Spring Biking: Further Indignities

This year, spring is a mean drunk. It's here, it's not here, it's dumping rain on you like it's trying to start a fight in a bar.

Well, no dice spring. I'm not going to fight you.

I'll just ride my bike anyway. 

I was on the chariot today, even though the rain was cold and bitter, while the wind threatened to blow me into every delivery van on Spadina. I even rode it last week - or was it the week before? - when it unexpectedly snowed, icing up my rear brake. However, you really only need 50% of your brakes, when you have Nature's Brake - the foot. 

The brake has since returned to working condition, at least to whatever degree anything is ever working on the Silver Bullet. As I've already complained on Facebook, the Bullet has declined to the point where unicyclists are passing me on my morning commute. This happened on Tuesday. I want to defend myself by saying that he had fenders a fender on his wheels wheel, and therefore was a professional at this unicycling thing, but still. Simple arithmetic tells me I should have been going twice as fast, right?

I have to do something about the Silver Bullet this season. Even though I've been commuting by bicycle since last summer, I still don't know what to do with a bicycle except ride it. I can't even put air in the tires, or grease the chain. Though I bought lube just a few days ago, which is at least half the battle, or even three quarters if I'm feeling generous with myself.

The physical form of the Silver Bullet doesn't invite tinkering. It's a big knobbly mountain bike creaking behind the sylphlike Linuses of the streets. There are bar ends and shocks and more gears than I probably need. Sometimes I wander through bike stores just for the thrill of imagining one of the sleek, colourful city bikes is mine, and that I wouldn't look out of place upon its Brooks leather seat. But the Silver Bullet works. It's cheap. And I sympathize with it. Though not pretty, it's reliable, and I can always trust that I'll find it chained to the ring and post where I left it.

So, the Silver Bullet stays, but with a few tweaks. Step one: pry off the bar ends. Then we can move on to step two, which is either figuring out how the air pump works, or greasing the rusty chain. I'll never have the stomach to do anything about the shocks though, so step three will be: