Tired

Here's yet more feedback from the perfect ride I took last Monday.

I just spent a contemplative evening dealing with the flat tires I found after I'd returned. And by contemplative, I mean that I was again contemplating just how it is that cholla thorns keep managing to defeat my tire liners. I can understand that some come in from the side, where the tubes are unprotected, but others have gone straight through the plastic strip.

Veelz told me shops love selling Mr. Tuffys to customers- who knows, maybe they have a substantial markup? The kicker is the misplaced sense of immunity to flats - the customers will inevitably keep coming back for patch kits, thorn-resistant tubes, Slime treatments, Spin Skins, etc., all in a fruitless quest to thwart punctures. What a scam.

I may end up having to use the nuclear option and try out No Tubes or some homemade counterpart, though I can buy a lot of patches and glue for what one Stan's kit costs. Also, there's no ghetto tubeless system that would have healed and sealed the sidewall slash demonstrated so ably by my Sith Lord friend, below.


I found this ruinous little cut while searching my tire's casings for errant thorns. From the looks of it, it probably came from one of the millions of shards of broken glass that litter the trailhead area. I was already feeling lucky to have ridden out before dark without having to deal with two punctures but now I'm wondering just how it was that my tube didn't bulge out of the sidewall and fail catastrophically. Maybe I was surfing a wave of good Karma for having picked up a discarded scrap of a gel packet I found on the trail though admittedly, I rode by it once without picking it up because it wasn't my mess. I thought better on the next lap and pocketed it.

The cut tire was past its prime anyway, having already been run for several hundred miles as a front tire before being swapped, dirtbag style, with an even more ground down rear tire. Anyway, I dipped into my bench stock and I now have two crisp new knobbies mounted up, ready for the next ride unless - and I may be jinxing things by even mentioning it - either or both of my freshly patched tubes fail. They won't - I've been just that lucky lately.

I've been listening to a couple of Material Issue CDs this evening. The band remains the very definition of a power pop trio despite the tragic fact that lead singer Jim Ellison's voice is now coming from beyond the grave.



I saw Material Issue in concert at an Edge Fest or KUKQ Birthday Bash or something similar in Phoenix back in the '90s. Big Country was also on the ticket and, in a sad coincidence, that band's lead singer, Stuart Adamson, also committed suicide. Years later, I watched Bradley Nowell, drunk, stoned, or worse, stagger through a Sublime show at the Nile Theater in Mesa. The music of my youth is littered with similar tragedies - Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain - and yet it remains the soundtrack my rides.