Hello, and welcome to Budget Bicycle Center’s first blog post, a weekly blurb about

[caption id="attachment_22" align="alignright" width="263" caption="Budget Bicycle Center of Madison is into blogging"][/caption] anything bike. I was pleased when my manager asked me to right a blog for the store because it gives me a chance to talk about bikes with total strangers. Somehow this works better on cyberspace than on State Street. The haggard guys shaking their cups won't talk to me anymore. I think my obsessive bicycle ranting depresses them. I know there are a lot of you out there too that love to talk about everything on two wheels. Maybe you’re one of our regulars, one of the Bobs, the Tims, or any of the others that stop in on their lunch breaks to talk shop and trade stories, but even if you’re not, you have found your way to an obscure blog on your local bike shop’s website in the hopes of escaping into the bike-nerd culture that you love. Is it a culture or a cult? Have we all drunk the Gatorade? Our cult is an eclectic one. Spandex wearing roadies, flocks of gear-hound one-upsmen. College students on rusty Huffys with flat tires, riding through red lights, blissfully unaware of the fact that they almost just died. Swarthy hipsters in skinny jeans, and thick rimmed glasses, pumping their legs wildly on a brakeless slack-chained, color coordinated fixie. Gray haired men with a handlebar mustache and a helmet mirror, riding a recumbent with a full fairing. Whatever ritualistic garb you don to celebrate your love of human powered propulsion, welcome. This is not to say cyclists everywhere and of all different ilk will sit down around the campfire and sing Kumbaya. No, at times, we all seem like warring factions. When I say warring factions, I don't mean a slower version of Mad Max, more like high schoolers sitting at separate tables gossiping about how the kids at the other tables don't even, like, know how lame they are. But here, nobody can see your clipless commuter sandals, your insulated water bottles, your anodized chainring bolts, or anything else that exposes your faction, so relax, you're in the clear. Your Local Bike Shop shouldn't be a place that makes you feel small or be judged by a bored, swarthy fellow with knuckle tattoos and an upturned nose; it should be a gathering pace to celebrate the sport we love, and this blog will be no different. Thanks for reading, and I hope you tune in next week. -Your Friendly Neighborhood Bicycle Mechanic