I am obsessed with trashy TV shows like "Intervention" [and yes, "Obsessed"].
I'm not ashamed to say that I'll watch episodes of "Intervention" on Hulu while I'm on my rollers, morbid fascination allowing me to momentarily forget how much my legs are hurting. Crack addicts, meth heads, anorexics, cutters...It's addictive. I can't stop.
One episode in particular has stuck out; maybe because a bicycle was involved. A loving mother of two who was now homeless, hooked on meth, and forbidden to see her children, she did lines off of the porcelain top of a toilet in her underwear. With close-cropped black hair, darkly-lined eyes, and a stick-thin figure, even on her bicycle, she looked like a total rock star.
I am slightly ashamed to say that I was disappointed and shocked when she cleaned up and transformed herself into a normal, slightly frumpy woman in her late 30s. But I think of her whenever I lube up my chain.
Because I've been using Rock 'n' Roll lube, and that stuff is slick.
After about two months of forgetting to buy lube [despite the inordinate amount of time I spend in bike shops], a friend finally brought me a bottle of this stuff because it was apparently flying off the shelves at NYC Velo. I had my doubts. It looked exactly like the dry stuff I was using earlier, which a seasoned mechanic told me was probably made by Satan. Also, it's lube. Other than the whole wet or dry thing, aren't they all just the same?
Apparently not. A single application later, my chain was as smooth as Mick Jagger. A length of metal links that had once groaned and squeaked with accumulated dirt was now as silent as rock shows are loud. Pedalstrokes were like cutting through warm butter - or, to keep the rock star analogy going, like doing lines of top, high-grade cocaine.
"I looooove riding my bicycle," that meth head had said with the delirium produced by non-medical use of hypodermic needles and snorted lines. I remember being slightly appalled as I watched her pedaling her cruiser along, and thinking that this woman was clearly living in some other reality.
But I started thinking, maybe that declaration wasn't so much a product of illegal substances, and just the result of proper application of Rock 'n' Roll lube. Or, at least I sort of hope so. Because otherwise, with the way this lube has me loving my bike rides, people are going to start thinking I'm a meth head, too.