appreciate you

You know how the barista says “appreciate you” now when you get your coffee? Maybe you have even started saying it to others. Please stop. I get what you are trying to do here. I understand the desire to express gratitude without it sounding so beggar-ly as “thank you”, since all sorts of deeper linguistic baggage is coded into those two words. But have you paused to consider the unconscious damage you might be doing to the phrase “I appreciate you,” how you might be devaluing it by turning it into the latest glib transactional throwaway? DO YOU REALLY APPRECIATE ME? Sigh…

It took Hailey about three sentences to dismantle the hastily constructed scaffolding around my idea for “inspirations”. There I was, poised to write an echo-chamber homage to the people who have inspired me this year – people who I don’t really know in real life – and then right before my very eyes, one of those people went and Jenga-ed my idea by talking about how she herself was struggling to find inspiration this past year. Sure, she finessed her piece by getting meta about Meta, but in turn I was left with my awkward pile of sticks that had a few minutes before looked like the framework of a pretty good concept.

Let me back up a bit here.

A few days before Christmas, I turned 61. The day before that, I was sat in our regular weekly teams meeting staring at the faces of Cam, Pete, Deniz, and Cy. We meet every Monday and talk through the coming week and what our relative workloads involve and when our scheduled posts will go live and whatever speed bumps we might encounter along the way to that point. Pete was asking, since he’s the one who tries hardest to make the metaphorical trains run on time around here, if any of us were struggling with inspiration for the inspiration piece. I personally was, because I was a day shy of turning 61, and was/am down in Mexico hanging with a cadre of by and large grumpy octa- and nonagenarians who don’t always bring the party, and the bike I had brought down to explore some esoteric aspects of riding posture was not at that exact moment setting the world ablaze with illuminating insights. I was feeling old and a little worn out.

Inspiration to ride? Oooof, I dunno anymore. I sit at this age roughly equidistant between two people who used to inspire me in very different ways – Don Cook, aged 66, and Stuart Walsworth, aged 58 – and who both experienced life ending coronary events this past summer on trails that I now consider more or less “local”. My age, more or less. My turf, more or less. The landscape (both literal and metaphorical) is increasingly crowded with the headstones of my heroes. Some days I can manage to be sanguine about this and accept that we are all existing somewhere on the arc between birth and death and this is all okay. Other days, not so much. On those other days, it feels like I am accelerating on the downside of that arc in some kind of shitty runaway luge and, no surprises here, the fucking thing doesn’t have any sort of brakes. Overlay that on-and-off sense of looming existential dread onto the not-exactly-a-picnic daily reality of elder care, and sometimes inspiration can be a little tough to dig up.

Hailey’s face wasn’t there in the meeting, because it rarely is. She was on the call, but camera off and mic muted, since her usual schedule has her calling in while striding purposefully through an airport, or bouncing along some bony dirt road in a pickup truck, or poaching the internet in a café somewhere exotic. Hailey covers some ground. And then I realized, looking at Hailey’s avatar, and at Deniz who was doing his level best to pay attention even though he was probably hours away from having to catch a plane and fly halfway around the world, and at Cy who was probably biting the inside of his cheek and willing the call to end so that he could whip out a book, or a series of macabre but beautifully sentimental holiday cards, or jam out a pile of articles for any of the other several jobs he holds down, where I have found the most inspiration in this past year.

When the ax fell (again) on the neck of BIKE Magazine in 2020, and the writing began to faintly glow on the wall (again) at Beta a year later, I was at a pretty low ebb regarding both the bike industry and the world of publishing. I had been hired and fired by the various venture capital or PE-fueled corporate entities that had owned those titles somewhere around a dozen separate times, maybe more. I had also barfed a small mountain’s worth of copywriting and brand work out for several bike companies in the prior decade, from small to big, and had come to realize that if it isn’t my own brand, the barfing eventually gets kinda old. And, just like in publishing, the job security is questionable and the safety nets are nonexistent. I decided that if I was going to keep slinging words about bikes, it had to be for some people who weren’t backed by private equity, who didn’t have shareholders to answer to, and who weren’t looking to “build out a portfolio” or employ any other bullshit executive verbiage.

And that’s how I ended up here. Keeping it real, as the kids say.

It has, on the whole, been a joy to write for nsmb.com. I have only had a few momentary night-sweats when the well has suddenly felt dry and echo-ey, but those are part and parcel of writing for a living and they have generally passed quickly. I remain inspired to write about bikes. After 34 or however many years of doing this, I am somewhat surprised by this ongoing inspiration, but I hadn’t really put much thought into where that inspiration might be coming from in this latest version of my bike writing existence. Until Pete asked us to write about it, and I found myself blinking at the assembled faces (and Hailey’s avatar) on my laptop.

Here. Right here. In these Monday calls. In the stories on this site. Scrolling through the comments you all leave.

Hailey. God damn. She gets after it. Shredder on a bike, super talented photographer, videographer, social media wrangler. Visual storyteller. Globetrotter. Not only does she ride at a level that earns a deserving place among the elite athletes she is often filming or shooting, she can contextualize both the physical and mental challenges of aspiring to be in that rarified atmosphere, as well as understand the shape of that world in nuanced and insightful ways. She can find the humanity in the extreme, and she can also interrogate the worth of that particular risk/reward calculus in a thoughtful manner. And then can jam out award winning imagery, smash out piles of work for her clients, rack up insane airline miles chasing those images around the world, all while continuing to push herself and evolve as a rider.

Deniz. Sometimes we (okay, maybe just me) will look side-eye at a sentence of Deniz’s and wonder just what the exact metaphor he was intent on murdering that day started out as. But then I have to check myself, and realize he is infusing movie or comic book references into an article about disc brake bleeds and that he may have started thinking that sentence in Turkish or Spanish. And at moments like that I remember that Deniz can ride the wheels off me any day of the week, by a huge margin, that he can probably do a Fox lower service in about a third the time it takes me, and that he gets all the pop culture references just fine when I rattle them off, and that I only speak one and one-eighth languages to Deniz’s four or so. And that I can’t take pictures for shit, whereas he is a really, really, good photographer IN ADDITION to all that other stuff.

Cy. It’s fitting that Cy’s name is pronounced the same way as “sigh” because I imagine that is what he does inside his head whenever he has to slow his thinking down enough to explain something to me. I was hoping he was one of those artist-savants, and that his illustrative gifts came at the expense of an ability to write coherent sentences, so that I could still strut around and say things like “I may be old and out of touch, but at least I can write pretty good, and stuff” with some degree of conviction. But Cy is a really, really good writer as well. And he knows his shit on the product end. And he, too, can almost certainly ride circles around me. Or jump over me, which is basically what all the kids love to do.

Dan The Apprentice. Damn, we lucked out there. Or I did. I get to have a weekly conversation about writing and bikes and stuff with a medieval scholar who has a brain the size of a planet and is just so incredibly stoked about bikes that at the end of every phone call my brain is fizzing with contagious excitement.

Of the four people above, I’ve shared time in the real world with Deniz. He’s also the oldest of that posse. The others, I have never hung out with in person. Yet I continue to be amazed by not just their prodigious talents and productivity, but by their open-eyed stance in the world. I was never paying as close or as empathic attention when I was as young as they are, but I try to follow their lead now. They not only inspire me as riders and artists, but as humans.

Hell, even when one of my inspirations feels choked down by the algorithmic pressure, I am still inspired and in awe. So thanks for the inspiration anyway, Hailey. And Cy, and Deniz and Dan The Apprentice. I appreciate you. And I mean it in the genuine, not employed at a coffee shop sense of the phrase. And thanks to the voices and thoughts of so many of you reading this. After decades of either being too deep in my own rut to be able to see all the incredible people outside of it, I am now learning to slow down, look around, ask questions, and listen.