun!

I rode that bike for two years, came within an ace of selling it to a courier one time, then backed out the next day, and I'm glad I did. That bike is about one third lighter than my road bike and so much more fun to ride. Damn, that's good, especially in the Coldest Days of the Year, which are now upon us here in Hogtown.

Gotta go bed.

Winter thoughts

A few years ago I found myself in a cafe in a whitewashed coastal town in Morocco (where Europeans owned the best traditional houses), surrounded by local men watching an American tv movie while drinking the famous sugary mint tea in large glasses. I was there with a couple of locals who were 'hosting' me.

The movie was already into its second act,if I remember correctly, and was dubbed into Spanish with Arabic subtitles.

The film was a drama about a neo-nazi group in Los Angeles who are attempting to shanghai the broadcast of a Holocaust remembrance ceremony where an important Jewish Nazi-hunter was receiving an award. I think the plan was to assassinate the Nazi-hunter while broadcasting a speech by the Holocaust-denying neo-nazi leader, using the hijacked tv station that was filming the ceremony.

Morocco is a kingdom where polical expression is tightly controlled, especially in two areas: the ruling monarchy and Islam.

It was a bit like watching a prison-revolt drama from inside the day-room of a jail (which I've also done). I kept wondering just who these Moroccans were thinking of as the villains in this cheap tv drama. The film ended with the neo-nazis getting caught and the Jewish human rights defender being saved, just as we all knew it would in an American film featuring murderous antisemites, the memory of the Holocaust, and Jewish targets. We all know how that script goes - all of us - Arabs and Spaniards and Canucks and Malaysians, anybody. Its the successful confluence of history, Western media and Western morality since World War Two.

As the credits rolled, one guy said something in Arabic to the general agreement of the others. I asked what he had said and was told, "He said that the Americans try to fool us Moroccans with their propaganda but we are not fooled by them". That was all that was said on the subject and we left.

This was the winter of 2005, in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of 2004, the vicious targeting and killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (who made an incendiary film criticizing women's place in Islam, and was shot and stabbed to death in the street in Amsterdam with a note left in his body explaining why, and also the bombing of a Casablanca synagogue the year before that left many dead). The point is that in all cases the killers were Islamists of Moroccan origin. Times were a bit tense.

That subject had already come up over tea in the house of my hosts and I had rhymed off all of the above, minus the synagogue bombings (I'm now forgetting yet another European incident of the time that really cemented the 'low-ebb' of Euro-Moroccan relations in the whole context of Arabs-vs-the-West crisis we're living in these days), and was met with much nervous laughter and embarrassed smiling, in particular by the older brother, a failed gambler who'd married a Danish woman and then given up his life there having lost a custody battle over his daughter. He hated Denmark.

The Moroccans saw the film simply as the propaganda of the imperialist, who re-writes history to reinforce his agenda, in this case sympathy for the Jews to justify and reinforce the state of Israel, that perpetual insult and humiliation to the whole Arab nation. In Morocco and in all the Arab world, America is seen as a "Jewish country", dominated completely by Israel with a 100% pro-Jewish, anti-Arab bias in the mass media, Congress, and of course the White House. The political use of the Holocaust by Israel to justify a) its creation and b) its defense has manifested the inevitable: an equally politicized Arab rejection of the historical reality of the Holocaust as an imperialist Jewish lie.

I guess at this point all this is common knowledge, and yet I'm pointing it out. Something about that two weeks or so trip to Morocco still sticks in my craw, a trip only taken because it was an easy ferry-ride away from where I was staying in the south of Spain, a bit of utterly gratuitous Westerner-in-the-east backpacking slid into at the casual invite of a couple of young Aussies.

Of course my town hosts were in the process of attempting to rip me off through an bit of extra-billing at the end of my little stay with them. The trick being that the price of the bed, meals, etc. was a non-issue until payment time, with a huge outburst of rage and shock when I politely refused their price. I had fallen for their game but wasn't going to fall all the way, as I'd traveled in enough Arab countries before to know how outrageous their whole ploy was. It was an ugly ending, but the law of the land was completely on my side and while they tried to pretend otherwise everyone knew it, and finally the three of them faded away, having boarded my bus for Tangiers, after following me through the streets determined to get their rip-off price no matter what.

It all left the open question of just what the hell I was doing in a poor, Muslim country that faced onto rich Europe directly, where scores of young men calling themselves "guides" attach themselves to tourists, relentlessly determined to scam themselves into a few hundred diram for an hour of hustling the said ignoramus of the pink-skinned variety around town. Got to make a living somehow.

It was pretty hard to argue with Moroccans when they made the point: the world's hyper-power is of course 1000% pro-Israel, and so are the other western countries despite whatever gloss of criticism a France or Italy might make whenever Israel starts another invasion of Gaza or Lebanon or the West Bank. In every corner of the Arab world people watch Al Jazeera each night and see Israeli tanks and warplanes ripping the army-less Palestinians apart, and have been watching all of it helplessly since June, 1967 and even before. Even without mentioning the parallel American occupation of Iraq its totally obvious to Arab eyes just who the West loves, and who the West despises. Its as though the sickening, bloody history of the Crusades has taught us nothing.

A wintry veil indeed hangs over us all, in this age of carbon-fuel induced world-warming. This 'new year' won't hold so much new-ness I think, but only so much more of the same.

The Holidays

Holidays. I had a pretty good set of holidays because I got out of town and up to the farmhouse retreat I co-own up in the Ottawa valley. Just four days away, but what a difference it makes, no electricity, no plumbing, just a lot of woodburning and skiing and good wholesome meals by candlelight.

To make my overworked biker's body even happier, I didn't deliver anything for about nine days in a row. That made being back on the road come the new year feel vastly better; its called recovery time for a goddamned reason isn't it? My new year's resolution is to work only four days a week - Workless Wednesdays here I come!

After overhearing a few dozen office/elevator conversations about the stressbag mess that Xmas causes the citizens of Christiandom, it made me reflect on the work-mad nature of our fabulous Northernish European-derived culture. In some countries it is not unknown to have six weeks of paid holidays per year. Yes, that's correct, six weeks. But we couldn't handle such a thing here (especially here in Protestant Hogtown), because holidays are so incredibly stressful, what with the annual explosion of over-consumption that is the Xmas season.

Its such a fine piece of industrial society conspiracy: let the masses exhaust themselves with celebration fatigue so that they are positively relieved to get back to the calming rhythms of the daily grind. Instead of the craziness of Carnival in Brazil or the month long festival in Valencia, Spain which culminates in a huge blast of TNT and giant puppet-burning in the city square, or the Tomatino (a huge, drunken tomato fight in public), there isn't a real release of collective tension at Xmas. Its more like the opposite, an increase through the added traffic, parties and dinners to plan, and the miseries of gift-buying, all in the midst of the usual workload until 24 December. Then there is all the work and stress of organizing vacations to faraway, calmer places, which may or may not be combined with the Xmas/New Year holidays.

But don't you all know all this already? Of course you do, but that's what our overdeveloped industrial-consumer society is for, the exclusive use of time for relentless productivity, no matter how useless or destructive it may be.

Ah, January

I've been neglecting the blog, being off-line as I have been until today. Nicolas came over and worked away at my alien-to-him iBook of 2001 until finally, a couple of Mac-friend phone calls later, he had me back up and surfing like everyone else.

Its interesting, this world wide web. In N. America its an absolute passion, nothing less, for millions of people. It seems like every single person I know has their own website/blog/flickr account/whatever. In Mexico (which I am quite aware qualifies as "North America" according to whoever's in charge) people use the net all the time but its not the same, its MSN-ing and websurfing, not this absolute life passion that it is in these parts. But that's N. America for you, life through glowing screens.

One of those screens was set up in the lobby at 181 University yesterday, to show Canada vs. USA in a world junior hockey tournament. It was great, a 1-1 tie after sudden death overtime when I arrived. Frank told me to stay there and give him updates instead of fetching some waybill I'd left over at the Dungeon. So I obeyed my dispatcher and got really pumped watching tomorrows hockey stars trade penalty shots for admission to the final game.

Its not like soccer where the goalie is at a huge disadvantage because the net is so big, a hockey net makes the whole confrontation just about even. And a hockey shooter doesn't just shook from a fixed point as in soccer/futbol, he skates in from centre ice to add to the drama. Canada won it 6-5 or so. All the office workers cheered. It was more joy than I'd ever seen expressed in one of those buildings so stark in their perpetual absence of human emotion. I felt great for the rest of the day, a non-hockey fan thrilled by what I had seen and a non-patriot actually proud of 'our boys' holding the national game up.

Half the country on the edge of its seat, so it seemed, while doubtless in the U.S. of A no one even noticed. Hell, in Sweden, no one seemed to notice: the rink was empty. Of course, the Swedish team was no nowhere to be seen at that point.