It's my Monday and I'll ride if I want to.

Greetings from "Hipsturbia!"  That's where I am right now as I type this:

Look at that street I just rode down.  Now read the New York Times's description of it:

Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.

As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.

But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them.

Lies.  All lies.  I mean, sure, I bet plenty of boho douchebags move from Brooklyn to here, but I can only assume they become suburban doofuses almost immediately, because I'm up here all the time and I don't ever see anyone who fits the above description.  If this town is cool then my neighborhood is the trendiest place on the planet.  (Which I can assure you it isn't.  The hippest place in my neighborhood is a kosher cafe, withe the fro-yo place running a close second.)

No, there ain't no Brooklyn up here.  There is, however, a lot of the suburbs in Brooklyn now, but that's another story.

So what am I doing up here, besides looking for "heritage-clad novelist types with ironic mutton chops," of which there are none?  (Holy shit, I just realized I'm the mutton-chopped novelist type!  But I don't actually live here, so in your face New York Times.)  Well, I'm at a cafe where I'm busy patting myself on the back for sneaking in a bicycle ride this morning:

See that?  That's the gate to the mountain bike trails behind the mall where all the "Hipsturbia" bohos shop.  (Okay, fine, I shop there too, and we hit up Sur la Table pretty fuckin' hard this past weekend.)  What happened was I woke up this morning and thought to myself, "Aw, man, too bad it's Monday, back to the grind I guess."  Then I fired up the new coffee maker from Sur la Table, and as it slowly relinquished its fair trade caffeinated diarrhea I realized, "Wait a minute, I'm a bike blogger, I don't have a grind!"  I mean, really, if I'm going to be a semi-professional bike blogger I might as well enjoy myself, right?  So off I went.

Of course, since I was theoretically "on the clock" I strapped on the Fly6.  However, the little card inside of it seems to be freaking out a little bit, so I wasn't able to make all that much sense of the footage.  (In particular, I couldn't find the footage of myself urinating, which is a huge loss for all of us.)   I did, however, get to watch myself clearing this difficult (for me) section:

See how I get behind the saddle and my scranus totally blots out the sun?

Amazing.  Who needs one of those newfangled "dropper seatposts" when you've got this kind of crotchal agility?

I hereby dub this section "Mount Scranus:"

(Like my scranus, it's craggy and forbidding.)

In addition to patting myself on the back for riding my bicycle when actual useful people are working, I'm also patting myself on the back for owning this particular bicycle:

Which, to mitigate the sheer artisanality of it, I've currently got rolling on wheels I built using only the very cheapest mail-order components:

I think the Nashbar hub cost me something like fourteen cents, and it's one of my favorite components in cycling because about twenty different companies sell variously branded versions of it at wildly different prices, the most amusing of which is the "Woodman" which goes for well over a hundred dollars:

Still, you get your money's worth in terms of sheer bulk, because the thing weighs as much as a Honda Civic.

Meanwhile, you're probably as shocked as I am that Paolo Savoldelli was doping:

I cannot believe that a rider whose entire career was based on having slightly above-average descending skills was forced to resort to drugs.

Anyway, having frittered the morning away, it is now time for me to flee "Hipsturbia," so I'm throwing the bike on the old trunk rack and leaving town:

(Via Twitter.)

See you tomorrow, and if you're looking for me in the meantime I'll be taunting Clark Griswold.