The Resistance Force Rogue Contingent

Crowbar has decided that Bike Courier parties are her new favourite form of entertainment. This past weekend she had the great pleasure of wandering around one such bash while drunken urban warriors stumbled past her, asking cryptic questions like "what's the ratio?" and talking about wind resistance.

For the uninitiated, Bike Couriers are - unbeknownst to them - default Resistance Force members, simply because they do not function in any world but their own. The Dark Side(TM) doesn't stand a chance against 'em 'cause, like as not, they'll whip it out and take a piss on a PURE EVIL operative as soon as look at them. Couriers know no fear and have no concept of rules - their daily life consists of achieving ridiculous speeds while weaving in and out of killer traffic and trying not to get doored (the unwelcome experience of having the driver in a parked car open their door just in time for you to hurtle into it at top speed). They make their living by how much they can deliver, how fast, and how far. Couriers are a curious mixture of total independence and pack animal - interacting all day with only a bike, a dispatcher and hurtling projectiles seemingly intent only on killing them; and then gathering together at the end of it all to raucously celebrate the fact that they all survived to do it again tomorrow. When off-road, they can usually be found in large, somewhat impenetrable groups marked by low tolerance for anyone who doesn't appreciate the thrill of near-death experiences. Despite their exclusivity (I hear if the couriers accept you, you can make it anywhere - kinda like New York) they are easily located by the inevitable stacked pile of metal outside any place they happen to be drinking. 'Cause this is what they do - risk their lives, push their bodies to intolerable physical limits, gaze blankly at anyone who tries to tell them what to do, and drink. Hard.

Oh yes, and they party better than anyone else. At your average party a bunch of people sit around and get hammered, and only stave off boredom by being more and more entertained by their own inebriation. At a bike courier party, they do all the same stuff, but then they do Gold Sprints. If you're lucky, you'll manage to get the secret password to one of these events, and you can witness the phenomenon first hand.

A Gold Sprint consists of climbing on a bike that's been raised on blocks and trying to do 500 metres at the fastest possible speed. If you are a bike courier, you are likely to have a bike up on blocks conveniently located in the middle of your living room. You also likely have a huge board nailed to the living room wall where you can write up the top times as they are achieved. This past Saturday I learned:

• the average time for a Gold Sprint is approximately 35 seconds (although 28.41 won the night),
• that it's all about "how fast you can spin it" because there's no road, wind or friction,
• bike couriers take this activity very, very seriously.

The sprinter climbs on the bike, someone instantly adjusts the seat for their height, someone else straps their feet to the pedals and several people position themselves at the head and back of the bike. This is so they can hold the bike in place and steady while the sprinter goes for all they're worth (even with the back wheel raised, that thing's gonna move at those speeds). The sprint is timed to the millisecond and is probably more fun to observe than it is to do. Much to my surprise, I noted that no matter how poorly the rider is doing (even if they are drunkenly sliding off the side of the bike), the onlookers yell only encouragements, like "doing good! go, go, go! only 100 metres left!" I have to confess that my experience with crowds of drunken punk types is that they tend to insult one another for fun. Not, apparently, when it comes to serious things like Gold Sprint performance; it couldn't be more clear that an insulting shout would be totally bad form. Further, when the sprinters were trying to convince the women in the room to give it a shot, there wasn't a single sexist taunt to be heard. As there are very few female bike couriers (being predominantly a male phenomenon and definitely a testosterone crowd) predictability would seem to suggest that the obvious shots about 'being a girl' and not being 'tough enough' would be slung, but again, far from it. There was only encouragement as the guys in the room reinforced how fast the various female couriers are (all three of them present), and how well they figured they'd do if they tried it. Looks like the unspoken courier code in this crowd states that anything is fair game and no statement too inappropriate except trash-talking someone's cycling. Instead the rule seems to be: 'If you're willing to get out there and try, you get respect. Period." Too bad the rest of the world can't function that way.

Just in case you're unconvinced that a bike courier life is one of the most hardcore you can choose, confirmation came during one particularly entertaining Gold Sprint, by a guy who could still bike even though he could barely stand. Everyone was helping him onto the bike, strapping him in and telling him he could do it when someone said, "Dude, take out your teeth! Better intake." That's about when I realized that a lot of the guys had been removing dental work, and front teeth were literally disappearing before our eyes, thus allowing them to get more air for the sprint. I'm not sure I've ever been in a room with so many young guys in dentures - a final testament to the dangers involved in achieving speed for a living.

Our man on the bike grunted, "oh, yeah, good idea" and popped out an upper plate, while listing sideways on the bike. Then he held it up and slurred drunkenly, "Who wants the teeth?" Couriers are hardcore, but even they have limits and, in the absence of someone grabbing for them, drunk boy had to set 'em on top of the t.v.

He did pretty well. Beat his previous sprint by 6 seconds. He got tons of shouted support throughout his sprint and everyone was coaching him on, but they forgot to pay attention while they were putting his score up on the board at the end. Abandoned, he fell sideways off the bike and only a quick save by Crowbar stopped him from going through the aforementioned television. She doesn't do Gold Sprints, but catching toppling drunk people is a specialty.

More Reasons To Drive Fast At Night

Musical Appreciation Corner:

For those Tool fans who have not caught on yet, the song "Stinkfist" is an ode to anal fisting.

"It's not enough,
I need more,
Nothing seems to satisfy.
I said, I don't want it
I just need it,
To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive."

While this might ick some of you out, our pal CB can't suppress the overpowering urge to scream, "I'll! Keep! Digging! 'Til I! Feel! Something!" at the top of her lungs when doing 130 after dark on the highway. And it's goooood.

The Demon Spawn that Never Was

Crowbar Communique, filed at HQ at 08:36 a.m. EST:

Re: Last HQ Staff Update ("Wherefore Art Thou, Crowbar?"):

You know, this kind of irresponsible posting by the usually professional Crowbar HQ staff could create all kinds of misunderstandings. Ok, it's true, I've been missing in action for about a week. It is also true that I have had little to say to anyone about my activities (I'm a spy, goddamn it - what do you expect, a billboard?). But it appears the staff didn't think very carefully about their choice of sightings to report on. Let's think - staff listed:

• 3 sightings that involved eating
• 2 sightings that involved moodiness
• 1 sighting that involved baby clothes

Is it any surprise that I received the following urgent communique from Resistance Force Independent Affiliate Tibby before the sun rose?

Subject: Wtf?
"Holy shit, CB! Just read your blog, are you pregnant?"

See, this is how unsubstantiated rumours get started. Crowbar? Pregnant? Perhaps I've never mentioned that Crowbar, like the Black Widow spider, devours her partners immediately after coitus, thus putting a bit of a damper on the line-up of clamouring suitors. For some reason, ardour appears to cool after hearing, "Well, I could have sex with you, but then I'd have to kill you." A few bodies in your backyard and suddenly everyone gets all 'nervous'...

No, friends and neighbours, our hero is not pregnant. Allow me to explain:

First, and most damning - the baby clothes. I could see how this could lead someone astray. Perhaps it will make more sense if I point out that one of the groups Cake Wafit does support work with is teen moms out of a local home for Wayward Girls (didn't think we still had those, huh?). This means that sleepers, receiving blankets, playpens and nursing pillows have all become a part of the Crowbar lexicon. Believe me, having chosen not to procreate and believing that baby showers are the tenth circle of hell, no one is more stunned than I about the ridiculous amounts of time I am now forced to spend sorting through baby clothes and pretending to have mushy feelings about miniature sizes. Hey, if it's important to my service users it's important to me but, truth be told, I feel pretty much the same about baby shopping as I do about the grown-up kind, i.e. if I can't get it at Army Surplus, it's a pain in my ass.

Next, the food. Okay, I know that one's weird, but also explainable...the grocery shopping resulted from guilt feelings about Resistance Force affiliates who cook for me, as my own highest culinary achievement is burning water. I felt I should do something to try to contribute, and thus found myself in a grocery store, buying salad in a bag. The other food forays are connected to my push to force myself to stop being the suckiest-friend-ever. I have done more sociable-type things in the last month than in the last year. Of course this means I have been notably absent in updating you - if I am keeping up with one thing, I must inevitably fuck up another - it's just the way it works in Crowbar world. Now, if the cycle holds, I will go underground for another 6 months until everyone hates me again and then start madly scheduling apologetic breakfast dates.

And finally, the moodiness. Right off the top I'll say "I am Crowbar". This is equivalent to saying "I am volatile". Mood swings are my stock and trade. That said, I cannot comment enough on the tractor thing. Crowbar loves to drive, Crowbar loves to smash. Put Crowbar behind the wheel of a vehicle so big it can crush insignificant little imports like bugs, and you have a happy revolutionary. Next I'm gonna hotwire the combine and drive over a police station. Wheeeee!
And yes, I stormed out of a meeting. But I was right. What was going on in that meeting was bullshit, and it's just lucky I didn't break out the napalm. All things considered, I think I handled the situation rather well and I did at least wait until our scheduled adjourning time before I tore out of the parking lot, so maybe Cake should stop telling tales.

So, you see, there are always rational explanations for everything and if certain HQ Staff members weren't a bunch of drama queens, you, the Resistance Force, would have found this out in due time. But noooooo, they have to go and post anxiety-provoking messages - you can bet I'll be holding a little staff meeting this morning.

Speaking of which, some of them are standing behind me now, kicking the ground with awkward, abashed looks on their faces. I think it may be conference time - ignore the screaming, please.

Wherefore Art Thou, Crowbar?

Crowbar HQ Staff Update:

We are disturbed by Crowbar's conspicuous absence. Daily we wait for a communique, a mission update, anything to tip us off to her current whereabouts and activities...and yet we get nothing. It's not unprecedented - Crowbar is known for pulling disappearing acts, but we do expect to hear from her at least once a week. Instead we have been receiving random reports from field operatives; reports that form no discernible pattern and no overarching picture of the nature of her current mission. If anything, we are baffled by the picture they present, and offer them here for you to form your own conclusions.

Recent Crowbar Sightings:

• Driving a tractor big enough to go over a small car. Our operative reports that the maniacal look of absolute joy on her face seemed to indicate...happiness?


• Eating calamari in a Jamaican restaurant. This outing contained no work context whatsoever and thus we have yet to determine its purpose.


• In jail for hours upon hours upon hours...this one we understand.


• Sitting in an apartment going through boxes of baby clothes, item by item. This activity undermines everything we think we know about Crowbar and her relationship to minor children.


• In a grocery store, buying salad. This is incomprehensible - Crowbar shops but once a year during the Christmas holidays to stock up on provisions, allowing her to barricade herself indoors until the "season" is over.


• Storming out of a meeting in pure frustration. This too makes no sense, as Cake Wafit doesn't allow storming. Crowbar storms out of meetings in her head regularly, but it's deemed totally unacceptable behaviour by Cake, and thus belies explanation.


• Having brunch. Crowbar? Having brunch? She's been known to beat people simply for using the word 'brunch'.

We are sure that there is some ribbon threading all these varied activities together, we just haven't figured it out yet. Usually Crowbar has a limited repetoire: rant, smash, work, smash, rant, smash, work, smash. We've come to rely on it and thus find ourselves sorely tested by this inexplicable regime of sociability and non-work-related pursuits. We have sent multiple coded messages to Crowbar through our various networks, requesting that she provide HQ Staff with a Mission Update, and we'll post responses here as soon as we receive them.

Of Group Hugs and Metallica

I've got a confession to make. I've just watched the Metallica documentary, "Some Kind Of Monster"....twice. I'm not sure what I originally thought would happen when I stumbled on it playing on one of those lovely movie channels. I guess I'd like to say that I sat down to invest a few minutes in it in order to laugh at Lars Ulrich and point and sneer at big, lumbering James. Since the Napster days I have had little but scorn and derision for the Metallica boys, and one of my "most-mailed" internet links takes you to this little gem at Camp Chaos: The Original Napster Bad. So maybe I just thought the documentary would be good for some Spinal Tap moments while I waited for something I was more interested in to come on. Or perhaps I was paying some kind of strange homage to the past, and my own personal hidden Metallica history.

As I've so cleverly foreshadowed above, I'm one of those people who are weirdly conflicted about Metallica. Years back (uh oh, I'm having a Grandpa Simpson moment) Metallica weren't really a metal band. I mean, I suppose they were but for some reason they didn't belong to the metalheads, they belonged to the punk rockers. When "Kill 'Em All" and "Ride The Lightning" were getting community radio airplay, the metalheads were wearing leopard skin spandex tights, hairspray, and yelling "Shout At the Devil". Perhaps Metallica defined the difference between "Hair Band" and "Hair Band with Curling Irons" but it seemed clear that Metallica belonged to our team. And they were embraced. Did I play "Seek And Destroy" on my plethora of repetitive late-night radio shows? Why yes, I did. Did I feel requests for "Ride the Lightning" were entirely appropriate amidst the Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion and ALL? Why yes, I did. And I observed that knowing who Metallica were, and liking them, seemed to set one apart in an indefinable, music kinda way.

So fast-forward a lot of years. Somewhere in there, the world figured out who a lot of the bands we were playing on community radio were, probably starting with REM. It seems weird now to even write 'REM' in the same paragraph as 'Metallica' but will you understand if I say that for some reason, back then, it wasn't? Slowly at first the bands started trickling out....REM, Nirvana, Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins....the trickle started flooding and the next thing you know, Tool was out there too, along with The Pixies and Nine Inch Nails and even Rancid. And a lot of people got bitter, because the music they always said was better than the mainstream crap had now become "the mainstream crap" and maybe they couldn't feel so coolly superior anymore. All I know is that I looked upon it and saw that it was good. I always believed that musicians I liked should, in fact, be listened by everyone and it only seemed positive to me that someone other than Mariah Carey and Dire Straits might actually get paid and stop renting.

But then I found out that the metalheads got Metallica. Not really being so down with the latest developments in head banging, I hadn't spared them much of a thought until the Black Album hit the scene, when I finally looked up to realize that they had washed into the world in the flood too. And I was bemused. I could also tell that, were I to say out loud that I liked "Enter Sandman", I would now somehow lose coolness points (fortunately I was well aware by that time that I had an "L" tattooed on my forehead regardless of what I listened to, so felt fine about admitting it). Having not paid attention though, I didn't quite understand when the coolness turnaround had happened. In fact, I'm still not sure I know when it did....

Audience Participation Moment

It seemed to go like this, to me:

"And Justice For All" = for 'edgy', nihilistic-types/still cool
"The Black Album" = for metal-types/not cool

Perhaps the cooler among you out there will tell me that it was oh-so-much-more complex than that, and involved Metallica 'selling out to a major label', or becoming 'over-produced', or some other such standard jargon used to explain the fall-from-coolness factor. Feel free to unlock the mystery in the Comments section. It all seemed rather arbitrary to me.

Regardless of the reason, it seemed something had forever changed with Metallica, and their rock god status in the 90's only seemed to further the divide. Then there was Napster and I went from being generally disinterested and non-commital to hateful and scathing. Not being one to study the people behind the bands I like, I knew little about Lars, James and the lot (I'd never even freakin' heard of Jason Newstead), but I knew I now thought they were money-grubbing prima donnas with egos the size of their amps.

All of which leads back to "Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster". What I expected to see was a movie glorifying a bunch of penis-bigger-than-their-heads, corporate-rock temper tantrums - good for a few minutes mockery, but ultimately obnoxious. Instead I was shocked to discover I had landed in the middle of Metallica In Group Therapy. I know that sounds like an SNL skit, but I swear, much of the film consists of the boys on couches talking about how they make each other feel hurt, uncared for, or disrespected. Basically what you're seeing is every painful "relationship-talk" you've ever had (including every hackneyed, cliched line short of "I'm going home to Mother!"), being expressed by a metal band to some weanie named Phil. Astoundingly, Therapist Phil has a pathetic moment all his own in the film, when he gets upset because "you guys are saying you don't need me. And I'm fine with that." Phil was so, so not fine with that.

I was still having trouble processing that this really *wasn't* going to end with them destroying the therapist's office and mounting his head on a pole at stage left, when James Hetfield started talking about his 'abandonment issues'. Bob Rock talked about "understanding" and "embracing" the process. Therapist Phil told them to treasure one another. I sat with my jaw on my knee, unable to turn it off when it came on the second time.

And here I sit now, listening to 'Sanitarium'. And it's still a damned good song. But I'll never, ever, hear it the same way again.

And by the way Lars? I downloaded it.

Put It Down! Put It Down!

Ah, police. Funny, funny police....

DEA Agent: "I'm the only one in this room professional enough that I know of to carry this Glock 40."
Glock 40: "BANG!"

www.putfile.com/media.php?n=03084899

For those who have difficulty downloading the video, the text explanation is kindly offered up by Snopes.com, our favourite internet "is it true?" site.