as the snow...

begins to fly out my window; i sit down and watch roam. that was lent to me by norm.

to begin with...good show. great shots. and just a really cool watch. a great way to start my day, with coffee in hand. again the only bad thing is, is that i start to have thoughts of a downhillish bike. a riding style that i don't do, much less have the time to. i'd just become an urban assault rider, if i got one.

another sad thing enters my mind...here i am in cleveland. the home of the only indoor mountain bike park...ray's. and from what i understand; it's pretty popular. this tells me that there are quite a few mountain bikers in our area, so the question arises...why does our mountain bike scene really suck? really...it does. we have a few places to go, but that's it. we have a beautiful national forest area, but it is not used to its potential.

is it political? are our voices being heard? no. instead other riders are pushing for a velodrome...for what? so we can watch track racing? now if cleveland was a major hub of cycling, i'd understand. then supports of this bring up the point, well...it will be big enough to have an indoor soccer field. um...i'm not sure if you noticed, but nobody cares about soccer in the cleveland area. nobody. a few people make it down to catch the cleveland city stars, who won a championship (which i didn't know until i just checked their site)...so who's going to care about an indoor soccer field?

if it is political, then jacob was right when he said that there is strength in numbers. to join camba, and make our voices heard. now some of you know i'm not a big fan of camba, just because they tend to be too much of a trail nazi; which i am not for. however...i keep thinking about the numbers deal. if it is a political game...become political. the disheartening point becomes the bad rap that mountain bikers get, as was read in the pd (local paper) a few months ago. i don't have the date on me, but jim nichols wrote the piece. where it seems that the metroparks would rather let the horses have it, and tearing down trees and placing paved 'trails' in 'nature' and calling it conservation. even though mountain bikes leave less of a mark in nature than either of the former two things. my point becomes we are not north shore riders. i believe that the majority of us just want a sweet cross country trail that we could go out for hours, and get 'lost' as it were.

is it political? then become political.

to pull from my hip-hop influence...don't hate the player; hate the game. i remember one of the lessons that ice (to the mother fucking)-t taught me...to change the system, you need to become part of the system. so join...why not? i just did...

amitabha...