movements (three of them)

Eh, don’t know how I feel about this one, but wanted to do it anyway, because I thought I’d write about it no matter what. Beehiiv has now done that stupid trend of “YOUR YEAR IN REVIEW”, the robo generated shit slide deck, which I dunno! I wrote some stuff, that’s neat. Gonna try and sneak a couple more under the wire here. I’m glad you’re here. Things feel quieter, but my Signal Chats tell me all is not well, and we are all very tired. Amidst making a bike party happen, I would think, We’re chasing down the secret police, so who gives a shit? But most of us knew that, and that says something. My book is still for sale if you want it, speaking of big who cares, and hey, might be a neat thing for the Shakesqueer aficionados in your life. Anyway, here goes.

I.

If we are going to have to go full golden showers at this, you are going to have to be the top because you have junk that can aim your piss, I said to G. after the eleventieth ominous social media from the Tucson Alleybat account that continued to refer to people pissing on each other in 2024. So what. Piss happens. I recounted a story of all the whatever we were in the womensish college dorm when we went down the path of trying to learn to pee standing up in 2005. I’m pretty good at pissing standing up.

The manifest for the Tucson Alleybat was approximately the size of the Vogue September Issue and at the end of the day the winning team had about 900,000 points. At a poetry reading in a gravel pit I met last year’s champ and they told me a few things: they loved Chicago and had visited to work with an organization for unhoused people I was currently trying to work with and they also loved Noname and, full up on their BYOB white wine, they thought I was cool but at Alleybat, they would destroy me. Nothing personal.

Dressed as the Paris Heist, we picked up our raw hot dog, glowstick, and reviewed the manifest. Organizers in paper mache bat ear helmets led us up the hill in the park. Do NOT do anything that fuck up a bike permanently! one yelled into the megaphone. Do NOT take out people’s quick releases, loosen spokes, or cut brake lines! Do NOT try and kill someone! A story from another night of someone’s bike falling apart when they attempted to take off on it made sense. Otherwise, good luck. We got points if we could grab other teams’ glowsticks and I shoved mine into my jeans and tucked it into my boxers’ fly. Fucking try me. And then we Le Mans ran down towards our bikes, which were of course missing, piled up, or had the levers ziptied to the handlebars.

I had not done an organized bike event in some time, so anticipated this would go how most alleycats had gone for me, which was utilizing my tenacity and my ability to shotgun beers. Tucson in 2025 did not really apply to my experience, and so our very queer, very earnest team didn’t really need anyone with the gullet of a lush pelican. By the time the sun had set we’d sent nip-filled thirst traps to the Alley Bat instagram account, I’d posted a problematic Signal post to a niche local group (just ask me about it, and I was yelled at digitally immediately), gave my bits a moontan with a new friend, watched people get baby bangs, and, yes, helped coordinate pissing into solo cups for a pee tower. It went better than expected.

What else? We did bike things. I wall rode a police station, my friend jumped the hot dog and track-stood on train tracked. We smoked a joint (“Stoned on Stone St.”), we screamed at other teams and tried to steal their glowsticks, we ziptied handlebars. We crawled into a culvert tunnel and frotted the concrete to make clowns laugh as an audible tactic. We went to bike church and confessed, we tried to Lady and the Tramp Circle K Taquitos, but all the taquitos around town were sold out. I rode alongside someone new and put in my head: do something as we mooned the moon together, as they asked me, so how would your friends describe you?

It was dark and I was still not buzzed when we found the Federal Building fountain and I stripped to my skivvies to be baptized by a nonbinary Satanist. I slid in and said, I think the devil mostly really cares about my tits, but they insisted and dripped the cold water over my skull and I climbed back out into my jorts and muscle tee and heist safety jacket and had not shotgunned enough beer. My mind cast all the way back to the last bike event I really, really enjoyed, despite trying to be involved in a bunch since then, which was Troublemaker’s The Last Dance and soaked through in my racerback and harness and cubscout top and somehow still awake at 4 AM.

Who won? I can’t say, other than the feat of strength the tie break required was absolutely perfect, and my friend from the poetry gravel pit bestowed on the team the signed bat from the year before. I won a bikepacking bag, and as my friend who did not have to piss on us reminded me, I’d relieved myself of a jankier cradle in frustration and the need to lighten my load years before that he’d made work. Now mine was mine, fair and square. We never found the taquito to Lady and the Tramp but I made everyone sit at Circle K while I bought a tallboy and pounded it in the park. I shared the Modelos. When my new friend left, I knew I had grown old: sober enough to remain timid, tired enough to stay still, slightly stoned and unable to follow them off the couch where they had remained, late, as we used to do, when we wanted to see where something would go.

II.

Sometime in November when I returned, a niche-popular website published an in-depth article about the demise of the Adventure Cycling Association, and so I was also pushed to read this article. I was surprised at how little I felt anything about how the reporting was not all that expansive, and the thrust pretty singular. If what matters to people journeying and finding the whole, wide world on a bike is a boring building in the middle of a very expensive mountain town, I got nothing for you. I did my best there and I can’t say it went nowhere. I made my way to Austin and that very good bike event and would not have without that time in my life. I tried my best. Where it went? Nowhere. Except for all the people I know in so many places, in spite of myself.

III.

The list of things I scrawl and erase as tenets or beliefs in my code is not enormous (goddamn it you’ve got to be kind) but one is: if you don’t throw down or give something a shot, then you have no room to complain. If, on the other hand, you shoot your shot and , and it sucks, go nuts and say never again. A lesson I’ve truly learned, certainly after the aforementioned windmill tilting. Besides, sometimes you can’t leave the circus.

Thus scant weeks upon my eighth place Alleybat finish, I had my binders and and sixers of Modelo and Polar and tiger onesie (IFKYK) in my hatchback and in the dark I made my way from McKinley to Big Marsh Park.

How did this happen, I wondered, often. I wondered when I rolled my eyes that Slack was on my phone. I wondered this when I made budgets that were in their nature rudimentary because there was no money. I wondered this as I fielded calls from any number of guys: my friend (the guy with the venue), my coworker homie (the legal and the actual leader to my shadow), my beer guy and my donut guy and my park district guy and my EMT guy and my burnout organizer guy. I wondered this when I explained we needed inclement weather plans and please don’t drive on the grass and youth don’t show up because you want them to and I don’t care about points or results and competition, sorry to say.

How did this happen, I mused, after I met up with my Baby Cap to be vaguely salty and snoop at Little Cubs Field this fall and I piled my bike with everybody else’s bike and then Biscuit said, who knows what to do and go there? Baby Cap had managed to slink away with Modelos and there me and Marty stood in a group of people Who Knew What Was Up and then somehow I ended up shadow in charge of producing a bike race, all the while proclaiming all I knew was event nuts and bolts, and taxes.

How did this happen, I marveled as I sat underneath a tree on a wildly mild day south of 103rd off Stony Island Avenue, in this place I watched go from slag heap single speed awful road riding ex grant funded trash mountain hike dirt pump track rando dudes to this. How did this happen as I played accountant and tried to pull together the cash, pulled every drawer counter I had in me, every bike shop with too many Benjamins or bar jar with too many tips, overwhelmed by cash? How did this happen, the new faces who were brought in by old faces, and the old faces and me shot the shit and I continued learning the lesson that there is some parallel track between becoming, also, A Guy, and by virtue of sticking around and giving a shit, you maybe become an elder of some kind?

I think I could write too many thousands of words about making shit go, from DIY fundraisers to children’s camping trips to bike summer camp. Certainly I could write a Harvard case study on this event and because I’m me I have a zillion thoughts, a SWOT analysis, and how I see whatever iterations of this go down. By this time I am soberly aware that I probably don’t fit into the iteration this experiment desires. I have firmly found the national organizing body full of shit for years now, and panty checking or refusing to let me into the party race for no reason than gross transphobic bullshit only cemented that. It isn’t that I don’t think people here can decouple their hobby from this structure. In fact, I know they can, and hope they very much fully do because I see a future where all kinds of people can enjoy something not run by cowardly white cis dudes. But I’m indifferent to the tenet of noble competition, as much as I wish everyone luck.

I’ve raced to be funny, then to try a little harder with encouragement from the selfsame good gals of racing bikes. It is a funny type of bike activity, maybe the only one you can hype to curious non-bike people: people go in circles around parks or golf courses or speedways and navigate obstacles and eat candy and drink beer. You can enter it on any terms you want, and that’s what I liked. It didn’t feel like that here in the last couple years and my homies had sort of bailed on it, too. What’s the point of waking up early on a Sunday to watch discrete groups of kitted kids under team tents and, oh, also, it’s expensive and all the money goes to a pretty shitty organization?

The things that frustrated me about how this group made it all happen also held the appeal to me. We were not one Team - no previously established group held sway or took it over. If anything, nobody wanted to take it over. I discovered later the big presence of leaders and people making things go were burnt out bike people (“All Burnouts On Bikes”), and we were not shy about calling it out over and over. We were skeptical, and tired, and flagging by the time we got to that park. The sun was up at 6 AM and Biscuit walked down the sidewalk in coveralls and hugged me hard because we were going to do it. I counted a lot of money and sat at reg. I stood next to a lot of homies and shot the breeze: DJ guy, favorite gravel gals, many, many acquaintances, and many new people. In Tucson I surmised I had added to the list of Best Bike Events in my life with Alley Bat. Austin’s Last Dance, their organizers now roaming the park with me, still holds the number one spot in my heart.

All the parts, maybe especially the ones I worried about, lit me up, all day: the bar off the new singletrack, a Metal AND a Prog Rock band, people taking turns making announcements (including me who, without much to say about the Very Competitive Men’s Race went, There’s thirty minutes left in this A race, but who cares about men, so let’s Thank Our Sponsors!), house music, kids, so many volunteers, a bounty of snacks, and God fucking Bless, no incident reports. So many queer and trans people. Ending in the black. A couple cold ones. A miraculous November sunny day. CX4E aka Biscuitcross, this race, makes the trio of the Best Bike Events I’ve Done, and finally, it is an event in Chicago.

In the shower that night I found I wanted to race another one. A fellow organizer I admire asked Are you coming out of retirement to do gender expansive?? Once again, my code compelled me, bullshit of any retirement aside, and I’d made such a fuss about racing sleeveless. I tried my best and DNF’d, happily.

At the volunteer tent I regrouped with a new face to me who all day waffled on doing two races, and I said, well I’m gonna do one. Our faces flushed, we coughed our lungs up. Whiskey? They needed this, they told me. Their partner had broken up with them. They lived together. It was rough. I thought, Oh, honey. Can I hug you? I asked how old they were and predicted the Saturn Return would deliver them through, eventually. They kicked ass on both those races on their black Straggler, hit that grade through Igor’s Dungeon¹ three times while I stood in my onesie, offerings of crap beer and dollar bills, and hollered.

I recently remembered how much “Sam’s Town” meant to me, fuck me, almost 20 years ago. It’s a banger, and this one is a today song. Take care of each other, and cast long shadows.

1  I could not say enough times we could not call DJ Booth #2 and Party Hut the “Secret Bar” to the Park District, and thus our homage to a Boystown Stalwart stuck, paper mache rainbows in the trees, and beats.