Come On With the Rain: Hot, Wet Smugness

As you may know, back in June, after a trip to Gothenburg, Sweden, I changed my name to Wildcat Rock Machine. While the name ostensibly comes from a bicycle brand and model name, I know that the Almighty Lobster on High actually emblazoned those words on those tubes so that I might see them, just as so-called "God" wrote those so-called "Ten Commandments" on two so-called "tablets." And indeed the Lob has spaketheth again, for commenter Leroy has recently spotted a Wildcat here in the Lob-forsaken wasteland that is Brooklyn:



"So, who is this Wildcat Rock Machine?" is a question I receive not at all ever, and the truth is that Wildcat Rock Machine is a person who has not only undergone something of a spiritual awakening, but who is also the sort of douchebag who refers to himself in the third person and answers rhetorical questions nobody ever asks or cares to have answered. As for the spiritual awakening, it consists of realizing that he (by "he" I mean "I," remember he's still writing in "douche"), must strive to liberate himself from the societal constructs to which we are all in thrall, and to live not by the clock and the calendar, but rather by the rhythms of nature and of Life Itself.

In other words, I'm very often late, and I rarely shower.

So what does all this crap about living according to the natural rhythms of the whatever entail? Well, mostly it involves surrender and understanding that we cannot impose our will upon the world; rather, it imposes its will upon us. Instead of fighting the will of nature, we should heed its guiding hand. (Or guiding claw, inasmuch as, according to my worldview, it is embodied by an omnipotent lobster.) Consider, for example, the rain.

There are those who say, "If it rains take the bus." I disagree. However, there are those who say, "If it rains then be a man/woman/whatever, ride through it, and be wet and miserable." I also disagree. I believe there is a Middle Way (or "Meh-ddle Way"), which is, "If it it rains then seek shelter and wait it out." I put this into practice yesterday when I set out on my Smugness Flotilla with one of my 17 children in tow, only to get caught in a sudden downpour, at which point I sought shelter beneath an overpass:

Others more hardy than I am braved the rain, but I was content to watch it fall upon the horse manure:



At first I was impatient, but then I found myself being lulled by the sound: countless drops falling upon trees and cars and building roofs and piles of horse doody, each individual impact with its own unique timbre, yet all of them blending together into a seamlessly transcendental "Shhh." It was like the universe itself were telling me to hush, and to relax, and to take this non-negotiable moment to listen and to reflect. This was not something to hurry through with hunched shoulders, cursing as the rainwater filled your shoes. It was actually a reprieve from timetables and routine and tedium and monotony.

Still, despite my profound sense of inner peace, I must have looked like a grinning idiot who should not be entrusted with a child, for at one point a woman pulled over in her car and proffered an umbrella to me. Naturally I declined, and assured her that I already had like three umbrellas, a complete set of patio furniture, and an entire rotisserie chicken inside my Xtracycle FreeLoaders.

Nevertheless, I thought to myself, "Could I have found the key to happiness?" Sure, you can't always wait out the rain since sometimes you need to keep an appointment. But what if the person with whom you have the appointment also waited? What if the rain were a cue to everyone beneath it that, for however long it lasted, we should take time to rest and ponder and stay dry and do other things? Wouldn't it then become like some bucolic church bell summoning us all to worship at the altar of our own contentment?

Of course not. Obviously it would be a complete fucking mess. Pull your head out of your ass, Wildcat Douche Machine.

Anyway, it wasn't long before the rain stopped, though much to the nonplussitude of the fenderless the flooding remained:

So deep was the water in places that it caused minivan rotors to steam:





It submerged not only the bike lane but the horse lane too:



Fourteen head of Brooklyn's finest Tennessee Walking Horses lost their lives that day. Ten drowned, the other four had to be shot by their riders, and a group of children from a nearby day camp looked on in horror. Had I not been spiritually "foffing off" beneath that overpass as they struggled then maybe I would have been able to help them.

Damn you, cursed rain. Damn you!

Speaking of chain gangs (inasmuch as day camp can be likened to a chain gang, I know that was my experience at Camp Hillel anyway) I was browsing the Kickstarter recently when I spotted this project:





The Chain Gang is a comic book about bikes that can talk, and the plot is clearly lifted wholesale from "Bike Kill:"



Instead of waiting years for me to draw all 1,000 pages, I'm going to be releasing The Chain Gang in 24-page monthly issues. Each month will welcome a new limited-edition (only 100 copies) issue of The Chain Gang's ongoing, sprawling epic as they battle in junkyards, wrestle dogs, avoid the police, jump over people's houses, and ride inside whale skeletons. They're breaking all the rules and will stop at nothing in their quest to spread their trouble!



I must admit I was intrigued by the part about riding in whale skeletons, since if there's an antithesis of the bamboo bike then it's almost certainly a bike made out of the bones of an endangered species. (Though strictly speaking I suppose the antithesis of a bamboo bike would be a panda bone bike.) Still, it's pretty audacious to ask people for money before drawing your comic, especially when Rick Smith (the Bill Watterson of cycling cartoonists) gives you a new Yehuda Moon every day for free:

Though I admit I do pay a premium to receive the special "NSFW" version of the strip:

It's positively teeming with "hot bhabis," and if you want to borrow my password it's "pantsyabbies69."

Lastly, speaking of suggestive imagery, a reader recently spotted the time-traveling t-shirt-wearing retro-Fred from the planet Tridork Bret at T.J. Maxx on a package containing a "Mammoth Precision Tool:"

I had no idea T.J. Maxx had an "adult" section.