I feel like my world is crashing in all around me. Things used to be simple. For example, there was a time when I knew what gravel was:
Okay, fine, I didn’t know the third thing. Also, I didn’t know people used to call sand gravel, though if you think about it that makes sense, since people used to be smaller so to them the sand was more gravel-like proportionally speaking. But yeah, life sure used to be easy: men were men, women were women, and gravel was a bunch of very small rocks that rich people put on their driveways.
But not anymore!
Now, people have no idea what gravel is:
The above just appeared on a certain website, which I don’t want to link to because they get annoyed at me when I point out some of their more egregious linguistic contortions. And yes, I realize I’m being petty, and that in doing so I reduce myself to a meme. Yet I can’t help myself, because it’s fascinating to contemplate what horrible wrongs the English language must have visited upon the curators of that certain website for them to constantly heap such vengeful abuse upon it.
As for exactly when we as a society completely lost the ability to define or even recognize gravel, it was probably a gradual thing, though certainly by August 10th, 2021 the erasure was complete, as this was when SRAM officially declared that gravel was anything you wanted it to be:
Yes, gravel is the morning dew. It’s the film that forms over uneaten pudding. It’s that feeling of ennui you get on Sundays at around 4:41pm, and it’s the cocktail you have at 5:00 that makes it go away. It’s the alpha and the omega, the yin and the yang, and the chocolate that serendipitously winds up in your peanut butter like in those old Reese’s commercial. It was created in the Big Bang, and one day all the gravel in the universe will come together again in a Big Crunch, creating an infinitely large piece of Mono Gravel. Some physicists believe this has already happened, and that this Mono Gravel is the universe.
What is gravel? Do you even have to ask? Gravel is.
They say gravel is “inclusive,” and the antidote to roadie elitism, yet I don’t know what’s so inclusive about needing a degree in philosophy from a small liberal arts college in order to read a bike review. If anything I find road cycling refreshingly lowbrow, and riding a bike that won’t clear any tire much wider than 25mm insures that I won’t find myself disappearing up my own ass as I contemplate the essence of gravel:
Though if you think about it the road’s just really tightly-packed gravel, so I guess there really is no escape.
Speaking of the LeMond, which is a highly specialized type of gravel bike made especially for processed gravel, further to yesterday’s post I have changed the brake pads:
In 2024 this information will be useful to virtually nobody, but if you want a pad for both ceramic and non-ceramic rims, you want these.
You’re welcome.
