The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Goya at the Legion Centennial.
San Francisco is a good town for bookshops. This is a route I’ve done a few times. It’s like a bar crawl, but with fewer alcoholics.
Start at Stout Architectural Books. This is a great shop for flipping through pretty picture books – think Phaidon, Taschen, etc. Most of what they carry is foreign to me, and not the type of book I am likely to come across elsewhere. I can spend a long time here.
From Stout, it is only a few blocks to City Lights. This is the most famous bookshop in the city. It is always be packed with tourists, which makes it less pleasant for browsing. It isn’t a large place, considering the size of their collection, so you’re constantly squeezing around people in narrow aisles. But I seem to only end up here on weekends – weekdays may be better. If you are here on the weekend, you should see the legendary V. Vale and his RE/SEARCH Publications table just outside, in the alley between City Lights and Vesuvio. Make sure to browse his wares.
If you need a potty break at this point, you’re in luck. San Francisco is notorious for how few publicly accessible bathrooms it has, but one of the nicest is just a few blocks away at The Ritz-Carlton on Stockton & California. Walk in the main entrance like you belong. Try to project an aura of being parvenue and you’ll fit right in. Take an immediate left, and in maybe 10 or 15 feet there will be a short hallway to your left. The bathrooms are at the end of that hallway. No keys or code required. I don’t always defecate in this part of town, but when I do, I poo at The Ritz.
The next bookshop, Green Apple Books, is across town in the Richmond. This is the best general-interest bookshop in the city. It doesn’t look like much from the street, but is deceptively large inside. Of all the shops, this one takes the longest to browse. It is about 4 miles from City Lights and The Ritz, so if you’re on foot you might want to jump on the 1 California.
From Green Apple, head two blocks west to Pho Huynh Sang. This is, in fact, not a bookshop. But they have good phở and bún, so I pretty much always eat here when I’m in this part of town and can justify a meal. The staff is friendly and the place is big enough that there’s always a place to sit without having to wait in a line.
After you’ve had a meal, you are allowed desert, so you might as well walk one block east back to Toy Boat. I usually buy a loaf of the banana bread.
The final stop is Borderlands, recently relocated to the Haight. This is our genre bookshop – scifi, horror, fantasy. I’m only interested in the first of those genres, so I don’t usually spend too long here. But I do like to at least peruse the new arrivals table in the front, and the used book shelf in the back room under the office window. The staff here are exceptionally good at recommendations. Give them the name of some obscure SF book you liked, and they’ll be able to recommend something else similar. You don’t even need to remember the title – just give them a vague description of the plot and what the primary color on the cover was and they’ll probably know what you’re talking about.
While flying down the side of Tamalpais via Eldridge for the first time in a couple months I found myself wondering if that trail somehow managed to get even rockier. Once I regained the pavement at sea level I went to shift and my twist shifter just spun. Turns out I had rattled the shift box off the hub.
To be fair, I hadn’t popped off the rear wheel or otherwise touched that bolt since before my recent tour, so it could have been working itself loose over the course of the two airplane flights and 700+ miles through the northwestern hinterlands, rather than just the ridiculous rocks of Eldridge, Indian Fire, Blithedale, et al.
It’s easy enough reattach, though since I had moved the twist shiftier I had to reset the gear selection. I think that’s a pretty good reliability record for 7 months of riding. Maintenance has been minimal: I’ve swapped the brake pads, and I think I’ve lubed the chain twice. I think all the components are just about broken in now.
I wanted to carry bear spray on my recent tour through grizz country. A stem bag, such as the imitable Revelate Mountain Feedbag works well for this, but the two stem bags that are always part of my touring luggage system are already used for other purposes. There’s a number of people out there selling solutions to the problem of how to carry bear spray on a bicycle. I looked at all the ones I could find online, and chose the Ghostrider Equipment Kermode.
Ghostrider offers their holster in a direct mount option, where it attaches to standard bottle cage bosses. This would require giving up a bottle cage, which is unappealing to me. They also offer a universal mount option, which just includes two Voile Nano straps. I bought the universal option so that I could mount the holster any place I could dream up. I ended up strapping it down near the top of the down tube, canted to the right-hand side. This did not interfere with any of the other equipment that gets attached to my bike in touring mode, and allowed for a quick and easy draw. The position also did not interfere with drawing my bottle to the right-hand side from its down tube cage.
The holster worked out great. It carried an 8.1 oz can of Counter Assault bear seasoning perfectly. No rattling or moving around, yet easy to pop out with minimal effort.
Ghostrider includes an extra retention strap that can wrap around the can. Its use is optional, and mostly for peace of mind when flying down rocky trail. I kept it on while I was riding. For me, carrying the bear spray was mostly about having it in camp. I wanted the can to be accessible all the time, but I didn’t think it likely that I would have an argument with a bear while riding down the highway. I decided that the extra motion required to unhook the retention strap was acceptable. But an important factor in this decision was that I knew that if I did not keep that strap secured, I would never see it again.
This is my one complaint about the holster. Neither end of the retention strap is well secured to the holster itself. Both are just pulled over open hooks that are molded into the holster. When using the strap to wrap around a can, the tension keeps it in place. But when you flick off one end to release the can, the other end of the strap can easily fall off. Losing it eventually is pretty much guaranteed if you don’t keep both ends hooked. And it is some sort of proprietary doohickey, not something you can easily replace. I like that the strap can be completely removed, but I’d also like to be able to attach just one end and trust that it’ll still be there when next I look down. I also think it could work just as well if it was simply a piece of shock cord, which could be easily replaced if the user does misplace (or break) it.
This complaint is minor, as the holster does hold the can securely enough for my riding even without the extra strap. It is an excellent solution to the problem of carrying bear spray on a bike.