Yesterday I found out my bike had been stolen over the weekend. I left it chained to a rack in the parking lot of the building where I work and then headed up to Seattle to see the opening night of the David Lynch/Twin Peaks Festival at the Seattle Art Museum. It was fun; I sat two seats behind Kimmy Robertson (aka Lucy Moran from Twin Peaks), saw my old friend KTJ, and caught the premeire of Jennifer Lynch's new movie Surveillance. If it hadn't been for the headache brought on by the screechy sound effects in Surveillance and the stomachache I got from having Red Vines and beer for dinner, it would have been awesome.

Flash-forward to work Monday at noon: I go out to get my bike and go to lunch and it is nowhere to be found. Now my bike was nothing special, an old twelve speed Schwinn with a bent back rim. The derailer was misaligned from banging against seats in the Capitol Theater and it wouldn't consistently stay in any gear but 6th and 12th. The seat was held together with duct tape and I would be suprised if you could get $25 for it on Craigslist. Hell I got it for free at a service project organized by local AmeriCorps members but it was worth a whole lot to me. It was my main form of transportation, besides my monthly IT pass, and it was sweet. Fast and light, no frills and I liked my duct taped seat, it kind of looked like it had a racing stripe. They even took my butt-ugly, helmet with my name on it, that I paid all of three dollars for at the Goodwill.

The day before a couple of my best friends had their bike stolen from out of their yard. Theirs was a sweet 70s Schwinn with super cool lights powered by the friction of the wheels. Again not a super valuable bike but cool and practical.

What I wonder is who is stealing these crappy old bikes and what could they possibly be getting out of it? I also wonder why people are such jerks but I wonder that a lot.

Anyway I have decided to turn this shitty event in my life into a positive by using it as a catalyst for starting a blog dedicated to bicycling in the Olympia area, an idea I had been toying with for a while now. Of particular interest to me is discovering fun bike routes around town, sharing resources for bicyclists, and providing a forum for collecting the funny shit that gets yelled at us bicyclists while we are innocently trying to get from one place to another without dinosaur bones. So tonight I'm going home to fix up my old mountain bike and get back on the road.

And tomorrow I'm buying a new lock.