working in the goathead district
Mr. Kramer (played by Robert Stack), an air traffic controller in the movie ‘Airplane!’:
“Alright, Stryker, you listen and listen close. Flying a plane is no different from riding a bicycle. It’s just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes.”
- - - - -
Dang, is it nice to be back on the bike.
I’ve been wearing a big silly perma-grin on my rides lately, after riding barely at all while I was working on this site the last couple months. My road bike actually had a thick layer of dust on the seat. So right now I’m not forgetting just how lucky we have it in Tucson, out there in january in our shorts and shirt sleeves under sunny, clear blue skies.
Speaking of things that don’t belong on bike seats, what’s going on w/ this? That really is a bike seat for sale..
I made a photo album for my former bikes. So “all my exes live in .. a bunch of places maybe including Texas.” Some nice bikes there — a couple that I’d definitely still have if they fit me better. Others had their issues and had to go. Like the Gios which was spicy & fun, but squirrelly - you couldn’t ride it no hands. And the NOS Paramount was a bike I realized I just wasn’t feeling, after the shininess wore off.
For me, if your bike is unridden that’s something you don’t go bragging about.
We just had a bike come in the shop w/ a ridiculous number of thorns in the tires. Literally hundreds. We ended up having to throw these tires away:
And we know those ‘goathead’ thorns all too well by now, after years of pulling them out of people’s tires every goddamn day. It’s like they were perfectly engineered to find their way to your tires, and to stick to them until you hear ’ssSPSSSSS-SSSSSssssSSSssssss’.
A few years ago I realized that there was no stopping this plant; it looks like it’s gonna be pigeons, cockroaches, and goatheads after we’re all gone. And since my destiny might be to curse them forever, I decided to study them and pay more attention to where they grow and how they go about working their evil.
So now when a customer asks, “What caused my flat?” and I answer “A goathead“, they might regret following that up and asking me “_What’s_that_?”
Because I’ll tell them the common name ‘puncture vine’ and the Latin name ‘Tribulus Terrestris’ and how it is an invasive species in these parts. How officially they aren’t thorns, they’re ‘fruit’. How they grow in your front yard, and in vacant lots and along that stripe of dirt next to the sidewalk, popping up everywhere after it rains, and blooming w/ little yellow flowers.
I’ll mention how bodybuilders use this plant to get “pomped” & boost testosterone, and how Africans used to smear poison on the thorns and leave them on the ground to kill the person who steps on them.
“Uh, thanks for the botany lesson.” (fucking weirdo…)
And I noticed that we work in a “goathead district”, of sorts, w/ the Tucson Herb Shop a few doors down from us on 7th street selling ‘tincture of puncture vine’. (I asked where they get it, and it’s from her backyard.) And across the street, the co-op is selling it in their ‘natural male potency supplements’. Because apparently it does the opposite thing to your penis of what it does to your tires.
Maybe we should start a union - The 4th Avenue Goathead Workers #43.