And so here we are…. Give or take, roughly bang on 364 days since I last managed to squeeze some rambling filth out the rear end of the WordPress editing suite, to insidiously worm its way into your junk folder and infect your browser like a dose of something the Rodfather thought he’d cured in 1997.

Given we’re one day off a total collapse into a full year without a post, a feat not seen since Dirty shit kicked off in 2013, I thought it best to squirt an AGM post out in a desperate attempt to save some form of blogging face.

Yes, my Dirty demise has been complete, but oddly, it’s been both a swift subjugation of freedom, mixed in with a slow descent into the bonds of corporate slavery. I know, before anyone clamours reaching for their ‘First world problems‘ card or to tell me you’re triggered, I’m fully aware that I am the cunt that did this to myself.

I have indeed managed to unleash one of my patented overcorrections; going from the relatively divinity of casual part time parenting and full time semi-PRO cycling, head first into a cauldron of PowerPoint, an endless gang bang of “Back to back” Teams calls All fuelled by a whole new character base of Middle Managers, replete with behaviour that will be able to fuel this website for another decade should I ever manage to free myself from this self imposed capitalist exile.

From time to time over the last 12 months, when my brain wasn’t completely drained from the horror of another week at the all you can eat meeting buffet, or I got back from a 30 minute ride feeling like it was the Whaka100, it had occurred to me that I should possibly write a post here or there to keep my soft hands in the game. I mean, aside from the fact the last 12 months have yielded the least amount of riding (not to mention, Blog posts) since records began, it wasn’t like it was completely barren of some form of adventure, with usual Good Cunt suspects:

But it turned out that time was now a luxury that had packed up and fucked off with my friends who had a much better command of, and appreciation for, ‘balance’, which is cuntspeak for not being a workaholic. Having said that, they have gone to pains to confirm that Pimping remains complicated and far from simple, even if it does have it’s moments:

What little time remained now I was pegged/plugged back into the matrix was either invested in the lowest quality rides possible, or self-loathing for abandoning my so called principles that I wouldn’t do exactly what I was doing ever again. I’ve also found myself having an extreme aversion of sitting down at another type of keyboard to search my mind for content. You will also rightly note that content requires adventure, and adventure is allergic to fuckheads who spend 14 hours a day using words like “Alignment” or “Translating strategy into action

My inner workaholic spent an extended sentence locked in a maximum security vault, and like Hannibal Lector, now that he was out and in the wild, he was going to consume brains and have his time in the sun… Did somebody say “Daily Stand up?! Yes PLEASE! Fucking GET IN my calendar

Of course, as I signed the surrender monkey paperwork with my workaholic self, just as cycling had predicted, I reassured myself that on the upside, at least I would be able to invest the cash flow back into my fiendish two wheeled passion. LOL, nice one cunt! The transition to being able to spend cash on bikes I now didn’t have time to ride was as rapid as it was embarrassing.

Things were so dire, I didn’t even have “The bandwidth“, as we say in corporate drone land instead of saying “I’m fucking rinsed” to announce the arrival of the utterly fucking fabulous Blur 4 into the dirty line up over the last 364 days:

If I had waxed lyrical about this Unicorn of a machine, which I hope to do so once I regain some sort of blogging form, I would have naturally followed it up with the tale of punishment and self-loathing that was me trying to hold on to the Professors wheel at the Prospector back in March. As it turned out, only having a mediocre 3 hour range on back to back 4 hour marathon XC stages was an excellent test of Friendships:

In usual AGM fashion, it would be remiss of me to leave out commenting on the weirdest 2W season on record – One round banked, but with weird timing issues. Another round missed due to the Creator and I going down with the dose of Covid which fucks you right up and then rounded out with the final round being cancelled due to weather and utter trail destruction that ensued. Again, more nuclear fuel on the fires of my general riding demise.

As the past year ground mercilessly on and riding 4 hours in the week became the new consistent benchmark, I found myself spending more time musing over whether or not I was a size Medium or Large in the Santa Cruz line up than actually riding bikes – A level of puzzling that has become almost as amazing as finding out that people believe what they see on LinkedIn is actually real, and somehow needs to be mimicked in the workplace (Spoiler alert – Fuck it definitely doesn’t).

But it turned out that I didn’t know pain until Euro summer rolling around and I started getting a train run on my face of images of so called friends and rad fuckers bathed in Euro goodness, both Gnar and Tar. The pinnacle of the horrendous error that is not scheduling a Euro summer trip? Missing the inaugural Stone King Rally, having Covid aside, I could only console myself that it was pretty clear to me that I wouldn’t have been able to prepare in a manner which would have made surviving it viable. The story that the day 4 or 5 opening commute to Stage 1 was 5 hours a humbling data point when you’re only managing a mediocre 4 hours a week on the road bike, if that. Instead, I settled for the daily eye gouging from Instagram as rad units explained in story after post after reel how fucking insanely mega Ash’s second act was… It’s now solidly on the 2023 revenge tour schedule.

As my work zombie self likes to say, that’s the perfect segway to introduce my new two wheeled soul mate being released to the public… Yes, Nick Anderson and his team of beautiful maniacs have essentially reached into my rotting work brain, moved through the mushy parts destroyed by people saying “Oh, haha, I was on mute” for the 69th time on a Teams call before Monday lunchtime, and found everything I have ever had a dirty thought about in a Mountain Bike. The delight of the branding realignment with the launch of the Nomad 6 not lost on me for a second:

Could this be the machine to set me free again? Could this be the mullet catalyst to stop this rot and divert me from the slippery slope of being another corporate drone on an eBike explaining how their phone can connect to their bike while any semblance of sex appeal floods out of their ass? The upcoming Southern Hemisphere summer looms as an extreme proof point. If ever there was a white rabbit to follow, this has to be it.

So then, what’s the point of all of this? Well, like most AGM’s it’s about reporting on mediocre performance and then investing time in covering ones ass for said performances, while laying down a new set of unrealistic promises (backed with vague action plans) on how the next 12 months will be ‘different’… Hoping the audience is either too disengaged or guidable enough to believe it (or, ideally both). The Mon-tons and GC’s are out there and I know they won’t wait forever – it’s time for me to take accountability for the outcomes in my sphere of influence ride my fucking bike.

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