Having It All: Long Time, Tall Order

Most scholars agree that human history can be divided into five epochs, which are usually represented as sections on the Dachshund of Time:

Each of these epochs is defined by certain technological advances and consequent shifts in behavior and human expression. The Stone Age was the time of the caveman, when people made crude paintings of bison, domesticated dinosaurs, propelled their cars with their feet, and generally lived life as it is depicted in "The Flinstones." Next came the Olden Days, when people traded their dinosaurs in for horses, went to the opera, wrote lengthy treatises with feathers, and made marble sculptures of fat naked people. The Olden Days eventually gave way to the Old School, which in a historical context is usually regarded as anytime between the invention of the internal combustion engine and the point at which beating children fell out of favor. Back in the Day is the period between the day you were born and 10 years ago (if you are less than 10 years old you are actually living Back in the Day, which is something of a temporal anomaly), and Right About Now is right about now.

Through the Olden Days, people generally took life as it came. If they were born poor, they stayed poor. If they got sick, they died. If someone told them to schlep big rocks and build a pyramid, they schlepped big rocks and built a pyramid. This changed in the Old School days. People who were born poor didn't want to stay that way, so they recorded hit singles and bought big cars with tail fins. If they didn't like their environments or moods, they changed them by purchasing new living room furniture and lava lamps and by dropping acid. If they didn't like being men, they had surgery and became women. It is this attitude with which we were raised Back in the Day, and it is what informs our behavior now. Children aren't stupid anymore; they have learning disabilities with long acronyms. We have our teeth made preternaturally white. If it's less than ideal it's not good enough, and if we can't change it then we change reality.

In some ways, this is good, and most of us would agree we're better off now than we were in the Stone Age, when disease and saber tooth tigers struck with alarming frequency. In other ways, though, it makes life even more difficult. Constantly striving for the ideal can be costly, both financially and spiritually. In strictly material terms, it means you can wind up spending almost endless amounts of money on almost nothing, since we feel like we should be able to Have it All. This it leads to the fundamental modern consumer's dilemma: If you settle for too little, you're a schmuck, but if you pay for too much, you're a sucker.

Consider the world of cycling. Back in the Day, people were willing to accept the fact that a dress shirt is simply not optimal cycling attire. If you were going to ride a bike, you wouldn't wear a dress shirt, but if you had to wear a dress shirt and you wanted to ride your bike you'd simply deal with it. You might even improve things a bit by riding a bicycle that afforded you a more upright position, or even by changing your shirt at work. However, if you're willing to spend $120 you no longer have to make these painful decisions, because Outlier have now invented something called the "pivot sleeve:"

Outlier calls this shirt an "experiment in form," and here it is in the lab:

Here's the thinking behind it:

The basic challenge was straightforward, when you lean forward on a bike a buttondown shirt stresses. It pulls uncomfortably taut across the shoulders. The sleeves pull up exposing your wrists to the cold, and the tails pull out of your pants, leaving you either untucked or with a blooming blouse of a shirt. Our solution is the patent-pending Pivot Sleeve, a completely reconstructed buttondown that retains the traditional look and feel of a dress shirt while working equally well both on and off the a bicycle.

This is indeed a brilliant solution to the rarefied problem of needing to ride a racing bicycle to a place where you need to wear a dress shirt. It's like the Henny Youngman joke about going to the doctor and telling him, "It hurts when I do this." ("Then don't do that.") If leaning forward on your bike stresses your dress shirt, maybe you shouldn't lean forward on your bike. But are you a schmuck for riding an upright commuter when you could be zipping around town on a road bike thanks to the miracle of the "pivot sleeve," or are you a sucker who's buying a special wardrobe just so you can ride the wrong bike? I'm not saying either is the case, but it's a uniquely Right About Now problem to have.

Another Right About Now problem is where to put your "essentials" when you ride. (Never mind what objects actually qualify as "essentials," which is another dilemma.) Fortunately, Rapha have come to the rescue with their "Essentials Case:"

Placing your essentials in a non-essential item like a $55 leather case may be ironic, but Rapha is promoting this as a "stocking stuffer" for the holiday season, and exchanging non-essential items with practical applications is what adult gift-giving is all about. While you probably wouldn't buy one for yourself, you'd probably appreciate it from somebody else. Also, gifts are exempt from the "Schmuck or Sucker?" dilemma--in fact this is the point of modern gift-giving. That said, while Right About Now this is an Essentials Case, what it really is is an Old School purse. Even in these enlightened times, the process of branding man-bags is a delicate one. If you call it a "purse" then men feel self-conscious, but if you call it something too masculine then it just sounds like a scrotum. (Think, well, man-bag.) So while "Essentials Case" may be a bit pretentious, it's at least somewhere between being feminine and scrotal--though it may lean just a bit towards the latter. ("All You Haters Suck My Essentials Case.")

Yes, in many ways cycling Right About Now is about never having to compromise, and this doesn't just apply to your clothes and your possessions. It also applies to your responsibilities. What if you have a dog who needs to be walked, but doing so will cut into your precious riding time? Well, a reader informs me that you can simply go to eBay and get one of these:


In the Olden Days our animals pulled us around, but now we pull them, and our parks and bike lanes are full of people exercising with their panting, miserable canine companions in tow. It's one thing to do this with the dog at your side, but it's another to relegate your pet to the back of the bike altogether, where you can't even check on it. With this device, you're flirting with a "National Lampoon's Vacation" scenario:


Speaking of what's going on out back, another reader informs me that Craft have finally solved the problem of flatulence ventilation:


"Areas that require more exhaust" feature a "thinner mesh weave:"
Note it appears to be particularly thin around the posterior.

Even more astoundingly, yet another reader tells me the geniuses in Portland have finally solved the problem of cycling in high heels:

And still another informs me that you can even buy "street cred" now:

While you might not need two-inch heels or flatulence vents to ride your bike, you at least can't argue that they're there. However, if something actually says "Street Cred" on it then you can be sure it doesn't have it.

Posted in: bicycle marketing