Tag: motorcycle

Tri, tri, tri

Before returning to the backyard bog paradise where hints of autumn tinge the tree leaves bordering the bog, we look once more at the consequences of quality control…

My boss, concerned about the major oil leak on his brand-new Iron 883, took the motorbike back to the dealership yesterday and was told it would be a week before he got his bike back because the service department was so filled up with work.

Reminds me why there are so many Volvo and BMW certified mechanics. Image-conscious drivers/riders are willing to sacrifice quality for looks and less time on the road. Lol

Anyway, last night I ran into three cool fellows sitting on their Can-Am Spyders. They exclaimed what a joy riding the trike would be should I shell out 18 thousand. They were genuinely pleased with their purchase decisions.

Hmm…

Ride, ride, ride…

My boss bought a blacked-out 2019 Harley-Davidson 883 off the showroom floor and it’s already leaking significant oil.

My ’07 Honda Shadow Spirit, chrome and black, still doesn’t leak fluids.

Quality control — which company handles it better?

I’ll take a well-made product over one with a reputation for producing weekend mechanics out of new owners.

I remember taking a tour of the local H-D dealership and the head of service saying, “When you buy from us, you’re not just buying a motorbike like the ‘metric’ brands, you’re joining a special club, like a band of brothers.”

When the head of service has to sell an image, you know the product must have quality issues!

People may have more Harley-Davidson tattoos than Honda tattoos because they’re sold on an image…of DIY repair?

But at least my boss can enjoy riding the open road between visits to the H-D service department. He repairs his own car so he’s ready to repair his H-D motorbike, too, when the warranty expires.

A story with no in or end, in n-to-the-n parts

Tonight, whilst riding my motorcycle, enjoying the new heel-toe shifter, I watched the sunset.

Lines, thick yet thin, of water vapour — clouds — reflected reds and yellows, some green, some blue, then fading to gray-blue, then gray and finally toward a black sky as the Moon, almost fully illuminated, guided me from its rising position in the east.

I rode.

I rode and I thought.

I thought and I rode.

The Ol’ Wandering Wonderer (or is it the Wondering Wanderer? I’m never sure who) rose in my thoughts as I rode.

I don’t want to be myself, the messenger carrying a message millions of years old.

Who, me?

Who am I?

I do not change, not in the sense of an entity, a set of states of energy, that morphs from one character to another, telling and retelling itself the story that must be told, in the right format at the right place and time.

When?

Where?

How?

The reporter/journalist in me steps in to work up a good lead paragraph in opposition to the writer who wants to hint, leading the writer on many goose chases, down dark alleys, into and out of dead ends, hinting, pulling, dragging, suggesting, selling, cajoling, begging, if need be, to take the reader on a journey where one forgets one’s self, oneself, one, self, further in, farther away from real life, if such exists.

Of course, nothing is real.

Thus, all is imaginary.

Long ago, I quit questioning my role as messenger.

I accepted the inevitability of the possibility that me and my message are messing with someone, something, outside of my imagination.

I cannot know what I do not know.

I can only traverse the boundaries of what I do know, building a library, a repertoire, a list of limits that define what is there but I cannot see or comprehend.

I build upon the works of those who existed before me, of those in my time, with an eye toward those who will exist after.

I do not want to be the messenger simply because I want to believe I am a random set of states of energy that will disperse and be quickly forgotten.

Neither is my choice.

As I rode from suburb to countryside and back, I passed through times, eras, hopes, dreams, despair, disrepair and discoveries. I also passed by a housing estate where the strong smell of marijuana smoke emanated from behind a backyard fence.

I rode past an assisted living facility built beside an elementary school. How many children sitting in their first year class will end up 70 to 90 years later needing someone to change their adult diapers next door? How many already have?

Dozens of insects died on my helmet visor.

Whilst riding, I pondered how I wanted to retire from carrying all the selves with me, either in my thoughts or here on this electronic page.

When I gave up every social media creative outlet but blogging, I decided to cut back entertaining myself and others with the characters I conjure out of the miasmic effervescence which permeates my being, outer shell upon outer shell of shills, shellack, shells and smells which I used to hold up to protect my self from the cruelly arbitrary universe.

It took me long enough but I finally learned there is no one and nothing to protect myself from.

Nothing and no one stops me from being me.

To be sure, there is the general social order which governs our shared space, including language and mannerisms with which we communicate our needs/wants to others.

However, I’m past the point in my rebellion against arbitrary authority that used to fuel my contrariness to speak sarcastically, sardonically, cynically and slyly.

I no longer seek to change the social order.

I have found my peace, where, if I don’t like a driver in front of me waiting to turn at an intersection, I’ll honk my horn, knowing the echoing imitative effect will resonate amongst drivers until, mere minutes later, another driver behind me will incessantly lay on the horn when I hesitate a microsecond to pull out of the way.

I am still the carnival hall of mirrors that comically reflects the behaviour of those around me.

Last night I finished reading a set of practical philosophical ideas by Matthew S. Crawford about shop class as soulcraft first published as an essay, which later became the book I purchased for $4 from a used book seller called McKay’s, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work“.

In the first “half” of my life, up to about age 47, I lived primarily as a white collar office worker. I’ve chosen to live the second “half” of my life, as long as I’m able, as a blue collar worker.

I never took shop class in high school. I was bred to attend college preparatory classes and did.

I always fought against the college prep life, beginning as best as I can remember around age 16.

Having been bred and nurtured for the college/white collar life but then realizing that I was mentally wired for something else led me in the wrong direction for a long time.

Now, having accomplished all the white collar attainments put before me by the society of my youth, I turn to the life of the tradesman.

So far I’ve stocked the shelves of pet stores and pharmacies, building cardboard displays to help companies sell prepaid “credit” cards, seasonal children’s toys and pet insecticidal pills; cleaned and restocked refrigerators/freezers at a big box store; packed and delivered blood products; stored and packed medical supplies. I’ve built a treehouse. Mowed the lawn again. Learned to ride and maintain a motorcycle. Picked up the hobby of fishing and kayaking. Learned ballroom, East/West Coast swing, zydeco dancing. Dug, planted and harvested a vegetable garden. Built and grew a raised bed herb/flower garden. Constructed a greenhouse. Repaired a barbed wire fence.

What’s next?

Where and to whom do I pass on the message intertwined amongst my sets of states of energy in motion?

How much louder will the tinnitus get?

Regardless, I relax.

No more worries.

No more entertaining others with my cast of characters.

Be me, simply so.

I am comfortable in my skin, no longer pretending to be a person I never really was or will be.

Heel thyself!

Bought a handmade heel shifter off eBay for my ’07 Honda Shadow Spirit.

Pretty easy to attach with a 14mm socket and an Allen/hex wrench — five minutes including time to find my Allen/hex wrench set!

Just don’t do like me and forget your kickstand is up when you go to park the motorcycle after testing the heel shifter and then lay the motorcycle on its side. I’m almost getting too old to lift 500 pounds by myself.

This “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” stuff is more fun than I thought. Meditation in motion! Love it!

Minimizing vortices

Whilst investigating the possible fairing styles for my motorcycle, I ran across many sites dedicated to aerodynamic studies which I forgot to bookmark, but you can perform an Internet search as well as I can.

Both serious:

And fun:

The important point was the issue of not creating a vortex behind the fairing, rider and rearend of the motorcycle.

Major motorcycle manufacturers have spent millions of pounds/dollars/yen on wind tunnel tests, simulations and track tests for such additions as winglets which I neither can afford to duplicate nor want to.

Instead, I’ll rely on the ol’ noggin for guesstimating the design I want which will reduce vortices without turning me and my motorcycle into a wind sail or a wing with a lot of lift.

I’ve decided to first experiment encasing my ride at lower speeds by building a motorbike (top speed 25-30 mph without engine mods) and testing some easy-to-assemble fairings for it.

Balancing lift and downforce will be quite different between the two machines, I know, but it’ll be fun testing different designs anyway.

Progress…

I’m old and slow so mounting the rear gear plate by first removing the back wheel…

…and then mounting the plate…

…took an hour more than it should have to get the plate aligned perfectly.

Mounting the engine took even longer because the bike frame is wider than the mounting bolts…

A trip to the local hardware store for longer bolts, as well as rigging up my own antivibration plate with a personality…

…solved the problem — engine mounted!

House chores await so it may be a week or so before I get back to the motorbike. 🙁

Where is the future?

By now the future should be closer to 25-50% electric/autonomous vehicles on the road.

But I don’t see it, at least not here in this mega-tech oasis called Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

Instead, SUVs and jacked-up trucks seem to dominate the pothole-filled old-fashioned asphalt highways.

Fossil fuel use still fills the tanks of single-occupant vehicles crowding the streets.

With that confluence of congestion influencing my thoughts, I “window shop” for motorcycles and motorbikes like the petrol-powered Phatmoto:

Maybe it’s time to build the 79cc motorbike engine from a box of parts in my garage?

Sunday evening mediation: Life after father

Fading into the background of life, as I decided to do upon retirement in 2007 at age 45, has taught me to appreciate the silence that lack of conversation with other humans has given me.

With silence, then appreciation, comes reflection.

As either Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong (who described himself as a “white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer”) said after they’d traveled to the Moon and back, going on a world tour, fielding questions about what they thought when they were on the Moon, paraphrasing, “The reporters wanted us to answer them like poets or philosophers but if we were either one of those we wouldn’t have been the ones who’d gone to the Moon.”

“I wanted to say something profound, something meaningful,” Buzz Aldrin wrote in his 2009 autobiography, Magnificent Desolation, named for the words he uttered after stepping onto the moon’s surface 40 years earlier. “But I was an engineer, not a poet; as much as I grappled with the quintessential questions of life, questions of origin, purpose, and meaning… I found no adequate words to express what I had experienced. Yet I recognized that people wanted me to provide them with some cosmic interpretation gleaned from the lunar landing.”

In Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin describes telling two different psychiatrists about “always being known as the second man to walk on the moon, and continually being reminded of that fact.” To some extent, it clearly grates on him still. He recently told the National Geographic that being forever introduced as the second man on the moon gets “a little frustrating.”

Portrait of American astronauts, from left, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong, the crew of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to the moon, as they pose on a model of the moon, 1969.Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images

= = = = =

I have been a poet-philosopher my whole life, more apt to write than act.

In the past few weeks I’ve asked myself why I ride a motorcycle. I’ve watched a lot of motorcycle-related films such as “Silver Dream Racer” and “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.”

What do I get out of increasing the tinnitus noise in my head? What do I get from increasing my chances of dying on the road? Why do I put up with stop-and-go city traffic on steep inclines trying to keep my motorcycle from rolling backward whilst changing gears? How can I compare myself to the tattooed/smoking Harley riders or kids on Ninja bikes?

I even drove to the local motorcycle dealerships looking for the next perfect ride, including a barely-used 2015 Honda NC700X:

It’s not about the “what,” “why,” or “how.”

Riding is like climbing a mountain, because it’s there.

Yesterday, I watched a film called “Marjorie Prime” about a mid-21st century future where we have a digital assistant who/which is a projection of someone familiar in our lives, a projection that learns about us as well as about itself so that it can interact with us in an approximation of the loved one it represents.

For those of us who remember, the “Marjorie Prime” digital assistant is like a 3D version of the ELIZA software program from the 1960s.

But for me, the film reminded how much I missed my father. Dad has been dead for over seven years now which has given me time to forgive myself for holding negative thoughts about my father which were over-exaggerated in my thoughts compared to the real person Dad was.

Dad was the only person I cared enough about to share my enjoyment of mechanical things like cars, motorcycles, airplanes, lawnmowers and heat pumps.

After Dad died, sharing the things I’ve learned, like changing the water pump on a 1962 Dodge Lancer, or changing the oil on my 2007 Honda Shadow Spirit…well, there’s just no one like Dad to share them with.

I’ve tried. I really have.

But the people I talk to have lives or body piercings/tattoos/haircuts I don’t understand that get in the way of the mechanical stuff.

As my social life dwindles down to just my wife and me, containing a little social interaction with my boss and a few coworkers (but where I mostly work by myself all day, sometimes taking short phone calls for medical supply orders in between filling orders alone in a stockroom/loading dock area), I realize what I’m missing by not willing to understand others who are different than/from me.

But I am old beyond my years.

When 80- or 90-year old men think I’m close to their age while the calendar says I just recently turned 57, then I know the wisdom of my years shows itself in the thoughts of others.

I wish I had more to give.

Today, I watched a film called “The Flying Dutchmen” about a young man who took his older mentor on 3000-mile motorcycle trip to the Pacific Ocean.

The film reinforced feeling lost without my father’s guidance.

Dad and I didn’t share enough road trips together although we enjoyed several, including an Indycar race weekend in Long Beach, California, a vintage racecar weekend at the Mid-Ohio racecourse, NASCAR races in Bristol, TN, and Charlotte, NC.

He and I also traced the paths of our ancestors on a trip to Norfolk, VA and down the Atlantic Coast to Cape Hatteras, NC.

So, you see, my father was the person with whom I shared road trips about mechanical objects that move fast.

I love my wife dearly and miss her much (thank goodness she’ll be back tomorrow). She and I share everything with each other.

Well, almost everything.

I don’t fully share her love of handmade cards although I appreciate it when she makes one for me.

She doesn’t share my love of tinkering around in the garage on my motorcycle or building structures like treehouses or wooden bridges in the backyard.

Yet we love each other for our differences.

I would like to take a cross-country motorcycle trip with someone I love but my wife won’t ride on a motorbike and my father is dead.

Also, I can’t see taking a Dad version of the “Marjorie Prime” digital assistant on the road with me would have quite the same effect.

I still dream of traveling somewhere, around the world or to the Moon, on a motorcycle or flying machine.

However, already I drove my parents’ station wagon from Knoxville, TN, to Seattle, WA, to Los Angeles, CA and back by myself in Sept/Oct 1984.

I wonder if reliving that 1984 trip on a motorcycle in the next year or two would make that dream of mine a reality? With whom/what would I ride to give me closure?

Would this blog be enough? After all, I’ve written to myself for just about as long as I could write, always with an eye toward readership by more than one person, always freely, never for money.

If I wanted more readership I would stick to posting photos of the sights around me, whether here in our yard or on the road, leaving out personal philosophical commentary, adding notes to enhance the image rather than give insight into the writer. I understand that only a small number of readers are interested in what I have to say about my personal life unless there is something to increase the reader’s personal understanding of self. I used to struggle with the imaginary connection between writer and reader but then realised I needed/wanted to be myself, not a well-crafted writer, so I’ve let go of the image of the Perfect Reader in my thoughts, the Other, the Not-I/Not-Me, the Yin to my Yang, that sort of thing.

No compromise.

I also used to think I had to keep growing, keep improving myself, feed the work ethic, perfect my craft.

But I get bored in pursuit of perfection. I just want to have fun which takes me in many directions, rarely any one direction for very long.

I have read/heard that perseverance in pursuit of perfection pays off proportionally to our sense of purpose. The ol’ 99% sweat, 1% talent saying.

My wife and I are already self-invested millionaires who’ve lived beneath our means whilst working at jobs with modest incomes. Do I really need any more financial/social reward for having fun?

In other words, I’m telling myself it’s okay to say, “Dad, I sure miss you. I always felt like I could have done more to make you proud of me but that was in my own thoughts. Except for your comment that you’d wished I’d gotten a PhD or some other professional degree, you often told me you were proud of me just the way I was, a creative writer who was able to achieve success in many different (and at different levels of) industries without going completely mad by what we both saw, in our shared snobbishness, as the general idiocy of the average self-important human manager.”

I thank those who’ve taken the time to post comments on my blog entries, or clicked that they liked what I’ve posted. In my deepest depressive moments, I’ve found comfort in believing that some future blog post will make someone feel generous enough to like what I’ve written/posted.

I’m an old man now, bordering on becoming a curmudgeon, in part because I see I don’t have as many days ahead of me as I do behind me, shortening my patience, decreasing my tolerance/kindness and increasing my insensitivity.

Even so, I will do my best to heed the advice of Thumper’s mom to listen to what my father might have said, “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”