Hello in There

Supposedly it’s the year 2020. I’m not sure whether that’s true, because time suddenly feels non-linear, unpredictable, and meaningless. I don’t know if it’s been the same for you, but here at the shop 2020 has been populated almost entirely by WTF moments, and even though we are all healthy and upright, our minds are fatigued as chewing gum affixed to a public commode, cold and unpliable.

I have a friend who, when she was four years old, used to sneak old chewing gum out of the ashtrays at the mall that were full of something like kitty litter and chew it, cold and gritty and rock hard and diseased. Perhaps that’s a metaphor for the mouthfeel of 2020.

I’m not complaining. We are employed and healthy when a lot of people are not. But I do want to address our almost total absence from social media, as well as from our own blog and newsletter. The shop has been incredibly busy, and because of our social distancing measures we’ve been spread very, very thin. Part of the truth is that we’ve been too busy to post on the interwebs. The other part of the truth is that so much feels broken, and many of our friends and customers are experiencing new hardships. To an extent, publishing content on the internet has felt kind of like saying we’ve figured out just what our downtrodden followers out there need: they need to be marketed to!

Obviously, there have always been hardships while Yawp! has existed, and we’ve managed to create quite a bit of online content in that time. Right now, though, just about everyone is facing new problems. Stoking the fires of the giant capitalist Want Machine in a time like this feels empty, worthless, and a betrayal of our values. Bicycles are valuable to me and, presumably, to you. Bicycles have helped people stay healthy when we couldn’t otherwise exercise during the stay-at-home order, stay sane when there was little else keeping us sane, and get around town to hunt for toilet paper. In fact, there are a fair number of essential workers who ride bikes to their jobs at hospitals and grocery stores, and obviously we have been honored to help those people continue to help us all. I know that what we do can be important, I just don’t know how to present it on the internet right now, when so many things—including a public heath crisis, a racial reckoning, and a politically savage election—are far more important.

We are a bike shop that has always valued and spent a lot of time with our community. Right now it’s not safe to spend time with our community. We used to also engage that community through social media, but right now we aren’t sure how to do that either. People in our community may be losing loved ones to COVID. People in our community have lost their livelihoods. People have lost their futures and their certainty. They are questioning everything. Perhaps touring on a bike for some number of months to let their minds unspool might be the absolute best thing for them. So is interrupting the ongoing conversations about disease control and equal rights to natter on about bicycles a service or just plain inappropriate? I don’t know. Possibly it’s both.

While it’s time to move forward, I don’t know how. We might get through this and we might not—either way, there’s not much point in getting through it alone. So we’re going to meet our community where it’s presently safe: online. Perhaps we’ll try to meet you outside in the near future as well.

In the meantime, keep riding your bike, and please be excellent to one another.