This is The Shorts and you're listening to The Dirt Factories.

You know what they're going to put on your tombstone, Nick?

You should have bought that mountain bike.

My wife had had enough.

For two years, Nick talked about buying a road bike or maybe a mountain bike.

This has always been good with money, which means he always knows where it's going.

His decision-making on large purchases often precedes a glacial-like velocity.

We all lived within a one and a half mile radius of downtown Denver, where hundreds of cyclists,

from the most balladic bike messengers on fixies to day laborers on reappropriated magnets,

run the streets daily for most of the year.

Nick was watching all of them, debit card glowing white hot in his pocket.

The day after my wife made the tombstone remark, Nick walked into a bike shop here in Denver

and bought himself a black steel road bike.

For the next year, I listened to Nick talk about bicycling.

He talked about bikes, old classic ones, fixies, single speeds, old track bikes.

He talked about riding, whether it was down to the Cherry Creek Reservoir or Up Lookout

Mountain or the 50 mile midnight ride he went on.

You should get a bike, it'll change your life, he said.

I heard this over and over, like a nagging brake pad rubbing against the one wobbly spot

on a bike wheel.

Eventually, I began muttering about bikes.

Then I started saying it every week, then every few days.

...