...Broken down and busted in the head; 2 weeks of Influenza type A - the really, Devilish nasty shit: this is how my NAHBS 2016 trip started, and continued through a maze of drunken stupors and high-altitude descents, a spiral of pollution-filled Toyota 4-Runners and 1 a.m. sharts, lost in Sacramento. It is not as if I was expecting any other result from a week with my 8Lumens/Oddity Cycles brethren, but trying and failing to recover from the flu during the Fatbike party from heaven was arduous at best and ZZ Top karaoke at worst...
Wilson Lake, Kansas, IMBA Epic Switchgrass Trails.
On the occasion that a narrative arc, or linear account of events is merited, the case can be made that the benefit from such coherent and reality-inducing activities only bolster the exposition against the author being far too addled to know any better course of action; so let's just start from the beginning and cut out the juicy anal glands of one #hardcorbincummybuns of Black Sheep Cycles, for my nose hairs need no trimming for the next *467 years.
My route west started in my home base of Kansas City in a rental car packed with my Stinky Pinky 29+ Sexbot and a myriad of cycling hats, dildos and lube; stopping at Wilson Lake was a must, a trial of my lungs that had been ravaged by the plague of 8 days prior. Other than 50 mph wind gusts which mimicked a haboob in Persia, my ride was quite bonerific, my first time back on the bike in over 10 days, and a warm-up for the impending mountainous trek in the high desert of Reno, Nevada. The wind continued to worsen on I-70 west through the Kansas Brownbackistan tundra, even to the point of removing part of the rental's driver-side mirror - a detail that I conveniently failed to report and that Enterprise did not notice - and I made it to the Oddity Cycles/Black Sheep shop and rode over to Funkwerks Brewery to get pickled whilst waiting for the crew to arrive. After a two-hour jaunt into all things sour and yeasty, I made my way back to the shop and 'helped' load 10 bikes and gear for the Oddity booth, and we left Ft. Collins at around 10 p.m. after a stop at Illegal Pete's for potato burritos and enough Sprite to make a camel blow a cactus.
Wyoming at night is other-worldly in the winter, as is Little America on I-80 at 3 a.m. - let alone a 6 a.m. stop in Salt Lake, which, at 7 degrees Fahrenheit made my desire for *17 sister-wives far less apparent; a chubby-reducing temperature if there ever was one...As daylight arrived, we cruised past the Bonneville Salt Flats, almost stopping for a four-man drag race on the Oddity show bikes, but gave up on that idea in order to make a 3 pm deadline in Reno for a ride in the Southwest mountains across the valley from Lake Tahoe - although I opted for a night on the strip and a $200 threesome with some beautiful gentleman who only wanted funding for their college education.
We spent the night in luxury at a KC expat's house -an Oddity bike owner as well - and I made Kcup coffees for * 45 prostitutes whilst eating cold pizza and inventing *56 new hashtags with the help of Justin_Fury and The Corbs, #crackhamandmilkytits being the superlative of all other applicants...
The check-in for NAHBS was from noon til 8 or something akin to those parameters, and after a battle of booth-locations came to a brutal detente, we made our way to the pre pre-party at Ruhstaller Brewery, a basement wonderland of free beer sponsored by Paul Components, Paragon Machine and White Industries...and my eventual passing-out under a pool table and La Pirata's later barf-fest on the curb with The Corbs holding his faux-hawk away from the spew.
Farmer, the Pirate, HardCorbin and The Fury.
Friday morning came in like a wrecking ball ridden by a *400 lb Miley Cyrus impersonator, and after some major fuckery, we finally made it to the convention center 5 minutes before the show opened - par for the course for the 8Lumens Chub for Growth. After an arduous day of Burnsey and Justin selling *388 Oddity Cycles - myself taking over the Fat-Bike.com Instagram account and barely refraining from filling it with dick-pics - we made an executive decision to actually get some sleep after our 48+ hours of siesta-deprivation, and we arrived back at our rental house ( shared by Matter Cycles, Sklar Bikes and Porcelain Rocket and eventually Dirty from Drunk Cyclist and Shanna from Endless Bike Co. ) wherein I drank myself to a stasis of hyper-relaxation that only can be analogized with a coma.
Saturday is of course the 'big day' at NAHBS, and we prepared ourselves for the inevitable mind-numbing discourse of millimeters, headtube-angles and the differences between 29+, 27.5+ and 26x3.8-5", as well as my personal self-image issues of being balls deep in a tuna can. All went quite well, Outside Online Magazine photographed - and eventually chose my Stinky Pinky 29+ as one of the world's 21 most beautiful handmade bikes - the Oddity booth and we were visited - and nominated - by the infamous Single Speed Amigos team, replete with the insanely fashionable orange jumpsuits and invited to the #sopwamtos after-party wherein only the early arrivers were let in due to free a beer crowd of epic proportions...Society of People who Actually Make Their Own Shit .
Toilet seats were awarded in a variety of categories - which I was far too drunk to remember- but, since Burnsey, Dirty, The Fury and Endless Bike Girl were waiting outside bribing the doormen, I was the only available representative of Oddity Cycles to accept the French Curve award: for the best bendy-ass tubes and sheer amount of mistresses.
Specialized also won the Excellence in Litigation award...
As is customary and regal in the Boner Ghost universe, we skipped out on the #sopwamtos party after the complimentary booze was evacuated, making our way to a Paul Components shindig at an upstairs Karaoke bar where #hardcorbincummybuns struck out with one of the only 4 women amongst *894 men; a Homeric-level sausage-fest that wreaked of rancid testosterone and Phil Wood grease....And this, dear readers, is when the veritable poop hit the propellers: what would follow, upon our exit from the aforementioned club, well after midnight, and our subsequent massive group ride 6 miles back to our lodging, would go down as a crowning achievement in the Captain's Bible of Bowel-Porn that may not have an equal in the 21st or any subsequent century. I have little, if any recollection of which direction we traveled in order to find the simple bliss of horizontal accommodation, but it was certainly circuitous at best and resembling a spiral on a good day. Regardless of where our group diverged - I vaguely remember a failed attempt at poaching some railroad tracks - I became utterly lost and alone, my piece of shit Sprint service unable to even use GPS, and I did my best impression of a homeless man on a $4k custom bike somewhere in midtown Sacramento. After what seemed the equivalent of*45 days of foggy pedaling at 1:30 a.m., mother nature reared her ugly turtle head and my WTB saddle became my last hope for plugging the impending flow of bean-infused effluvium. As fate would have it, just as I dropped trow in an unsuspecting citizen's front yard, my phone came to life with a litany of texts wondering where on earth I had ended up, a celebration of elation that was only superceded by the brown pyramid below my hunched loins. In my amplified, inebriated state I reached into my messenger bag and found one of the *56 promotional t-shirts I had accumulated and did the best to launder my canyon and, thank Satin, realized I was only 4 blocks from my final destination, arriving only minutes after the rest of the cult of Oddity had materialized out of the barley-ether. My last words of the night were doctoral-thesis-worthy: I just shit myself; goodnight, I'll be here all week...
I had decided, decades ago, to fly home to KC Sunday afternoon, having Burnsey ship my Oddity back to me sometime in the next *13 years, avoiding the impending Superfund Site that is #hardcorbincummybuns' crop-dusting, and, though I missed some killer single track rides, arrived with my sanity attached by a thread, and my family only slightly pleased that my plane had landed; a 110% testament of sucksex, a brilliant display of incompetence, another year concluding in offending yet even more custom bike builders: Salt Lake Fucking City 2017 get ready to Die in a Fire.
Matter Cycles full-susser...
I'm far too illegal at this point, if you want more info on my pictures of the bikes above, go to the Fat-Bike.com Instagram account and whack your weasel on a park bench with Forrest Gump.
