Look I so old to your eyes? - Yoda
Were you to put all the "BMX" Basics columns I have written in the past five years together, you would have a fair-sized book - about two hundred and sixty pages by my reckoning. Add the "One Racer's Perspective" columns I wrote from 1990 to 1992, and you would add another 240 pages. My "Some Prefer Nettles" 'zines add another twenty or so pages of editorial content, and the contributions I have made over the years to the Sweet Brothers 'zines and to East Coast Pull probably add another fifteen or so. I've written and then destroyed three or four columns per year for the past five years - another ninety-six pages. It adds up to more than six hundred and thirty paperback-book pages of blathering on BMX.
The evil folks at Amazon.com state that their newest paperback edition of Moby Dick is five hundred and ninety-four pages, including the introduction and index. Is this really true? Have I written a Moby Dick's worth of BMX material? It would appear so.
Which leads me to wonder if perhaps I should have done something else with all this time. Written my own novel, perhaps. Written on more serious topics for more serious magazines or newspapers, maybe. Written fewer, but more profitable, words on the sport for the color mags, praising everything and condemming nothing, picking up a few friends here and a few dollars there, like Gork, Buddendeck, and countless other hacks have done.
These questions mattered a lot more to me when I was younger. I worried a lot about being a "serious" writer. When I turned out my first "One Racer's Perspective", more than ten years ago, I intended for it to be a single piece, not the beginning of a monthly column. I thought writing about BMX on a regular basis would damage my credibility as an author. The popular reception accorded my "story", though, was such that I decided to continue.
I tried, in those first years, to single-handedly raise the literary status of BMX. The columns I wrote while still a teenager were dreary, serious five-thousand-word monologues on such elevated topics as social justice in the sport and the dangers of cutting profit margins for bike shops. Oddly enough, people read them despite their sheer size.
I met a lot of friends through the column, some of whom have turned out to be friends for life. Others turned out to be not so reliable, but that was the way the ball bounced.
I spent two and a half years, from 1993 to the middle of 1995, more or less out of the BMX world, concentrating on finishing school and starting a career. After a while, however, I started to miss writing about BMX, and I proposed to Jill Geiger at BT that I write a small series of articles summing up the "Modern Technique of the Motocross Bicycle". It was supposed to last for six months, but five years later I'm still at it, trying to sum up something that resolutely refuses to be summed up.
At the age of eighteen, writing "One Racer's Perspective", I thought I was finishing up my BMX career. At the age of twenty-three, beginning "BMX Basics", I thought I was bringing my riding, and writing, time to a close. Now, at the age of twenty-eight, I have no such illusions. I don't have any concrete plans to ever stop riding BMX. Nor do I have any concrete plans to stop writing about it.
I do, however, begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel for "BMX Basics", at least in its current form. I am currently speaking to a young rider or two who seem to have a sound grip on how the sport works, how to explain it, and how to teach it. It is my intention to turn "BMX Basics" over to these riders some time in the next year. They can pick up where I will leave off, and will offer a fresh perspective on what we are all doing, much like I feel I did a decade ago.
I would invite my readers in their late teens to contact me about helping to take over the reins here at BMX Basics. In doing so, you will have the attention of thousands of the sport's most intelligent riders and readers. We log well over a hundred visits a day here at BMX Basics, sometimes a hundred in an hour. Together, as riders, readers, and writers, I think we form a pretty neat group of people. There's no reason we can't continue on as long as the sport does, which I'd guess will be a pretty long time.
So, if you are somewhere between seventeen and twenty, and you are
willing to think about BMX, rather than have your thinking done
for you by SNAP! and company, for the next decade, let me
know. I will be here, of course, as I have been, for the past ten
years - and into the next ten.