Friday, September 15, 2017

Scrubbed

In my experience, the toothbrush has a life-cycle: It begins in your bathroom, for brushing of teeth, then off to the kitchen for cleaning the grout, and finally ends up on the workbench, for scrubbing cassettes.

There’s a class system here to be sure, but since so many make the transition, value judgments are set aside.  After all, flossing the teeth of a Shimano Megarange is no less noble an enterprise than getting into the spaces between molars. 

Your average toothbrush is just happy to have a role in life; it doesn’t matter whether it’s the penthouse or the outhouse, what matters to it is being used, performing its function, expressing its purpose, or as Aristotle would say, its telos.

Shirts in my house follow a similar trajectory as above: they start out as items in the weekday wardrobe, then become articles to sport on the weekend or in summer; finally, I figure I can put them on for a Thursday night ride without caring whether they end up with a burn hole or smeared with waffle batter or, as was the case most recently, shredded on the forearm due to an unexpected dive at the gravel path following an overzealous attempt to avoid a blackberry bramble hanging over the trail to Foster Island.

Nobody likes crashing, but I am pleased that my helmeted head slid under the park bench rather than landing on top of it, which is what I’ll try to keep reminding myself if the pace of sore shoulder recovery drags in the coming days.

And while I might regret the carelessness en route, at least I’ll be glad for thoughtful preparation: heading out on the ride, I swapped the nicer shirt I’d gone to lunch with for one already showing a few holes near the hemline, no great loss in its loss, after all.

Nobody minds when the workbench toothbrush falls to the floor; you just pick it back up and keep scrubbing.

1 comment:

  1. it was supposed to be DONG themed dave. please submit your posts in the form of a dong

    ReplyDelete