They can’t be given every year, but depending on your giftee, there are some nifty (and easy) go-to items that don’t always cross everyone’s minds. If your birthday boy (or girl) rides a bicycle at all, or needs to look like an 80’s hair band singer, bike gloves are a great thing. Partly, it’s because bike riders spend time thinking “Where the heck did I leave them THIS time?” Eventually, there won’t be time to look for his or her favorite gloves and he or she will gleefully go to the ‘spares’ (i.e. the ones YOU gave last Christmas) which spend most of their lives stuffed in the bottom of a camelbak pouch. So having three or four pairs scattered here and there is a real luxury, and they’ll bless your name when the time comes. I speak from experience. Next time: The luxury of being given a tool box. Yep, that’s it. Tool Box.
I’ve been happy to have been given some low-end fifteen dollar bike gloves, and I’ve even given some in a pinch. You can troll the bike shops and see what’s there. Or, if you don’t have time and want some slightly nicer gifty gloves, you can click on the gloves below and shop ’em from here.
Here’s the computer file of the whole mural. There are no electrical boxes and exit signs to interfere, although the I-beams on the roof are marked in for space. And the access hatch that Lance’s torso fell across is marked in. Still, this is pretty much what the whole thing looks like. The impression you get while in the shop is different, because you can’t back up enough to get the mural to this scale in your line of vision (you’d find yourself in the back parking lot of the shop) In other words, you can’t actually see it at this size. You have to turn your head and scan across to get the whole thing. For scale, look at Lance’s bike. That’s a 1=1 scale bike that the shop owns, won at a charity raffle. Lance is full size. That makes it a pretty neat thing for the store to have. Because it’s behind and above you as you enter, there’s no “Whoa!” moment, at least not until you’ve been in the store and glance up at the colors. The only big difference between this file and the wall itself is that I was asked to scale back the shop logos in the sky and the parking area on the right. They’re not so obtrusive in the real version. Other differences are minor, decided on after seeing the thing on the wall.
Once upon a time, I painted a mural for a really good bike shop locally. It’s sixty feet long, eight feet high, and eight feet off the floor. Also, it has Lance Armstrong on it, and one of his bikes hanging right in front of a full sized matching illustration of the same bike. It’s kinda cool. I included every kind of bike I could think of- BMX, road bikes, mountain bikes, cruisers, hybrids, cyclocross, even kids bikes including those chopper-looking things that went through a vogue a few years ago. And unicycles, of course. It was fun.
Way back in 2002, I got to do this illustration for Dagger Kayaks. They had a deal going with Subaru, and every year would put some kind of entertaining graphic on a spiffy new car. This was one for 2003, I guess. I was at the Ocoee river a bunch that year, and expected to see it on the hood of a Subaru, but never saw it in person. If you saw it, let me know.
I’ve said in the past that I would try not to degenerate into crotch-area humor. But this is a product review, not a cartoon.
The subject of The Camp Shuffle comes up on long outdoors trips. Going down the Grand Canyon for a couple of weeks, say. Or taking your kids to Scout Camp. They warn the kids and warn them good, but you know somebody in the group will neglect to take proper showers or change his underwear or not take the proper precautions in the sweaty days of Summer camp.
I feel bad for them. Because I’ve gotten the Camp Shuffle. I’ve staggered along like the crippled sidekick in an old Western, wishing I could quit the hike, go back to camp and let my tenders heal. It happened this past June. I was miserable. I could have been MORE miserable, but another scout leader told a funny story about a buddy of his that got the Camp Shuffle. The guy had gotten some powder, figuring that would fix it all up. But, the story went, he bought MENTHOLATED powder. Everyone laughed, and I felt better. My drawers were uncomfortable in the extreme, but at least I hadn’t dropped menthol down in ’em. Ha. Hilarious.
This gave me a good idea, though. While the scouts were being taught or tested or whatever the heck during their Camp class, I’d step over to the trading post and see if they had anything for Camp Shuffle. I figured that if it was standard practice to lecture the kids about it during our first few moments at camp, surely the trading post would keep powder or something on hand. And they DID. They had two different kinds of Gold Bond powder. Regular, of which they had a dozen containers, and Extra Strength, of which they had two containers.
It hadn’t been that long since I’d heard the story about the idiot who dropped Menthol down his pants, so I looked over both bottles carefully. ‘Extra Strength’, the one bottle said. ‘Healing’, it said. ‘Triple Action Relief’ it said. ‘Cooling, Absorbing, Itch Relieving’ so far so good, and I’d exhausted the front of the bottle. No mention of ‘Mentholated’. The directions on the back say, ‘Apply freely up to 3 or 4 times a day’. It also says, under ‘Uses’: temporarily relieves the pain and itch associated with: minor cuts, sunburn, insect bites, scrapes, prickly heat (!) minor burns, rashes (also “!”) and minor skin irritations. The ‘Warnings’ say it’s for external use only (good. I had no plans to eat it.) and to keep it out of my eyes. (also, no problems. I’ve never powdered my eyes and couldn’t see a reason to start.) There was some ‘ingredients’ list at the bottom. It didn’t mention ‘menthol’, though it did say ‘methyl salicylate’, which worried me since I had no earthly idea what the heck it might be or if I wanted it on my tenders. But I figured that there were only a few ‘Extra Strength’ bottles left because that was the kind everyone bought. And I bought the Extra Strength.
Then I went to the car. It was very close and mostly, no one goes to the parking lot during the day, so the lot was empty. I opened both doors on one side, stepped between them, and discreetly medicated my nether regions.
Which is to say I set my own crotch on fire.
Fire. fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire!
While I am trying to hold still and wondering if I should, maybe, run around or call for help or die or something, my son comes up from the trading post. He said… something that didn’t have to do with testicle fires, so I don’t recall what it might have been.
Nerve endings, says my wife who was a burn nurse for many years, die. They burn up and the victims of fires no longer feel the pain- not until they begin to heal, that is. I decided, while standing there sweating, panting, gasping and trying to answer my son (I thought, I’ll tell him I’m okay. Everything’s okay and I love him very much. Those would be good last words.) that I would just wait until there was enough nerve damage that I could get on with the day.
Finally, things changed. The fire didn’t go out, you understand, it just started oscillations between nuclear fire and nuclear winter.
fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice
I had never thought that I’d be happy to have my gonads light up and freeze over and over again, but I assumed that any change in blinding furious pain was a good thing. Maybe someday I could live like normal people again, and this was the beginning of it.
•••••
Okay, that was about as funny as this story gets. Eventually, the pain turned into a confused discomfort that I was able to see through and deal with. It was probably only a couple of minutes that I had flop sweat, agonizing fire and ice and a sincere concern that I had crippled myself to the point of needing hospitalization. It seemed like longer, but you know how that is.
I finished the day and got back to our campsite. Another Den Leader with us had Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Powder. I used it that night and the next day, and didn’t have another minute’s discomfort.
So here’s the conclusion: If you have Camp Shuffle DO NOT put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. Even if you DO NOT have Camp Shuffle, do not put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. If you have a bitter, bitter enemy for whom you have nothing but a seething hell-born hate, and you find that you have an opportunity to put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in his shorts, DO NOT do it. It’s and evil thing to do, and you’re not that evil. No one is that evil.
You have some poison ivy rash on your arm or leg? It’s itching like crazy? Use Gold Bond Extra Strength powder. Use it. It’s fine. It feels good. It even smells kinda nice. Need something on your pits before you go out on a long hike? Go for the powder. Back of your neck a little sunburnt? Use it according to instructions. It’s good stuff.
But DO NOT put it on your genitals. Ever. Under any circumstances.
Last thing- I must have been in a desperate hurry to get relief. The label on the back of the bottle? Yeah, at the bottom there’s those ingredients listed? They’re ‘Inactive’ ingredients. Up at the top, Right under ‘Drug Facts’? THERE’s the ‘Active Ingredients’ and the first thing listed is ‘Menthol’ 0.8%. You might want reading glasses to see it, but it’s there. Oh, it’s there, my friends. On the label and in the bottle. It’s THERE.
On an only semi-related note… in this video they are using the non-mentholated Gold Bond:
By the way, THIS is the stuff I’m using next trip. Mostly cause ‘MonkeyButt’ is just too funny not to have on some kind of packaging around here. Click on the bottle if you’d like to buy some too:
They can’t be given every year, but depending on your giftee, there are some nifty (and easy) go-to items that don’t always cross everyone’s minds. If your birthday boy (or girl) rides a bicycle at all, or needs to look like an 80’s hair band singer, bike gloves are a great thing. Partly, it’s because bike riders spend time thinking “Where the heck did I leave them THIS time?” Eventually, there won’t be time to look for his or her favorite gloves and he or she will gleefully go to the ‘spares’ (i.e. the ones YOU gave last Christmas) which spend most of their lives stuffed in the bottom of a camelbak pouch. So having three or four pairs scattered here and there is a real luxury, and they’ll bless your name when the time comes. I speak from experience. Next time: The luxury of being given a tool box. Yep, that’s it. Tool Box.
