What a day
23 May 2005 
in the late evening 
Matt Winckler
Today was a pretty rough day for biking. On Friday, getting ready to leave from work, I discovered my front tire was flat. So I expended my one and only instant repair canister to get me back to my car. On arriving home, I discovered that the front tire was flat again. Whether this was due to failure of the repair canister or more goatheads puncturing the repaired tire on the way home, I do not know. But I replaced the flat with my one and only spare inner tube, resolving to obtain additional repair materials over the weekend.
The weekend came and went, consisting primarily of house painting (finally a day of decent weather!), barbequeing, server administering, old-junker-Subaru-offloading (half the garage now empty–hooorah), and general business. In short, I had no time to go get replacement supplies.
To counter this, I strapped my large non-portable tire pump to my backpack, which I believe when silhouetted probably gave the impression that I was a heavy support infantry tasked with carrying the 80mm mortar tube to the front. Not very classy at all, but I figured that if I got any flats, and they were anything like the slow-leaking ones of Friday, I would be able to pump up the tire and get home anyway.
So a little over halfway to work, I hear the telltale click-click-click of a goathead (or two…or three) stuck in the tire. Rats, I think, I’m actually going to have to use this tire pump. But it was not fated to be so! For a scant quarter mile later, the tire was completely flat. No half-job slow leak this time; the goatheads were out to ensure that my inner tube was well and truly lacerated to the point that in order to keep running I’d have to figure out a way to ride my bike and operate the tire pump simultaneously. (I didn’t try.)
So I walked the rest of the way to work, admonishing my wingmen Robinson and Buschbach to carry on without me in a very clichéd yet heroic, self-sacrificing manner. (I learned later that, true to the cliché, Robinson is a firm believer in the “leave no man behind” doctrine and convinced a coworker to lend him a pickup truck, which he used to come search for me. Of course, by this time I was practically arrived at work, and he never saw me. Still, his loyal and valiant deeds have been recorded in the appropriate annals of history.)
Once at work, I had the slight problem of being stuck with an irreparable bike some five miles from my car. Not keen to a five-mile walk, I entreated another friend (wise enough to drive to work) to take me to a bike shop over lunch where I picked up some more gunk to go in the tire and fix it up. I performed the repair, and it seemed to hold up all right. And so it was that at the end of the day, considerably after my faithful wingmen had left without me (loyalty only goes so far), I found myself bound homeward once more.
Until, that is, I was cruising down George Washington Way and happened to look behind me, at which juncture the wind somehow caught my left contact lens, ripped it from my eye, and cast it somewhere out upon the road asphalt.
Let it here be recorded that I thoroughly detest contact lenses and all of their faithless tricks, and, after the example of Sancho Panca, heartily commend them to the devil.