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"Maybe I ain't funny no more, you know? Like, maybe I ain't angry at nothin', for real, in my heart. I'm just not mad about it. I don't get it. You mother(bleep)ers want to kill yourselves, that's your business. Just don't do it on my porch." — Richard Pryor, “Live on the Sunset Strip”

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Cycling’s been good to me. When I first started working for VeloNews back in the late Eighties, I thought I had finally fused profession with passion. Two years later, when I quit newspapering for the tenuous career of a free-lancer, I was certain of it.

Cover the occasional bike race and trade show; meet the stars (and make fun of them); see and sometimes play with new toys before the unwashed multitudes even know they exist; all while getting paid, albeit in small bills and rarely on time. What’s not to like?

Lately, though, I’ve come to feel like the advance man for some sort of criminal carnival. And when the 2007 Tour began coming apart like a two-dollar skinsuit, that gang of bicycles lurking in my garage started to look like the wrong kind of crowd, the sort that might lure a guy off the yellow-brick road and into that endless field of blood-red poppies. So I avoided the garage, the way you’d avoid a bar with fresh bullet holes in the front window, or a horny Republican.

I mean, c’mon. Amid all the speculation about whether 2007 Tour de France champ Alberto Contador has any connection to that apparently immortal, massively retarded Spanish tar baby dubbed Operación Puerto, does anyone even remember that we still don’t know who won the 2006 Tour? Or wonder, as doper after doper gets busted or gives out with a tearful mea culpa 30 seconds after the statute of limitations has expired, whether the sport’s record books will eventually boast more asterisks than a Kurt Vonnegut novel?

While we’re on the topic of asterisks (and what Vonnegut intended they represent), the folks who promote the top-shelf events, run the teams and govern the sport continue to be more concerned with trying to grab a bigger slice of the pie than with the questionable ingredients in that pretty pastry, which looks so Betty Crocker on the outside but is so Island of Doctor Moreau on the inside. There are too many talentless chefs in cycling’s little kitchen, and they all act like they’ve been into the cooking sherry.

Frankly, like Pamela Landy in “The Bourne Supremacy,” we’re in a big puddle of shit and some of us don't have the shoes for it. For example, you will notice elsewhere on this site that Tailwind Sports has struck a chemically tainted headwind in its sponsorship search and will be climbing off the bike at the end of this season, despite winning eight of the past nine Tours, amassing a considerable pile of palmares in lesser events and graduating a not-insubstantial number of champions whose positive tests ensued while wearing other people’s jerseys. Tailwind won the big pots and now they’re fleeing the casino before the joker turns up. I’d run like a big yellow dog too, if I had their money, but you don’t strike it rich playing the penny slots with the rest of the chumps.

Frankly, there are days where I feel like hitting the door running anyway. A guy can always find some less despicable means of earning a living, like swindling the elderly, selling kidnapped babies over the Internet, or gassing puppies at the pound.

But it’s not about the money. Not for me, no sir. It’s about being able to work at home, barefoot, in sun-faded shorts and a wife-beater T, with a cat snoozing in the window.

I thought about that today as I granted a cyclo-cross bike a two-hour work release from the garage. I wasn’t on drugs, so nobody paid me any mind, and the bike didn’t try to take me anyplace I wasn’t ready to go. There are no bad bicycles, I thought. Just bad bicycle owners.

Besides, I’ve been playing piano in this whorehouse for 18 years now, and there’s almost always been something questionable going on upstairs. There’s just been more of it lately, now that the cops have joined the party. I’ll just have to start playing a little bit louder.

Did he hit all the right notes, or was he off-key again? Send your musical reviews to webletters@insideinc.com. Please include your full name, hometown, and state or nation. — Editor