Calling for Backup: Raising the Bar

Calling for Backup: Raising the Bar

There's much in my life for for which I am thankful for, not least of whom is my impeckable grammor and spealing ability. (Seriously, you can't peck it.) There's also my hundreds of dollars, my 17 children, my luxurious apartment-shaped home complete with separate kitchen and bathroom (most people in New York are forced to prepare their meals and "make" in the same room)--and, most recently, this, which I picked up this past weekend and around which I'm still trying to wrap my feeble mind:

(Engin builds nice bikes so you don't have to.)

I'm tempted take this bike and live out the rest of my days in the woods as a mountain bicycle cycling minimalist, except I have the outdoor survival skills of a Fabergé egg and would likely perish within a New York fortnight. (One (1) New York fortnight = three hundred (300) New York minutes, or roughly nineteen (19) Portland seconds.)

Still, as fortunate as I know I am, I can't help but get angry when "society" keeps stealing all that I hold sacred and then trying to sell it back to me. You know how it is--just when you find a lifestyle that you think makes you special, someone comes along and commercializes it, and next thing you know you look like everybody else at the mall. Honestly, they do it with everything, and since starting this blog I've witnessed the appropriation of all sorts of formerly-edgy "cultures," among them:

--Fixed-gear culture;

--Axe culture

--Minimalist culture (otherwise known as "poverty")

--Mayo culture

And of course my beloved Culture Club culture.

Yes, one day riding a track bike while covered in tattoos, sporting a genital piercing the size of a Cannondale downtube, and eating a tub of artisanal aioli makes you unique, and the next day you look just like every other dad in Park Slope. (And two days later you just like every fourth grader in Park Slope.) However, despite all this, I thought there was still one subcultural habitat that would remain free from commercial exploitation and unsullied by the filthy conformist hands of the mainstream, and that culture was "cockpit culture:"