It feels like the month-of-July-long heat has "broken" for whatever that's worth. It means walking outside and thinking Oh, this isn't that bad, meaning it doesn't feel like I'm about to spontaneously combust. And that's all it means. It's still wretched hot, but optimistically knowing it could be worse. These are the standards we're working with here.

And my daily-use street bike effectively "broke". Of all things, it was the seat tube that broke near the top where the seat post inserts into the tube. Can't be fixed. It's because I set the seat high like on my road bike to get the most power out of leg extensions (who thinks like that for a clunker bike?). But low-end street bikes aren't constructed like road bikes and setting the seat high basically created a lever point near the top of the tube and after about or over 10 years of pressure on that point, the steel just ripped. This wouldn't have happened if I set the seat lower, I shouldn't wonder. I'd never've thunk it. There must be a metaphor in here somewhere.

I can still ride it standing on the pedals so it still has limited use (alcohol runs to the mega-mart), but it's no longer a comfortably assumed daily-use ride. It means my daily routine has to be re-tooled for not having my own bike and utilizing Taipei's YouBike bike-share. And walking.

Unlike if my computer broke, I'm not even thinking of buying a new bike. This is a permanent disturbance in my dearly-held daily routine, but not a fatal one, just another brick in the wall. I'll try working with it and assess the annoyance factor. But it hints at how fragile I'm treating my life and routine. This isn't going to make me definitively decide to end things, but shows how things can be shaken, and at some point something's gonna change and shake so much that I'll supposedly decide that's it. Everything changes, I'm waiting to see how much change is too much for me, short of funds running out, having to move, losing running water or any number of things that trigger the fack-fackitty-fackaroo.

This kind of bike is commonly used by anyone in Taiwan. I wouldn't be caught dead riding something like this in the U.S., as temptingly intriguing as a sight that might be (the dead part, not the bike part). Note the height of the seat. The seat post doesn't go very far into the seat tube, and every time I grabbed the back of the seat to maneuver the bike manually it put strain at that juncture. If the seat were lower, the pressure would've been more spread out along the tube. 

Detail of the seat tube steel rip. If I grab the seat from the back, the whole thing levers forward and I imagine it wouldn't take much force to just tear it off completely. I've found if I lift the seat from the front to maneuver the bike manually, it's fine. I also found that I could lightly ease myself onto the seat for balance and that's more stable than riding standing on the pedals. I won't try putting my full weight on it anymore, though.