Uh-oh. I've joined the Freaky Cockpit Crowd

First off I want to post a picture of my Fat bike with a clean drivetrain:

In the middle of winter when my drivetrain is a thing of nightmares, I may well come to this post, sigh deeply, cry a little and in the process feel a little better.

Now to the censored circle in the room, my new handlebars. I've always had a bit of disdain for overly complex cockpits. When I would see bars with all kinds of stuff on them I would think to myself "ruh roh, koo koo", and "c'mon man, who needs all this shit"? Well, the post title has already tipped you off to the fact that I can no longer sit in judgement of anyone's setup.

After fooling around with my new butterfly bars, of course what I liked best was kind of upside down and backwards from the product photos. That would have been OK I guess, had I not ended up going a little crazy with extra stuff. The censored circle:

And now, the explanation nobody really cares about, complete with handy diagram:

1 - Overly snazzy mirror, because that's what would mount properly on this bar. This thing sticks out about a foot, which is nice for its vehicular space-making features. It is awful sporty though. Or is it sporty awful?

2 - Headlight. Need one of those.

3 - Good old lock-on grips. I have always liked the solid feel of them. I removed one of the clamps so they would meet up more seamlessly with the, urg, foam. I am overcoming my aversion to foam I think. If I fail, I will have to wrap tape around all this crap.

4 - Brake hood stand-ins. When I flipped the bars they became much like normal drop bars on the top corners, and back when I used drop bars I spent most of my time on the brake hoods. I cut some old bar ends short and now they serve the same purpose brake hoods did, stoppers that keep my hands from sliding down and forward.

Advocates of trekking/butterfly bars are all about the numerous hand positions. Although there are technically 4 or 5 hand positions available to me, the reality is that there are 3 that feel good to use; on the high horizontal grips, on the "brake hoods" which allows me to rotate my wrist 90 degrees and is awesome, and the low horizontal bits for the odd time I want to hunker down.

Well, that about sums it up, riveting stuff, I know!

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

PS - If you are a card carrying member of the freaky cockpit crowd, reach out. I'm sure we can find some sort of cult-ish deprogramming camp where we can together be brainwashed into being normal, or at least stopping here, vowing never to complexify further.

PPS - If you have ever been deprogrammed, please accept my apologies for being an insensitive jerk. Also, where was it? Can you refer me/us? Ooh! Even better, can you get me/us a discount?

PPPS - Oh man, I've dug quite a hole, haven't I? How about a nice blanket sorry for everything I've written, today and every other day. Sorry.