Surly Bikes
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over I'd never want another.
– Capt. Willard, Apocalypse Now
I spent a decade or so weaving my own dreams and nightmares into Surly’s DNA, and in so doing helping to grow the creature called Surly Intergalactic.
I am proud of the bikes and parts. They work like they’re supposed to, they do lots of good stuff, and they’re full of good ideas. We put a lot of time and thought into them. I am proud of the iconoclasm, from which even now reverberates an irreducible truth under which people may shelter from the uncertainties of life. More superficially, I am unreasonably fond of the puddinglike, emotionally translucent prosy by which we have endeavored to explain, come to grips with, and/or in some way illuminate the prepubescent and early teenage years of this whole dumb juggernaut our hippy lawyer once long ago dubbed Surly Bikes.
The only constant is change, of course. None of the people here now are the ones who switched the thing on, set its circuits humming, by divine breath enabled it to blink on and come awake in a warm fold of dedicated cyclists, fun seekers, complete whack jobs, angry misanthropes, and what-have-yous. We are only its custodians, inside it gliding silently through the vast empty, to be replaced when our shift is up. Devotion doesn’t come without cost, but one is grateful to carry this sort of weight.
There are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and ours is just one of billions of galaxies. Stars are an apparently common reaction to something, the glow and glower of happenings whose origins and futures are perhaps meaningless, possibly divine, floating in deep space and infinite indifference. So how is it possible you find yourself here? Bikes. That’s why you were there, with those people. You rode there. You will remember it always and be connected to the bike that introduced you to these people, the bike that got you to these places and got you home. These tiny moments are so fragile. Sadly, you won’t remember most of the details later. Later, what’s left of you will drift on and find a place closer to home, perhaps under a bridge, to have one more beer, the last one in your bag.
But now my shift is up. It has been for a while, actually, and I must move on. I have been restructured into a new position within the greater whole by the spreadsheet jockies at Universal Bicycle Systems Technologies Diversified Interstellar, a position in which I will remain, as it were, the metaphor in the ointment, a warning, a ghost in the machine. Thank you so very much for listening, for buying, and for believing. It has made all the difference. Commencing countdown, engines on. The moon rules the night. Your bike will get you home.