Thank you FELLOWNEWS!!

I am flabbergasted at the sensation of pulling g’s on the internet.
Velonews made my blog their ‘site of the day’ on November 30hth. My small blog with three dozen diehard friends/readers morphed into today’s cool thing, grabbing 6,300. Wow. That was too easy. Can’t wait til I’m unpopular again, there will be less pressure (plus I won’t have to “check” to see the blog stats skyrocket).

Ten years after my column, LIFE IN THE FAT LANE (Bike Magazine) got the axe I find myself still writing in thousand-word chunks. I have perspective now, and I bet I was canned because I laughed at car advertising.

For whatever reason, I dropped out of the scene, and wrote my friends only. I used a “Glob” which is better than a blog because it LANDS ON YOUR DOORSTEP…and sticks! Sort of a snotty sounding analogy, huh. No hunting around in distraction-laden cyber-space.
Just me and my mind…in their (er, your) mailbox!!!

SO clever, right?

Except that my server started viewing my unwieldy 200 people “Knobby Nobility A-List” as spam.

THE NERVE!

My subjects need regular directives from their monarch. Jeez.

So then I hacked it into about four grouplets (duchys, if you will) and the Glob made it down the gullet past the gatekeeper Spamprevention Posse.

For two or three years I wrote globs monthly, well, sometimes less, but anyway that very personal letter to my favorite 200 people (among them Kip Mikler and Charles Pelkey and Art Read and Charlie Kelly and damn few women, ok Holly Harris, Judie Scalfano, Susan DeMattei..)

I even had reunions, yes I did.

“The Return of the 80’s Ladies” in 1998. Two days at West Point Inn, twenty two of us…many hadn’t seen one another in YEARS!!

Then I had to do the same for the boys, since it was them I was duking it out with (sorry, bad pun) I produced Retroriders Reunions 1 & 2 (at Taylor Made Farm, and Tim Fox’s place on the Russian River), plus Whiskeytown revisited, Rockhopper Revisited. Buncha gray hairs in stupendous shape. I started attending George Mount’s ‘dino ride’ (roadies of yore, true dinosaurs).

You’d think I’d forgotten to get a life! How wrong you might be. (Jury not yet re-convened)

Some of us just have to tend and defend those delicate lines of commun(ity)cation because er,
well, because some of us think they are important, even more important than a paycheck.

It is hard if you have a short attn’ span, to send four times a letter to four sets of dukes, earls, dauphines and princesses. So the idea of a blog took root. Chip, thank you for the nudge.

And Chris Hill thank you for muscling THIS into being. And SeeKay? You were right.
And Velonews even seems to like it, what’s not to love?

So I am just going to smile myself ta sleep.

Til tomorrow, pinch me, I’m dreaming.