Personally Famous...

Ah, fame at last. Never imagined it could feel so edifying.

Wait, that's not the word; so, uh...so... pedestrian. Yeah, that's it.

Seems one chap who rode in the recent Single Speed Punk Bike Enduro appreciated the years of sweat equity (and strict asceticism normally reserved for trappist monks) that it took to raise my drawing talents to their material apogee, as represented in my latest artistic reification seen at right (with a dash of pink) and here.

So he approached me to ask for the rights, which I shamelessly granted. The result is shown in the pic above, artfully cropped to preserve his anonymity. Immortalized through the magic of the old school iron-on transfer—a DIY one-off job that seems to have turned out quite well—the image now adorns a canvas à trois dimensions in this world, having narrowly escaped the simulated, absolute zero confines of cyberspace. Nice work!

Did I say immortalized? I meant briefly rescued from shameful obscurity (damn 13¢ words!). The bane of iron-ons, of course, is their tendency to eventually peel away from the fabric like an old scab—hence their near annihilation beneath the bootheel of more technologically advanced processes such as dye sublimation and screenprinting.

But the iron-on's strength lies in its immediacy (as Hakim Bey uses the word), in the fact that it can be created at home with only a modest investment of time and equipment—the same intangible quality that makes all DIY projects ennobling. And its ephemeral nature offers another advantage, at least in this case: if it does self-destruct, it will probably happen before the tell-tale year included in the design renders it passé. Heaven—and all Hell's minions—forbid!

(The iron-on is sort of the fixed gear of the fashion world...long live the iron-on!)

Again, nice job, my friend.

Speaking of the Enduro, here's the GPS data for the ride, flagrantly stolen from Big John of Empathy Test fame. (Hmm, I recall a couple of miles that didn't seem to make the graph—then again, the lines I usually pick can't exactly be called straight.)