Robot’s Useless Reviews—Park Blue Grease

Robot’s Useless Reviews aren’t really reviews. They take their cue from the impossibly obscure ’90s zine “Beer Frame—The Journal of Conspicuous Consumption,” which introduced the idea of reviewing books entirely based on their covers.

If you don’t have a tub of Park Blue Grease in your cycling potion bag, I don’t know what you’ve got in there. It’s basically the eye of newt for any bike repair. Do you really not have eye of newt? How are you going to cast any of the good spells, like Uncreak Bottom Bracket or Don’t Have Seized Pedals?

Park Blue Grease is available in a few sizes, but I prefer the tub. More things should come in tubs, and it is part of my very positive review that the container for this magic elixir is a tub. Other good things that come in tubs: fried chicken, lard, bubbles. Bad things that come in tubs: inseparable babies and bathwater. I mention this only for balance.

I don’t know why Park Blue Grease is blue. A more intrepid journalist would find out. Is it because Park’s iconic brand color is a sort of royal blue, and the creamy cyan of the grease is as close as they could come? Or is it all the eye of newt packed into this colloidal suspension of lubricity?

Yeah. That’s right. Lubricity.

This stuff is lubricious. It’s slippery. Other good things that are slippery: soap, ice, banana peels. For balance: snakes. An alternate definition for lubricious is “offensively displaying or intended to arouse sexual desire.” In this case, I think both definitions apply, but your predilections may vary.

When you get a new tub of Park Blue Grease, and based on my needs that happens about once every eight years, the first thing you should do is peel back the foil lid (satisfying in its own right) and put one very careful thumb print in the top layer of grease. Now step back and look at that one perfect thumb print. So good.

Another excellent thing to do is to put this same thumb print in a friend’s brand new tub of Park Blue Grease. In the pantheon of funny jokes, this is somewhere just below “replace toothpaste with hemorrhoid cream” and “shift friend’s bike into lowest gear while he/she pees behind tree.”

The Park Blue Grease tub measures 4.5-inches across, which means it sits on a shelf nicely, unlike many other lubricants that come in odd little plastic squeeze bottles and tubes which always fall over when you reach for one or the other, so then the whole mess stays a permanent mess. The Park tub does not contribute to that particular shit-show. It just sits there, waiting to be needed, like a bench vise or a psychiatrist.

The pro set up for the Park Blue Grease tub is to cut a hole in the lid and insert a small brush, left there for easy deployment of lubricious gold. I saw this configuration first on the shop floor of a custom bike builder, but then again on the bench of a particularly adept mechanic. My own mechanical skills relate to theirs as a butter knife might relate to a chainsaw, but I cut the hole in mine, and stuck in a brush.

Faking it till I make it.

The full name of Park Blue Grease is Park Poly-Lube 1000 Polyurea Grease, which basically means ‘Eye of Newt.’ Evidently, you can lubricate many things with it, because it’s a polylube. Also, it’s a polyurea. Urea “serves an important role in the metabolism of nitrogen-containing compounds by animals and is the main nitrogen-containing substance in the urine of mammals.” Possibly many mammals urinate into every tub. I don’t want to dig in too deep on that. Let’s just pretend I didn’t say it.

Finally, you can get your own tub of this lubricitous manna from heaven (St.Paul, Minn., actually) for just $18. And you should, for all the reasons. Except the urine thing. Please stop bringing that up.