End of an era?

Recall fondly with me if you will, the year is 1981, break dancing is alive and well, parachute pants are all the rage, and the band, Cheap Trick is on the rise. You are clad in a red leatherish jacket adorned with silver sequins. Or maybe not. However perchance like me, you were enthralled by either the menacing look of the movie posters, or the first movie “Mad Max” to see one of that summers blockbuster movies, the creatively and aptly named Mad Max 2 the road warrior. A piece of cinema that defined the movie era i can assure you. There is a point in the movie where one of the Mohawk marauders of the wasteland is killed by an errant razor boomerang meant for one of the movies main players. Its at this point we realize he wasn’t just another cast member, he was a “special friend” to one of the lieutenants of said gang; Wez. Wez is the leather-clad biker that, when realizing his compatriot has been slain, goes berserk in an attempt to return the favor of a horrific death to a young brooding Mel Gibson. The next few moments of the film are the reason I asked you to travel with me on this little trip down memory lane. The charismatic General of the outlaws “Lord Humungus” pulls Wez aside and offers him a few words of consolation that have since burned themselves indelibly on my soul. Its one of those lines I simply cannot forget:

“Be still my dog of war, I understand your pain. We all lose someone we love. But we do it my way! We do it my way. Fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours. Then you shall have your revenge.”

“We all lose someone we love.” Twenty seven years later, I reminded of this quote when looking over my vanilla-shake beauty “lucky” as she rests in my garage.I believe she and I have possibly come to the end. Not that I would take her out back and shoot her, or subject her to the embarrassment and torture of an online auction house or worse yet sentence her to a lifetime of languishing on the never updated webpages of craigslist. But I feel the time has come to replace her with another model. As my eyes light on her slender and impossibly tall seat tube, and the lack of anything remotely considered track geometry, I can still get a bit choked up. Sure she doesn’t have any toe overlap and the fork has a bend that resembles an over ripened banana. But she does have class. And that has to count for something. Needless to say I am in the market for something with a little more aggressive geometry, a true track drive train, single chain ring spacing on the crank, a manageable distance to the rear stays, track dropouts, clean tubing, and a low slung BB. In short, everything lucky is not. Keep your eyes peeled. SK is ready to fire.