A few weeks ago my commutey bike got stolen.

I didn’t feel like writing about it at the time.  It was a personal loss.  It’s funny how the value of that bike couldn’t be much more than 100 bucks on the street, but it has proven to be painful and expensive and difficult to replace.

A long time ago I lived in a very strange place called The Carleton.  It was basically an old hotel above an all-night pizza place in down town Berkeley.  Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber lived in the same building at one point, way before he became the Unabomber (however, I suspect The Carleton may have been the starting point of his insanity).  I moved there when I was a freshman in college – half my stuff got stolen the day I moved in.  There was no bathroom or kitchen, just a sink in the corner and one window overlooking Telegraph Avenue and a communal bathroom down the hall.  You could squeeze a microwave in the room, but there wasn’t much point because the cockroaches that crawled into and around the warm electronic screen would just ruin your appetite.  I suspect one of my neighbors was in house arrest, as he spent hours walking up and down the stairs with huge weights duct-taped to his ankles and I never once saw him leave the building.  Sweating like crazy.  Another was 92 and died but we didn’t know for weeks until the smell overpowered that of the pizza.  Then there was Ed, who was only in his 70’s, but the man was an incredible chimney of a chain smoker, and I hear he has passed away as well.  Not all the Carletonians were crazy or old, some were incredibly normal college kids and some were just plain old little kids. 

It was a funny place and lead to funny things, like throwing Snap-It lil firecrackers at noisey people out the window and driving my Honda scooter in the building, up in the elevator, and hiding it in the indoor hallway from the manager. 

The Carleton was very centrally located, so when I moved out after four years, I found myself in need of a commuter bike finally.  A friend of mine had just moved to a new place in Oakland, and low and behold we found a tiny sized Japanese steel frame, fork, and wheels abandoned in the bushes in the backyard.  I picked it up and rode across town on a mountain bike, with the new bike hooked around my shoulder.  It’s not that easy to do, especially in traffic.

I peeled off the stickers, added wrap-around handle bars, sparkle blue grips, metal silver fenders, a basket, and a Brooks B17 saddle.  And a 34 cassette for riding the tank around the hills. And suddenly I had a beautiful stealth ride to freedom – commutey. 

And then suddenly, like I said, I opened the door to the storage room and the bike was gone.  Without a trace.  It seems so strange that someone would want to steal my bike, get it . . . MY BIKE, not their bike, mine, that I keep wondering if maybe I locked it up somewhere and forgot about it? 

I keep my eyes peeled for my commutey.  But so far no luck.  It makes me pretty sad, especially since my favorite thing to do is casually cruise the streets in the afternoons.  And now I have to walk . . . everywhere, slow, boring, and stuffy.  I search craigslist for something reasonable, but lets face it - it’s all other peoples phoney fixe crap up there now. 

I am hoping I can love another bike, but not so sure.  Maybe at the bike show I will find something new that will work out, or I might be heading back to the central location of the Carleton where you really don’t need a commutey.