Five reasons you should return a friendly wave.

Editor’s note: The Twitterati are abuzz with references to various wave/not wave essays, which goes to show you that the times, they are not a-changin’, no matter what Mr. Dylan said. I wrote this piece for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News back in 1995.

I swear to Eddy Merckx, the next time I wave cheerily at a passing cyclist and he just gives me The Look, I’m gonna chase his arrogant ass down, knock him off his bike, drag him back to my house and chain him to a wind trainer in front of the television, where a steady diet of anaerobic-threshold intervals and “Full House” reruns — coupled with a chamois full of red ants and occasional encouragement from a Bull Buster cattle prod — should drive home the argument that courtesy is the grease which keeps society’s bottom bracket spinning freely.

What is with these guys? Unlike passing motorists, I generally wave with all five fingers on a given hand, and there are no pentagrams tattooed on my palms. Has the mousse that grips their so-carefully coiffed ’dos soaked through their scalps to enmire the already-sluggish machinations of their brains? Are their Oakleys so dark that they simply can’t see my friendly salutation? Have they heard the ugly rumors about me, their sisters and the Sonoran donkey?

Beats me. I have no answers. But, as you might expect, I have a few theories. And here they are:

• Me Cool, You Lame — You, the non-waver, may think that your bike and/or cycling attire is way neater than mine, and that to wave would be to compromise your coolness. But I’m a Media Dude, see, and that means my bike is so much cooler than anybody else’s that I have to let it get all grunged up and filthy-looking just to keep wanna-bes like Claudia Schiffer and Tom Hanks from trying to steal it. Should anyone make off with this bike, of course, I can track them by the hideous shrieking of its 4-year-old, unlubed Dura-Ace chain. But I won’t bother, because I’ve got three or four even cooler ones at home that I never, ever ride, and I didn’t pay a nickel for any of them. Hahahahah.

• I Have a Goatee and You Do Not. This is a corollary to Me Cool, You Lame. It’s also on a par with thinking a Murray preferable to a Merlin. I sport a full salt-and-pepper beard and a sizable bald spot because of a nagging case of testosterone poisoning picked up in Vietnam when I was teaching Chuck Norris all about karate. You, on the other hand, wear a straggly soup-strainer named for a smelly barnyard animal fond of eating garbage, and it doesn’t even cover your zits all that well. As my daddy was fond of saying, if you can’t grow more hair on your face than you can on your butt, you should shave.

• I’m Too Scared to Take One Hand Off the Bars. This is a theory with potential, since most velo-snobs seem to spend all their free time rifling Mom’s purse for the cash to buy purple chainrings and trying to trials-ride the tables at Espresso Yourself instead of practicing basic cycling skills, like waving to other cyclists, riding a straight line, and and blowing your nose without getting boogers all over your Banesto jersey.

• I’m Dumber Than a Food Stamp Office Full of Suntour Executives. Also a theory with potential, this assumes big lag time between the eyes registering an occurrence — a friendly wave, a big smile, the development of trouble-free indexed shifting — and the brain processing the information: “Duhhh … hand up; smile on face; duhhhh … he was WAVING, George! Yuh, yuh, that’s right … he was WAVING, George! Can I pet the rabbits now, George?” That’s a Steinbeck reference, dude. Jeez, four years in grammar school and four years of reform school, and you didn’t learn nothing in either place.

• Don’t Bother Me, I Am a Racer. “Look, Marlin, it’s a USCF licensee! And here we thought they were extinct! We’ve got to move quickly — I’ll get the tranquilizer rifle and the ear tags; you call the Smithsonian and National Geographic!”

• Exercise is Serious Business. Sure it is. So is getting chained to a wind trainer by an irate stranger with a sound-proofed basement, an ant farm and a cattle prod. Think about it … then wave.

“I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it.”

Jim and Greg redeemed themselves ever so slightly by adding Procol Harum’s “A Salty Dog” to their Desert Island Jukebox. That is, until I discovered that they misspelled the band’s name on their website.

Keelhaul the lot of ’em.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

It was chores, chores, chores today — a full shift’s worth of my usual stock in trade, which is to say bicycles and bullshit — and I didn’t pay much attention to the Black Forest fire until it was about time for Herself to motor on home from her gig in Denver.

And then, holy shit! The friggin’ thing is spreading like a head cold at Interbike and more evacuations are ordered, this time in Bibleburg proper.

“Traffic nightmare in northern Colorado Springs,” quoth the Gazette.

“I-25 is completely congested. Avoid traveling if not necessary,” added the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

El clusterfucko, bucko, as we say south of the border (Monument Hill). I’m thinking she’s gonna be idling at Baptist Road for the better part of quite some time. And you know how those Baptists are.

So I propose going long — E-470 to Interstate 70 to Highway 24 and home. Or maybe C-470 to Highway 285, then jink down through Pine and Deckers to Woodland Park and thence back to the ranch.

Nope. She blazes right on down the Big I to home and hearth — and with hardly a bobble, too. Go figure.

Ride the Rockies is not so fortunate. Thanks to the Royal Gorge fire, they’re getting rerouted through our old stomping grounds of Weirdcliffe, which adds some 33 miles to their ride from Salida to Cañon City, many of them uphill.

I know all of them well, having ridden them as a Crusty County resident and as an entrant in several editions of the late, lamented Hardscrabble Century, which tackled Weirdcliffe from the other direction, from Florence through Wetmore and up Hardscrabble Cañon.

The riding is easier the way the Rockies types are doing it, once they’re past Bear Basin Ranch. From there, it’s mostly downhill to Graybar City. Whip a power salute on H. Rap Brown as you roll past Supermax Florence, kiddos.

The Black Forest Fire, as seen from the safety of Caramillo Street.

Here we go again — this time, the fire is in Black Forest, and it sounds like another doozy.

We used to train up there in the Nineties, when I was still racing, and from the sound of it the fire may have started near Black Forest Regional Park, where Team Mad Dog Media-Dogs At Large Velo promoted a cyclo-cross or two back in the day. Plenty of fuel up there, and with the humidity in single digits and the wind in double digits, you have a recipe for some very bad news indeed.

Herself and I saw a couple of Fort Carson CH-47 Shithooks whock-whock-whocking overhead toward the Forest this afternoon, but we didn’t see any buckets dangling. The Blue Zoomies are pitching in, too.

And this is only one of the fires going on at the moment. Others are at the Royal Gorge, La Veta, Douglas County and Rocky Mountain National Park. The Denver Post is also live-blogging the blazes — using actual live-blogging software, too, unlike our local cage-liner, which seems to be doing it the hard (and cheap) way while expecting the customers to keep refreshing the page. Spend some money, peckerwoods. Phil Anschutz has it to burn, you should pardon the expression.

Anyway, we’re just fine here, but sounds like plenty of folks aren’t. More as we hear it.

The known terrierist “Banzai” Buddy Boo, captured from my iPhone. (Actually, he’s more of a spanielista.)

C’mon — you don’t think they put a camera in that phone of yours so you could take cutesy pix of puppies and kitties for teh Innertubes, didja? Wave hi to your Uncle Sammy.

I guess I’m with Kevin Drum here. I just assumed that once the surveillance genie was out of its bottle, the ratfink stool-pigeon bastard would never get stuffed back in, no matter which crypto-Mooslim Kenyan socialist tyrant happened to be occupying the Black House. And thus whenever I plot the smashing of the State I make certain that I’m out in the open, safe among The People, far away from that snitching corporate stooge, my iPhone.

Oops.

I do have one question, though. As a nominal journalist and underemployed rumormonger, I consider myself to be in the entertainment business. And everything I do — from writing columns to drawing cartoons to making prank calls to the Queen warning that the Irish Republican Navy plans to dispatch an armada up the Thames — is part of the Work. Shit, I spend more time and effort editing my emails than some people devote to entire magazines. I’m saying I take my comedy seriously, is what.

So my question is this: By data mining my phone is Uncle Sammy violating my copyright, and if so, can I sic’ the FBI on him? Seems to me I can’t watch a goddamn “Game of Thrones” DVD without enduring a multilingual series of dire threats regarding the high crime of piracy from the Feebs, Interpol, the Sûreté, MI6, the Mossad, SHIELD, the Illuminati and Captain Video.

I think the sonofabitch should at least be picking up part of my AT&T tab.

• Late update: More on this revoltin’ development from The Old Gray Lady.

• Ever later update: More here, praising the leaker, from The Atlantic.

• Very latest update: And of course, Charles P. Pierce has a few light-hearted observations to make.

And now for something completely different: There is no truth to the rumor that Bradley Wiggins is skipping the 2013 Tour de France in order to stand in for the late Graham Chapman in a revival of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

I’d not read the series until I heard a report on it from Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! But I have now, and you should, too.

Other bits worth considering today:

• ”Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart,” from retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry and professor emeritus David M. Kennedy at The New York Times.

• ”Is PTSD Contagious?” from Mac McClelland at Mother Jones.

• ”On Memorial Day, Remember the Sequester,” from Alison Buckholz at Time.

Add your own reading, viewing or listening recommendations in comments. Peace.

The view from the DogDeck during a respite from cycling rumormongery.

The 2013 Giro has been fun to watch, but I won’t weep when it comes to an end this morning in Brescia.

Working each stage with Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey sort of fills up the morning, which is a time of day I normally reserve for trying to get the old motor started — stomping on the pedal with the key twisted in the ignition and the hood up, occasionally slouching forward to spray some ether into the carb’ and kick the sumbitch smack in the grille until black smoke farts out the rusty tailpipe.

This takes time. There must be at least two cups of strong coffee, followed by a leisurely breakfast taken while scanning the headlines to see what the gummint stole from us during the night and sold to the Kochs for pennies on the dollar. Fuckers are worse than crackheads. Steal the pennies off your dead granny’s eyes and the copper bottom right off your skillet, they will.

There’s none of this gradual easing into one’s morning during a grand tour. It’s up and at ‘em, right from the gun, trying to entertain people who’ve already been up for hours, some of them in other countries where they actually know stuff and aren’t shy about correcting you a nanosecond after you sleep-type something exceptionally boneheaded.

And holy shit! Just about the time the peloton scrapes the Giro’s ice off its Oakleys it’ll be time for the Tour. It’s the 100th edition this time around, so there will be extra cluster in the fuck, and I can already hear my last few brain cells sputtering like a candle whose wick needs trimming.

Mister P and I are still on the fence as regards LUGging the Tour. ScribbleLive finally figured out how many viewer minutes we were doing and they’ve started to wonder how we’d feel about being bent over a desk with our trousers puddled around our ankles and some banjo music playing. There are other options, of course, but most are equally pricey or woefully inadequate.

And then there are the ruined breakfasts to consider. Twenty-one of them, to be precise.

So, yeah. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, we have one more Giro stage to get through. Swing on by Live Update Guy to say arrivederci.