One Monkey, Thirteen Years

Support Our Troops, but not our draft dodgers. Hey, if they could harass Clinton mercilessly about it...

To folks like karenbynight: "support our troops" isn't meaningless, exactly. It's like supporting an alcoholic. Support the person, but don't support their symptoms.

Except, of course, that supporting the symptoms is the legally mandated part. I suppose we could think of ourselves, collectively, as a store clerk just doing our job by redeeming Beer Stamps for an alcoholic on welfare.

Never mind. Forget the "support our troops" bit.

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I've now fallen a second time on my bike. Unlike the first time, this one entirely lacked an "oh shit, I'm gonna fall" moment. It was happening before I even realized. Like the last one, the worst damage inflicted on the bike was minor scrapes and on me was a skinned knee.

It was odd. I was turning, it was pretty low-speed, and the bike just seemed to fall. I wasn't doing anything particularly bad. In fact, in retrospect I'm not at all sure why it happened. Maybe my tires are more worn than I'd realized. I can't think of any other reason a random slowish right turn would turn into a skid-off-the-road.

The skinned knee looks gruesome, but is bleeding barely at all. There's a big black patch in the center which I'd assumed involved asphalt, but it's not bleeding, it's not doing much anything, and the black doesn't quickly wash off, so maybe it's ground-in grime or something.

The muffler was hot enough that the leading edge of it melted up a chunk of road paint. Yeah. Like, it was all gooey. I assume that happened while the bike was on the ground and not while it was falling, because it wasn't gouged -- it was just kinda melted on.