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Journal dump…

Ah yes… the bird dancing with the elephant.

And these guys…

And a little deep contemplation of the dichotomy of city and country life interrupted by a gigantic zombie dog attack.

And a statement of the obvious.

I never really much understood labor day or any of the other kind of lesser holidays. Those ones where the bank and a lot of business’s are closed but no one really celebrates them outside of getting a day off work. That is until now when I have (for the first time) a 5 day a week “real” job.

I had a few jobs back in Michigan but never anything too serious. I rented canoes and cross country skis when I was a kid, worked as a dishwasher at a diner, worked a K-mart. I even worked at Albe’s for a bit as a gorilla of a mechanic (wrestling and smashing early 90’s BMX bikes into shape). I moved out to Standard in Davenport Iowa for a bit and worked as a short order cook in a strip club and then finally made the move to Austin. In Austin I got a job in a health food store making smoothies. That was a pretty fun job.

Not long after the smoothie job got going I quit to take a open position riding in Sprocket Jockey shows for Hoffman. Poor Dave Mirra was in the hospital with a ruptured spleen and they needed a fill in. Someone could write a book on doing BMX shows at state and country fairs… what a wild ex-convict haven of interesting and sketchy people. I also got to learn to ride vert some. Can’t tell you how horrified I was rolling up late for my first show and being told to do an abubaca for the first time ever on a vert ramp in a show! ha ha…

After doing all the shows I could take I luckily started making enough money off bikes to not have to work. I had some golden years where all I did was get by, travel and ride bikes. Not bad at all. After a while I got kind of bored of being such a slacker and helped start T1. All of a sudden I had a job I couldn’t ever get out of my mind. Drove me a little crazy… I guess thats the danger of taking a business so personally… kind of get pretty wrapped up in it. In the end I walked away from the company because it was so mired in personal issues.

Now I’m working at Odyssey and Fairdale and its super fun. After being hurt and off BMX for so long I am really grateful to have such a good job and to be doing such fun things for work.

Even so, I appreciate (for the first time) a good long holiday weekend! Hope you had a good one too!

Today I am 12. Monty and I are celebrating! Its Taj’s birthday too, but he’s off at work at Odyssey having a pizza party lunch.

Dave Parrick Photos

I went shopping at the Asian market up in north Austin over the weekend. I really like the supermarket… one of the least organized shopping experiences you could ever have. Seems like things are just sort of thrown on to various shelves with no thought for any kind of order or sense. For instance, right above the eggs I found a package of this:

I bought it, but there’s no way I am eating that. Maybe if you end up at my house and are really drunk I will try to get you to eat it. The whole idea of this product just sounds foul!

The best part is the back of the package. I love the little chics praying for your carnivorous soul.

Someone sent me this picture from the New York Daily Times and I thought it was really cool. It came from this website. I like to pretend that this guy was an asshole driver who hates cyclists and woke up to his worst nightmare; an army of bikes riding all over and around his house so he could never leave.

As long as I am crossing the line and borrowing content from other websites I might as well go all out right? I found this on the Crupi site. I really think this is awesome! BMX racing at its best! Some kind of weird clipped in style tuck flying by blurred lights totally at the top of the Speed Chain! I wanna’ be at the top of the speed chain.

Here’s my best attempt at climbing the speed chain pyramid from the internet. Look at that pan blur! I like to imagine I’m going like a million miles and hour!!! This is from several years ago at a Backyard Jam where they had a long jump contest. I remember that things seemed to be going well as the distance advanced with each jump… I would pedal as fast as I could and smoothly reach the landing. Well,  that is until the distance finally got too big and I cased so hard that nails literally blew out of the landing…  and I almost threw up.

I also got a friendly little interview in the latest Slammed magazine. Nice to see some independent BMX media out on paper.

Speaking of paper…

There are still a very few Fairdale zine’s available and hats. Please buy one so I can make a new one! 68 pages of Fairdale art and doodles and R-word-edness. Buy it on the Odyssey store here. I think that Empire has a few of them too, but as I can not find them in the store you will have to ask them.

To tell you the truth I don’t really understand Twitter still, but there is a Fairdale twitter if you are into that kind of thing. Also, we have a lonely, generally neglected and poorly trafficked Fairdale facebook page too.

I’m not really sure what the current status of this is, but hopefully it will all work out.

Its another cool project happening at the school where I filmed part of my Electronical video part.

TAJ MIHELICH FROM ODYSSEYBMX.COM