Why am I Mr. Pink?

I grew up with an Atari 2600 as my first gaming system,.. which originally cost $189 then... which is the equivalent to $811 now?  Anyways, it came with this controller:

Of course we had the paddle controllers, and eventually the driving paddle because the OG paddle couldn't drive a car, but essentially they were all a knob and a button.  That's it.  Movements and a single action like jump or shoot.  It was buenos.

I went to my friend's house years after we got our Atari, and he had Colecovision.  

Jeebus.  He had a baseball game, and you had to know which button did what in order to play.  He destroyed me.  Every single time.  I could barely throw a pitch.  It was absolutely frustrating,

Eventually (long story short), my dad owned a video store, he rented Nintendo and later Super Nintendo and Playstation, so on slow days at work, I eventually learned how to play with consoles that required you to know how to use more than one button.  Graduate college, become a parent... lose free time to play video games... and lose touch with the concept.

When my kids finally grew old enough to play video games, I was back to square one in my familiarity with how to use a multi-button controller and my lack of patience and desire to learn.  The squeeze was not worth the juice in my adult life.  Fighting games were just a fat-fingered fury of trying to hit as many buttons as I could as fast as possible hoping that my bezerker fight mode would somehow prevail against my opponent who knew exactly what he was doing (it rarely did).

I haven't been 35 for quite awhile... and I was 34 when I started riding single speeds... so...

There you have it.

I have definitely been struggling with using my gears on the Epic EVO when riding in technical terrain.  I'm often in the wrong gear AND experiencing a hazardous amount of pedal strikes as my pedals are spinning around not in a 32/18-20 as I'm used to, and the rear end of the bike is always sqaurshing around as it do.  It's alarming when I'm in a precipitous place and the penalty for failure is a decent roll down the side of a mountain.

That said, I do enjoy coasting down things and not worrying about rim strikes as much as I do on my hard tail.

But one of the things I was looking forward to when I got a geared bike was tackling technical climbs again.  As someone who started mountain biking on a 3 X 8 drive train which is arguably more complex to operate than a 1 X anything, I'm perplexed with my difficulty in embracing and enjoying all the options at my thumb/finger tips.

Gears don't matter much when you're "riding" over to Brown Mountain from the Sinkhole side of Pisgah.

My berzerker fighting style isn't helping things.  Randomly smashing buttons is not the way to win this fight.  Nor does following Todd up a climb and looking at his cassette which is a Shimano 11-46 and I'm on a SRAM 10-50 and if I look down to see where my chain is, I'll fall to my death...

Bryan will attest that this is indeed steeper than it looks.

What I do like is the option to do long climbs at a speed and comfort level of my choosing.  That super long and punchy ascent outta the deep hole on Brown Mountain (5.5 miles, 1,400+ feet) is an exercise of patience, timing, and brute strength to make in one pull without getting off on a single speed.  I've done it many times before... but ooof.

So it was nice to take it "easy."

Relatively speaking.  It's a long way to the top when one wants to rock and also roll.

But the down is so worth it.

I did get better as they day moved along, and I'm sure with more consecutive rides to practice, I would improve drastically... but I'm not gonna do it.  I'd miss my single speed too much.

And no, I still have no plan to SS this bike as that would defeat the purpose of owning it...

But it does reinforce how much I like modern geometry AND my desire to do a rigid single speed with a slacker head tube, steeper seat tube, longer reach, and shorter stem... but... money?

Putting all my YOLOs up against my YORO* and being an adult and priorities and stuff.

Money isn't real, but apparently the bill collectors still like to have it.

*You Only Retire Once