Jamie Lynn Spears
This is the case with most things now: cars, houses, furniture and cities. This kind of convenience allows primitive folk to use things they can't possibly understand, and use them in the same intuitive way that they use their reproductive organs.
Assembling stuff is generally held to be unpleasant. Steve Jobs has made millions because his intuitive little machines help us avoid the unpleasantness of assembly. So have auto mechanics and the big geeks who rule the Geek Squad empire. If we could just snap our fingers or jump into bed and produce a neighborhood or a house or a bike, we could avoid the unpleasantness of assembly. Who wouldn't want to avoid this?
Well, a lot of men I know. The kind who buy hydraulic pumps on e-Bay so they can build a push-button dumping trailer on their lawn tractor. The kind who grow furious when denied (by their spouses or other family members) the right to change their own damn timing belt. The kind that buy eight sheets of styrofoam to place around their apartment in various formations to manipulate the sound coming out of their hand-built tube amplifiers and resurrected turntable. The men in my family, probably mildly autistic, all.
In this spirit, my brother sent me this bike frame, probably the most extravagent Christmas gift I've ever received:
It doesn't look like much, but, believe me, it doesn't feel like much either. It weighs less than a coffee cup (under two pounds). No one has ever given me something so perfect. Please note, my wife's supernatural gift of putting up with me is hardly a gift; more like an endowment or divine grace.
As it is, the frame, all 956 grams of MMG carbon of it, is useless. I must assemble a bike around it. I have to buy a seatpost, wheels, shifters, etc.
My brother's gift is an engine or a pile of lumber or a block of marble.
Let the assembling begin.
0 comments:
Post a Comment