Addendum:

Go out for a short ride, and look what awaits! Tons of offers for the saddle, and a few for the bar. Very nice, should be enough to finance M’s new front wheel, and a minimal loss from original cost.

Speaking of riding, this evening I hit an out on 305 with the “new” old Monkey SS, complete with dual v-brakes and riser bars. Weird, very weird. Braking power is ok, though not as easy to access as with discs. The risers feel strange as all hell after a year riding flared drops. They use back muscles in very different ways, and bumpy descents on the rigid fork are much, much less secure. Perhaps most odd, the front end feels much, much taller, even though the saddle to grip drop is actually the same. More “in” the bike feeling, dare I say? They’ll stay for a while, but I’m skeptical.

The SS is an essential training weapon, and 305 the perfect interval track. I made a point to stay on the hammer the whole time, barely pausing to drink at all. The climbs get longer until right before the end, and are spaced well for a good cascading burn. Pity I did not set my watch, because I think I came very, very close to breaking 40 minutes for the trip out.

Life is rough with two sweet bikes to ride, and a brilliant new pair of trail runners waiting to get dusty.

Now, just as last night, I’m allowing myself to be seduced by The War on PBS. It’s a curious beast. I’m averaging one “heah! you forgot ____” moment every 3-5 minutes, but that’s because I’ve been a WWII geek since I was 8. Most importantly, it calls up old (and always, new) questions about the narration of things past. High school was always a semi-inspired, architectonic, linear narrative of “facts”. College was a very sudden segue into a more modern view of competing narratives never designed to tell a complete story, as the very notion of such things represented a problematic attitude about the past and future. (Following Nietzsche, they’re really the same.) Burns’ work trends more towards the later, though he tries to stack each neat little story such that they build a stout wall, more I think a concession for the audience than a genuine aspiration. Most importantly, some of the stories that make up the whole (last night’s bit about B-17’s over Germany comes immediately to mind) are very, very well done parts of the whole that will never exist.

And above it all, the last vacation of summer and the first of fall, calls.