Miss McCain?

Wondering why nation's seniors aren't outraged over loss of one of few benefits of reaching 65, income tax age exemption. Was a lifelong golden parachute, just check a box to pull ripcord. Still exists if you dig deep enough, $1,300 each if both over 65 and filing jointly as married. Senescent filers wouldn’t know this. Sure, IRS sweetened deal by slightly raising standard deduction and supposedly simplifying filing (though actually confusing further through a slew of additional forms that refer to other forms, so you might overlook some small reduction), but whole deal will ultimately transfer dollars from charity and elderly to greedy too wealthy. Sounds like a swindle, but what did you expect with a hustler in highest office? If nobody notices, will social security payments be next?

Shrewd parasites don't add value, rather siphon billions in reserves. Why sweat and toil when you can slake your insatiable thirst from biggest spigot ever, $5 trillion in internal revenue squeezed annually from nation’s workforce, who actually do everything that needs doing? Already, $50 trillion has vanished from treasury through such schemes that continually abuse suckers who begrudgingly support pervasive corruption, though unappreciated remnants of public service persist in certain agencies whose workers are jerked around with threats of unpaid furlough. Is this the proverbial last straw that broke nation’s back?

Simplify? Just about every system including revenue collection was designed by a crooked committee, fulfilled by compulsive/obsessive nutjobs, governed by self serving sociopaths led by terrible tyrants. Everyone is entitled to chip in and get paid, nothing more. Respect, however, flows from achievements that benefit majority, not splinter groups and tiny cadres bent on sole control. What most employees concern themselves with daily is how to make systems provided to complete tasks but riddled with annoying flaws and inherent insanity actually serve needs. You'd think they'd give up or replace with something better. Motor vehicles, for example, have so many oppressive downsides, including legal liability, operating costs, and potential fatality, you'd think more would seek better, cheaper, safer options, such as bicycles.

For a century savvy workers saved for retirement. A plan began under PAC rat Reagan where thrift was "rewarded" by tax deferral. Banks got a multi-trillion dollar windfall, which they loaned to criminal accomplices, who intentionally defaulted under bankruptcy clemency, which resulted in tax paid bank bailouts in the billions while executives took unimaginable bonuses. The few who realized what was going on were silenced lest they connect dots back to Oval Office. Seniors, who based their scrimping upon harvesting when rules would be more advantageous, just got gut punched. As often explained, laws only apply to private entities including you. Government agencies and stockholder corporations only act as individuals when it suits them.

Deemed an honor, jury service, which is mandatory, should be paid, if not at hazardous duty differential, at least by state's minimum wage. Currently, locally, for decades that's $15/day, no matter how long, when it should be $10/hour under current statutes governing both private sector and public service, so 5 to 6 times what's given. It's practically indentured servitude after paying costs of commuting and parking, though it's supposedly only a couple of days every 3 years. Many employers don't cut your pay while away, but not all who are called are employed, especially retirees and 25% of workforce who gave up job search but slip through unemployment headcount. Kidnapping and slavery have long been illegal, even if short term. But states never abide laws they concoct and enforce.

Suppose majority will just shrug all this off, further betrayals among many, injustices they are powerless to quit being complicit in. Labann will be cutting support in writing for all current representatives, to the effect, "You will not be getting my vote ever again. Do not contact me further for any reason, especially campaign contributions." You might try the same, and persuade everyone you know to do likewise. Easy enough to support progressive candidates who run, if any, though it usually splits vote in favor of conservative or liberal incumbents. Independents, progressives and libertines often run as Democrats or Republicans, depending upon which predominates in that state, as that guarantees voter interest. To accuse everyone would mean blaming victims, too. Aged, deluded, distracted citizens should be held less culpable than addicted, apathetic, brainless enablers who are aware but back stab anyway or don’t give a damn.

Hard, however, to discontinue paying taxes, though you know politicians misappropriate, even steal, instead of dedicating to worthwhile effects, like environmental stewardship, national parks along borders including badly needed reservoirs or secure desalination and waste treatment plants. No, they'd rather build a 12th Century wall, copy China's Great Wall, which began to crumble before even finished and failed totally to isolate empire. Natural laws say bodies in motion tend to keep moving, and corpses arrested contribute nothing, cost money, and drag everyone down. Such solutions merely transfer money and power to oligarchs, whereas parks level playing fields, which is why tyrants despise them and push own plans down public's throats. By dutifully following tax code you enable wrongdoing, but objecting conscientiously invites reprisal.

Neocons like to explain how you’re mired in past, that situation has totally evolved and improved. Don't buy it. It's same old con, in many cases same faces, McConnell's extreme right besmirching any semblance of McCain's (bona fide hero, MIA, POW) dignified compromises and preserving phony facade of treasury rape. To do otherwise would mean retirement in a penitentiary. Late Senator McCain, big bicyclist hater after aide died in an accident yet considered too centrist, was too classy to earn presidency. Only decent legislators ever die; sociopaths stay active decades after harm they've done hiding behind an illusion of stupidity, high on misery they intentionally caused out of schadenfreude, highly entertained on how you squirm under their withering villainy.

How politics work: The more you serve and worry the less they do and more they hate you. They champion corruption as if it's a global board game where losers really die, the more the better, “More for me!” they think with childish glee, obtusely or stubbornly oblivious that everyone thriving is in humanity’s best interest. How far off that ideal you determine things to be can be used to measure response necessary, whether impeachment, recall, revolution, or something more drastic. How do you define your patriotic duty? Who deserves any defense?

Lame duck POTUS began campaigning for a second term. Are we great again yet? About the only things in his favor are that supporters figure they better justify electing him and that they like that he's like them: lazy, privileged, psychotic and stupid. Only thing not headed down toilet, though not noticeably improving despite continual practice to the exclusion of fulfilling demands of position, is his golf handicap. Beer goggles and drug giggles account for it. Any focus on chief’s foibles lets senate off hook for crimes committed. Conservatives who put distance between McCain and self must really feel threatened; a couple hundred hand picked GOP cabinet members and presidential staff since Nixon have been indicted and/or served time for official malfeasance. Democrats, only a couple, which might seem meritorious until you know they outnumber Republicans 2:1, so can stack deck against minority party when they agree, though that seldom occurs.

Millennial Chilblain

One begins to see bikes in all sorts of contexts. Labann gathers and sorts, intentionally overlooks and underrates some brackets. But culture tends to be ubiquitous. Bicycling signifies as a means of motility for a billion humans, thrice as many as motoring, nearly as universal as walking. What and who you associate can be less than objective and more sentimental. It’s not a diamond frame or spoked wheel that fascinates, though hypnotic repetition does fixate, rather what you do, where you go, and who you meet, sources of untold delight and inspiration, because you’ve emerged from a frightened cocoon into a wide world by rolling farther and faster.

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who curated an art show on bicycling culture (at The Aldrich, Ridgefield, CT) about same time as Labann, wrote a book on his experience pedaling his Montague folding bike through various localities. Curiously, he only mentions bike in one song you can point to, listed among 2000 others, but you’ve got to think it informs a lot of his repertoire. Consider, for example, his Slippery People, “What about the time? You were rollin' over. Fall on your face. You must be having fun... Think of a time. You’d best believe this thing is real... These slippery people help us understand... Don’t play no games, he's alright, love from the bottom to the top... We’re gonna move right now, turn like a wheel inside a wheel.” But Byrne goes on to say that, “There are some things you just can’t write songs about,” including a concept album on city planning that could serve cyclists, though songs aplenty exist to fill scores of them. Labann was there with B&C on CD and rainbow poster to hand Byrne after he spoke about Bicycle Diaries, but the squirrelly rock star slipped away from book signing, so his loss. David has gone white haired. Labann, 2 months older, has not. Cleaner living?

All this occurred in 2009, renowned as the Year of the Bicycle, as did the publication of Robert Hurst's Cyclist’s Manifesto: The Case For Riding On Two Wheels Instead Of Four, Falcon Guide, 2009, 224 pp. “The United States is not going to morph into a nation of bicyclists as it does in the darkest apocalyptic vision. The first thing we need is for people to be realistic... Americans cling with renewed urgency to the ideal of the personal automobile... It’s a colossal and perhaps fatal failure of imagination.” That mankind got lazy, grew tired of struggling, and slapped motors on everything couldn’t be more obvious as the beginning of the end. Before Civil War Bitter Bierce berated Inventors as people who arrange levers, springs and wheels and believe it civilization. Hurst’s slim Manifesto recalls several such prescient insights. Might dismiss it as historic revisionism if it didn’t expose white snobbery of wheelmen nerds, because it persists into present as an epic disappointment.

Late Audioslave/Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell's, When Bad Does Good, ostensibly has nothing to do with cycling, same as his I Am The Highway, but watch official video, and its autobiographical lyrics are portrayed throughout by a bicycling paperboy. Cornell cut a tragic silhouette of mental depression and opioid addiction, but still haunts imagination of filmmakers, such as Brad Pitt, who just announced a biopic on the fallen star. Perhaps his calls for help went unanswered, like so many others, which exposes the failure of psychology and wealth of behavioral knowledge that lets booze, drugs, guns and injustices coexist and explode in mass murder. Unlike 27 Club, including neighbor Kurt Cobain, he made it into his early 50's, but short lives succinctly dissected seem esteemed more than complex extended deeds completed.

Likewise, with no thematic connection though previously listed, video for Corinne Bailey Rae’s Put Your Records On, features a bevy of beauties on girly bikes, with baskets for trips to the market and no top bar, though you now also often see women using so called boy’s bikes. In same vein, Kenny Loggins pop tune I’m Alright opens comedy Caddyshack with head caddy resolutely riding his bike to work. These and more have suggestive lyrics but just don’t plainly spell b-i-k-e. Then others stoked on testosterone spell BIKE right out, such as The Foes of Fern’s, but suggest something else altogether. Nothing new, Sammy Kaye and his swing orchestra recorded something similar in 1950. Kristen Black, The Bicycle Song, Can’t Bring Me Down, 2016, just must have some. Perhaps she can hook up with fellow CD Baby artist Nicholas James Thomasma, who has his own Bicycle Song, Barefoot, 2016, full of hormonal heat.

Better to praise the best, but how do you define it? Used to form a posse on Sundays for recreational rides. For a while, we’d all go together in a van while listening to CDs of Labann’s collected bike songs. Sure, carpooling cut carbon footprint, but riding a bike to the ride reduced it further, though took a toll on group performance. Commuting by bike reigns supreme as carbon neutral, sequesters carbon in graphite components and steel frames, and skips motoring entirely. Driver once asked for a Best Bike Mix, since so many shared seemed shrugged off rubbish. It’s been tried, internet sites claim victory, but Labann knows scores of sweet tunes that few do since seldom said. You get Logan Paul’s misogynistic, reckless ripoff of Flobots’ No Handlebars instead. Did he get hired? Based on comparable background, a president was elected.

Tried to honor that request without insulting artists who at least made an attempt or did their best. You endear audiences when you reach them personally. Labann strongly connected with certain tunes from almost unknowns, like Jack Wardell’s aptly named Bike and Chain, Matthew Price’s all too true Freedom Machine, Melody Gardot’s alarming reminder Some Lessons, and Tracy Jane Comer’s coming of age Yellow Bike. Bits of bicycling media don’t bring big rewards, rather derision from lowbrows, stereotyping as just another crank, or worse. It’s sales suicide, so often shunned. Honest assessments get turned into click bait by millennial hackers, who can’t be bothered doing own research and don’t know why it matters, to extract pennies from greedy advertisers. Pathetic. Hoar frosts any commitments for earnest scholarship published open source, yet not so heavily one might get a chilblain for which calamine lotion, Pond's Extract, witch hazel, and wool socks would soothe pain.

Nature’s Brane

The new brane thin shell model of creation of the universe, derived from earlier ekpyrotic or pre-expansive models, describes a bounce or cyclic recreation to account for the repulsive cosmological constant measuring several magnitudes smaller than predicted by Big Bang Theory. A bicyclist’s reading of this might suggest that frequent trips by bike for recreation avoid the blues and winter's deep emptiness, and there’s a big fat universe of undiscovered facts yet to be revealed by someone smarter than Labann.

Looking for cheer? Cupboard is bare. Groundhog was wrong; winter’s not complete. Bikes don’t belong with snow on your street. Not getting in miles, no motives for smiles. Burning gasoline to blow snow. Carbon dioxide’s got nowhere to go. Target methane, ranchers complain. Comment on snizzling weather, warnings of disasters come from scientists together, while leaders deny facts, hell bent for leather. Sends a message: Do whatever you like. Labann will keep trying to ride his bike.

Gave up on cataloging emerging bicycling culture when it became all too easy to repeat self, and far too difficult to divulge uniquely interesting examples, though any search engine will show an arbitrary grouping of art forms, articles, books, commercials, crafts, films, lyrics, songs all somehow related to bicycling, usually when they want to promote healthy living and smart choices, although seldom do so themselves.

Adventure Cycling’s CycleMiles collected a bunch of representative illustrations in Pinterest. Design Museum of Chicago just closed an exhibition called Keep Moving. Harks back to Chicago Museum of Science and Industry’s 2013 exhibition. New York Times has an index of recent articles to read. Amazon likewise indexes latest 92 bike books for sale. Etsy points to a burgeoning craft market; time was you’d be hard pressed to find any such tchotchke for self promotional gift giving and subsequent dust collecting. Already have enough tea mugs and towels to last a lifetime. Better might be a 6-pack of Belgian ale small brewed with bicycling as an inspiration, something thirsty athletes might at least get down with gusto, maybe target heartbroken brain cells. Nature abhors a vacuum, and these few links hardly peek over edge of bicycling culture's vast abyss.

Depressing enough being stuck indoors, Oscar Boyson’s short public service announcement Ride a Bike (2018), further twists the knife and worsens the wound. But given a day above 30°F without sheets of ice and shoals of sand everywhere, it would be perfectly inspirational. Climate change means a lot more rain as superior nature scrubs itself clean from inferior human ingenuity. A sixth extinction of beneficial insects will lead to rise in deadly fungi and viruses and a seventh extinction of polluting technologists and their doomed species. Forecasts promise springlike conditions in coming weeks as long as tipping point hasn’t already been passed.

Mokska (2018, Francesca Weikert, dir.) documents three women who are cycling pioneers in Nepal for MTB racing across Asia. The title, also vimoksha in Hindu, refers to an enlightened freedom from the cycle of agony, death and rebirth. Nishma, Roja, and Usha repurpose it to mean freedom from patriarchal domination, exploitation, and human trafficking. Wow! Freedom machine indeed! Imagine what might occur if money was unnecessary, powerlust deemed insane, and terminal scenario stopped.

Amanda Palmer, Berlin, Theatre is Evil (2012). Pianist Palmer, former founder of Dresden Dolls, and her Grand Theft Orchestra plinked out this dreary 7 minute dirge, “Your bicycle's chained to the fence outside. There’s plenty of offers, but you won't ride. How you pedal in those is a miracle, a miracle. And you laugh at yourself as you speed through the red lights. Oh, Berlin, nobody knows where you've been... It's hard to work on an assembly line of broken hearts. Not supposed to fix them, only strip and sell the parts.”

Honey Brothers, Green and Gold, Time Flies Like a Peach (2012): “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night shall keep. No fear, no lust, no sand, no tears shall take your trace. No hate, no wind, no irony shall dim you dull. Your shine, green and gold bicycle.”

Hymner, Bicycle, (Finnish single, 2018) Tenacity Records, pop tune that came out about a year ago.

Sia, Riding On My Bike, (c. 2005), “I’m riding on my bike. I'm going round the block. No, I can't cross the road. I'm not allowed to do that... My tummy's rumbling. My mama's selling tickets to broccoli and fish sticks. I’m hungry.” As a Grammy nominated pop star, this old nursery rhyme fades into background, but emulators including Australian Kina Grannis won’t let public forget.

Toby Keith, Mama Come Quick, Toby Keith (1993) is a jejune country western ballad that somehow slipped through the cracks. “I straddled my bicycle when I was ten years old... there’s a creek bed six feet wide. If you peddle fast enough you can make the other side, Mama come quick, I think I fell and hurt myself again... ’Cause nothing heals as much as your lovin' touch.” Sounds so familiar, but couldn't find it previously mentioned. Once you've diligently covered it all, something will always appear out of nowhere, demand attention, and prove you wrong.

Beat Detrain

Why write a book, any book? Authors expect to sell their scribbling, or at least get paid by someone who wants to spread whatever they’re spewing. If not, then for glory or therapy's sake, strictly out of craven conceit, especially among self absorbed babies stuck in sandbox battles. Maybe some feel compelled to change minds and win support for hopeless causes, such as civil rights or social justice. After all, they were cycled through a system that educated them how to compose and encouraged them to produce. Reading begets writing and vice versa. Presidents pen memoirs to publicize legacies and pursue agendas, more likely ghostwritten by mercenary evangelists.

Only bankable stars or brown-nose sycophants actually secure book deals, yet library shelves groan with hundreds of millions of titles, too many to read over an eternity even if you wanted to. Effort expended on each is considerable. Wonder why so many exist, not to mention how many more never get past censors and editors. Took millions of contributors, dreamers, librarians and publishers many centuries, yet some jihadists and neocons would burn books by the gross squared per minute because they disagree with their nazi scheme to power their steam rolling machine.

Bike&Chain took 25 years to date, not full time, mind you, except at intervals between cash gigs and professional contracts, late hours stolen from sleep, multitasked during otherwise boring bicycling, cooking, gardening, and household chores. Can't really produce own books while proofing texts and writing books for corporate crusades, though ideas distract and percolate 24/7/365, why so many would-be celebrity wordsmiths drink or take drugs lest they go mad not submitting to this herculean chore.

Researching content takes as much time as writing copy. B&C was based on personal experiences including 7 solid work years worth of cycling spread across half a century; external resources were hardly ever used, nor were experts interviewed. Can entirely blame none other than Labann. Let other authors take pride in parading champion soundbites. Didn't take an expert to publish something so pitiful, akin to busy Bay Area street graffiti glimpsed on Google Maps, yet who's to say it isn't just as brilliant as any other title? Depends upon what you value including role you accept, reconsider, or reject when opportunities equal one among thousands who apply.

Whole B&C thing traces back at City Lights bookstore in postwar San Francisco, where Beat began a lifetime ago in year after Labann’s birth. Ink for innocent verses had hardly dried before anger waxed and charges were filed. During obscenity trial, Berkeley professor Mark Schorer rightly defended Ginsberg’s poem Howl as, "an indictment of materialism, conformity and mechanization leading toward war,” same as B&C, and smartly helped acquit defendants. Great notions rippled into next decade onto opposite coast to a curious teen kneeling between magazine racks perusing old issues of Argosy and Evergreen Review, racy rags libraries didn’t lend, trying to duck surly shopkeeper, who kicked out loiterers for not spending. Before Internet, ideas took years to spread thousands of miles. Freedom forever faces accusation, indictment, persecution, and resentment.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, coauthored by Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs in 1945, wouldn’t be published until 2008, same as B&C, despite Jack’s best drunken efforts and both of their deaths. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review also posthumously serialized his biographical nonfiction Wake Up: A Life of Buddha. Few recall his aborted lawsuit against GM for On The Road ripoff TV series Route 66. Was it all an anarchist hoax, insider jokes giving The Man irreverent pokes, nonsense wheedled from needles and tokes? Yet Beat bellowed from the heart, spilled out dancing characters, disgruntled protests, jazz rhythms, ragged sentences, vignettes from thousands of miles of road journeys, same as B&C. Nothing so emotionally sophisticated, humanistically tender, and literarily pious cannot help but succumb to a crass movement within mundane masses. In fact, good rhymes almost always get inverted into vile crimes. How does one detrain this Beat express, exit its miserable boxcar, quit crowd of disreputable copycats, and transcend urban distress?

Mr Master and his grammar police to this day release almost no measurable empathy. Their old rules suppress resolve to express among those they oppress, so couldn't matter less. Mothers babble and coo over babies you know they cherish. Trigger words repeated, repeated, repeated beseech a monument to one's opinions as if an obelisk of Babel to the threshold of heaven, as do all magical incantations, and, spit at risk, supplicate in order to resurrect spirit, if any residue persists.

Poetry and prose don't primarily exist to inform, but emote, inspire, raise girls and guys above ignorance and want into sustainable teams with purpose in common, say what should be said, sometimes right wrongs, or underscore better ways to relate than war. Wild oats Beat generation liberally sowed were harvested by hip hop, rap, and rock stars - Dead, Doors, Dylan - who cared for the neglected, fed starving, founded charities, redistributed riches, and restored some semblance of balance. Few music icons are multimillionaires; most just possess extra bling, golden grilles, and obsessive entourages. Free hands and open wallets may save marginal society, though quickly vanish since mostly mirages.

Champions of contradiction, pilots of paradox, pray poets never go away. Though persecuted by petty officials and reviled by bourgeoisie, as déclassé as it gets, they signify another forsaken refugee, who supposed leaders portray as nation's biggest threat today, since they'd have to pay for some welfare skyrocket from revenues they'd rather pocket. Worst threat will always be greed that does directly lead to wealth disparity, engenders powerful cadres with selfish agendas, and establishes scenarios that result in fiascoes. Must you be reminded of what living was like under inbred monarchy madness? Masses pay price, while billionaires who own all media escape deserved vise by applying divisive debate as a rhetorical device thereby disguising own avarice. Only one independent voice in Congress redirects this argument, proof it's plainly a rudimentary truth.

Entire sectors of busy bees have invested lifetimes into bilking consumers and screwing other nations. Complicity disassociates from legacy, tunes out contemptible poetry, and washes down guilt with bilious wine approaching life expectancy. America’s biggest employer, government, resolutely ensures tax revenue flows, from which conservatives have established a long running ruse to appear benevolent while they deliberately stuff offshore accounts and war chests to stay in office despite repeated layoffs and scandals. Meanwhile, $50 trillion disappeared. An awful lot of good might have occurred with so much public treasure, but didn’t. Tragic consequences await.

Sometimes what you do is simply manifest within you. It's the best and worst reason to write: pure intentions, poor rewards. Original inquiry into dubious activity will never be popular or salable; only plagiarists and publicists ever profit. By 1940’s linear narratives with rigid plots had already forfeited power to communicate to rival films, recordings and television. Demanding quests capitulated to passive consumption. Beat poetry represented a requiem for a dying art form, which morphed into meaningless musical lyrics people were willing to plonk down cash to hear so distorted they might as well have been beats of branches banged on tree trunks. Yet this business has also faded. Only rants and vents against momentary frustrations entertain anymore, that is, fake infomercial news and iron fisted judges settling cases on brazen ego. Viewers want to believe they can exert control in a world best described as sheer mayhem even though they cannot and never will. Maybe a smidgen of mercy is all anyone can assume.

“...nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my life three thousand five hundred miles from birth-O, opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America.” Jack Kerouac, "October in the Railroad Earth", Evergreen Review, Volume 1, Issue 2, 1957, which recounted his impressions as an apprentice train brakeman.

“Unlike motor cars, which have developed into baffling robots that apparently have opinions of their own and would much rather they drove themselves... the bicycle rewards hard work; we understand and respect that.” Paul Maunder, The Wind at my Back: A Cycling Life, (Bloomsbury Sport, 272 pp), 2018, explores how bicycling inspires creativity. It’s well known that artists and authors gear toward cycling, because it invites world into one’s soul instead of insulating body from universe within a self inflicted cage destined to kill when computer control inevitably crashes.