Skip to main content

Nostalgia: This Bike


Following a fast few rounds of vodka tonics and I'm certain, vehement arguments about nothing of importance at Parasol’s with Alex, I crashed my bike and face planted in front of Coliseum Square and a group of winos who checked me out and said I was "probably fine." I rode home covered in blood (scaring tourists in the French Quarter), and ended up getting 15 or so stitches in my face at Touro Hospital. I decided it was time to give up on my beloved RB-1 that had been crashed a few times before and, I suspected, had a stress fracture somewhere in it that made it prone to failure. Clearly, it couldn’t be the vodka.
I decided I needed a new bike for getting around. I was disappointed to hear that my favorite bike shop in the world, momovelo was kaput and I wrote to the owner Kai for advice. His advertising had a picture that I still consider one of the Top 10 Sexiest Bike Nerd photos in the world. And that's saying a lot, after spending a lot of my spare time looking at sites like this and this.

He told me about Ebisu, where he got many of the frames that he sold. I bought the frame and then proceeded to collect a series of specialty parts for it, including Ritchey cranks, moustache handlebars, bar end brakes and one of those little brass zen bike bells I put on every bike I own. Tim at Bicycle Michael’s built it from all my crazy parts and it was tight. I found the picture above recently on an old thumb drive. It’s jauntily posed in the Marigny, probably moments after I picked it up.

Mustache handlebars definitely deter theft.
This bike went underwater when the levees broke in August 2005 and our recently purchased house got nailed. When I finally retrieved it a few months later, it had been buried in muck for a month and was rusty and unusable. It ended up in those multi-story piles of debris you would see in Lakeview after the storm.

The bike in the storage shed post storm - October 2005.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Since I spend about 75% of my work time either in or thinking about New Orleans but live in Austin, I am often asked to compare the two places. I spent the last five years of my life as a highly visible, highly vocal booster of New Orleans, so many people I meet are surprised when they hear that we have settled, at least for the near term, in Austin. For Cassie and me, the decision to stay in Austin was pretty easy. We didn't have any assets to protect in New Orleans. Our house was pretty thoroughly destroyed so there was no hurry to come back. We also wanted to find some degree of stability for our son; New Orleans is a dynamic place right now and since he had already spent about a fourth of his life in evacuation/gypsy mode, we decided we would try to give him a rest. So we arbitrarily chose Austin off the map. It was a reasonably short drive away from New Orleans. It was the only really progressive city in Texas. Much like New Orleans, it's a blue island in a sea of...
1 comment
Read more
Nice Weekend So, pretty fun weekend. I got to spend a lot of time with the wife and The Boy, which is always a delight. Everything after that is just gravy. I did get to see, and more importantly, play in, some sweet improv. On Thursday night, I was able to see the new Pgraph show, Grimm , which is improvised fairy tales. This show was intriguing to me for a number of reasons. I'm always a sucker for Pgraph. They're easily one of my favorite troupes because of their mix of funny, smart and highly theatrical improv. Besides being technically superior performers who clearly delight in each other's company, they always seem to come up with great concepts, and the whole improvised fairy tale is a pretty good shtick. In fact, one of my classmates had suggested that as a genre for my class' performance work, but since it was already in play, we decided to go to a different direction. Class was another one of my pleasures, even though it was hard hard work. This w...
Post a Comment
Read more
So, here's the e-mail I got today from my collaborator on the film: >Heat was accepted into the Atlanta Film Fest! >Holy Mother of Pearl! http://www.downstreamfest.com/2003films.html So, we have now broken into the world of the cheesy film fests!
Post a Comment
Read more