Blech!

Man, this blog is a God damned downer lately, isn’t it? I promise to work on that, really.

Sheldon’s Memorial Celebration

This may or may not be the last of my posts about Sheldon Brown, the man was a huge influence on me.

This was written by Peter Cole and posted to the Usenet group rec.bicycles.tech (yes, I know I’m a geek, and yes I got his Peter’s permission first).

I attended Sheldon Brown’s memorial celebration last Sunday. It was held in the afternoon in the church across the street from Harris Cyclery. There was a memorial ride before the event, but I was unable to participate.

There seemed to be 200+ people in attendance, the large church was almost full. While there were many from the local cycling world, I’d say we were slightly outnumbered by the community theater and singing folks. The event lasted about an hour and a half, mostly consisting of remembrances delivered by family and friends, some singing, both by performers and the assembly, and some Morris dancing. The Reverend Deborah Pope-Lance gave the welcome and closing as well as some shared remembrances.

Sheldon’s wife Harriet gave the first remembrance. She spoke quietly and warmly about how she met Sheldon at a club ride, where they first noticed each other’s unusual bikes. She recalled their many family cycling trips on Sheldon’s homemade tandems, including one favorite memory when they were interrupted in their tour of Cape Cod by an approaching hurricane and they worked together as a family, helping to get the youth hostel ready for it.

Sheldon’s daughter Tova spoke next. She struggled with her composure, holding back the tears as she described the warmth and affection she had enjoyed from her dad. She smiled as she described parenting Sheldon style, where the children’s rooms had both ABC’s and periodic tables on the walls. Her memories of bedtime stories were not Mother Goose, but things like Galileo vs. the church and how an airplane wing works.

Sheldon’s older brother and sister told us some growing up stories. Arlene laid claim to being Sheldon’s original cycling instructor, remembering how she would sit 3-year old Sheldon on the cross bar of older brother Richard’s bike, letting him steer sometimes while they rode off for day-long adventures hiking near their home by the Tappen Zee bridge in upstate NY. Richard recalled Sheldon’s enthusiastic conversion to communism at age 13, which he claimed to have cooled off by introducing him to Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.

Long time friend and local cycling author/advocate John Allen described his collaborations with Sheldon, including some videos they were producing together, regretting that they had only completed the first of a planned series. He joked about his frustration, during his 30-year friendship, over the way Sheldon could always go him one better every time he thought he had a cycling brainstorm. He gave a graphic demonstration of this by performing a tire folding method he thought he had perfected, then showed Sheldon’s inevitable improvement on it.

The Reverend Pope-Lance had us all laughing when she read a list of some of Sheldon’s favorite quotes — many of which are familiar to readers here. Any misgivings I might have had about the irony of Sheldon’s memorial being held in a church were swept away when she handled the inevitable anti-theistic ones with a graceful chuckle. She then read several tributes posted from cyclists around the world who had been touched by Sheldon. From the hundreds received, we heard voices from every continent, all appreciating his generosity mentoring his Internet friends.

At the end of the gathering, members of the MIT Chantey Chorus sang the “Mary Ellen Carter”, with the congregation joining for the chorus:

Rise again, rise again,
Though your heart it be broken or life about to end.
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Many of us choked back tears watching Harriet, Tova and George holding each other for comfort as they led the singing of the deeply moving piece.

After the memorial, we made our way to the parish hall. There, on a small stage, several of Sheldon’s favorite bikes were on display. A few laptops had been set up on tables running slides shows of photos familiar from his web site. I mingled there awhile, in the eclectic throng, bikers in jerseys, tights and clompy shoes, Morris dancers in red shirts and (real) bell-bottomed pants; friends, family, bikers, singers, dancers and all, a true slice of Sheldon’s remarkable life.

When I left, I went to retrieve my bike from the 30 or so behind the church. Mine was the only MTB, I rode it over in part because it was the only “whole” bike Sheldon ever sold me. Of course by now it’s a mongrel mix of odd parts, and that, more than the bike, is a tribute to his impact on me. There were many similar mongrels out back, including an obviously home-made recumbent with a sign on the back: “If you don’t like an 80 year old on a bike, think about me driving a car”. That said, there were also a number of elegant vintage bikes, and fixers of course, and more Brooks saddles than I have ever seen in one place.

I pedaled home slowly in the bright cold afternoon, past Harris Cyclery, past Sheldon’s street, past the town field where the fireworks are held, past the old hardware store we both loved, to my home, to my garage full of bikes, thinking about him all the way. Life’s short, and you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

Peter “I miss you, big guy” Cole

I Don’t Like Mondays

First, forgive the length of this post, brevity is not my forté.

I try not to make this a place for me to bitch about whatever maladies or ailments I might have at the moment, but this was a fairly life-changing (and damned near life-ending) experience.

Hopefully this can serve as a cautionary tale for someone out there. As some of you (my imaginary fan club) may or may not know I work in group home with four adults with “intellectual disabilities” (that’s the latest PC term, anyway). I work 3rd shift 14/14/12 hours.

Now just a bit more setup. I have an undiagnosed (so far) bleeding disorder, generally not an issue, unless I’m subjected to some sort of trauma. Sometime back I saw a “Dr.” for a stiff, very sore, and inflamed big toe. When I got home with my prescription of Naproxen (an NSAID) I immediately realized that I’m not supposed to take those, and so, I didn’t.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. The toe is flaring up again, and tylenol proves to be ineffective. Naturally I remember the Naproxen and decide to give it a try. It works and I’m thinking that 500mg once or twice a day, a few days a week should be fine.

So, flash forward to this past Sunday night/Monday morning: I’ve just had a slice of apple pie and my toe is starting to really hurt again, so I take another (my second of the day) Naproxen. I’ll try to keep what came next as in-offensive as possible.

My bowels began grumbling that they needed to be moved, so I did. When I looked into the bowl and saw that one end of the stool (sorry) was composed of the stereotypical ‘old coffee grounds’ I said to my self, “Oh, that’s not good.”

I’m thinking at that point that I’d be ok to finish my shift and can worry about it later.

Within minutes I began to realize that I had miscalculated.

After evacuating (shitting, if you prefer) several gushers (I lost count) of increasingly bright-red blood I knew I was in serious trouble and needed to call someone to take over for me, and ‘maybe’ an ambulance. The problem was; at this point I couldn’t stand without blacking out and didn’t have a phone within reach.

Finally during a break in the action, I crawl to a phone, get my boss’s number and make the call, (from the toilet) downplaying the situation not wishing to alarm her. A few minutes later as my hold on consciousness grew extremely tenuous I called back telling her “This is really bad, I’m going to have to call an ambulance.” (Which I should have already done, literally, hours earlier.) I did, then crawled to open the front door, so the EMT’s could get in.

The ambulance arrived, followed immediately by my boss, and it was off to the ER. I won’t bore you with my tales of the rampant, and apparently institutionalized incompetence I witnessed in the ER.

The bleeding stopped on its own by the time I’d been in the ER for a bit. They did all sorts of tests, revealing nothing that I hadn’t already deduced. They eventually moved me into a room, gave me two units of blood, all sorts of fluids and anti-biotics and such and they were even quite generous with the Morphine.

Tuesday afternoon (I arrived at the hospital around 5:30AM Monday) they finally let me eat, then Tuesday I was parolled, just in time to miss out on getting to vote.

Caldonia (my cat) was overjoyed to see me. She’s a little fat and I’ve noticed that she eats a lot more while I’m at work; so naturally I’d picked this weekend to start leaving her just enough food for the night.

They want to give me a chance to heal before they do any scope-work. So I have that to look forward to; colonoscopes, endoscopes, kinoscopes, otoscopes, kaleidoscopes, oscilloscopes, fluoroscopes, gyroscopes, telescopes, periscopes, all sorts of ’scopes.

I just wish they could tell me something concrete, right now I’m a complete wreck. Every twinge or grumble from my gut absolutely terrifies me.

I’ve already taken next weekend off from work, I’m a nervous wreck and I’m exhausted.

Oh, and the moral to this story?
Don’t take stupid chances with your health.

London Times Obituary of Sheldon Brown

From the London Times

If Sheldon Brown had been only an excellent bicycle mechanic, the esteem in which he was held, while great, could not have extended much beyond his native Massachusetts. But because of the selfless use to which he put the internet, regret at his death has been felt across the world.

His knowledge of bicycles, from a lifetime of riding them, taking them apart, fixing and modifying them, was encyclopaedic. For more than 20 years he earned a living from that knowledge with the spanners, screwdrivers and tyre levers of a succession of bicycle workshops around Boston, and he could probably have gone on doing so happily until retirement. Then, at 49, he found at his disposal an invention more powerful than anything in a mechanic’s toolbox. He quickly saw that the internet could make his expertise available not just to the customers of one bike shop, but to anyone who wanted it, anywhere. It turned out that a lot of people did. The website he built, sheldonbrown.com, has attracted millions.

Sheldon Christopher Brown was born in Boston in 1944. After his father’s death in an air crash when Brown was 9, the family settled in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it was in the Marblehead town dump that his career in the bicycle business originated. During high school he built bikes out of parts scavenged from the dump and sold them. Like many in the 1960s he heeded Timothy Leary’s call to turn on, tune in and drop out, not staying long at college or in a series of jobs selling shoes and hi-fi, and driving taxis.

By 1972 bike repair was his career, and he set up the Boston Bicycle Repair Collective, a fellow founder member being Stan Kaplan, inventor of the Kryptonite bike lock. After, as he described it, being “purged by Maoists” from the collective, for a time Brown turned his dexterity to camera repair. But he went back to working on bicycles, and by the early 1980s, in a move towards his ultimate future, he was not just repairing bikes but writing about them.

His audience in specialist cyclists’ magazines, however, was necessarily limited. Then came the internet.

In 1990 Brown had joined Harris Cyclery, a shop a few minutes’ bike ride from his home in Newtonville, a Boston suburb, as a mechanic. As the internet developed, he became a contributor to cycling newsgroups, and in 1995 Aaron Harris, his employer, let him set up a website in association with the shop. Initially it was intended to sell specialist parts, but soon Brown took it far beyond that. “Aaron let me spread my wings,” Brown said in 2001.

The website certainly flew. Last year sheldonbrown.com had more than half a million visitors a month. They came for everything to do with bikes, from advice for timid beginners on how to mount a bike to instructions for the daring on how to build their own tandem. The site has a glossary of almost 1,000 terms from “A and B chainrings” to “Zzipper”.

If you couldn’t find what you needed on the website, you e-mailed and asked, and “captbike” usually replied the same day. Answering 200 e-mails most days, he was courteous and informative, but hadn’t time to be wordy. One correspondent, told that replacing his 20-tooth back gear with a 22-tooth would make climbing hills easier, asked how much. Back shot a classic captbike reply: “10%.”

Brown did not charge for access to the site or for his e-mail advice, but the site was a vindication of the internet freeware credo that putting up free content will bring its own reward. It brings in about half Harris’s business.

But sheldonbrown.com was, and is, about more than commerce. Nor is it just a compendium of technical information. It includes a blog that started before the term existed, recording the personality, the philosophy, the likes and dislikes, and above all the family life, of the man who built it. In 1979 Brown married Harriet Fell, who teaches at Northeastern University, Boston. A daughter was born in 1981, and a son in 1983. The blog records his devotion to them, his pride in their accomplishments, and such family adventures as touring in France on two tandems when the children were 6 and 8.

Given his lifelong delight in cycling, it was particularly cruel that in the past two years multiple sclerosis gradually robbed him of the ability to ride a two-wheeler. His response was characteristic — he got a recumbent tricycle and kept pedalling, still riding it to work until shortly before he died. And he wryly put a page titled “The Bright Side of MS” (easy parking with a disabled sticker, jumping airport security queues) on his website.

The response to his death has been a fitting combination of bicycles and the internet. From Melbourne to Missouri, cyclists have held or are planning memorial rides — co-ordinated, naturally, on the web. The London ride is on April 6.

Sheldon Brown, cyclist, was born on July 14, 1944. He died of a heart attack on February 3, 2008, aged 63