Love is love.

One of my favorite things in the world is playing outside, and one of my favorite times to play outside is during the summer time, which if you are in this half of the hemisphere, we’re in the full swing of.

Also, one of the fun parts of summer is the Wizard Staffs Across The Universe celebration, which I had every intention of heading to Seattle and meeting Hodala for, but life got in the way, and I plum spaced on making a flyer, or pushing nearly at all.

Sally got a straight job with the USPS, Dirty Randy got knee replacement surgery, I’m on antibiotics, (for the funny story about that, you’ll have to tune into a future episode of Revolting), plus I had to work at the bar that night, and so on this end, it kinda fell flat.

In my defense, I did tape least two cans together;

Joe, Greg, and I did get out oh a little cross rip;

-and I did buy a watermelon Buzz Ball for us to share on the beach;


-Which we were enjoying until Joe stepped in a pile of human shit and ruined the day.

Thanks a lot Joe.

I guess we can always try again next year.

In distressing news, it came to my attention that an ace homie, KC loc, and well-established member of the AHTBM familia named Matt Rogers got hit head-on while on his motorcycle by a car driving in the wrong lane on Friday night, and died upon arrival to the hospital.

Absolutely senseless.

He was as solid a cat as they come, and I want to extend my deepest and most sincere condolences and love to his friends and family. I’m gutted for all of our loss;

If you’d like to throw some bucks towards his family, you can do so here.

Not that any of us needed a reminder, but don’t neglect to let your loved ones know that they are.

Over the course of the last couple of weeks I made mention here that I’d been working on a mural project at Ritual Records which sits smack dab in the heart of Bellingham, Washington;

Well, after a few cans of beer, a couple of margaritas, and what I estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 47 hours (give or take one or two), it’s finally finished.

If you’d like, you can enjoy the whole process, boiled down here to eight minutes and forty-one seconds, as the cool sounds of Slint’s ‘Washer’ flows over you;

Hopefully I can do more of these on the other walls in the future, but Cory (the store’s proprietor) needs to first save another million dollars for payment.

Now, not that I need to ask, but is it safe to assume that everyone here is familiar with the SOPWAMTOS awards, (more can be learned here) though more specifically, 2005’s running of the awards’ and ‘(The) Golden Fist’? (The list of full awards can be found here.)

Well, for a recap, I’ll pull an email from Soulcraft Bicycle’s founder Sean Walling from 2010;

The fist made its first appearance at Waldo Lake in Oregon on a mountain biking/bachelor party trip. After returning home I began working on the SOPWAMTOS (Society Of People Who Actually Make Their Own Shit) awards which were usually toilet seats with the recipient’s name painted on. I called Gary Prange at Screen Specialties (they make a lot of the frame decals for small builders and used to make them for a lot of the bigger companies). I asked him if he could make some SOPWAMTOS stickers and he not only offered to make a bunch for free, he nominated Cannondale for an award for screwing a bunch of their suppliers out of money by declaring bankruptcy.

Cannondale owed Gary about $70,000 and it almost put him out of business. He said after the creditors ahead of him in line and the lawyers took their respective cuts, he might see a few cents on the dollar. So Cannondale went through the bankruptcy and came out the other side as if nothing happened at all, except for all those creditors left holding the bag.

I was so pissed to hear this I decided a special award was needed. I tracked the fist back to Moab (“I don’t know how it got in my bag man.”) and had my friend Josh make a base for it, paint it gold, and bring it to Interbike where I attached the badge that said something like, “To Cannondale: The Golden Fist Award. For Excellence in Business”.

We presented it at our awards show but no none from Cannondale was there to accept so we walked it over to their booth. There were two very helpful older ladies at the reception desk and we told them they had won an award, set the fist on the desk, and started to walk away. Then one of them says, “Would you like me to get someone to come and accept the award?” I turned to see her smiling at me (genuinely), with the fist sitting right in front of her. “Yes”, I said. As my compatriots and I waited we watched the lady walk up to someone in the middle of the booth, point to us, and tell him the deal. He looks at us and picks up his cell phone. Then another guy 20 feet away from him picks up his phone, turns to look at us, hangs up, and makes a call. A third guy in another part of the booth picks up his phone, and now we can see they are getting a posse together. So we waited as they stared at us but they never came over to the reception desk. Pussies. So we eventually left.

Fast forward several months and I get an e-mail from a former Cannondale rep who saw the fist in the garbage at the show and asked my if I wanted to buy it back and if not, he would put it on EBay. I passed, and the fist was put up on the auction block. As I remember it went for a couple hundred bucks to our friends at Kona Bikes. I saw it the next year at Interbike in the back of their booth sitting kinda cockeyed on boxes of catalogs. It looked lonely, as if its time had come and gone. I still get riled up when I think about that whole Cannondale thing. Its great that they were able to stay in business and provide a lot of people with jobs that may have disappeared had the company gone under, but I think it’s complete bullshit that they can make profits going forward without any regard for the trail of destruction they left behind.

So, now as Kona Bicycles fully reconfigures its operation, (goes the way of Raleigh/circles the drain/vanishes completely?) I felt as though I needed to rescue the fist before it ended up getting thrown away (again), which turned out to be an easier caper than I’d imagined;

Sneakily, I boxed it up and sent it back to Sean at White Industries. Naturally, he was thrilled and sent me an image of it safely being transported back to his home;

Just like helping to save the Shitbike, it has both been my duty as well as an honor.

Now, in closing, as I often do I’d love to direct your attention to the 82nd episode of Revolting;

While it was done somewhat spontaneously, one thing I can certainly assure you of is that it was at least done from a place of love.