jwm's world famous blog

Chopadero Doo Dah

2011-05-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

So What owns your brain time? What fills your head in that rare hour alone with your thoughts? Like when you're driving, for example. Long list of movies? Long list of books? The TV networks? The newspapers? The internet? The War? The End of the World as We Know It? Lots of foolishness masquerades as serious stuff out there, and if you pay too much attention it can just make you sick. What is important? What are you going to- well, do?
Sometimes the best choice is to allow yourself to relinquish your hold on the events of the world. If the Apocalypse comes on our watch, we won't be able to postpone it. We may as well enjoy the last days of the finest thing that ever happened on Planet Earth-

The miracle of Western Civilization.
Which is- slack.

That is- time on your hands, and the means to enjoy it.

Slack well done is a power plant that generates joy. It charges up the spirit, lightens the soul, and fills you with enough silly to laugh for days afterward. It heals you up from the abrasions caused by the media's daily assault on your sanity. Having fun makes you a happier person, and I believe that God wants us to be happy. But we still have to choose.

Small gestures are the seeds of great trends in our lives. The most casual decision spins out events in a vast web of coincidence that catches us up and connects us with others in ways we never dreamed possible.
But, once again-you have to choose. You have to make that casual decision, and extend the small gesture. Waiting for life to find you means sitting around and waiting forever. Television is dying to devour your slack.

In the meantime- what kind of stuff are you going to fold into your resume? When you see your life flash before your eyes in that last few seconds before The End- what kind of stuff will be on the screen? Your choice.
There is always the choice of either doing some thing, or doing no thing: Always choose Life, right? Even when it means asking yourself- just how much fun do I want to have here? It's like surfing- sometimes you don't realize how big the waves are until you paddle out to sea. And once you're out there, "I don't want to deal with this" is not an option. But I'm past the rash behaviors of my youth. Mostly. I mean, risking life and limb is out, but that still leaves a lot of cool stuff to do.

I'm on the Freeway heading for Pasadena.
And I can't shake the odd feeling that I'm paddling out into some big swell.
It's just a parade.
Yeah, but...

I've been hearing about the Doo-Dah Parade for years. It was originally a send up of the Rose Parade, but now any connection between the two events is a total accident. Still, it's a chance to put on a yearly freak show, and who in California can resist the opportunity? It's one of those events that gives Southern California its well-deserved reputation for kookiness. It's also one of those things like the Renaissance Faire- You say to yourself, "Yeah- some day I'll have to go see it," and then you never really go. But, as I noted earlier-Small gestures are often the seeds...

Browse around on the computer. Hit the 'gotta' have it' button.
And I'm getting off the 210 Freeway on Sierra Madre Boulevard heading south- hooking a left on Colorado Boulevard, East Pasadena. I pull off Colorado on Altadena, and there's a free parking place less than a block down. I pull the truck over, and I've got that deep water feeling again. I start unloading the Spoiler. I'm not just going to the Doo-Dah Parade. I'm gonna' ride in it with The Chopaderos.
And as always, I'm early.
The first truck of bikes pulls into the parking lot of the Comfort Inn right around when they said they would. Chuck, from Cyclone Coasters pulls around the corner. Here we go. The morning comes alive as bikes are unloaded, wrenches twisted, tires checked, greetings exchanged. Tada and his film crew are back. They rode along on the Cyclavia trip, and will be filming us again today. I got acquainted with a few of the Chopaderos from the Cyclavia ride, and a few other 'Deros come out for the monthly Cyclone Coasters ride in Long Beach. So I'm feeling less like a total stranger, which helps ease this recurring case of the willies- Just how much fun do you want to have? I've already paddled out.

Below- Bikes in the truck. All pictures click to enlarge

Below-Make unloading a brand new chrome plated cruiser

Just like Christmas

Everyone is saddled up. We get the signal, and a moment later the bikes in front of me are rolling. The Chopaderos get ready to make the plunge into the Do Dah. My feet are on the pedals, and there are no second thoughts. Just pay attention, and go. The pack rolls out of the parking lot, down Colorado, left at a side street, right at another, and we're there. Sort of. That is, we're in the staging area- the alleys, and small parking lots behind the storefronts on Colorado Boulevard. We jostle the dozens of choppers into our spot in line.

Southern California earns it's reputation for craziness. And I'm here with the Chopaderos getting ready to add to that reputation. We're right behind the Whistling Diva in her unrestored convertible 1970-something Volkswagen Thing, and right in front of a rock band dressed as Mormon missionaries- white shirts, ties, blacks slacks, bicycle helmets, and electric guitars. A spot or two behind them the Hare Krishnas are drumming, and chanting (with loudspeakers) while pulling along their circus colored juggernaut. There are women floating around in all manner of curious costume. There are folks in dog suits, stilt walkers, mask wearers, clowns, and queens of all genre and gender. And the Chopaderos outlaw bicycle club. Everyone waiting in the warm April sun.

Below- Welcome to RidiculousBelow- Mask wearers

Below- Women floating around in all sorts of curious costume

Below-And the Chopaderos Outlaw Bicycle Club

Below- Smog beast of the Whistling Diva

Below- Tada (plaid shirt) and crew never stop

Below-Queens of all genres

Compare and Contrast

Below- And Queens of all genders

Below- Last minute adjustment

And soon enough we hear air horns. The show is starting; the entries roll slowly forward. Remember the Whistling Diva, and her 1970-something Volkswagen? The last tune-up on that car called for new breaker points, spark plugs, and condenser. My guess is that the car was still under warranty when they did it. We inch forward engulfed in the cloud of toxic yellow exhaust belching out of those ancient pipes. This ain't good. The shirt and tie and helmet kids are rocking out behind us. We're getting close to Colorado. T hands out tortillas, and announces a quick change of plan. We're going to ride circles around the rock and roll helmet kids. Genius. This will extend our street time, and get us out from behind the smoggy Diva. Suddenly we're rolling, hooking a right on Colorado Boulevard, springing forward so we can heel a hard tight U-turn and loop back behind the rock band. I've done parade riding. It's a little tricky to ride a circle that progresses along a straight line, even with a regular bike, and the full width of a four lane street. Here all we get are the right two lanes. Some of these bikes (like mine) have a turning radius larger than a car's. Easy Rider this is not. This route is half a block down the right side of the street, a U-turn, a straight ride for a block before U-turning again, half a block more, then turn right to exit by the same street we enter from. The crowd spots the chopper gang on their bad ass bicycles. At this point everything sort of compresses into a blur. Tortillas and marshmallows are flying everywhere. We're crankin' on it, then going slow, coming to a full stop frequently, reach down and gather a couple stray tortillas, a marshmallow beans me back of the head, I'm riding again trying to get the Spoiler heeled around, zinging the tortillas Frisbee style, taking hits from marshmallows, getting all the way back to where the Hare Krishnas are pulling their float, and there's T off his bike leading the crowd in shouts to the laborers HEAVE HO, HEAVE, HO...,

Below- In the middle of the Madness

Below- Cutting back in front of the Hare Krishnas

Below- T off his bike directing the crowd. "HEAVE HO"

... and we're around the last U turn, stop to toss marshmallows at some kid, sling another tortilla, and the next thing, we're going right off of Colorado, back up the side street, around to the parking lot, and it's over.
Holy cow, what was that?

I have absolutely no sense of time right now- How long were we out there? What the hell just happened? Everyone's tires are full of marshmallows; how did we end up here? There is still a long line of parade entries inching toward the starting point. One by one they dive into the mosh pit. So when you see your life flash before your eyes in that last few seconds before The End- what kind of stuff will be on the screen?

The bike gang regroups. We pause for some picture taking, and then hit the street for a cruise down to a local watering hole. All the way down Colorado, people drive by honking their horns, shouting, giving the Chopaderos a thumb's up. We decompress for about an hour, and then head to the Dog Haus gourmet hot dog place for lunch.

Slack well done. It was all very good.

JWM

Bikin' with the Chopaderos

2011-04-11T09:25:00.000-07:00

Click to enlargenate

Eight thirty AM Sunday finds me alone in Mariachi Plaza, East Los Angeles.

Waiting. This is typical. I have a mania about being on time. Waiting, boredom, anticipation, I can handle, but I have an absolute horror of being late. The Chopaderos are supposed to be here at ten; I'm almost two hours early. I'm glad to be here at all. The weekend started badly, with toothache pain Friday morning. By Friday night it reached vicodin level. Saturday morning found me in the dentist's chair, fortunately with vicodin as a reward. No serious pain this morning, but I'm wrung out from pills and little sleep. That's OK. I'm here
.
From time to time bicyclists emerge from the underground Gold Line rail station, and head toward the Cyclavia starting point several blocks down Boyle Street. Today the city belongs to bicycles. Seven and a half miles of downtown are blocked off for bikes, skates, scooters- anything without a motor. Today I'll be riding with the outlaws. I've been looking forward to this the way an eight year old anticipates Christmas. Soon enough we'll roll, but for now, there is nothing to do but wait.

So, how did I get here? What are the links in the chain of events that finds me alone in Mariachi Plaza, waiting for an outlaw bicycle club called the Chopaderos early on a cool Sunday morning in April? It's always an interesting mind game to trace back the ties in the web of coincidence that connects all things in life, especially when you've got vacant brain time, like when you're driving. Or sitting and waiting. How do I find myself here?
I could go back to sometime in the early 70's, when I ran into a guy with a beautifully restored Schwinn Autocycle at Huntington Beach pier. That got me hooked on classic bikes, and got me started building my fleet. But I wrote about that in an earlier series of posts entitled The Jaguar Project. The first link in this particular chain came about a year and a half ago when I was filling in for the custodian at one of the local elementary schools. I was daydreaming about motorcycles- revisiting the cross country trips I made on the Harley back in the early 90's. Thinking about those long solitary summers on the road, the runs to Sturgis, the parties out in the backwoods of Tennessee, and West Virginia. And thinking how far behind me that stuff is, now. I took to searching out pictures of choppers on the web. How cool it would be to have the means to build one... Then I stumbled on to the picture of the Spoiler- a chopper with pedals.

I had to have that damn bicycle. I found one, bought it, and that got me going on bicycles, again. Soon I had it tricked out with a three speed, a suicide shift, a new saddle, and sissy bar.
But just having a chopper bike would have gotten me nothing except a reputation for being eccentric around my home town. The crucial link came when Mary and I were riding our (boring) comfort bikes around Huntington Beach. We ran into a guy that had an incredible old Shelby Airflow. He told us about Cyclone Coasters, a group that meets each month for an antique/classic bike cruise. I got the chopper bike up and running, and then set out to bring the classics out of the crates they'd sat in since the nineties. We got to the first Coasters ride last June. It was there that I heard about the Chopaderos.
A chopper bike club? You gotta' be kidding me. Really?
I had to look into this. And now I'm here in Mariachi Plaza, waiting. And soon enough I catch a glimpse of a truck loaded with long bikes pulling up around the corner. I wheel the chopper over to the far side of the plaza. This is it. They're here.

Click makes pic all big.

One by one, by two's and threes they arrive. I have met a couple of the guys a few times, but that's it. It's always a little awkward the first time you meet with a group, and unlike Cyclone Coasters, this group is an organized club. Nonetheless, I'm not stressing out over it. Getting older has its advantages- you learn to take things in stride, bide your time, and allow, rather than force things to happen.
These guys have some incredible bikes. Some are customized Basman cruisers, others are one off hand built choppers. A couple of young guys with video cameras are working their way through the growing crowd. They're shooting some footage for a possible cable TV project- maybe a viral web cast. They go about this like professionals, handing out releases, and video recording everyone's permission to appear on screen. Who knows? This may be the fifteen minutes of fame I've been told I have coming. I'll take it.

Pics grow huge with a click.

But now I'm hearing bells. The ride is about to begin. The group moves out by twos and fours and, Here we go! This is what I've been waiting for. I'm ridin' with the Chopaderos. The first leg of the run is down hill; we gain some fairly serious speed, and the fat rear tire on the Spoiler sings on the pavement. We approach the iconic bridge across the LA river filmed in countless television shows and heaven only knows how many movies. A stop on the bridge for a group shot...

Click me and I grow.

And then we're rolling again- through Little Tokyo, around through the artist district, and then we make the right onto 7th Street. This. Is. It.
Los-Goddamn-Sangeles!
The city in all its glory.

Here's where the strangeness of what we are doing hits home. These streets are never quiet. Cars, buses, truck, sirens.- gone. There are bicycles, pedestrians skateboards, and the soft hum of the crowd. Our pack moves slowly through the traffic, and everyone on either side does a double take, and points, as we pass. Guys on road bikes slow down and ask questions. Others just stare, incredulous. We pass a cop trying out some kid's three wheel scooter. Other cops are cruising along, or watching the few intersections where the ride is halted for cross traffic. They seem to be diggin' it. They're friendly, courteous, in synch with the vibe of the day. We pull off to the side near Hope Street. One of Chopaderos, Fez, has bike trouble.
The delay gives everyone a chance to take in the scene, and watch the parade of bikes pass by. You see a little of everything- road bikes, mountain bikes, cruisers, but we seem to be the only bunch on choppers. I'm a little surprised- I expected to see more stretch bikes, or some classics. I haven't seen anyone from the Cyclone Coaster group either, but this crowd is huge- easily in the tens of thousands. After about twenty minutes, or so the word comes down- Fez's bike is out of commission for now. So we we roll again.

Click to embiggen

Next pause is for a pit stop at McArthur Park. The sun is out, the sky has cleared up, there's a band playing, and the park is full of partiers. And the Real Rydas show up. This is an all black bike club on the most outrageous looking machines on the street. Bling is the theme: mirrors, chrome, multiple spare tires, zillion spoke wheels, and springers unbolted from the fork head, so the whole front end flips under the bike. I clicked a bunch of pictures, but only a couple came out.
Here's Fonda, meeting with the Rydas . (second pic)

These too shall grow-click

At this point the traffic is getting pretty heavy- just like LA on any normal day, only without cars. The cops are pushing us off to the side of the street, so we cruise on. Now we have to climb some hills into East Hollywood. That's the only drawback with a chopper- you can't stand up on the pedals, and grind; you gotta' just grit your teeth, and tough it out. But everyone makes it up the hill, past the pretty girl handing out grapefruit wedges, past the rock n' roll string quartet, around a few more turns, and then there it is- Melrose Avenue- end of the line.

Click to increase your size.

We hang out here for about an hour, and I'm glad for the break. I've been up since early, breakfast is a long ways down, and I don't want to eat on the still tender tooth. Here, there seems to be the mix of bikes that I did not notice on the pass through downtown- more cruisers, a few classics, a bunch of folks with quickly scribbled hand made signs protesting coal. Coal? Welcome to LA.

The ride back is mostly down hill. The day is getting late, and soon the streets will be opened for cars again. The group gets spread out very thin, and it's hard to keep track of the patches. As we return to the downtown area, I see the Chopaderos gathering at a corner bar. Bikes are thick as spaghetti around the place, and it's standing room only inside. I pull over, but by now I'm just beat. I want to hang out some more- want to keep this day going for just a little while longer, but my tanks are drained, my needle is on "E", and I have to just call it in.
So it's back through little Tokyo, back over the bridge, and then back up the steep incline to Hollenbeck Park that started this long strange trip. Beat as I am, I suddenly get determined to make this final hill without getting off to push. Crank by crank, yard by yard, it's like climbing out of the inferno, until I see the baricades. I stop at the corner of Boyle, and then coast back down the hill to the park. I come around the bend in the road. There's my truck. Waiting to take me home.
It's been a good one.

JWM

Cold Spring Afternoon

2010-04-14T07:06:00.000-07:00

Sunday I just needed to get out for awhile. It was drizzly, too cold for the bike, so I walked. These have been tense, and busy days and each one of them seems to call out almost all the juice that I have leaving nothing in reserve. Working early. Putting in a full hard eight, and maybe a bike ride to the corner. Up at midnight. Too much computer. Too many clicks, e-mails paypals and fedexes. Try to get back to sleep. Up at four for work. It won't last forever.

I got in a good ride and a good walk on Saturday, so I wasn't up for putting out some great athletic feat on Sunday. Nonetheless, I needed to just get out, and move. So I went down to the tracks. This year we've been lucky. Despite some pretty heavy rainfall (for So. Cal.) the trail along the easement has been spared attack from the Goofballs of four wheel drive. The dirt road heading east is mostly healed of the tire track scars from last year. The foot flattened path is easy to walk on again. The mowers haven't torn through here yet, and the wild grass enclosing the path is a good three and a half, or four feet high. It smells sweet in the cold gray wind.

There is a bunch of wheat that grows in the tall grass there along the railroad easement. I have, on occasion, taken the ripe kernels home, and planted them in pots in the yard. They grow; they produce kernels which ripen in turn. They taste OK too, but I've never had the impulse to gather a bunch of it, and then cook it, or make some sort of bread. Nonetheless, watching it grow interspersed with the weeds along the tracks, you feel like you can witness the first impulse to agriculture. Eh- maybe I will try gathering a bunch of it later on. It isn't nearly ready yet.

An old creekbed turned storm channel crosses the path along the easement, and there is a low trestle where, twice a day, the freight train crosses the dirty stream. A depression in the creekbed just before the trestle has created a small, dark pond. Enough water remains there year round to support a thick stand of false bamboo and a small forest of cattails where the black, murky water spills over into the stream under the bridge. You can't tell how deep the pond is, but you can tell it's deep enough to drown in. Kids have been sitting under that trestle, sneaking cigarettes, beer, weed, and sex since long before I discovered the place in 1966. Then the trestle was bolted together from heavy, black, creosote saturated timbers, and pilings. You couldn't stand up straight underneath it. It was hairball as all hell to sit under the trestle, feeling the ground shake, and watching tanker cars lumbering over the ties barely twelve inches above your head.

You gotta' go under there stoned on acid, man. It is sooo heavy...
I went there with that chick, and we...

Thanks 1968. Glad you reminded me.
The railroad rebuilt the thing some years back. They raised it up, a good eight or ten feet above the creekbed, and, of course the trestle is no longer made of wood, but concrete, and paved all the way across. It's no big deal to be there when the train goes by now. Kids still taste their first forbidden fruits under the trestle, but rather than pad discretely behind the houses at night to meet there, they advertise their presence with spray cans and paint sticks. The city hires a full time graffiti abatement worker to paint over the tagging on that bridge, and elsewhere along the easement.

When I got to the Beach Boulevard crossing I looked up the street the half mile or so to the corner. Go get a cup? No. So I just turned around, and headed back. I just didn't feel like walking up to the corner for coffee- head's too full of stuff, and while there are people I talk to up there, there is no one I really share anything important with. You know how that is. You want to talk to someone, but there just isn't anyone to talk to. Except for old John, that is. And I don't say anything to John that I don't want well mixed, and repeated. So I re-traced my steps, but when I reached First Avenue I still didn't want to go back home. So I walked back down to Beach again. Now what? Take the sidewalk through the neighborhoods? Go up Beach? Down? Feeling like the distilled essence of indecision, I just turned around and started scuffing back along the tracks again. What is this? What's wrong? What is it that I want?

When I got back, my mother let me know that opossums had come to visit. My mother likes possums. There were two of them snuffling around in the geraniums by the block wall. The one old guy had lost a tooth, and it looked like some cat had given him a bad scratch down the snout. One lip was kind of hanging open in a sad imitation of a tough-guy sneer, but like all opossums he just couldn't even do a bad imitation of tough. They're harmless, not very bright, and so pathetically ugly that they're endearing rather than scary. An opossum usually doesn't even have the good sense to run away. The big guy with the missing tooth looked up at me like he expected me to give him a snack. I didn't have anything to give him. The smaller one hung back a little, and peered at me from under the geraniums. They decided I wasn't much of a threat, waddled back to the corner of the yard, and climbed up the shefflera trunk to the block wall. They were good enough to pose for a couple of pictures before leaving.

JWM

Parting Company

2010-03-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

The den is a mess. It's usually disordered, and mostly messy, but now it is in total chaos. The place is a jumble of boxes, paper, tape, and bubble wrap. You have to climb in to get to the computer. This will last throughout the month of April. By the end of the first week in May, it will all be over, and my collection of Japanese die-cast robot toys will be scattered to the far corners of the globe. The old toys will have new owners. I'll have enough money to replace our crummy old cars with newer, somewhat less crummy used cars. Maybe have a few bucks in the savings account. We'll see.

I made the decision some months back. It was time to let the collection go.

It's kind of odd. I have all sorts of reasons to get nostalgic about this. I gathered the robot toys in the old collection during a wild, and eventful season of my life- first true love and serious relationship, friendships broken, trusts betrayed, fights, broken windows, lots and lots of booze, and dope.
And then the restless years- over a decade of not staying in one place for more than a few months. Apartment after apartment- the shelf going up in the living room, the collection taken out piece by piece, dusted off, and put on display.
This is it. I'm settled here. I'm done with moving...
And a few months later the room would again be full of boxes. The same boxes that held the collection after the first move. The same boxes from the Jr. High school where I worked back in the seventies. The box that held the Sony amplifier that I bought in seventy six. Those same boxes are empty now for the last time- piled on the back porch to go out with Wednesdays trash. The thirty year old robots are, one by one, being nested in crumpled newspaper, and secured in new Fed-Ex cartons, waiting to be shipped, same day delivery, to who knows where.

Like I said it's kind of odd that I don't have any sense of nostalgia over doing this. It occurred to me last night as I packed up the large, gift-box sets that will be the first to go up for sale- this is the last time I'm going to look at these things. I'll never see them again except in the pictures that are on my hard drive, or posted here on the wfb. Just like I'll never see Diane again. Diane was my first real girlfriend, the first true love in my life, and the one who gave me the silly talking Robocon that started my whole fascination with Japanese toys. Diane went on to marry well, and raise a family. She died this last year from cancer leaving behind a husband and two kids. The guy who was my closest friend back then called to let me know. I doubt I'll see, or hear from him again, and I do not care if I don't.
Anyway.
I packed up box after box last night, and it was a chore that needed to be done and nothing more. Wednesday I'll have to get out of bed at midnight to open bidding on the first, and most sought after item. That's going to be a pain. The auction will have bidders from all over the world. The best way I could come up with to ensure that people in Europe, Asia, and the Philippines all have a clear idea of when bidding opens and closes is to start the sales at midnight, and keep bidding open for a twenty four hour window. I'll survive.

Again though, what strikes me here is that I don't seem to have any palpable connection to the toys any longer. When I first bought them, each one was just a delight. For years I took great pleasure in setting up the shelves, working the transformations on the various robots, then periodically re-arranging the shelves. And when I brought the collection out of mothballs almost ten years ago that sense of delight was reawakened in me. I found Robot-Japan, the collectors' forum, on the internet, and learned for the first time, that there were thousands of people all over the world who, like myself, were just crazy over these things. I made friends on line, traded notes with people from all over the planet. It was a lot of fun.
And now it's just over- closing the door on one of the last tangible artifacts from a life I once lived, and a person I once was. It is a disturbingly easy thing to do. I'll be glad when it's all done.

JWM

Project Failure

2010-03-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

From jwm's world famous blog

'56 Starlet with three-speed

I finished up the work on the '56 Starlet last weekend, and put the old girl on the street for the first time in almost thirty years. Of course there were some bugs to work out. Even as simple a job as putting a three-speed on an old bike can give you a world of grief. But I got lucky. The little bugs were just that- small matters of adjustment that I got worked out with a little fiddling. The shifter works fine, and the heavy old machine is just a little easier on the legs than it was before.

And completing that project bolstered my confidence, and opened the door on the big project I've been anticipating for a couple of months now- putting the big three speed hub on the chopper bike. In fact, I used the picture of the stick shift mount to head up the last post here on the wfb. I was going to wait for the weekend, but I'm working the 6:00 AM to 2:30 shift, and daylight savings gives me a long afternoon. I couldn't wait for Saturday, so I ripped into it on Tuesday after work.

Taking the bike apart is easy. Machines always come apart easily. It's getting them back together where you encounter the problems. Before having the new hub laced into the rim I figured it would be a good idea to bolt it into the frame, hook up the chain, brake and shifter, and make sure everything fit, and worked the way it was supposed to. Once I had that assurance I could get it all spoked up and then just re-mount the wheel on the bike, and go cruisin'.

And here's where everything just went horribly wrong. I'll spare you all the tedious details, and sum it up: I couldn't get anything to fit right. Within the span of an hour I made a precipitous plunge from reasonably competent backyard mechanic to being a left thumbed geek who couldn't tell a crescent wrench from a claw hammer.

This was gut drop, red lights in the rear view, weak in the knees, full body sweat, Oh my God, what have I got myself into here? An hour became two, and then three, and then Mary came home, and I hadn't eaten, and she said, "OK I'll cook dinner tonight." Sit at the table with black fingertips, I haven't had a shower, what the hell it's after eight...
And I got into bed with my self esteem in free fall, and realized I hadn't done one single thing right since 1974. I couldn't sleep. I had to get up early. What the hell am I gonna' do here? I know! Put a post on the Schwinn forum. One of those guys will know what to do. So I did. The answer came before I'd finished typing. The moment of genius came on like a soft warm light in a cold dark cave. I figured out the problem. Easy. Drill some holes; cut some metal. Go down and get a couple nuts and bolts. Sleep followed.

I woke up Wednesday morning with my self worth restored. I could do this thing. Sure it'll take some work but I can do it. At lunch I checked the Schwinn forum, and Wayne, one of the more competent guys who posts there, had given me a list of steps to resolve all the issues, and finish the project. His solutions were better than the ones I had come up with. I got home Wednesday afternoon in good spirits, and went straight into the garage. I did all the stuff that Wayne recommended. The hub went into the dropouts just fine. Then I looped the chain over the sprockets. It almost fit. And the rotor was jammed into the brake pad. And there wasn't enough axle protruding on the shifter side... OK, I could see what I needed to do. See if I can find some ultra thin washers to space out the left side. Get out the die grinder, cut into the frame right there...

No. No fucking way. The lights came on again, only it wasn't the magical soft glow of Wile E Coyote Super Genius. It was the bright epiphany of realization. I was in over my head. This seemingly simple task was, in reality, an engineering project that was just beyond my skill set. I could push forward, but I stood a much better chance of ruining the bike than improving it. The best thing to do was to leave it alone. I felt like I'd been released from jail.

I unhooked the chain, pulled the hub out of the frame, took off the rotor, and bolted it back onto the wheel. I noticed that the wheel bearings were too tight, so I re-set them a little. I put the bike back together, gathered all the parts for the three-speed hub, and put it all back in the box. Then I wheeled the chopper bike out of the garage, dusted it off a little, and took it for a cruise around the block. It worked just fine, and it felt as cool as ever. Mary drove up beside me when I was halfway down the street. I told her I'd meet her back at the house in a minute, and then we'd go get some dinner. Job finished.

JWM

A little change in the wind

2010-03-07T17:18:00.000-08:00

Shifter mount ready for installation on the chopper

February just about set a record for being the most difficult month in memory.My mother's illness, my own bout with some hideous bug or other, my wife's bout with the same illness, no work, and suddenly finding my life on a very short leash has taken its toll on my otherwise less than sunny disposition.
But February is over, the first week of March has passed, and things are beginning to look hopeful once again. For this I am grateful.
I had a couple of days of work last week. That was a good start. But Thursday I had a call from the boss waiting for me when I got in. Something about a long term assignment.
Of course I'm going to take it.
And bit by bit, my mother is regaining her strength. She still needs the walker, but she's fixing her own food again, and the demands on my time are slowly easing. More to be grateful for.

I've been working on restoring the '56 Starlet for Mary. I'm installing a three-speed on the old machine, and soon enough we can get a truck, and join the Cyclone Coasters Vintage Bike Club, and go on their monthly group rides along the beach paths here in the Southland. And the three-speed conversion is coming along nicely on the chopper bike, too. I got the shift mount built, and next I'll start lacing that monster three-speed hub into the big fat rear wheel, and I'll be styling uphill, and down. There is something immensely satisfying about taking on a fabrication project yourself, and pulling it off without taking it to a shop, and paying to have it done. Fun stuff. So for this one day, things are going OK.
God willing they will continue to do so.

JWM

U.T.O.L.'s and the Horror House

2010-02-18T01:49:00.000-08:00

It's almost two in the morning. Too early to get out of bed, but insomnia has become my alarm clock, and when it rings my night's sleep is over. Usually it has the decency to wait until after three, so I can just call it being a very early riser, but tonight it went off without so much as a bad dream to jar me awake. Benadryl doesn't work, xanax is useless, and even Ambien gives me all the relief of a strong cup of coffee, and a couple of bennies. Do they still call them bennies? I wonder if they even exist anymore. Probably not. Seconal is, no doubt, extinct as well- all gone the way of Dylocid, replaced by newer, "safer" products that may sorta' work, but have "lower potential for abuse", or some such thing. There is still alcohol, but I haven't had a drink in twenty years, and even a night's sleep isn't worth getting back on that ride.
And I just heard my mother get up... and make it to the bathroom and back. There's a straw of gratitude to grasp. She's been in and out of the hospital over these last ten days. Bronchitis, some unspecified infection- you never get to see the actual doctor, and it's hard to get a straight answer. Mostly, just sick with age, and twenty wasted years spent sitting, and staring at television. Monday afternoon the insurance schedule dictated that she be moved from the local hospital to a convalescent facility. Yesterday morning she demanded that they release her. I wanted her out of there too, and they had to comply. I don't blame her for wanting out.

Old John said it: "Those places are a horror house." And he was right.
The smell- Ozium masking leaked urine and death. The white breathing corpses- toothless mouths hanging open in that last long delirious sleep before the breathing stops. The woman doubled over in the wheel chair, face on her knees inching her way down the hall, and the obese double amputee, legs lost up to the thigh to diabetes, uneven stumps uncovered. But the woman in the bed next to my mother. That was the worst.

The sight of that unfortunate soul is going to give me nightmares for years to come. They wouldn't say what happened to her to put her there. My guess was an auto accident, or some sort of hideous brain trauma. There was obviously no consciousness left, but the body in the bed never stopped moving. Dead eyes blinking open and shut. Her jaw rotating in some grotesque imitation of a chewing motion while the shoulders hunched and unhunched, her left arm partly raising and dropping as if endlessly reliving the final flinch before taking a blow that should have killed her. There was nothing voluntary, nothing human in the motion. It repeated and repeated and repeated each blinkchewflinchshrug blinkchewflinchshrug identical, with the mechanical cadence of a busy signal, or a car alarm. Just an endless electrical discharge snapping through what was left of a nervous system. Hanging over the bed was a square plastic bottle filled with brown stuff that looked like liquid shit that dripped down a tube planted through an incision into her stomach. That kept the body alive to keep twitching, while another machine suctioned phlegm from the lungs, and still another gurgling pump collected the foamy waste product out of the intestine and dripped it into a jar that needed to be drained every hour or so. She couldn't have been more than thirty five or forty. The nurse told my mother she'd been like that for five years now.

So I had to get my mom out of there. But my mother really isn't able to do for herself. She needs help getting on and off the pot, and the toilet in the main bathroom now has one of those big white plastic things that raises the seat by ten inches or so. She can't stand up long enough to fix herself food. This is a U.T.O.L.- a universal task of life, caring for your aging parent, and it is my task at this stage in the game. And you don't have to tell me- I know. I know all too well that it could be much, much worse. You know- there is how you're "supposed" to feel when caring for loved ones: caring, compassionate, full of filial piety and all that. And then there is the real feeling that overwhelms everything: like I've just had a very short leash put on my life. A leash that get yanked several times an hour. Let's just say my well of charity is draining faster that it is being replenished.
I managed to get out for a while this afternoon, and went down to the corner for a cup of coffee. Luckily, Old John was there alone and we spent some time talking. He's taken to gathering discarded scratch off lottery tickets, and double checking them for winners. He's been on a lucky streak. Yesterday he found one worth three bucks, and he got a card in the mail from a famous book writer who sent him twenty dollars, which came in handy. I hung around long enough to get a refill before going home to cook dinner. Maybe I shouldn't have had coffee so late in the day.

An update, and a reflection.

JWM

A Little Help From My Father

2010-02-02T18:15:00.000-08:00

From jwm's world famous blog

I went down to Dennison's Schwinn Saturday to pick up the wheels for the Jaguar and the B-6. I mentioned before that whoever owned the B-6 before me had plundered it for parts- no doubt to use on another restoration project, and the painted wheels on the bike had surely come from some less expensive bicycle. So I took the chrome rims from the Starlet, and had the three-wing Bendix brake laced into the rear. The Jaguar wheels were out of true, and needed to be straightened up a little.
Bill Blake over at Dennison's runs what is probably the last true old-school bicycle shop in Los Angeles. I have three good bike shops within walking distance of my house, but I drive ten miles into East LA to take my business to Dennison's. Here's why. I paid up front for the re-lacing, and the true & tighten, plus tires, rim strips, and tubes for the B-6. When I got there he brought out the Jaguar wheels, and the newly re-done B-6 wheels. The new wheels didn't have tires on them, yet.
"What kind of tires do you want for these?" Bill asked.
I said that I wanted a good set of whitewalls- something as close as possible to what the bike came with.
"Something like these?" He pointed out a brand new Schwinn cruiser on the showroom. The new cruisers come with a retro-reproduction of the original Schwinn Typhoon Cord whitewalls like they used back in the day.
"Something like that would be just all kinds of cool," I said. Before I could say another word, Bill had his mechanic pop the wheels off the brand new bike, take those awesome Typhoon Cord whitewalls, and put them on my 60 year old rims. That's why I drive ten miles out of my way to take my business to Dennison's.
But as I said in The Jaguar Project I've always seemed to have this almost supernatural good fortune when it comes to my old Schwinns.

What I hadn't mentioned was how often my father has stepped in to lend a hand with this stuff. This month it will be seventeen years since I got that phone call in the morning:

John. I think I'm having a heart attack...

He called me before he called 911. I got over to his house just as the paramedics were wheeling him out the front door. I stood there in the street. He turned on the gurney, saw me, and he waved. The ambulance drove off. I stood there for a minute, and went to get some breakfast before going over to the hospital. My grandfather had had two or three heart attacks, and he always pulled through fine. He died at eighty nine, of old age. When I got to the hospital emergency room they took me straight to the chaplain's office. Dad was sixty six.

Like most fathers and sons my dad and I quarreled, and were often at odds. We had our communion, though, in project work. My dad was an inveterate tinkerer, and a world class mickey-mouse engineer. He loved ripping into lawnmowers, bicycles, anything mechanical, and I inherited that trait deep in my genes. Often I'd let him 'help' when I was working on the Harley, or any of the other motorcycles, and bicycles that passed through my hands, and just as often I'd really need his input, and sense of how to get things done. The garage, while neat, held enough junk, and crap to fix damn near anything that could break.

My dad's wife was an insufferable bitch, and I do have the potential to be a world class bastard. I got seriously aggressive with her and her parasitic offspring when it came to the stuff in that garage. I knew that her dick head son would pilfer what he could, and to this day, I'm sure he did. Dad used to have an ancient set of woodworking tools that had belonged to his grandfather. I didn't get to those in time. But I rented a big truck and I took, along with my dad's huge tool collection, every rusty, worn out, seemingly useless piece of junk that was in there, and crammed it into the garage at my mother's.

That stuff has served me well.
I can't tell you how many times I've need a doodad, or a whatchamacallit, or just the right sized screw, or a piece of rubber just so big by this wide, and found it in one of the drawers in the blue dresser that I had in my room as a kid, and that served for the main workbench in Dad's garage.
And I hadn't remembered, until starting the Jaguar Project just how much old Schwinn stuff that my dad had saved for me. There was a ton of it that I had completely forgotten about.
The bearing races on those old painted wheels were shattered. Try finding a pair of original Schwinn races. Dad saved me a pair. They're now on the front axle of the Starlet awaiting the final rebuild. Just like the two shattered top headset bearings in the B-6. Or the front axle lock washers for the Jaguar. And the locking clip for the master link in the chain, or the perfect rubber washer to shim up the shifter.
But this last find just sort of takes the cake.

From jwm's world famous blog

It doesn't look like much, does it? A steel ring three and five eighths inch diameter, and a quarter of an inch thick with three holes drilled. I have no idea what it was originally. A scrap of two millimeter thick aluminum plate. What the hell use could that stuff possibly have?
It is exactly what I need to mount this:

From jwm's world famous blog

on this.

From jwm's world famous blog

The Spoiler is an awesome bike, but it's big, heavy, and has only one gear. The stick shift is to a special extra- wide three speed chopper hub that will fit into the Spoiler frame. The hub fits, but there is no way to mount that shifter without resorting to machine shop fabrication. I had secured the assistance of a guy from the local Starbucks gang. He has a hot rod/ auto restoration business, and was going to fab up a bracket for me. I was happy to get the help, but...
I wanted to do it myself. This was my bike, my project, and I wanted it done my way. Yesterday I opened the garage, stood there for a moment, and the thought came winging into my head:
You know I'll bet- I just know I have something here... And I started fishing around in the tobacco cans full of nuts, bolts, and miscellaneous bits of hardware.
It's my bike, my project, and it will be done my way. I'll do it myself, with a little help from my dad.

Thank you Father.

JWM

Raccoon Prayer

2010-01-31T05:53:00.000-08:00

Think about God,
And think about God,
And think everything
You can know about God.
Think about God,
And think,
And think,
and...

God The Creator.
God omnipotent.
God ubiquitous.
God omniscient.
God all loving.
God, and God, and...

God before time
God beyond eternity
God before the infinitesimal
God beyond the infinite
God, and God,
Who wills creation into being
And is the Lord, and God and...

God is before me.
God is beside me.
God is behind me.
God is beneath me.
God is above me.
God surrounds me-
round, and round and round, and...

I open my innermost ear to the voice of God.
I open my innermost eye to the light.
I open my heart to Jesus Christ.
My soul is a spark of the infinite light.
My life is a manifestation of
God within me
flows, and flows and flows, and...

Father.
For this one day,
I place my life, and my will in your care.
Please
Guide me,
Instruct me,
Show me the way
That you would have me follow.
Teach me the path
On which you would have me walk.
As this day unfolds,
Guide my heart.
Guide my mind.
Guide me:
Emotion,
Intention,
Thought,
Word,
And deed
Guide me: emotion, intention, thought, word, and deed.
May the Holy spirit
Suffuse my emotion,
Shape my intention,
Inspire my thoughts,
Temper my words,
And guide my deeds.

It is not what I want,
But what you want for me,
Not what I would do,
But what you would have me do,
It is not my will,
But that yours be done,
That I humbly pray:

Grant me, God, the wisdom
To perceive your will
Unfolding on the events of this day.
Grant me the humility,
To seek your word
As the guiding force of my life.
Grant me the courage,
To walk in the path of your will.

These things I ask in Jesus' name,
That I may grow in the spirit,
And come closer to God.
These things I ask in Jesus' name.
Amen.

Dedicated to Gagdad Bob, and the Transdimensional Disorder of the Friendly Sons and Daughters of the Cosmic Raccoons, without whom this would not have happened.

JWM

The All Time Coolest Bike Ever Built (and it's mine!)

2010-01-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

This post is sort of an epilogue to The Jaguar Project. As I mentioned early on in that narrative, my three classic Schwinns were doing time as living room decor, and hadn't been ridden since sometime in the mid 80's. In '97 I crated them up, and they were buried deep in the rat's nest of my garage. Right now, I'm having the wheels to the B-6 re-spoked, and while I was at it I pulled the wheels from the Jag, and took them in as well. They needed to be trued up. With a little luck I'll have both bikes done by the end of next week, and then I can start work on the Starlet.

So how did I catch the fever again? What made me go to all the trouble of cleaning out the garage (no small task!) unpacking the oldies, and finishing the overhaul that I never quite completed thirty years ago?

It has to with this post, here.
I had been thinking about motorcycles. More specifically, I had been amusing myself by pipe dreaming about getting hold of an old Harley Davidson Panhead, and building a chopper. I was killing some time checking e-bay motors, and going through Google images when I stumbled across a picture of one of these:

It's the Schwinn Stingray Spoiler adult sized chopper bicycle. The Schwinn company filed bankruptcy on 9/11/01. They were bought out by an outfit called Pacific Cycles, and the bikes were being made in China. Pacific introduced the Stingray Chopper, and decided to take a gamble on an adult size version. They went out on a limb with the high end Spoiler, and promptly went belly up. It was introduced for one model year, in'04, or '05. They didn't make very many. Pacific was sold. Schwinn bikes still exist, but they're little more than a badge on inexpensive discount store bikes. Sad.
I found this one on e-bay. It was owned by a former Schwinn dealer, and never uncrated. I had it shipped down from Washington state this last December.
Anyone who gets into cool machinery, new, vintage, or custom, does so, in part, for the attention it draws. Part of the fun of riding the Jaguar, or the B-6 around is that people notice the bike, comment, and strike up conversations. I'm used to that, and I enjoy it immensely.
The Spoiler is in another class entirely. Even I was unprepared for it. I've had several people actually pull their cars off to the side of the road, and flag me down to get a better look. Harley riders (notoriously impossible to impress) stop and stare. I've secured a reputation around here for being that crazy-ass old fart with the wild bike. This is not a toy for shy people. But dammit is it fun!

JWM

the 4000th visit.

2010-01-18T07:59:00.000-08:00

Sitemeter hit 4000 today with a click from someone at the comments section over at American Digest, which has become my first stop and favorite site on the web. If you haven't been over there, forget the rest of this silly post, and go take in what Gerard Vanderleun has to offer.
Whoever #4000 was- they have a good firewall, so I wasn't able to invade their privacy, hack into their computer, steal passwords and credit card numbers, or hijack their paypal account to fund my bicycle restoration project. But thanks for stopping by anyway.

JWM

Jaguar Project (conclusion)

2010-01-14T17:44:00.000-08:00

1955 Schwinn Starlet

1950 Schwinn B-6

Schwinn Black Phantom

It rained today, and I didn't get any work done on the B-6. I had planned on having all three bikes overhauled in the time it took to write the narrative of how I came to own them, but that didn't quite work out. The Jaguar Project turned out to be more involved than I had anticipated. But then again, make me a list of all the things that work out just the way they were planned. It occurred to me last night that I've made several references to the Schwinn Black Phantom, but most people outside of the antique and classic bike scene have never seen one. This picture came from Memory Lane Classics in Grand Rapids Ohio. Another great source for pictures and information about old bikes is Dave's Vintage Bicycles. They have an incredible gallery of old bike pic's, and it's worth some time to just go browsing through the folders. Beware, though. You don't have to come in contact with one of these things to get Old Bike Fever. You can catch a wallet draining case of it from pictures alone. The photo of the B-6 was taken in '93 when it was serving time as a living room decoration, and if you look closely at the shot of the Starlet, you'll notice that it's looking pretty dingy, the pedals are off the bike, and the tires are flat. I'll get to it soon enough, and then the whole fleet will be overhauled, and ready to ride.

It's a peculiar sort task- composing a narrative wherein the main character behaves in a -shall we say- less than admirable manner. Particularly when the main character is me. I could, at this point, sling some pious crap about 'turning my life around' back then, but that isn't part of this story. Just for the record, though, that was the end of my affair with the gal from the market. Yeah, she had her problems, but I behaved like a world class asshole, and she really didn't deserve to be treated like that. Some years later I looked her up and made a formal apology for my behavior. I did give cocaine the boot later in 1980, and to this day the very thought of it makes me sick. It's the uncontested heavyweight champion of dogshit drugs.

But back to the final notes on The Great Bike Hunt.
I patched up the damaged headlight shell with fiberglass, and fabricated a light to go inside. Not original equipment, but it would do. Now, with e-bay, Craig's list, and on-line collectors' forums at my fingertips it's only a matter of time before I find the original light tray that came with the machine. I mentioned that the B-6 was sporting chrome plated fenders when I bought it. The picture shows it as it is today, with correct fenders matching the rest of the bike. The fenders came to me in the last, and most improbable coincidence of all.
It was 1983. I had quit the utility company, and started the long, tedious march through my college education. The Starlet, and the B-6 were under wraps in a storage shed in my Dad's back yard. I kept the Jaguar out for occasional rides. It was Spring Break, and I was on Main Street in Huntington Beach just a block away from the intersection where I first spotted the Autocycle that lit the fuse on this whole obsession to begin with. Old Schwinns were a fad with the surfing scene, and one of the small shops had a dusty Black Phantom sitting in the window. I stopped to look, and a moment later another guy stood beside me checking out the Phantom. I always talk to strangers.
"Awesome old bike, huh?" I said.
"It sure is," he answered. "I have one like it at home. Only problem with mine is that it has painted fenders that belong on a maroon and cream B-6. I sure wish I could find the chrome ones that went with the bike."

(epilogue: The coolest bike ever built)

JWM

Jaguar Project (part seven)

2010-01-12T18:40:00.000-08:00

I got to work on the B-6 today. The bike is disassembled, and I got the spring fork taken apart, cleaned, greased, and put back together. The wheels are going to be a project in themselves. I didn't realize it when I bought the thing, but whoever owned the bike before me had plundered it for parts. The painted rims were surely taken from some other Schwinn, but luckily the Bendix rear hub is still correct for the bike. It looks like I'm going to do a little plundering myself. The Starlet has chrome rims, and the B-6 needs them. So I'll get an opportunity to try my hand at lacing up a couple of wheels. Never done that before. Should be fun. I'm a little reluctant to plunder the Starlet, but I gave it a rattle can paint job way back when, so swapping out the rims won't affect either its value, or its originality too much. For all their rarity, these machines seldom command great prices. Come to think of it, the prices that these things were fetching thirty years ago are not much different than the price you'd pay for one today. I guess you could make the case that the monetary value has actually declined. So what. If you're looking for an investment, you can do way better than a rusty old bike. Anyway- where was I? Oh, yeah- back to 1980...

I didn't cash the tax check right away, and I remember carrying a queasy sort of knot in my gut all that week. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was in trouble. The gal from the market worked nights until Friday, but I had promised her that we'd get all kinds of crazy that weekend. That was one promise I did keep, but not in the way I intended. I'd talked to The Cowboy several times, but I kept balking before coming to the topic. Thursday afternoon I cashed the check. Friday morning I told The Cowboy I'd maybe be in touch tomorrow. I stopped for beer and groceries Friday night, and told the gal from the market that we were on for Saturday evening.

It is only in hindsight that we can see the patterns of events that shape our lives. Part of the web of coincidence that surrounded the Great Bike Hunt had this recurring theme- Bikes I didn't want would come my way. And they would provide essential components that would be missing from the machines that I would buy later- machines that I would not have bought otherwise. I'd scavenged some small pieces of hardware for the Starlet, and I wouldn't have bought the Jaguar except that I already had the racks that it was missing. And now I had rotten headlight shell, half of a rusty horn tank, and the remnant of a Black Phantom sitting out in the garage. The newly repainted Starlet, and completed Jaguar occupied center stage in my living room. Remember I said that those bikes kept me out of jail? We're going to get to that part in just a bit, here.

I wasn't exactly hung over that Saturday morning, but I wasn't hitting on all eight either. I had told The Cowboy I was going to come by sometime early that afternoon. But I didn't want to do it. Six hundred bucks meant a quarter ounce of toot, and a marathon "session" that could run twenty four hours or more. I wasn't up to a long bike ride that morning, so I took the truck down to Woodlake.
I pulled onto the freeway with the bottom falling out of my stomach. I felt like I was going to trial. Four off ramps to The Cowboy's house. I lagged along in the right lane. Three off ramps. Then two. Then Dorado Boulevard Next Right.

And all in a flash, something wild just took hold of me. I got hit with an adrenaline charge that felt like I'd grabbed hold of a power line. I let fly with an AHHHWOOO from the beach bum days, punched the accelerator, and passed the Dorado Boulevard off ramp like I was ditching school for a surf run. I pulled off on the Southbound 405, and headed for Newport Beach. I was going to see the pusher. The Pedal Pusher, that is. They sold old bikes.
Parking in Newport beach on a Saturday is usually close to impossible. There was an open spot with time on the meter right in front of the bike shop. I pulled up, got out of the truck, walked in to the shop, and spotted my next bike. It was a maroon and cream B-6. But it had chrome fenders that should have gone to a Phantom. And, of course it was missing parts: the headlight shell, the gooseneck, the signature seat post. I had all that stuff at home. And the rest of the bike was immaculate. Asking price: five hundred seventy five dollars. I put cash on the counter, and rolled it out the door. Bike in the truck. Truck on the road. Straight home. Well, a stop for beer, and then straight home. I was manic- jumping up and down giddy. I couldn't believe what I had just done. But dammitall- I had my tanker! I took it out of the truck, and spent the next few hours just cruising the neighborhood, and then made I a stop for more beer.

Soon enough, though, I remembered I had a date that night. What to do? Screw it. If the chick didn't like it she could take a hike. I cracked another brew, and cranked up the stereo. I had parked the B-6 in the living room right next to the Jag and the Starlet. My fleet. I sat there watching them like a television show. And then the doorbell.

She was dressed to kill- perfume-short skirt- heels- hose- the works. And ready for some serious party, too. I was dirty, sweaty, drunk as a boiled owl, and ready to declare my independence.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"Hey, check it out I got a new bike."
"I see. Did you see your friend down in Woodlake?"
"No," I said. "I bought this instead."
"What about tonight?" she said.
I shrugged. "Wanna brew?" The gal from the market did have a temper, and it was heating up fast.
"What about tonight?" she repeated.
"Who fuckin' cares?" That was it. She went off like the Disneyland fireworks. Only this wasn't Disneyland.
What happened next was sort of a blur. I remember a lot of yelling, and before I could get up off the couch, she went for the bikes. She tried to knock them over in the living room, but she slipped (thank God for high heels). Drunk as I was, I was on my feet before she could take another swipe at the fleet. I grabbed her around the waist, and tried to wrestle her out the front door. Things got very very loud, and the next thing I knew there were police cars in my front yard, and I was spread eagled on the lawn. I heard a voice over my head.
"So what was happening here? Did you hit her?"
"NO!" I said, She was trying to trash my bikes, and I was trying to get her out of the house."
"Your bikes?" said the cop.
"Go see." I said. "She was trying to wreck them."
Just then another cop came out of the house. "Hey", he said to his partner. "Check out the old bikes this guy's got." The first cop went into the living room leaving his partner with me. "Where'd you get those things?" he asked.
So there I was with my face in my own front lawn chatting about antique Schwinns with a cop I couldn't see. It was kind of surreal. The other officer came out of the house. The two of them talked for a bit. They said I could get up off my face, but I still had to sit on the grass.
The first cop came back to me. "You're lucky," he said. "She said you didn't hit her, and she doesn't want to press charges. She's going home. I'd suggest you go in and sleep it off. We don't want to hear from you again, understand?"
I understood.

Jaguar Project Part Eight (conclusion)

JWM

Jaguar Project (part six)

2010-01-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

No seat. No fenders. Broken spokes. Rotten tires. Spray-can black paint job. But I knew a Schwinn frame when I saw one, and the locking spring fork, and razorback gooseneck marked it for a high end bike.

"Well", said the old guy. "How much'll ya give me for it?"
"It's missing a lot of stuff," I said. "Do you have any of the parts around here?"
"Well- I don' know... here wait, there's this."
He went over to a workbench, rummaged around in the junk, and came back with a rusty tank half, and the headlight shell, The pot metal shell had been rotted out from battery corrosion. There was a big hole in the top of it, and a large section had pretty much turned to dust. The tank still had the black paint, and yellowed decal. No doubt about it. This rusted old beater had once been the top of the line of the top of the line. It was beyond restoration.
"Well?"
I could pretty much figure was coming next. He'd be sure that this old junker was worth a thousand bucks, or something. As it was, it was good for spare parts, and not much else. Nonetheless, if I bought it, even for more than it was worth, then maybe I'd get a shot at the rest of the stuff he had in the yard. Who knew what could be out there in that pile?
"I'll tell you what," I said. "There's not too much to work with here- best I could offer you for it would be fifty bucks."
"Fifty bucks," he grumbled. "You said these things were worth money. Alright. You can have her for fifty."
I loaded the sorry old wreck into the back of my truck, and headed home. It was Tuesday night, and the gal from the market was waiting at the house when I got back. She wasn't exactly living with me, but she never really went home much these days. Home meant dealing with her daughter, and her mother, and, well- it was more fun over at my place. The kid hated my guts. But that's not part of this story.
"You got this in the mail", she said. Yellow envelope. Green cardboard check. Tax return, and six hundred bucks. "Woo hooo," she exclaimed."We can do some real party there!"
"Uh, yeah- we can at that," I said. Six hundred bucks would buy a load of buzz. And I'd be a liar if I said it didn't sound like fun. But this relationship was nowhere. It was sex and dope. It was an easy getaway for her, and easy sex for me. And I had promised myself no more of this shit one too many times.

Jaguar Project Part Seven

JWM

Jaguar Project (part five)

2010-01-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

"It snowed last night in Woodlake, brah..."
"What do you mean?" I asked Eddie. Eddie was from Maui; he was another one of the crew at the utility company. He lived a couple of blocks away from me, so we sometimes shared the ride to work.
"You ain' talk to da Cowboy?" Eddie said. "He gots da soda, man. Da kine shit."
"Oh, yeah? Well maybe I'll check it out. I've never done it before. What's it like?"

The Cowboy lived in Woodlake, which was about seven miles down the river trail from my place. I used to ride the bike down there Saturday mornings, pick up some weed, and then take a buzzed and leisurely cruise back home, or maybe down to the beach. This Saturday I took the Jaguar, and came back with my usual stash, plus a tiny white envelope full of grief. I had just made one of the two worst decisions of my life, up to that point. I'd follow it up soon after, by asking out one of the checkers at the nearby supermarket.
The gal from the supermarket was not interested in bicycles of any manner, shape, or form. She liked blow. And she liked to party.

Every time I'd invite the Gal from the market over for "a little session" as we called it, I'd be well supplied. I found reasons to stop by The Cowboy's place more and more often. I'd see him at the yard before the shift started, and we'd BS about this and that, and somehow the topic always rolled around, and I'd order another G. That was a hundred bucks in 1980 bucks.
And I couldn't quite figure it out. I don't know how many times I'd plow a line, and realize once again, "you know, this stuff isn't all it's cracked up to be- in fact, it's a shitty excuse for a buzz at all- I don't really even like this feeling, and besides it's fading already after barely only ten minutes, and yeah this stuff is bullshit, and right now I need a hit, but once this shit's gone that's it. No more...
And the next day I'd feel like total crap. And a couple or three days later, I'd be talking to the Cowboy, and...
Even though I was making pretty good money, it didn't take very long before I found myself running short of cash.

But, wait- we were talking about classic bikes here, not sex, n' drugs. Wasn't there something about an old Schwinn in this story?

Despite the new relationship, and the financial drain I was still on the hunt for old bikes. The Starlet was the right vintage, but it was a girl's bike. The Jaguar was cool enough, but it was a middleweight sixties bike, and barely twenty years old. I wanted a forties, or fifties machine. And work still kept me going in and out of old neighborhoods, and old houses, and one day I got a call to change out a meter at an ancient two-story wood frame house, set way back on a big lot. The place even had a barn. I knocked. A scruffy, skinny old guy came to the door. I identified myself, and told him why I was there. I walked around to the side of the house to check the meter, and my eyes were pulled like a magnet to a giant rusty tangle of old bikes sitting in the yard like a mountain of iron spaghetti. I walked back to the fence for a closer look.
"What're you lookin' at, there?" I hadn't heard the old guy following me, and it startled the hell out of me when he spoke up.
"Oh," I said. "I like to fix up old bikes- hobby of mine, you know?"
The old guy said nothing.
"I was just wondering if maybe you had any of this stuff for sale. I pay pretty decent money for the right bike in the right condition."
"Nothin's for sale here."

It wasn't supposed to go this way. He was supposed to say, "Well I got one I could show ya' here. Bought it for the boy way back when, but he ain't interested no more so you can have it for twenty bucks if you want it". And then, of course he'd pull a tarp off a 1949 Black Phantom...

"Nothin here's for sale", he repeated.
Time for diplomacy.
"I understand, sir- know just how it is. I have my own big old pile of parts, and stuff at home, and well- I'll tell you what. Here's my home phone." I wrote it down on a blank repair order. "If you ever want get rid of any of this stuff give me a call. Like I said, I do pay good money for the right old bike." He didn't say anything, but he took the phone number. Weeks later I got a call. He had one old bike he'd sell me if I wanted to see it. I drove over there, and he took me into the barn to have a look. And damned if it wasn't a genuine Schwinn Black Phantom, practically the Holy Grail of collectible bikes.
Or what was left of one.

Jaguar Project Part Six

JWM

Jaguar Project (part four)

2010-01-04T19:24:00.000-08:00

I went out yesterday, and put ten or twelve miles on the Jaguar. This was the first real ride I'd taken on the bike in years. I mentioned earlier that the old brake shoes were hard, and the shifter is a little touchy. Nothing I can't live with. And the other little repair jobs held OK, too. The headlight lights, the beeper beeps, and the handlebars are firmly clinched in the gooseneck.

And actually riding the bike? Like I said, I put maybe a dozen miles on it yesterday- not exactly a marathon, but it was enough. The Jaguar was supposed to be a 'sportier' model full dresser- thinner tires, a little less sheet metal, three-speed hub. By contemporary standards the Jag is "sporty" in the same way a 1961 Ford Falcon is a "sporty compact car". A dozen miles on my two year old, 21 speed comfort bike is no effort at all. A dozen miles on the Jag is a lot like work.

When you take an old Schwinn apart, you realize that you're dealing with an antiquated technology. There was no planned obsolescence in the design. You didn't buy a Schwinn, wear it out in a year, and just get a new one. Everything on the bike is solid, over-engineered, infinitely adjustable, and durable as a hammer. But all that durability and style has a price. It is steel on steel, and unapollogetically heavy. It's a bike built to take years of hard use at the hands of the Great American Boy.

I'm sure that this was the first time in its fifty year history that this bike had been taken down to nuts and bolts. And I have no doubt that the Jaguar will be good for another fifty years of service. No part of the bike was worn out or unserviceable. Except for the gooseneck.

The gooseneck.*sigh*
This was one of those slightly unnerving incidents where hard reality cuts into the soft edges of memory. But then again, this stuff happened in 1980. Thirty years ago. Anyway- The gooseneck on the bike is not the one that was on the bike when I bought it. I do remember that the old one didn't hold the bars tight, and that it cinched down with a nut and bolt rather than just a bolt, threaded into the gooseneck itself. But I don't remember swapping out the part. At any rate, the gooseneck that I have is correct for the bike (I checked), and that's what really matters. Nonetheless, it still didn't hold the bars tight so I had to shim it up with a piece of aluminum cut from an old license plate.
And, as I try to piece the rest of that year or so together I find a lot of stuff that seems pretty clear until I try to focus in on it, and then...
And why is it important? The part is important, because the object of the game is to get your 1961 bicycle back together with all the correct parts. Similarly, I want to get the story of those bikes correct, because it is my story as well. And now, with the Jaguar complete in both the present, and in this narrative of events passed, I'm moving on to the second of these three machines up for overhaul: the 1950 B-6.
The B-6 is the flagship of my little fleet of bikes. And as with all of these old bicycles of mine it took a near miracle of coincidence to complete the bike. But I didn't find the B-6 through any sort of amazing coincidence. I bought it from a shop, out of a desperation that had nothing to do with bicycles.

Jaguar Project Part Five

JWM

Jaguar Project (part three)

2010-01-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

I finished the Jaguar, and put the bike on the street for the first time since the mid 1980's. Of course, there were a few minor glitches, but I got them worked out. The brake pads are hard, and they barely stop the bike. The shifter is a little touchy. I remember when I first got the bike that the shifter wouldn't stay in gear. The spring was weak, and the notch that holds the indicator lever in place was worn, and rounded. In my Dad's can of miscellaneous rubber pieces and parts I had found a large rubber washer that seemed like it was made to fit the inside of that shifter. It did the job, but, like I said, the indicator is still a little touchy. Nothing you can do about fifty year old brake pads. I did a damn nice job on that thing, if I do say so myself. It whirls along like a brand new bicycle.
Yesterday it rained all day, so I took the camera out into the garage, and tried to get a very cool, moody, low available light picture of the newly reassembled cruiser. Tried. Most of the pics were shitty, and I don't know why I was surprised and a little disappointed that the bike ended up looking just like it did when I started. The picture I posted is probably the best. Anyway...

I mentioned earlier that I found my three classic Schwinns during a brief period of good luck. Finding those bikes was the only thing that remotely resembled luck during that period of time. The rest of my life was on track for a major train wreck. That I pulled those bikes out of the fire is pretty remarkable in itself. I can count the good choices I made in that year or so on the fingers of one hand. And the bikes count for three out of five good choices, at that. Hell, those bikes kept me out of jail. Like I said, the bad decisions started with taking the job. I hated the job. But, as luck would have it then, I got introduced The Cowboy, and that only helped to set up the impending disaster.

The Cowboy was another one of the service crew at the base. He was a tall, raw boned man in his early sixties- gray, weatherbeaten, mustache, cowboy boots, and Stetson hat. Looked, and talked like The Marlboro man, pardner... Drove a new Corvette, and carried a sawed off, side by side 12 gauge in his coat pocket- right chamber, rock salt; left chamber, buckshot. He didn't drink, or get high, but he sold weed for a hobby. That, for me, was not a bad thing. But back then in the early eighties, cocaine was becoming a fad, and all the cool kids were doing it, so The Cowboy sold coke too. Which brings me to another less than wise decision that I made: hooking up with a gal who liked cocaine, and kinky sex. She had a budding sociopath of a daughter to boot...
I'll let you infer the rest. This narrative is about bikes.

I had walked out my front door and found the 1955 girl's bike. This was what I'd been hunting for. This was the real thing.
The first thing I did with the old beast was to soak every nut, bolt, and screw with Liquid Wrench. I let it sit a couple of days, re-soaking all the fittings, and then I began disassembling.
Despite the thick coat of barn paint, the bicycle was in very good shape. The fenders had dings, but the struts were straight. Of course, the horn, and light were ruined from corroded D-cells, but the tanks were undamaged. I actually got the old horn to work; the light was beyond repair.

I got a few cans of paint stripper and, piece by piece, started brushing it down. The thick coat of red paint peeled off easily revealing the bike's true colors- white, with rose pink trim, and the model: Starlet. I bought more stripper, and took the whole thing down to bare metal, and then fine sanded it all until the whole collection of pieces and parts was gleaming naked metal.

The painted frame looks like a single curving piece. Stripped of paint it reveals an assembly of beautifully bent segments of tubing, mated with elegantly brazed joints- shiny gold against the cold white steel, and ground so smoothly that a blind man's fingers would not detect a seam. As I disassembled the Bendix coaster brake, the brass shoes, friction polished like two pieces of gold jewelery, tumbled out into my hand. I think this is where I really began to fall in love with these old machines.

I hadn't painted anything with a spray can since I built model cars when I was in Jr. High. And I had never tried giving anything a two tone paint job. Original or not- white and pink was an unacceptable color combination for a bike I planned to ride around. I bought a bunch of rattle cans: forest green, and antique ivory. I'll have pictures up in a subsequent post, and I wouldn't have sidetracked into talking about the Starlet at all, except it was fixing up the Starlet that led to my finding the Jaguar. One coincidence set up another.

The house I was renting was a couple of blocks away from the San Gabriel River Trail. If you're not familiar with Southern California, that may conjure up an image of a serene path following the green banks of a flowing river. It is nothing of the sort. The riverbed, all but dry for most of the year, is a concrete culvert some hundreds of feet wide with smooth cement banks some fifteen or twenty feet high. The bike path runs along the edge of the trough, and if you're courageous enough you can dive off the path, and skate a bike up and down the steep walls like a wheeled surfboard on a concrete wave. Seal Beach was about two hours away, and that was my first destination once I got the Starlet finished.
I remember that I had just reached the end of the river trail. I was lifting the Starlet over the bike gate when another bicyclist noticed it, and stopped to talk. He knew someone who had some old bike like that- wasn't sure what it was. I gave him my phone number, (I used to carry pen and paper just in case.) and forgot about it.
Many weeks later I got a phone call from a stranger. Was I interested in buying an old Schwinn? When I saw the Jaguar I was too excited to do much bargaining over the price. I think he was asking $275. or $300. (remember- 1980 dollars) The only problem was that the bike was missing the front carrier, and the four-reflector rear rack. I had those parts sitting at home on the girl's bike that I had bought some months earlier.

Jaguar Project Part Four

JWM

Jaguar Project (part two)

2009-12-29T19:37:00.000-08:00

I started reassembling the machine today. This is the fun part. First , pack the headset bearings, then put the forks back on the frame. Get the front and rear wheels hung, flip it over and put it on its feet. Pack the pedal crank bearings, and put the chain wheel back on. The crank threads turn backwards so you always have to think twice when you go to adjust the bearings.There's no instruction manual for these old bikes, but then again, you don't really need one. These are simple machines. Anyone with a glimmer of mechanical aptitude can work on one. Nonetheless, it is an axiom of all machines, that they come apart easier than they go back together. There are hundreds of parts to one of these things and every one of them goes exactly in one place, and it goes there in exactly the right order, or you have to stop, go back, and disassemble. None of it is really hard, but you do have to pay attention.
Mount the gooseneck, and handlebars, and it's beginning to look like a bicycle again, but this is the easy stuff. The Jaguar is a three speed, and there are tanks, racks, light, horn, fenders, and levers to mount, cables to route, adjustments to be made on both brakes, and the shifter.

I didn't get it finished today. In a way, that's an accomplishment. In years past I would have caught the burn, and worked all night until the bike was finished, or I was too exhausted to tell a wrench from a hammer. Today I took my time, solved a couple or three minor problems, and quit while everything was going OK. So now- well- at least I'm here in the den after a bath and a meal, and not out in the garage in the cold and dark on an obsessive burn to finish the project TONIGHT! I've mellowed just a little over the years.

Taking that job with the utility company had been a bad move. At first it sounded like a very cool gig- out all day driving around the city, going house to house servicing simple machines. Work at your own pace...
It sucked, and I hated it. But it gave me the opportunity to search around in damn near every neighborhood in the southeast corner of Los Angeles County. You see- I had this picture in my mind's eye. I'd get a call at some old house, and back in the corner of the garage, behind a bunch of junk would be that mint old tanker, and I'd ask if the guy would want to sell it and... Over a year went by. I didn't find shit. By this time I'd moved out of La Habra, and rented a house nearer to where I worked. Some of the other guys at the base knew I was looking for old bikes, and once one of the guys actually spotted one, and got me a phone number. Another letdown. It was a girl's bike from the sixties, a Hollywood, or a Starlet, I think. Anyway- it was a middleweight bike with chrome fenders. At least it had a front carrier, a half tank in the frame, and a fancy four reflector rear rack. But it wasn't what I was looking for. I already had one girl's bike. Nonetheless, something told me to buy it anyway. Besides it was cheap. By that time I'd pretty much given up on the idea that I was ever going to find some rare gem of a bike when I was out on a service call. It never did happen. I just gave it up, and quit looking altogether.

There is a thread that runs through a lot of new age baloney, but that also shows up in more respectable spiritual practices- The thread goes something like this: When you pray, or wish intensely, or imagine a thing that you wish to come to pass, you create a sort of energy in the cosmos. But that energy does not get released until you stop the imagining, wishing, praying. You know the old story- as soon as you quit looking for a mate, you find the love of your life. Maybe there is some truth to it. It seemed to play out in the Great Bike Hunt. As I said, I never did find a really great old bike when I was out on a service call. The first true classic Schwinn quite literally came my way when I stepped out my front door to go to work. It was trash day. I opened my front door, and the first thing I saw was an old guy rolling up on a bike to search the trash for aluminum cans. He was on an ancient bright red girl's Schwinn. Full balloon tires, tank, rack, light, chainguard, fenders, trussbars, all intact. Did I say bright red? Both tires, and everything in between- right down to the spokes and chain was brush painted barn red. I bought it on the spot for fifty bucks.

Jaguar Project Part Three

JWM

The Jaguar Project (part one)

2009-12-27T21:04:00.000-08:00

The picture actually represents the second part of a four part project: disassemble the bike. Take it down to nuts and bolts, fix what's broken, and give everything a thorough cleaning. Part Three: Put it back together. (not as easy as part two) Part Four: Ride it around. The first part, of course, is finding a bike like this one, and replacing all the missing stuff. I had that mostly done by 1980, but I never quite got around to part two. Thirty years later, I'm finally getting around to it. The bicycle is a 1961 Schwinn Mk IV Jaguar, the classic cantilever frame boy's bike updated for the space age with middle weight tires, four reflector rear carrier, a three speed gearshift, and stainless steel fenders. Here's another shot of the Jaguar:

After years of searching for a classic Schwinn, I found the '61 Jaguar, a 1955 Starlet, and a 1950 model B-6 during a brief burst of luck that lasted from the spring of 1979 until the fall of 1980. I rode it around for three or four years- actually took this heavy metal cruiser on fifty mile rides. It did service as a living room decoration for about a decade, but it's been crated up, and buried deep in the rat's nest of my garage since 1997. This was the second acquisition during that burst of luck so many years ago, and the first in line for a total overhaul now.

Of the three bikes, only the Starlet came into my care intact. The Jaguar here, and the B-6 (we'll get to the B-6 later) were missing major parts when I got them. And it took a wildly improbable web of coincidences to get all three machines into my hands, and help me spin together the missing pieces that put them within nuts and bolts of being 100% original.

I was nine years old in 1961. Back then I had an Evans 26" middleweight with a half tank, and rear carrier. Bikes like the Jaguar, and the the B-6 were around, and kids rode them, but back then they were just- you know- bikes. No one really paid a lot of attention. The first time a full dress Schwinn caught my eye was some time in the late seventies.
I'd been surfing at the Huntington Beach pier, and I was waiting to cross Pacific Coast Highway at the light at Main Street. A guy rolled up to the crosswalk on the gaudiest, most outrageous, and stone gorgeous thing I had ever seen on two wheels (without a motor, that is). I had to stop and ask him what it was. The bike was a fully restored 1948 Schwinn Autocycle, painted God and Country red white, and blue. It was big, round, heavy. Bulbous tires. Built in horn.Tanks. Racks. Lights. Springs. Curvy steel draped in gleaming sheet metal and dripping with chrome, and reflectors. This thing was Mae West with fenders. It was cool incarnate, and I knew right then and there that I was going to have one come hell or high water. But where did you go about finding obsolete bicycles?
Well. Sometimes you find them right around the block from where you live. Soon after, someone opened a small, what was then not-quite-antique shop on La Habra Boulevard just a few blocks away from the apartment I lived in. The place was called The Nostalgia Store, and sold all sorts of goodies, and trinkets from the 1950's. It seemed like an odd idea- keep in mind, that stuff was barely twenty years old at the time. The store didn't last long either. Anyway- point was- the coolest thing that the guy had was a perfect 1950's Schwinn Panther. For three hundred bucks. That was the price of a decent used car, or a good used motorcycle. No way. So I checked want-ads, and garage sales, and auctions. All I found was a 1950's Co-ed. A girl's bike. No, I wouldn't find my first full dress Schwinn for a few years to come. Not until I'd quit surfing, left my old job, and moved out of La Habra altogether. My new job with the utility company would have me in and out of neighborhoods, houses, yards, and garages all over a big chunk of L A County. If there were Old Schwinns out there, I would find them.

JWM

Jaguar Project Part Two

Big Loo. A True Christmas Story

2009-12-20T11:14:00.000-08:00

This story was first posted on Robot-Japan in '03. The pic came from google images.
jwm

I saw “Big Loo-Your Friend From the Moon” for sale on e-bay. Asking price was just over $1800.00. One thousand, eight hundred dollars for a forty year old plastic robot from the Marx toy company. Big Loo was a “Christmas toy” from the early 1960’s; kin to the likes of Great Garloo, Odd Ogg, Robot Commando, and Thinkatron.

Big Loo was the most desperately wanted toy on my 1963 Wish List. He could shoot balls out of one hand, and bend over and grab things to destroy with the other. He had blinking eye lights, and a crosshair sight for the dart shooters, missile launchers and water squirter. He could talk too. He had a crank operated voice with ten different sayings. Not to mention the warning bell, a two-tone whistle to further terrify the bad guys, and a compass and Morse code clicker in case you were lost in the wilderness and needed to send a message in code. Not only that- Big Loo was huge. 37” tall to be exact. He was just about everything I wanted in life that fall.

But late in that summer of 1963 we had returned home to Trenton Michigan after visiting friends who had moved to California. My younger brother had asthma; the pollen laden eastern summers were killing him. He had done remarkably better in the dry southwestern climate. Instead of spending time in the emergency room he had been running around, swimming, and skinning up his knees and elbows riding a steel wheeled sidewalk surfboard. Sometime around Halloween a ‘For Sale’ sign appeared in front of our house. My folks announced that we too would be moving to California. We were going to a place called La Habra- sort of near Disneyland, and sort of near the beach.

The house sold in November, and one Friday afternoon a fragment of broadcast broke across the loudspeaker in sixth grade Music class. The teacher turned directly to me. "John. Get down to the office right now, and find out what happened". Against all school rules, I ran down the ramp, through the lobby, and into the main office. “What Happened?” I asked.
The secretary looked at me for a moment and said in a flat, stunned voice,” Someone shot the President.” That was Friday, November 22.

Three weeks later, Friday, the Thirteenth of December was cold, and wet. The moving vans had gone. After school we said goodbye to our friends, finished packing, and took a last look at our home. The tree out front was a bare stick. The lawn was brown, the windows black, and everything else drizzly and gray. It was dark by the time we left. Mom piled my two brothers and me into the car, and my Dad drove south that night, into Ohio.

Many days later, our bedraggled family pulled up to the door of our friends’ house in La Habra California. It was after ten o’clock at night when we got there. The moving vans had been delayed, so we spent several days sleeping on the floor in their living room and everyone got the flu at once. One of the moving vans arrived Christmas Eve with half of our furniture and goods.
We spent that Christmas Eve moving into a shabby sprawling ramshackle house right off Whittier Boulevard. There were avocado, persimmon and loquat trees all overgrown in the huge shaggy yard. There were real poinsettias, too. Somehow in the midst of all that confusion my parents managed to get a Christmas tree set up and decorated in our otherwise empty living room. My Dad explained that Christmas might be delayed this year. At eleven, I understood what he meant, but my younger brothers still believed in Santa. He took my brothers and me to “Freight Outlet” and gave us each a few bucks to spend so we’d have gifts to give. My brothers and I never knew how broke we really were then. We got dinner that night from Burger Q, which was right across the street from our new home.

And the next morning my brothers and I woke up to Christmas. The house was half empty, and strange. Stranger still, it was warm, and sunny out. But it was still Christmas. I don’t know how my parents did it, but they did. We had presents. All the silly, wonderful Christmas-toy junk that my brothers and I had coveted, wished for, and figured we just wouldn’t get, appeared beneath the tree that morning. Including my talking 37” tall, ball firing, dart shooting, missile launching, water squirting eye blinking, waist bending, thing grabbing, bell ringing whistle blowing “Big Loo Your Friend From the Moon” robot from the Marx toy company.

That was Christmas 1963. By the spring of 1964, I had discovered car models, surf music, and then the Beatles. Big Loo went the way of most real toys, which is to say that I don’t know when or how it disappeared. And now there’s one for sale for eighteen hundred and some odd dollars on e-bay. There’s not a chance I’ll bid on it. Nonetheless, if it were mine I wouldn’t sell it.

A merry, and joyous Christmas to all my friends in the Coonosphere. John M

Imaginary Pan

2009-10-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Labels for this post:
e.g. scooters, vacation, fall

I know- I did that one already- the bit with copying the little labels for this post label. And I used it as an excuse to start BS'ing about motorcycles, and ended up writing about a hapless road trip I took back in 1973. Well- it is Fall. I could use a vacation, and an oddly wistful sort of dream has taken hold of my imagination. I say "oddly wistful", because I've been dreaming about motorcycles, and "wistful" is generally better suited to dreams of lost loves, lost youth, and all things nostalgically lost in nostalgia.

Still, I keep dreaming about a Panhead. I want a 1952 Harley, and I want to build. (With the emphasis on build.) a '70's "Frisco style" chopper, along the lines of the Captain America bike that Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider. I'd like to get an old FL, and disassemble the thing down to nuts and bolts, and resurrect it in the image of all those badass machines that the outlaw clubs rode when they terrorized hippies back in the day...

There's always a lot of free brain time at work, and The Project has become The New Favorite Toy for my brain. I muse on everything from the danger inherent in riding a chopped out bike with the old style foot clutch and suicide gearshift, to the ethical question raised by taking a vintage machine and customizing, rather than restoring it. I think on peanut tanks, sissy bars, how far to extend the wide glide... I can play with this stuff in my head for hours.

But that's all it is. Head play. It's a mental weed of sorts that feeds on traces of hope. The hope, in this case, would be finding my way to a financial situation that would allow me to indulge in the project. So I've been playing George to my own Lennie, and fertilizing this mental weed with bullshit. And it's a cover, too. As long as I'm filling my brain with this kind of stuff, I'm not letting my brain fill up with big picture stuff. And you know how it goes- the bigger the picture, the scarier the stuff. So I'm keeping stride with a day's work, and cursing this primitive goddamn pile of gears and iron for not starting after the zillionth kick, and then I remember to turn on the gas, and it fires right up, and everyone laughs, but right now I have to lock the upper field gate, change a couple of lights, and get the trash cans out in time for the first lunch...

I like doing this. Working the day shift is fun, and Stephen King Elementary is a particularly sweet routine. And I've been here for a couple of weeks already on what's looking like an open ended assignment. Short version- the regular day man had planned on retiring after this school year. Unfortunately, he had some heart trouble. He'll be OK, but it's doubtful if he'll be able to return to work. In the mean time, I'm filling in until further notice.

That's the hard part. Filling in. I've been filling in here and there for three years, now. I do a damn good job, too. Doesn't matter. Filling in is as far as I'm going to get in this outfit. I get all kinds of happy talk about what a good job I do, but they hired out the last two openings to guys cold off the street. Nice enough guys, but younger, and dumber to boot. And I've already followed up their work. They're doing an average job. Nothing special. So I know I could work this day position for months, have the plant buffed up like an antique car, and everybody happy with the service. But when the regular guy does retire, they'll tell me, "Thanks for all the hard work", and hire someone else for the job.

It's a U.T.O.L., a Universal Task Of Life. This one is called: Face it, dude, they're not hiring guys your age. They're hiring young men with families to raise, not old men trying for one last career before the boneyard. Hell, I'm older than the guy I'm filling in for. But I don't face it. I do the same thing I've done all along: bust my ass trying to do an exceptional job, and fail at suppressing the hope that I could still get a full-time gig out of this.

And- you know- it's not really about the Panhead. It's what full time work would mean- health insurance, life insurance, - shit we just can't get or afford. And less for me than for my wife. If she got... I'll just leave it there; I don't need to get all melodramatic. You know. So I think about building the chopper, and let the daydream grow like a weed on the false hope that I'm going to get anywhere on this job.

JWM

Life In The Best Of All Possible Worlds

2009-10-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

This post is a boast. A throwdown to every dude and dudette in the Coonosphere. This is a rocket at Rick, and Robin. A bomb at Ben, and Bob. A jolt to Julie and Joan. Know ye now, that the women are on notice, and the men are well, and truly pwn3d. I hereby stake an unequivocal claim on the loftiest and most rarefied reaches of high ground. And I mean like Himalayaville, Daddy-O.
I.
Rule.

What, you might ask, has catapulted your usually humble, and somewhat self effacing host to such ecstatic transports (not to mention annoying alliterations)? A winning ticket on the pick six? A sure shot at fame and fortune? An NEA grant for my cat litter sculpture of teh preznit?

Well, actually it's my wife who gets the kudos. Take heed here, Julie and Joan. Eat yer' hearts out guys. Here it comes.

I've been working this week. Friday morning started as it always does: Mary gets up in the dark to make coffee and oatmeal. I follow a few minutes later, pour a cup, and take half an hour to achieve consciousness while sitting on the couch with the cat. Mary stirs me when breakfast is ready, feeds me, and gets me out the door. It's a sweet enough way to start the day. But.
This Friday I fumbled my way to the table; she set the bowl of cereal at my place, and joined me with her own a moment later. She sat down, turned to me and said, "You've been working hard this week. How about tonight I take you for dinner, and then we can see this new movie I was reading about- Zombieland. How does that sound?"

Keep in mind that it was early, and my blood caffeine level was barely high enough to simulate awareness.
Zombieland?
My wife had just offered to take me to a zombie movie.
It would be well to note here that my wife is sixty one years old.

"That sounds good," I said.

Truly momentous events overwhelm our ability to comprehend them. Their impact is felt not like a blow, but rather more like a drug that requires some time to take effect. It took a while before I began to really realize what had happened at the breakfast table. And this realization was starting to remind me of the time back in the 60's when I tossed down half a dozen diet pills just to see what would happen. Sweet euphoria swirled around the wistful sadness that comes from viewing the Human Condition from afar.

My wife offered to take me to a zombie movie. I knew that just as I was reveling in the anticipation of burgers and fries, followed by a couple hours of guns, guts, shit blowin' up, and zombies gettin' blasted every which way from hell, (not to mention babes and cars!) that there were legions of men out there who were staring down the barrels of vegetarian dinners and chick flicks in the vain hope of getting...
Ah, well.
So, guys. I know you all have lovely women in your lives.
But eat your hearts out anyway.
And ladies take note. I have handed you the key to all sorts of renewal in your marriages.

And Zombieland?
Hands down, the all time greatest movie of all time.

JWM

Kicking the Football, and other notes

2009-09-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

Today it finally looked and felt like autumn. Heatwave broken. Morning haze wrapped everything in gray until early afternoon. Bronze sun yawned out around two.

The phone rang early this morning, as I lay asleep. I heard it ring, but I thought, "Mary's up. It's probably her friend..." Mary wasn't up, and I missed the call, and fell back asleep. Something wasn't right. That call. Work? I jumped up, and called in. It was still before seven. No answer. That ain't good. Leave a voice mail.
No reply.
And this first cool day of Fall was mine, like it or not.
So now what? What else? Take out the bike.

Old John was down at the corner. He's been getting a little discouraged as of late. He's been saving up money out of his SSI checks so that he can buy himself some land out in the desert, where- you know- you can still find land for a few hundred bucks. He was thinking about Corona. There's a Trader Joe's in Corona. That's important. Trader Joe's is one of John's favorite haunts. You can just spend hours in there, he says. You find all sorts of interesting stuff, and you watch all the different people come through and see all the kinds of stuff they eat, and how they dress, and you can just talk to folks there... But someone told him that the Trader Joe's in Corona is in a strip mall way outside of town, and the bus doesn't go there, and besides once they put in those malls the price of land goes way up and you can't afford nothin', so Corona's out. And he's not sure what to do. I understand.

Last Tuesday I joined the legions of those BANNED FROM LGF! I hadn't been over there in some time, and I wasn't even sure if my login would even work. It did. But unlike most of the banned, I didn't get kicked out for disagreeing with the mob. I set out to get nuked. I copied a list of banned accounts- more than 1200 names, and pasted the list in a comments thread. How closely does the Lizardoid Master watch over the comments? It took less than a minute for the post, and my account to get popped. Cheap thrills, eh?
It's too bad, really. Little Green Footballs used to be important. It was the first and most informative stop on the web for news about the global jihad. I remember saying, "If you aren't reading LGF you don't know what's happening in the world."
And it used to be fun. I loved the discussions, the arguments, flame wars, troll eviscerations, or just sitting up late BS'ing with the folks on the late night open threads. And, truth to tell, if it hadn't been for LGF I never would have run across Gagdad Bob, BabbaZee, or any of the folks in the coonosphere. But LGF has been over for a long time, C.J. has become a laughingstock, and the blog has become a jerkle cirque of sycophants. It saddened me a little. Having an LGF account used to be a point of pride. It had come to mean so little to me that I just threw it away.
Ah well.
Things change.
And with that I'll close. Tomorrow the whole world starts all over again. We'll see how it all turns out.

JWM

Official End of Summer Post

2009-09-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

Booger the Cat is Not Amused. (click for more grump)

This is one of those times when the keyboard is a teaspoon, and the blank post window is an empty pool.
Fill 'er up.
Well...
Where do I start?
First, I guess I'll have to apologize for sloppy blogmanship, bad form, and poor etiquette by just walking off, and leaving the blog unattended. No excuses.
Anyway.
I started writing about work some time ago. You see- the idea was to take a look at what work meant to me, to describe a numinous event, and to consider the change that that vision caused in me and my relation to work. It was all going to culminate with a decision I made last spring, and the consequences of having made it.

That was the plan anyway. And the narrative was going to be interspersed with all sorts of fascinating and funny anecdotal slices of life on the summer crew, complete with all the drama one generally comes to expect when the topic at hand drifts around to the cleaning of schools.

None of that shit happened. And, truth to tell, I really don't much feel like drawing out the metaphysical aspects of manual labor, and crafting them into an amusing story, a parable, or a pious admonition to keep your shoulder to the grindstone for the glory of God, or some such thing.

So, for those of you who have given me you time and attention, here's how the story wound up.
I got out of the cardiac event well, but totally broke. I got a spot substituting for the custodial/maintenance/grounds crew at the local school district. That was January of '07. For the last almost three years I have worked hard, and well, and gladly. I made a reputation. I made some friends. This last spring, two full-time jobs became available. After giving it much thought I decided to put in for one of the jobs. One of them is a tough grind of a job, but at 57, I figured I could probably make ten years- well, maybe make ten. It doesn't matter. They did not hire me for either position.
So. There's the wound. I'll spare you all the salt that got rubbed into it.

"It's not what I want, but what God wants for me. Not what I would do, but what God would have me do. Not my will, but that God's be done
That I humbly pray..."

It was no surprise. All summer long I stressed on it- shook the crap out of that inner-magic-8-ball, but the only answers that came up were the various permutations of "Not Yes". Now I'm just glad it's over.

Watch me dodge the part where I say, "Well, here's the lesson in all this..."

A final note:
Rick, I was just over at "Listening Now". I am honored. Durn near speechless. (that's why I typed this out). Thank you very much.
And to Julie, Thanks for the robot link! There's no such thing as a bad day when you have a warrior robot.
Helen (theo) Thanks for the thought, and the link. I checked the site out briefly, read through the introductory stuff. He sounds interesting.

JWM

Sometimes You See Stuff

2009-08-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

As I said last week, I believe that hearing The Voice, or experiencing a sudden flash of insight or intuition is a fairly common experience. Most everyone can tell the story of a hunch, a feeling, an impulse that led to some great opportunity or other. An odd thing about the experience is that you can only see it in retrospect. And if you try to anticipate the encounter- catch a glimpse of the wheels of fate in action, it becomes invisible.

So when I got out of the hospital, and wrote the narrative of my adventure in the cardiac ward I made a point of noting that I had not experienced any sort of luminous moment, no angelic visitors, no sudden spiritual awakening, or anything like that. It was sort of disappointing.

It just took time to digest the experience. Throughout the whole episode, from the moment I collapsed in the emergency room to the time they released me, a little over forty eight hours later, I had an odd, and almost annoying sort of tic running like a soundtrack through my thoughts: "I wonder who made that machine? Who drew the plans for this room? Someone sat at a drafting table, or a CAD screen, and created the layout for those circuit boards. Someone planned out the wiring and installed those electrical fixtures. Someone laid the tile, hauled the concrete, broke the earth to lay the foundation of this place. This hospital where these people are saving my life. The tens of thousands of businesses that create the tools that enable them to do so..." and on, and on. If I saw a picture on the wall I was reminded that someone painted it; someone made the frame...
And the vision expanded until I saw that the entire miracle that is Western Civilization is the compounded effort of countless ordinary people getting up and going to ordinary jobs. It is the will of God that life should flourish. Holy is the work done toward that end. And who can deny that life flourishes in this place? For all its microcosmic faults, the overwhelming balance is abundant Good. We here are so richly blessed.

Now as I look back on it I have to laugh at myself a little. I had The Voice shouting in my ear while I was busy listening for the voice. I was so busy watching for angels that I didn't see the vision. At least not until some days later. Not until the shock of the whole event had begun to wear off. The immediate details of the tests, the procedures, the pain, all faded pretty quickly. But the memory of that odd mental chatter, and the vision it pointed to, remained clear.

JWM

A Decision on the Hill.

2009-08-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

This has become another odd exercise, writing these musings on work. Almost everything I've written down in the last few posts has been biographical stuff I have covered before in one context or another. And much of the stuff yet to come will have been covered before as well. But there is a point to all this, beyond my vain rehashing of stuff that's already well and vainly hashed. If I go slowly enough I may just figure out what that point is before I finish.
Anyway.

Writing is work. So is drawing, painting, sculpture, music. Blogging too, come to think of it. Exercise is certainly work, and all the really fun things in life: games, sports, hobbies, require huge investments of effort. So not only is work, work; play is work too. Everyone would love to have play for a job, but, of course, once play becomes a job it is no longer play. Just like slack time. Unless slack is framed by a routine of productive work, it is meaningless.

By the summer of '06, the routine, productive, or not, was an eight mile loop that I'd walk every day through the steep narrow roads in the nearby hills. The route took me past the elementary school by my house, and one afternoon I paused there and just looked at the plant. It was built over fifty years ago. The low slung modern buildings are settled under the shade of huge ash trees. It looks as much like a park, as it does a school. I thought back, not on the teaching career, but to the days when I worked the night shift. What a mellow routine it had been. (Mellow was a highly prized commodity in the seventies) I thought about working at this, or a similar small facility, taking care of the place. It wouldn't be a bad gig at all, I thought. And I could see doing that again...

So I started thinking of just saying screw it with this 'retirement' business, and going back to work. But as I understood it, if I went back to work I'd risk losing the retirement income. That was a tough call. I wrestled with the decision all that summer. I was trudging up the steepest hill on the eight mile loop, sweating hard, and pushing the pace, and my head was swimming with 'what do you really want to do?', when the answer just burst out of me, and I said to myself something like, "I don't care, dammit. I want to go back to work."

And just at that moment- right on cue.

pain.

JWM

Vacancies

2009-08-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

Work is what we do and who we are. Notice that we say, "Mr. Smith is an accountant, a salesman, a manager." Not, "Mr. Smith is a father, a golfer, a jazz lover who works as an accountant, a salesman, etc". Like it or not, when you take a job it becomes part of who you are. Same when you lose one.
And although I left the teaching job in'97, I worked on the stones without taking a break until '03. I couldn't stand the thought of not being on project. Some time before the passion for artwork kicked the bucket, I got my first computer, and got on line. The goofy snapshot that headed Monday's post turned into the "Doesn't Play Well" project that took another couple of years to finish. But the story was a project, not a job. And when it was finished in'05, I didn't have anything to follow it up with.

The artwork sprouted under the eve of the teaching job, and grew strong enough to sustain me for a few seasons. Sprouting under the eve of the artwork was a spiritual hunger that pulled me back to a very cool "footbally" kind of internet site. At first I went to the footbally place for politics in the wake of 9/11, and news about the jihad; soon it was less about the politics, and more about 'meeting' with some few of the people there who seemed to carry a peculiar set of religious convictions that just- pulled at me like a magnet. Something in their words carried fire. And got them all expelled from the footbally place. Some started their own blogs. The Coonosphere was born. (thanks, Queeg!)

In the mean time I had *how do you say?* an overabundance of slack. And I was face to face with the Ghost of No Occupation- the place where you dread the "What do you do?" question, because the answer is, "nothing", and the part of you that is measured by what you do remains vacant.
That's not to say that I spent all my time staring at the wall or even the internet. After all, there was still the household to maintain, my mother to take care of, and the myriad details of life that can fill the better part of any day. I spent much time walking in the hills, much time in prayer, and much time wrestling with The Religious Question. And the Question seemed to be, "What do you want of me, God? What is it that You would have me do?"
Some time early in '06 I was marching up the first steep hill on my daily eight mile walk, and I just got The Voice again. And before I go on here let me explain what I mean by, The Voice: Compelling flashes of intuition, maybe. Sometimes, an actual voice in my ear. Ricky Raccoon described moments of intense visual focus. Some may describe a nudge from a Guardian Angel. I believe that most people can describe several such incidents in their lives. Anyway- this time it was a- voice. I was marching up the hill and... "Do you want to carry the fire?" it said. I got kind of a gut drop, and stopped mid-step. Whatever this was it was Real, and it sounded suspiciously like it was asking for a commitment. I didn't know... "You can refuse." it said. That set off a real gut drop. Whatever this was, I did not want to refuse it...And I just said, "Yes. Yes I will."
And just at that moment-

Nothing in particular happened.

JWM

Worked Out

2009-08-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

So anyway- yeah the breakdown and loss of the teaching job, and all that crap... I've written about it before here on the wfb.
But the topic is Work.
I wanted the legendary Job With Meaning. Make the world a better place. Feel secure that your keep has been earned. Teaching school seemed to meet all three requirements. And doing it in the inner city LA added the grit, and the drama. I liked doing it; I gave it my best effort, and for a while, I was very good at it.
Now. I could say the same thing, minus the part about inner city LA, about the night job cleaning up the local Jr. high. It met the requirements according to my own set of values.
But, of course, teaching pays better than cleaning up the classroom. And face it- you can sling all the happy talk you want about the value of 'good honest work' but there just ain't no prestige in answering the "What do you do?" question with saying you're a night janitor. Especially if it's an eligible woman doing the asking. Answering the question with, "inner city school teacher", well- that's a different matter. And it was a point of great pride with me to have earned the right to give that answer. I believed that I was doing good, and doing it well. Eh-maybe. I really don't know, now. But I believed it then.
It all crashed in June of '97. What started as the day from heck turned into a breakdown, and a two year nightmare that ended with my getting a disability 'retirement' from the state. So there went the job, and with it the title, modest as it was, and much of who I was, or thought I was.

And it was work that kept me going through the whole thang. Artwork, actually. For years I had used the drafting table as a source of escape from the stress of the day job. I channeled all the anger, frustration, and disappointment into graceful biomorphic graphics, and later, Celtic design. I have posted some of the work here on the wfb. With the loss of the job I turned my energy to stone carving. I carved every day. I treated it like a job. Show up early; get out the tools, and carve another chunk of alabaster into something new in the world. It got me through. I made some cool stuff, won some ribbons, and got invited to display at several fine venues. Even sold a couple. But did it have Meaning? Was I making the world a better place? Was I secure in knowing my keep had been earned? Not really. And, truth to tell, I was a fair to meddling fine amateur, but not big time material. And the artistic burn that had sustained me from the mid eighties onward just fizzled out cold in '03. I had been slowing down somewhat, even though I was about 2/3 through a very good piece. I just went out there one morning, looked at the rock, and it was like suddenly falling all the way out of love, and all the way down to indifference in the time it took to finish a cup of coffee.
It was like losing another job.

JWM

Where This Stuff Started

2009-08-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

Thank you Julie, Joan, Rick, and Robin for the notes. That made my day.
Like I said yesterday, the next few posts are going to be about work. That's nothing new here on the wfb; I write about work every now and again, and most of the stuff I'm going to talk about is stuff that has come up before. Work, for me for the last two and a half years has been substituting on call for the custodial/maintenance department of the local school district. Not exactly life in the fast lane. Nonetheless I like it well enough.
So much for the 'where I am'.

How I came to be here is another matter. I mean- this is how I started out almost forty years ago: pushing broom for a small town school district. Irony is- I recognized, in 1975, that I had every reason in the world to stay right where I was. Surfing was The Most Important Thing, and the job was tailor made for a surf bum. Fall, winter, and spring were on the swing shift, so I could surf every day if I felt like it. Summer was day shift at work, but the summer beaches were crowded, hot, and usually flat anyway. Besides- I actually enjoyed the work. Cleaning up the school was simple, but it was important that it be done, and done well. Administration was easy going, and most of the faculty was appreciative. Life rolled along on the rhythm of season and tide. I was having fun, and I knew it. Money? I had enough. That was enough.

Seeds of discontent sprout anyway. Girlfriend arrives on the scene. Late night beer and bedfest. Bye bye surf, and "By the way, why don't you get a better job?"
So I left the night job with the school system for a job in field service with the gas company. I hated the gas company for three years before I quit. I took a trip through Mexico, and came home wondering what to do. A couple months of salt water therapy later, I had my answer.
I wanted a job that mattered, not just an eight hour exchange of time for dollars. I wanted to do work that was more than just work. I wanted a job with meaning. [insert eye rolling emoticon]. I was on my way home from the beach, waiting to make a right turn. And I just got The Voice. Suddenly I had a picture of myself standing up in front of a high school class getting a bunch of first semester freshmen ready to gain the basic skills that will get them through the next four years and beyond...
So just after my thirtieth birthday I signed up for college. I wanted to teach English in high school.

And so I did. For ten years. Until the breakdown in '97.

JWM

Getting Plugged Back In

2009-08-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

It would just figure. For the last couple of weeks I've been impatient to end the internet fast, get back on line, get in touch with Rick, and Ben, and everyone, and most of all, try to spill some of this turbulence that has been churning up my small corner of the world. But now I'm on line, and the road between my head and the keyboard is crawling along like the freeway at five on Friday. I don't even know where to start, and I can't come to any conclusions while the wheels of all this stuff are still turning. July is over, but the maelstrom of events that began the month will still suck the life out of my brain for another week or so before the next set of challenges comes up to take its place. Vague enough? I hope so. I do not know where things will end up. And much depends. Much.

But I do know where the next few posts are going to end up. They're going to end up being about work: work through the lens of my own epiphany, the translation of The Voice into the hard currency of deeds performed at its prompting: the simple business of getting up and going in and putting out a day's worth- the gritty business of working a tough dirty job. And the bullshit.

There's always crap to put up with on a job. Any job. It gets under your nails and under your skin, and worms its way into your head where it crowds out your attention span, and spills over into every corner of your thoughts. Seeds of discontent sprout into silent soliloquies, and lectures. Righteous internal monologues grow like so many annoying goddamn weeds. Trivial matters morph into mental gadflies that sting you awake at twenty to three, and buzz around the gates of sleep until it's time to get up anyway... This is fly season, this summer in my head.

But if I want to make sense of anything, I have to go back to the start of the current situation, and sometimes it's a tricky business to know exactly where you are and just how you came to be there. Some situations in life arise from the cumulative result of all the decisions and events that preceded them. Others are visited upon us suddenly, with no precedent or preparation. Sometimes it's a combination of the two. Point is- I need to pick a point, and start from it. I'll do that in just a minute.
Anyway.

To my friends in the Coonosphere: I will be in touch. I have to catch up on The War, and the Froth; I'm hungry for haiku, and I'm lookin' forward to BS'n with Ben.

JWM

A Note to the Coonosphere

2009-07-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

Figure in Seven Lines

This isn't really going to be much of a post. I am just sort of checking into cyberspace (as we computer savvy folks like to call it) to leave a note to my dear friends in the 'sphere: Bob, Ben, Ricky, Robin Starfish, Walt, Mushroom, Van, Julie, Joan, QP, and anyone else from the One Cosmos crew who happens by- even the troll. I think of you folks even when I'm not on line.
Anyway.

I'm taking a hiatus from the internet. I'll be back with a boatload of shit to sling after August 1st- maybe even a new project. We'll see. In the mean time, I hope all is going well for all of you. All right. That's it. See Y'all later.

Oh, and just one other thing. If you just stopped by here, and you have a little time to waste, and hey- who doesn't? Check out The Greatest Toy Story Ever Told, (actual title: Doesn't Play Well With Others) linked on my right sidebar. It's dreadfully corny, occasionally funny, and mostly ridiculous with a rock 'em sock 'em bang up epic ending ripped-off from all the best cliche's in anime.

Take care.

John M

Flowers In The Yard

2009-06-15T16:22:00.000-07:00

Secret growing heart
opens for a lover's eyes
playing give and take

haiku by Julie

I finally got the evil ie8 uninstalled, and ie7 is back limping along as always. No, thank you. I do not choose to update. I'm using Firefox anyway.
And I still don't feel much like posting just yet, but that may change. In the mean time, as always, I'm ready to go to almost endless lengths to find new material to write about. In this case I went all the way out to the back yard, where I planted one of those trumpet flower plants a couple years ago. So here are some shots of the trumpet flower plant in my back yard. Maybe I can bum a haiku off someone, and then the pictures will have captions. Click to enlarge.

JWM

WTF at the wfb. stepping back

2009-06-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

I read Joan of Argghh's post yesterday, and it tied in with the last two posts over at Mushroom's. I'll weigh in here, rather than post on both blogs. I too have felt this odd sense of impending doom. Indolence, and Barbarism. I seem to get the flashes when I'm driving. For me the flashes manifest as titles- names for the stages in some huge thing that unfolds before us. 9/11 was The Dark Epiphany. The shock wave resonated around the globe, and set the next phase in motion. What followed was The Alignment of Sides. Sheep to the left, goats to the right. Or was it goats to the left? At any rate, the Alignment of Sides is all but over. The lots have been called and cast. Here we are. We know who we serve. And you see who won the power. Now comes The Inversion. It is impossible to look at pop culture or the media without being drowned in it. Ugly is cool. Nothing is sacred, not even beauty. The Lie owns, and a frightening number of people have placed their Faith in The Lie. Or so it would seem. What will follow The Inversion?

I don't know.

But I'm bettin' it ain't good.

Right now I can't even stand to listen to talk radio unless it's Prager on values, or great issues. Politics is toxic. Pop culture is depressingly ugly. And right now, I just don't want to add another screedy log to the fire.

So, I'm going to drop back into lurk mode for a while.

Maybe just post a pic here and there for a while- who knows?

JWM

Silver and Slack

2009-05-29T14:16:00.000-07:00

This is the season for our all silver weatherless weather that blankets the southland in woolen gray. It isn't warm or cold. Eight in the morning looks just like five in the afternoon. Windless. Nothing casts a shadow in the diffuse light. Sound muted; dials turned down to six, and everything is slow.

I didn't get a call for work today. But I'm on Monday for a little over a week. Much to be grateful for.

And I missed old John's birthday party because I didn't know he was going to have one. Neither did he. I haven't hung out at the corner for quite a while. I've been working, and after work I mostly don't want to go hang out- I just want to rest, and poke out a post here on the wfb.

So I missed the whole thing; all the locals there at Starbuck's, along with the Starbuck's crew, the gang from Fresh n' Easy, and Trader Joe's bunch got together and threw old John a surprise party at Starbuck's.

I found out about the party this morning, but it was yesterday, that I learned that John had been down with the flu. I walked up to his place this morning. Some folks up in the Heights let him live in their pool house. He takes care of the dog. He was up, sitting outside talking to a woman who sees him at the corner. She was stopping by to check on him. Old John has a wealth of friends. It's is truly one of the finer things I have seen in people- they way that so many folks look out for him. Even M, the guy I - oh, forget it. But even a guy like M shows a decent side when it comes to old John.

Anyway- The woman left a short time after I got there. John showed me the pictures, and we talked for a while. But he wanted to go back in and lie down, so I walked on back down the hill. He's going to be OK.

Saturday:

Today is a carbon copy of yesterday. If you photographed the place in black and white, no one would notice. I went up to John's place, and he gave me a couple of pictures from the party. He still isn't well, and he doesn't want to hang out at the corner anymore because it's too windy down there, and sitting in the draft is what he figures gave him the flu. M had just given him a ride down to the store so he could pick up a few things. Again, he wanted to go in and lie down, so we visited for just a short while. I drove down the hill, took care of the small business of the day, and now I am in possesion of that sweet distilled essence of time: slack. Of course there's a ton of shit that needs done. Find me a time when that isn't the case.

Slack. God knows I have had my share of it. I think it's safe to say that I have had not just abundant slack, but excessive slack. But slack is like salt. Too much of it spoils the meal, and if it's spread too thin it might as well not be there at all. There must be balance and proportion in order to make slack, slack. Maybe just one day out of seven is enough. Only as long as you keep slack in its proper proportion can you realize how truly precious real slack time is.

Up until the last two and a half years, slack had been the default state of my existence for a decade. But try as you will to place a high value on something, if you have that thing in limitless quantities the value diminishes. Even slack. As of late I've been working very steadily, and my slack time has been reproportioned, and redistributed according to the rules of the forty hour work week. The diminished quantity of available slack has raised the both the quality, and the value of the slack time remaining.

But like all things it comes at a price. With diminished slack time, I have chosen to spend several hours a week writing here on the wfb, rather than hanging out with the gang at the corner. Had I been hanging out instead of sitting home writing I'd have been in on the plan to throw John his 87th birthday party. As it was I missed it completely, and the regret smarts. Priorities, huh?

Anyway.

With that I resume the non duties of the day.

JWM

Waking up to Wednesday.

2009-05-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

Damn. It's like Wednesday, already. How did that happen? I know. I've been working a lot, and hard. And I've ended the last few days just plain tired out. Having Skully around over a long lost weekend didn't help.

Skully was a grim reminder of how far I've fallen from even the semblence of cool. I'm not kiddin'- I didn't know the whereabouts of a single strip joint, underground club, topless bar, or card casino. I had no idea where to go to find a hooker. I told him I know of a guy somewhere back east who makes book on sporting events, but Skully didn't seem interested. I just don't know where it's at. But I know enough about booze- well, I remember enough. It's been quite a while, you know... But I figured Caribbean rum would appeal to the pirate in the parrot, so I grabbed a couple quarts. That, and the computer kept him reasonably happy.

So now the place is a mess, my wife is all kinds of pissed off, and I'm still getting hundreds of spam e-mails from third world countries. You don't even want to know what they're trying to sell.

But Skully's on a Continental Trailways headed for Washington.

*bitchen*

JWM

Strange goings on at the wfb

2009-05-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

Skully

Well, now this is a peculiar predicament. I went on line, looked at the e-mail, and got a note from one "Bogie", a mysterious troll who often shows up at USSBen's blog One Cosmos at Sea.
I'll cut 'n paste it here:

Lishen, jwn:
I was workin' on a case wit' Mack when I hear these mugs in a dive bar talkin' 'bout kidnappin' Skully the boid. So I says to 'em You lookin' fer someone to pay ransome to get a boid back? Naw, they says. We're lookin to pay someone to get this *^&%#*(*%$ boid outta' here! How much you payin' I asks. The mugs says "I'll give ya' twenny bucks an' the boid". Sho I says, "Make it fifty", and he takes the deal." I'm out here, by the LA airport, and I heard you know Ben good enough to make sure the boid gets home OK. So I'm sendin' him over to your place in a cab. You pay the hack.

Bogie

So the next thing I know I get a knock at the door. I open up, and some guy's standing there. "Greetings very much", he says. "I am Mohammed Mohammed Mohammed from the company of Yellow cab. I have for you the boid.
That will be sixty seven fifty cab fare, please very much."

And now he's here. I have him amused with a bottle of Mount Gay rum for now, but he's already starting to ask when I'm going to be done so he can get on the computer. So any posts from Skully will be coming from this ip address for a while, until I can get him on a Greyhound back to Ben anyway.

JWM

Blog 101

2009-05-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the 100th post on the wfb, hence the clever, "Blog 101" title today. When I ambled into the bike story last Tuesday I finished by saying there was a point to my talking about bikes. But recounting that road trip was not the point I had in mind. Nonetheless, writing about the road trip turned into the point of the whole exercise. I took up surfing in '74, and sold the bike some time later. The next motorcycle I'd own would be the bad ass Harley that I dreamed of as a kid, and when I saddled it up for a road trip I kept going east until I could go swimming in the Atlantic. That was '91, and the trip was the stuff of epic fiction. And I kept a careful journal the whole time. I ended every day on the road with an hour or so of writing down everything that happened on the trip that day. The first thing I did when I got home was read through the journal, and fill in overlooked details while the memories were fresh. I started hand copying everything, and adding the details to a new spiral notebook, and got about half way through the project.

I still have those notebooks, and a big box of photographs from that trip in '91. That was the point I was getting at when I interrupted myself to talk about the old Beemer.

Here's where it gets weird. It was fun to dig through my admittedly flawed memory to try and put that Death Valley story together. However, when I think of dusting off those old notebooks I balk. I was a different person at thirty eight than I was at twenty, and I'm a very much different person now than I was at thirty eight. At thirty eight I was still somewhat in the thrall of my college education, and the liberal saturated environment of a high school faculty. In retrospect, that trip in '91 was part of what opened my eyes. But here's where I'll just cut through the crap, and say it. I'm sure if I look at those old journals I'll find some moonbatty statement I made back then, and when I see it I'll cringe. And then I will come up against my own strange imperative not to embellish, or waver from stuff as it actually happened... I guess I don't want to awaken an irresistible urge to travel back in time, and kick my own ass for being an idiot.

That's the excuse anyway. I had been thinking of digging out that journal and serializing it here on the wfb, but, as I said, I balked, and the balking was the point I was driving at last week. Spend time with myself back in the moonbat days? I'd rather ride over Cajon Pass in a rainstorm.

But I've done stuff just that hairball before...

JWM

Cajon

2009-05-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

I had enough dumb luck left to get me home. No more. Perhaps the ride over Cajon Pass was payback for the freebie I'd had going over Donner, and the last minute storm dodging the day before. But, like I said earlier on: the trip was a masterpiece of poor planning and reckless decisions. Or maybe it was poor decisions, and reckless planning that put me on the on-ramp in Victorville in a late spring storm, with Interstate 15, ahead, and Cajon Pass between me and home. Did I mention that I didn't have any rain gear?

I want to take a step back, and re-post the link to the picture of a 1960's BMW R/69S. The one in the picture is a '63, but they didn't change from year to year. I picked this shot because this bike is set up the way I had mine: solo saddle, rear fender rack, no windshield, or saddle bags. This is just like the machine that had carried me from La Habra to the Bay, to Reno, Death Valley, and now almost all the way home. What's hard to tell from the picture, is that the Beemer is actually not a very big bike. The six hundred cc motor put out between thirty, and forty horsepower. Most family cars were faster. Consider that most modern touring bikes have engines over three times the size and horsepower. They'll seat two people plus luggage comfortably, and cruise all day at at 100 mph. And they come with stereos, and heaters. The Beemer was pretty much a seat, two wheels and a motor. And that little motor had faithfully carried me a very long ways on this trip. Over a thousand miles. I was about to call on it for the toughest hundred or so miles of the trip.

I like road travel. I've crossed the continent, and with it, the continental divide over 20 times. I've ridden, or driven over a lot of mountain passes, including Monarch Pass in Colorado at over 12000 feet elevation. Cajon Pass coming into LA is hands down the worst. And I don't say that just because I live here. It blows chunks. At 4100 feet and change it isn't a particularly high pass. But the road is like some nightmare mutation of a six lane freeway fused with a broken roller coaster. The grade is scary. The freeway plunges down out of the mountain in massive sweeping curves. It's a huge challenge just to stay in the lane, and keep your speed under control. But the road is more than fast and treacherous. In order to appreciate the full experience of Cajon Pass, you have to add weather, and traffic. Any wind that comes over the mountains funnels through Cajon Pass. Trucks flip over. I15 is the road to Vegas. It's also the tie in from I40. So you get to do that wild ride down the the pass with thousands of other cars, and countless big trucks each just barely hanging on, and everyone just one fuck up away from the unthinkable. There's nothing like bumper to bumper traffic at eighty miles an hour. And that's on a good day.

This was not a good day to pull on to Interstate 15 in Victorville. It was like riding into a firehose. Trucks were throwing spray you could surf on, and waves of it were breaking in my face. The Beemer was straining for all it was worth to keep up with traffic, while I dodged cars, said rude things to God, and cursed for all I was worth because I was flying blind and scared as hell. I couldn't have been more soaked If I'd jumped in the lake. Cold, too. But I made it through the pass, through the inbound freeway traffic in the rain until I reached the 10, and then the 60 freeway west, off at Fullerton road, over the hills, and into La Habra.

I made it home OK. Actually, I should say that the Beemer got me home OK. That funky, underpowered little bike beat everything that nature, and my recklessness could dish out, and came though it purring like a long black cat. The Beemer is the hero of this little epic.

My brother had been staying at my apartment while I was gone. I pulled in late in the afternoon, and shut the motor off. That was it. I was done. Home. My ears were blocked flat. It would take weeks to get my hearing back. Of course, the place was a mess, and there was no food in the house. There was beer, though. I remember there was beer. I gave my brother a few bucks, and sent him out for Colonel Chicken.

JWM

The Law in Ridgecrest

2009-05-17T15:21:00.000-07:00

Dai Baron

So where was I on that cold rainwashed morning in Death Valley? Again, I find myself conflicted. As I've pointed out, I took this trip over thirty five years ago, and memory is tricky. And I seem to have this odd imperative not to let this story waver from the events as they actually occurred, and not to compress, combine, or exaggerate stuff for the sake of telling a 'cooler' tale. On the other hand, writing about all this does till the ground of memory, and stuff sprouts up here and there. Like Rhyolite. Or does it? Sometimes it's hard to tell.

Anyway.

The storm had passed. The bike was running OK. I had slept some, and I was dry. The campground was full of screwbean mesquite bushes (I remember the sign). They produced a brown corkscrew shaped bean that rattled when it was dry. I brought a few home with me, and kept them on the shelf for many years, along with one other piece of memorabilia from the trip. That much is so.

Now. Here's where the memory gets strange again. I seem to remember that the other two bikers who were camping there were riding a Honda 350, or 450, and a BMW similar to my own. Why is that odd? Well, earlier on in this narrative I made quite a few references to Easy Rider- the story of two buddies on a cross country bike trip. But there's another, in some way more famous story of two buddies on a cross country bike trip: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The main character in Pirsig's novel rides a middle weight Honda. His pal has a BMW.

I do recall that Death Valley was cold, clear, and probably as beautiful and hospitable as Death Valley gets. And I remember thinking that only I had the luck to get rained on in Death Valley. The road was still wet, and muddy in a lot of places. I kept the speed down, crossed the valley and made the hard climb up to the junction of 395. From there I headed south, and stopped in Ridgecrest for breakfast, and gas.

I had slept some, and I was dry, but that was about it. I was dirty, sore, and beat. And my usually immaculate BMW was a mud spattered mess by the time I stopped for breakfast. I sat at the counter, glad to be warm, and to sit in a seat that didn't move. I was drinking coffee, waiting for my food, when I heard the unmistakable rumble of a big Harley pulling up outside. A moment later the rider came through the door. He was an old guy, and one look told you he was a grizzled old hard ass from way back. No one to mess with. Being the town cop added to the vibe. He sat down at the counter, "Is that your BMW out there?"

His name was Phil Spooner, and he was indeed a hard core biker from way back. He asked about my trip, and I told him the story so far, sleeping in the restroom and all. He figured it was all good experience, and told me some of his own road stories. We talked for quite a while. He got up to leave, took out his wallet, and handed me his card. It had a small silhouette of a Harley on it, a listing of motorcycle clubs, his phone number, and large text that read, "Phil Spooner-Biker".

"If you ever get stuck up here, and need someplace to put up for the night, " he said, "Give me a call." That was the other piece of memorabilia that I kept for many years.

Getting hot food in me took the edge off the fatigue, and talking to Phil Spooner lifted my spirits. I was beginning to feel like one of the real guys, I guess. I took off from the cafe, and got back on the street that led up to 395. Or so I thought. I was probably running about forty- forty five miles an hour, expecting to see the turn for 395 at any minute. But instead of an on-ramp, the street abruptly ran out of pavement, and plunged down a breakneck steep dirt hill. Recall that it had rained all night.

Here's where I used up almost all the dumb luck that I had left.

Well, not entirely. More than any other machine I ever owned, the BMW gave you that 'extension of self' feeling. It wasn't like operating a machine; it was very organic- you go, accelerate, brake, turn, stop. And I used to just practice keeping the bike upright at very slow speeds, just to better know the feel of the machine. That stuff suddenly turned into a skill that saved my ass where pure luck couldn't. I instinctively stood up on the pegs, and leaned my weight way back, and off the front wheel. That strange front end refused to be thrown off course, and took all the slamming punishment that dirt road had to dish out. Back off the gas slowly. Do not touch front brake. Featherweight tiptoe on the rear binder as it jumps around under your foot...

Somehow, I got the machine to a safe stop, got it turned around, and made the treacherous climb back up to pavement without dumping the bike. When I say, "Got me home in one piece", I mean it.

I found 395, OK, rolled out of Ridgecrest, and headed south for Victorville where I could pick up Interstate 15, which would take me over the mountains, down into the Los Angeles Basin, and home. But by the time I reached Victorville I either caught up with the storm, or the storm caught up with me. I was already soaked to the skin, when I stood under the poor shelter of a gas station bay where I fueled up the Beemer for the last leg of the trip. Outside the bay was howling wind, spitting rain, and the deadly charge through Cajon Pass.

Road Trip part seven

JWM

Gimme Shelter

2009-05-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

Mekanda Robo

This has been an odd exercise. I really just sort of stumbled onto the topic of motorcycles at all, and before I knew it I found myself trying to recreate a road trip that I took over thirty five years ago. I had a skeletal itinerary, and a few events at hand: La Habra to Half Moon Bay, to Reno, to Death Valley, and then Ridgecrest, and then home. I left off yesterday thinking about that long full throttle race against the storm down the length of Nevada. I spent some time looking at maps, and trying to figure out just why I made the decision to turn west toward Death Valley rather than to try for Vegas, and a motel.

Beatty, Nevada was the fork in the road. And when I took a closer look at the map, another name nearby leaped out at me: Rhyolite. Until I saw the name I had forgotten about stopping in Rhyolite. But noticing that flyspeck on the map lit up the memory. I rode out to see the ghost town at the edge of Death Valley that afternoon. And I was the only one out there, I do remember that...

And here's where it gets strange. I seem to have two almost equally distinct memories of this small occurrence. In the first, I ride out to the ghost town, stop the bike in the middle of the the empty street, get off, and just take in the silence for a few minutes before moving on.

In the second version I don't get off the bike. I just go out there, ride down the main street, turn around and leave.

I lean ever so slightly toward the second version, but not enough to push a balanced coin off its edge.

It's an odd feeling, like being unsure of the truth of a tiny chip of your own existence. And not to get all metaphysical on anyone's ass- does it make a difference? No one saw me go there. And if I wrote out version one, when it was really version two that happened, would that make me a liar? A stretcher of the truth? Or, since the real event lives only in my faulty memory, again- why does it matter? Somehow, it does. It just does.

If I were writing fiction I'd lean toward the first version of the story. It's got all the elements of the Romance of the Road story- solitary biker, abandoned western ghost town in the desert. Wind in the center of empty. Approaching danger...

Or again, if I were doing fiction I guess I could make the second version work too. All it would take is a premonition- a strange sense of urgency- voices in the dust whisper, "runnnn!"

Anyway.

Locating Beatty, and then Rhyolite helped me piece together the decision. The plan must have been to cut across Death Valley on 190, and pick up highway 395 south of Lone Pine, and then hit I15 home. And I must have ridden far enough ahead of the storm that I thought I'd avoided it altogether. Otherwise I wouldn't have taken the detour through Rhyolite so late in the day. At any rate, I left the ghost town, picked up 190, rode over the eastern rim, and down into Death Valley.

Afternoon dropped like a stone into evening; the sky went black, and raindrops smacked my face like hard wet BB's as I buzzed across the desert. I saw a sign for a campground up ahead, and turned off. Fortunately it was a developed campground, which meant reasonably level parking, and a cinder block restroom with running water. As I pulled in I noticed two parked motorcycles, and a couple of guys setting up a tent. I stopped. Yes, it was cool with them if I shared their parking. Rain was beginning to fall pretty hard. Desert lightning flashbulbed the campsite and exploded in ground shaking thunder. I pulled the Beemer up under a mesquite bush, and a bat took a shit on the back of my hand. I wiped it off on the ground, grabbed my bags, and ran like hell for the restroom. It wasn't very big, and I didn't have a flashlight. It gets seriously dark out there, too. Rain hammered down almost all night. I slept under the sinks, cold even in my clothes, and sleeping bag. But dry. That was all that mattered. The next morning the bike didn't want to start. I'd kick it over, and it would fire once or twice, and then crap out. I got out the tool kit, and took the top off one of the carburetors. Fat round blobs of dirty water rolled around the bottom of the float bowl. Not hard to fix. And the bike fired up just fine.

By this time, you'd figure that I had pretty much used up my quota of dumb luck. No. I'd have to call on it twice more in the day in order to make it home in one piece.

Road Trip part six

JWM

Running From the Rain

2009-05-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

Mekanda Robo Tri- Max space car
Click for Mekanda Robo /Try Max Gassin private auction

Most of the movie Easy rider is rolling shots of Fonda and Hopper cruising those big gaudy choppers down empty highways through rugged and beautiful countryside under a clear bright sky, in shirtsleeve temperatures with an incredibly good selection of 60's acid rock jamming away in the background. Stills of the two riders became cultural icons, Peter Fonda's machine in particular, with the American flag motif on the teardrop tank on the long chrome chopper.

Of course it's total bullshit. The first couple trips to 'Frisco on that 750 Honda disabused me of the idea that it would be fun to travel on a rigid frame chopper. It's tough enough on a touring bike with shock absorbers, and everything. That wind in the hair crap works fine if you have a crew cut. Otherwise forget it. I didn't have my hair long and I wore a helmet then, anyway. And speaking of wind- wind is what film can not show. And when you're on the highway you're sitting upright in a 65 mile per hour wind, and the blast in your ears sounds like a perpetual explosion. Fun and exhilarating at first. I mean, check out the scene in Easy Rider set to Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild". Traveling on a big bike is exactly like that. For the first couple of hours. Then wind fatigue begins to set in in your neck, especially if your neck is carrying the extra weight of a helmet. The helmet also gives your head a larger profile in the wind. That larger profile translates into pounds of pressure that your neck muscles have to resist. Try lying on your back on the bed with your head hanging over the edge. You'll get the idea.

And of course there's no rock n' roll soundtrack on a bike. And no one to talk to. Self induced earworms, or tunes you can hum is the best you're going to get. And that gets old really fast. Even with a good set of earplugs, the soundtrack is windblast. Add as much exhaust pipe noise to that as you would like to listen to for days on end. You get a lot of time alone in your mind. Point is- motorcycle travel is much less fun, and much more work than it seems. And then there is weather.

Weather was what I was facing that morning in Reno Nevada, spring of '73. Remember what I said about reckless planning? I didn't have rain gear. Nor did I have enough money to get some. No credit card. And at this point I had just about enough cash to get home on if nothing went wrong. A storm was coming from the north west. That's about all I got from the news on the TV in the coffee shop. But I could see that without the weather forecast. I headed east out of Reno. I didn't want to go down 395 through the mountains, so I opted for highway 95, a two lane that ran straight north and south through the desert. Nevada had no speed limits. The R/69S would go 85. And it hummed out its eighty five mile per hour best for me all day long, with cars and trucks whooshing past like I was parked, and black clouds growing in the rearview mirror. I pulled off for gas and food, probably in Tonopah. I've forgotten much about the trip but I do remember shoveling food down in some roadside coffee shop, and rushing to get back on the bike and get running before the storm caught up. Sometime late in the afternoon I reached a junction in the highway: Las Vegas to the left, Death Valley to the right. I have been thinking about this all day, today. I can't quite figure it out. I must have been very short of money. Otherwise, why in the world did I think Death Valley would be a good place to be in a storm?

Road Trip part five

JWM

Cruisin' in Reno

2009-05-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

Like so much that I did in my late teens and early twenties the first motorcycle road trip was a masterpiece of reckless planning, bad decisions, and dumb luck. It was spring of '73, sometime in April or May. I was between jobs, and had a little money saved up. I had taken bike trips up to San Francisco; I had a friend from high school who lived up near Half Moon Bay, but LA to 'Frisco is really just a day trip. This time I was going to keep going. So after spending a couple of days getting famously stoned, and drunk with Gerald up in El Grenada I cruised the Beemer out of The Bay area, and headed toward Reno on I80.

That was the dumb luck part of the trip. Interstate 80 does run from San Francisco, California to Reno, Nevada. But you have to cross the Sierra Nevada to get there. The Donner Party had some trouble up that way, you might recall. Driving over Donner Pass is an iffy proposition in spring, and the Sierras are no place for a bike if it gets iffy. I cruised over the snow covered summit under a blazing white sun in an electric blue sky, the Truckee River charging down its course in ice white foam to the right of the interstate. I rode along, comfortable in a light jacket. That used up almost all the dumb luck I had in store. I had just exactly enough left to get me home in one piece. I got a cheap motel just outside of down town Reno. I couldn't have too much fun in Reno because I wasn't twenty one. So I went down town, got dinner in one of the casino buffets, and then went to see this hot new sci-fi movie, Soylent Green. (*spoiler alert* It's made out of people!) After the movie I cruised the main drag through town a few times. Damn, I was cruisin' in Reno Nevada! This was it. I was really travelling.

When I got up the next morning it was overcast, and cold. I got breakfast in a coffee shop, and sat at the counter where I could see the TV. They had the morning news on. Storm coming.

Road Trip part four

JWM

More Motorcycle Stuff

2009-05-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

Mekanda Robo (four missile version)
CLICK for Mekanda Robo private auction site info

When I sat down at the computer yesterday I had no intention of putting up a post at all, much less writing about motorcycles. I signed in, looked at the empty text box, and the bike thing just happened.

I left off talking about the old BMW. Actually, I should have made mention of what gave me the fever in the first place. Simple. It was seeing the movie, Easy Rider. Fonda and Hopper. Captain America and Billy. Those incredible Panhead choppers. And what on planet Earth could possibly approach the absolute awesome coolness of saddling up the most ass kickin' bike of all time, and heading out on a cross country rolling stoned party across America? I wanted to do that. Promised myself I would someday. You bet. I couldn't wait to get a Harley, and chop it all out, and head out on the highway. Go lookin' for adventure, and all. Like most teenage kids, I found out what a Harley cost. And even out in seventies suburbia, people knew. Bad dudes rode Hogs. If you weren't a bad ass, they'd kick your butt, or kill you and take away your bike.

That actually happened to a kid I knew in high school- skinny blond haired sixteen year old hippie. He got a bunch of money from a settlement of some sort, and bought himself a really cool chopper. Long front forks, ape hangers, five foot tall sissy bar, and loud ass pipes. Everyone was jealous as hell. For about two weeks. He wanted to go ridin' with the bad boys. They don't call those guys outlaws for nothing. They didn't hurt the kid. They just took his bike away from him.

Anyway.

A Harley was out of the question, but a 305, or 350 Honda wasn't. For a few years after Easy Rider, the streets just swarmed with 350 Hondas, some of them chopped. I ended up with a used 305 Superhawk. It wasn't the Captain America chopper, but it would do. For about six months, that is. I had big bike fever. I wanted the power, the weight, the size to travel on. And I didn't want to go Japanese. I wanted the cool, the low slung lines, and the machine gun exhaust note of a Triumph or a Harley. But both were expensive, and tempermental machines. They broke a lot, and you had to know how to get the machine going again if it stalled out on the road somewhere. Honda produced so many of their four cylinder superbikes that late in '72, the price dropped to around 1200 bucks for a brand new last year's model. And you couldn't break a Honda if you tried. So I bought the 750 Honda that I was talking about yesterday. And as I said, I sold the thing less than a year later, and got the '67 BMW. And it was on the Beemer that I finally got to try my hand at long distance motorcycle traveling.

Road Trip Part Three

JWM

Road Trip 1973 (part one)

2009-05-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

Mekanda Robo (spinner version)
Click for Mekanda Robo private auction info

Labels for this post: e.g. scooters, vacation, fall.

I'll pick scooters. I've had four: a Honda 305 Super Hawk, a Honda CB750, a BMW R/69S, and a Harley Davidson FXSTS. Oddly enough I have only a very few bad snapshots of the Hog, and maybe one picture somewhere of the 750 Honda... Too bad, because they were all beautiful machines. That I survived owning that 750 is indisputable proof of the existence of guardian angels. I mean- you want a combination that will like to take you out of the gene pool? Try a 19- 20 year old kid, a motorcycle that will break 100mph without even breathing hard, and oh, yeah. Beer. I shudder to think. See what I mean about the guardian angel(s). I kept that thing less than a year. Long enough to ruin my driving record for years to follow. But owning the big Honda cured me of the need for speed. I traded the Honda for a 1967 BMW R/69S. It was a classic. Beautiful, but slow. (I searched google images and came up with this. It's a 63, but a dead ringer for my old bike) Even though the 69S was the sport model with a hot cam and bigger carbs, it was barely as fast as the old 305 that I started out with. The R/69S topped out at 85. Period. And I was fine with that. It was my only transportation for a few years.

The Beemer was eccentric in a lot of ways. The opposed twin's crankshaft spins in line with the frame, just like the engine in a car. To kick start, you stood at the side of the bike, rather than straddling it. When you twisted the throttle the torque reaction from the engine rocked the whole machine sideways. It was harmless, but it took some getting used to. The other weird thing about the Beemer was the Earles front suspension, a kind of leading link construction. When you stabbed the front brake the shocks extended, and the front end of the bike lifted, rather than dove. Again, harmless, but it took some getting used to. But, in an age of push rod vertical, or V-twins, the flat opposed twin was the smoothest thing on the market. And the bike did have its sweet spots- right around sixty, where it just felt like coasting a two wheeled easy chair. Great piece of machinery. I sold it after I took up surfing, back in '74. Didn't even think of bikes for quite a while after. Anyway.

There is a point to this, and I'll get to it later on. Right now I'm calling it a day.

Road Trip Part Two

JWM

Just Monday

2009-05-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

UFO Diapolon, Trung robo

Sunset, and I'm finally done with the business of the day. Up early. Worked hard. Tired out. Nothing to add past that. I don't feel much like waxing poetic about the dignity of work, and the heroics of showing up to meet life's little battles. I'm not going to dip into the pile of bummers and try to fish out a ripe one to carp on either. Nope.

I'll just put up Trung, the third character of the UFO Diapolon Trio, and call it a post...

If you scroll back to, Monday, May 4 you'll see the DX Diapolon, which is made up of parts from Header, Legger, and today's robot, Trung. Interesting that the Japanese names are cognates for the English words, head, legs, trunk. This set is from the Bullmark Toy Company, 1978.

And that's all for today.

JWM

Has It Sunk This Low?

2009-05-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

I've been buying soda in these 32 can flats- four eight-packs, from Costco. It comes in a cardboard tray with a plastic wrapper. Mary was using one of the cardboard trays for some bunches of flyers that she was working on. She set it down by the desk, and Booger the Cat hopped in, curled up, and thinks that it is the greatest cat bed ever made.

We should all be so easily pleased. And this, I suppose represents the absolute nadir of blog- resorting to animal pictures for that awwww cute thang in a desperate effort to fake some content. What can I tell you? I'm out of ideas, and shameless to boot. Just be grateful I'm not cheap enough to try and rip off FU Penguin with some snarky narrative directed at the poor cat.

JWM

Short Call Tuesday

2009-05-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

UFO Diapolon Header robo

Wouldn't you know it, it was just before eleven, and I was just getting ready to leave on foot when I got a call to go finish the day shift at the school by my house. Four hours. Done.

So, back home, and sign in to the wfb.

I've reached a point where I'm asking myself why I'm doing this- writing a blog, that is. I was clicking some links on Joan of Argghh's blog, Primordial Slack, and I ran across a guy who had a set of rules to make your blog get a zillion visits a month guaranteed. Most of it made pretty good sense, but as I read through the list I realized I had no inclination whatsoever to put any of it into practice.

Get a thousand hits a week, or a day. Have hundreds, or even thousands of people regularly clicking on to read the things you wrote. See dozens of comments on every post. Is that what this game is about? And if it isn't, then why invest the time and effort at the keyboard? It would be an odd move to make a film, or write a story that you never planned to let anyone see. Stranger yet to invest effort in a project, and be almost indifferent to how the work is received. I remember how it felt submitting art work for juried shows. Would I get in? Would I win anything? Those were questions worth losing sleep over. I suppose if I were sitting and composing serious essays on serious topics like Van does, or writing fiction then I'd be more concerned with how the work was received. Is anyone going to read these small ramblings, the details of a rather uneventful life that I type out, and submit for public consumption? I'm almost indifferent. Almost.

In a way, I suppose this is a kind of graffiti, an extended tag on Blogger's wall that may get noticed, and may get ignored. Maybe it's a message in a bottle. Or maybe it's a half assed bid at fame that is guaranteed to return the rewards of all things done half assed. All of the above, I suppose. But the last details of the day still need attention. Dinner, and the peace of the evening await.

JWM

Six Mile Monday

2009-05-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

DX Diapolon

I mentioned having that 'day out of synch' feeling a while back only on a seasonal scale. Today was another such day- early May, yet it has the feel of November. And the 'day out of synch' bug seems to be going around as well. Several Raccoons have reported symptoms. Odd. No doubt it's all a function of The Inversion, and a sure sign of the impending end of the world. You know- 2012 is coming, and it's going to make Y2K look like a mild case of the swine flu. These timewave disruptions could be the foreshocks of some meta psychic hoedown that's just going to leave everything in ruins. The Aztecs will return, and rule the world. And Quetzalcoatl is gonna' be hungry for virgins. National Geographic will do a multicultural special on the newly rebuilt temple including interviews with some real virgins (pre-sacrifice, of course).

But then again, 2012 could mean a big ass meteor will smack into us like some cosmic cue ball and knock us out of orbit, and spinning straight into the sun. Actually, that would be kind of cool. I mean- since we're all going to die anyway, why not go out with a bang?

Or something.

I was too tired after work Friday to write anything, and it felt good just to let it go for a couple of days. And I got through the weekend, and discovered last night that I was a week out of synch. I thought I had to go in to work today, but it's next week that I'm on. (More evidence.) I woke up this morning, sat with Sam the Cat, and cup of coffee in the graylit den, fell back into a half dream which carried me into the morning prayer, past seven, and the day was mine.

So I made one of the six mile walks through the hills. Odd the way it measures out. Following my regular route through side streets, it's exactly two miles to where Solejar crosses West Road. From that intersection I can go right, left, or straight, and the loop back to the intersection is exactly two miles. I went straight, which is a very steep couple of hundred yards to the next intersection at the top of the hill. It's been a while. I've been lazy lately, and I felt it on the climb. Thank heaven for the cool, hazy morning. From the top of the hill you could see out only a few miles- at least as far as Knott's Berry Farm before the horizon fuzzed to nothing in the haze. I took the downhill loop to the left, which meant a long, but shallow climb on the return. Saw two snakes, and an alligator lizard squashed on the road. Bummer, guys. Someone had tossed what looked like a perfectly good pair of stainless steel salad tongs on the roadside. I have a pretty good collection of tools, and large ball bearings that I've picked up on various walks. Salad tongs would have been a great addition to the collection. But when I picked them up I could see they'd been run over by a car. Oh well.

It always feels good to get the muscles moving, and feel the blood flowing. Animal life. Primal energy. It is tonic. Clears out the head. It is medicine, in the sense of "That which makes you whole". The afterglow from a workout hangs with you for hours, too.

Which brings me back here, afterglow, or no. Monday afternoon on a sweet, cool day. The errands are run. I got some exercise, and all that remains is to finish spilling some goofiness, and accounts of a blissfully uneventful day into cyberspace. Last days of the world as we know it? Could be. At any rate, they are pretty darn good last days, as last days go.

JWM

Slack Thursday

2009-04-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

Astro Boy (Hot Toys 2005 Hong Kong Toy Show limited edition)

Today's slack rating scored in the high nines on a ten point scale. I oiled up one of my favorite defenses against The End Of The World, and set the machine in motion. Selective denial. No talk radio. No headlines, or newscasts. No politics on the internet. If I pretend it doesn't exist, then it all goes away. Bye Bye.

And part of what made the slack a little sweeter, was knowing that I have an enjoyable shift to work tomorrow morning followed by a weekend, and then a week of my favorite detail. The bills will be paid, and some modest gains will be made in savings. All stuff to be grateful for.

But for today, I walked down the tracks, up to the corner, and talked to old John for a while. Or rather I tried to listen. We sat outside at the corner table, but the kids running the Starbucks had the music on just loud enough that I had to strain to hear John. To boot, they play a really crappy station, Grate XM: All Irritating, All the Time. No deejay; no commercials; nothing to let you come up for air in the nonstop jangle of irritating songs.

And I ended up missing most of what John had to say. Much of it I have heard before. Nonetheless, I try to tune in when he talks. You get his story in fragments- a little here, a little there. It's not easy to fit it all together. Today I could not glean anything distinct, and after a while I quit trying. It was enough to sit and listen.

The afternoon was taken with the small details- the 'chop wood, carry water' of life at this place and time. Sometimes you take it for granted; other times you hold your breath until bedtime. Then you exhale, grateful for an uneventful day. Mary gets home in an hour. We're going to have steak for dinner. It's good. Sometimes it is just plain good.

JWM

Good in the Small things

2009-04-29T14:58:00.000-07:00

Daikumaryu Gaiking

It would seem that I am not alone in noticing The Inversion. (but I take credit for the cool capitalized name.) Odd set of feelings at work- Partly I feel vindicated. When you get a sense that there is something amiss on a vast scale it's a good idea to take a step back, and try to make sure you're not just seein' things. We often joke about people with paranoid delusions, but when you encounter the real thing it's very creepy.

I was going to a storefront Serenity Hall some years back. It was right when the first Gulf War was starting, and America was pushing Sadam out of Kuwait. A young guy took the podium- looked to be in his early twenties, and neat enough that he didn't look like he was on the street. He identified, but within the space of a minute he was telling about how he was receiving radio messages from Sadam Hussein in his head, and that he had contacted the CIA, but the agents are still tailing him because he knows too much...

After a couple of minutes someone took him outside. Nobody who saw it thought it the least bit funny.

anyway-

Like I said. Before you start writing about mass insanity, it's a good idea to make sure that you're not the one who's nuts. But Dr. Sanity is not nuts, and neither are the people who left comments on it here at the wfb. That still doesn't mean that I'm not nuts, but it does indicate that I'm not the only one to see it. It would seem, to borrow a phrase from the Lizardoid Master, that there is indeed, a 'bad craziness out there'.

So what can you do? That's the real question. Get in the political game? Engage the forces of The Inversion, and act like some noisy old crow on someone else's blog? I don't really have an answer. If the society lurches toward cultural suicide what can you do to dig your heels in against the pull? Focus on what is True...

Watch me sling some advice that I won't take- no. Forget it.

I'm generally doing pretty well when I can keep my focus on the regular details of daily living. Shopping. Fixing food. Paying bills. Once in a while straighten up the house, and change oil in the cars (which I need to do). Get out and walk. Work when I can. Even so, I was glad not to get a call this morning. The coffee pot broke. The internet was depressing. I had a case of the blues, and all the energy of calculator battery. I drove down to the corner. Old John was there. He had nothing to do, so we drove down to the frame shop to see Mary. But Mary had already left. The Boulevard was choked down to one lane in either direction, so we cruised back along the side streets. Soon the jacaranda trees will be in bloom and those neighborhoods will be lined in giant purple bouquets. But not yet. Today it was all just spring gray.

Got home, and found the house insurance bill. There went next month's check. And just when I thought we were going to get some breathing room. I know. Be grateful that there will be a check to cover it. Still. I said fuck it, and went out again. Sat and had coffee at another Starbucks. Didn't want to talk. Drove home, and picked up a burger for my mother. The boss had called when I was out. I got a gut drop, because I was tired enough that I didn't want to go pull an eight hour shift, but broke enough that I couldn't turn it down. Besides it was already after two. I called back. It wasn't for tonight. It was a day assignment this Friday, and a week long assignment next week at The School By my House. Couldn't be better. So if we don't get ahead in May, there's still a chance for June. Nothing left for the afternoon except to sit here, and let the day flow out onto the keyboard. Mary will be home soon. I got some Chinese bao muffins with barbeque pork to steam before dinner. Life is good in the small things.

JWM

Seeing Things on Tuesday

2009-04-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

Full Armor Double Zeta Gundam

So today it was a lunch pail on the roof.

Mary has been getting up around five thirty to go for an early morning walk with some friends. I've become lazy enough to stay in bed after six some days. I was going to do that this morning, as a matter of fact, but Booger the Cat had other ideas. March from my ankles to my chest. Weeow. weoooow. Swat my cheek. Nose in the face. Stand on the bladder. How the hell did a cat figure that one out?

I was just about to give in and get up when the phone rang, just after six. Another day at Beachside. Fine.

It was a good one, too. Monday was early dismissal so I took care of all Tuesday morning's work on Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning the grounds crew comes, and takes care of the exterior. The kids are testing. No activities. Except for the lunchpail on the roof, the day was as slow and uneventful as a day can be. It was a small day, in the great scheme of things. I took care of a set of duties in the absence of the regular man who does the job. A small cog in a small machine. I know those simple duties well, and I did a good job of carrying them out. I finished the day, and now I'm tired. Tonight we're just goin' for burgers.

Chop wood. Carry water.

In your mind there is a particular lens through which you can see Truth, and Beauty at the core of the most mundane details before you. But it's not an easy view to keep in focus. Sometimes booze, or dope gives you a glimpse in the transition from sober to sloppy. Never works for long, though.

anyway.

Sometimes Big Events cause the lens to click into focus. For the last going on three years now, I've had pretty good access to the lens. And since the service last Sunday, I've been able to look at a lot of things both small and large, and see something priceless in them. Today, things seem to be in focus. Grace. I'll take it while it lasts.

JWM

Cool Monday

2009-04-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

Zaku II

nam myoho renge kyo nam myoho renge kyonammyhorengekyonammyohorengekyo...

Somehow I never did take to the Daimoku, the chanting of Nam myoho renge kyo. The first time I heard the Daimoku, and the Gongyo, a recitation of liturgy chanted in a kind of phonetic pidgin Chinese, the sound struck me as cacophonous, jangling, unpleasant. Nine years later my opinion of it hasn't changed. And try as I would, I just never got comfortable with the use of the Gohonzon, a piece of caligraphy used as an "Object of Worship". My wife is a devout believer, and practitioner as are most of her close friends. I tried for a year, but- what can I say? It left me flat. Too bad, too because it did cause a rift between Mary and me. And it would be nice if we both shared the same religious views. I never really realized how deep set my own belief in God was until I tried to practice a religion in which that God was absent. I just couldn't do it.

Charlie was a firm believer in the Gohonzon, as is his sister. He was passionate, evangelical; he introduced many people to Buddhism. Charlie's sister and a couple of his closest friends sat with him and chanted the Daimoku as he lay dying. The last thing Charlie heard in this world was his sister and friends chanting for him, and the sound carried him over the line, and into the next world.

And the Daimoku rang out and clattered through the chapel where nine years and four days ago, Charlie had delivered me safe and sound to sit up on the stage there and exchange wedding vows with Mary. There was a black and white portrait of him on the stage. And the service.

Look, I don't want to give the wrong impression. We were not close friends, Charlie and I. But he was barely a year older than me. It's one of those instances where the lightning strikes uncomfortably close to home. And looking around the room there yesterday I saw a great many people who were there at our wedding, and every one of them just looked old. Well, that's because they are. And so am I. Mary is sixty.

I guess it just adds up to one of those dark epiphanies- getting a first hand look at mortality, and really realizing that you too have a ticket on that bus. And so does your most dearly beloved hold a ticket for that bus. Like it or not. In a few day's time this will fade, and I will go back to believing that there is no such vehicle. That's our default setting, and necessarily so.

Anyway.

Today was good. I worked the day shift at the Beachside school, and other than some rotten meat on the playground (go figure), and a stopped up toilet the day was uneventful, and just busy enough to make the time fly. And Mary just got home, and we're going out for Mexican food, although she doesn't know it yet.

JWM

Saturday Sweet

2009-04-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Perfect Grade Gundam RX78/2

There's all sorts of serious stuff going on that I'm not going to write about. The day, bright, clear and cool is as perfect a specimen of California spring as ever was enjoyed by anyone at any time. I saw old John at the corner this morning. He had scored some lasagna for cheap over at Fresh and Easy some weeks ago. He took it out of the freezer, heated it up, and carried it down the hill to eat at the corner. Eddie was there, and so was M, the guy I picked a fight with some months back. As I said before, I later apologized to M for my unseemly behavior. We're friendly and polite with one another when we both end up there at the same time, but it's still uncomfortable. Actions have consequences. In retrospect, if I had been content, last summer, to just walk off and go home, then none of the current tension would exist. I get pissed off, and lose my temper sometimes, but I never stay mad for long. Or more accurately, the latent anger in me finds another target. That's probably the best lesson I took from spending the year with Nichiren Buddhism. Anger is a world you carry with you, and enter periodically. It is a level of hell in a way. But it's the anger that's the issue, not the object to which the anger affixes itself. Because that's the nature of anger. The essence of it is pure, unconnected to any specific stimulus. It needs to latch on to something in order for it to work its dark magic. It is listed among the Three Poisons, along with stupidity, and greed.

In the Christian tradition, anger is one of the seven deadly sins. It's easy to see how you can get hooked on it. It definitely makes the adrenaline flow. But like anything that delivers a buzz, anger gets to be a habit, and even an addiction. Imagine being angry enough to seek out multiple discussion groups you don't like, and barge in on them for the sake of tossing out insults, and picking fights.

Now who would do that?

Anyway.

Yesterday I posted a picture of the Perfect Grade model kit of the Zeta Gundam. The one today is the original. It is the RX78/2 from the series Mobile Suit Gundam which aired in Japan back in 1978, and also the first in Bandai's Perfect Grade model series. In Japan, this Gundam is as iconic as Mickey Mouse is here. Incidentally, a Gundam is not a robot. It is a combat machine, driven by a human pilot who sits in a cockpit in the middle of the chest. There are thousands of variations on the basic Gundam seen here. The Perfect Grade, or PG models from Bandai, are the last word in precision toy making. The kits run from just over five hundred pieces like the RX78/2 to seven hundred plus for the Zeta, not counting decals, wires and screws. Underneath the white, red and blue armor is a completely articulated skeleton, detailed down to hydraulic pistons that move with the bending of the limbs. The kits are expensive. Opening up the box, and seeings dozens of racks of parts is just plain intimidating. Finding out the assembly manual is in Japanese is something of a gut drop. But when you study the manual, it quickly becomes clear. The manuals are absolute masterpieces of technical writing/ illustrating. If you pay attention, you can get through even the complicated wiring scheme in the Zeta without a problem.

The kits need neither paint, nor glue. All the pieces press fit; all surface matches, all fits are perfect. Once you've figured out the manual, and snapped the first two together you're hooked. It's like the first pistachio. Chances are you'll be up late.

The finished pieces, however, are not toys. They're model kits, fussy, and delicate. Even though the Zeta from yesterday makes a perfect (no part swapping) transformation into a space plane, the process takes nearly an hour, and it's really not very much fun to do. The RX78/2 is beautifully articulated, but it doesn't hold a pose well, and like I said- these things break real easy.

Anyway- that's the odd ramble for Saturday- from anger to toys. That's a progressive movement if ever there was one.

JWM

Mary's on That Greenline Train.

2009-04-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

Zeta Gundam (Perfect Grade model kit)

Click for Mekanda Robo/ Gundam private auction info

Sitting here in the den I can hear the playground noise from The School Near My house. I worked there the last two Mondays. This next Monday I'll be over at the Beachside campus. Work keeps trickling in, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that two long term assignments are taken right now. Which is fine by me. Barring the unforeseen, I should be on to work this summer again. No small thing to be grateful for. And we've had the second day in a row of cool, and cloud. Again, small good things add up. As always, there is stuff to sweat over.

I will feel immensely better when Mary gets home. She's got jury duty. Which has little to recommend it under the easiest of circumstances- wait.

Odd. I wrote 'wait' because I got interrupted by a phone call. It was Mary. She's on the train, and on her way home. They didn't pick her for a jury. She's free.

On the train? Yeah. On the Green line to be exact, which runs west from Norwalk almost all the way to the airport, and back. And there is a huge courthouse in Norwalk, which is about seven or eight miles from here. And there's a courthouse right here in town less than twenty minutes away. Like I said, jury duty has little to recommend it, anyway. But to rub it in just a little deeper, folks from around here, at the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County, Mary included, are being summoned to the courthouse in Compton. Yes, that Compton. Go figure why they have to bring in jurors from the far side of town. Google maps calls it at a little over fourteen miles to get from here to there. I think it's probably fourteen miles as the crow flies. On the street it's way more, and it's all nasty goddamn traffic, and little in the way of scenic beauty. And parking. In Compton.

That's why Mary took the Green Line. And she's on the train, headed back to the Norwalk station. I'll be glad when she's home. I'm going to barbeque chicken when she gets here. Later in the weekend my nephew should be up for his fourteenth birthday. Here's something of a relief- he's old enough to appreciate getting cash in a card instead of some dorky present that his uncle picked out. As you might guess, he's burned out on toy robots. anyway

I made a point today, of turning off talk radio, avoiding current events on the web, not looking at the newspaper, and generally standing here with both fingers in my ears, and my eyes closed. It does wonders for the attitude. It's hard to keep in mind that the meta events, and tectonic shifts in life, and the world as we know it are going to take place whether I pay them any mind or not. Getting distressed over it doesn't slow it down much.

And that's the sum and total of this day thus far. Some times are easy; other times need ease thrust upon them. So it is today.

JWM

The Loss of Cool Days.

2009-04-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

Dancouga

OK, now I need to cool off. I grew rather short tempered with a couple of trolls over at Gagdad Bob's site today. But both were such glaring voices for The Inversion that I just went off. And this when I had more or less decided to get away from the topic.

And, damn it, I'd rather be sitting here spinning off something amusing than getting into politics. But it isn't just politics. It is far more than that.

And it comes back to 9/11.

Remember The Weekly World News? You always used to see it at the supermarket check stand. Every time there was a disaster, the Weekly World News would run a badly doctored photo of Satan's Face appearing in the cloud of smoke. As a side note, I believe even The Weekly World News had the respect not to run such a picture of the attacks on The World Trade Center buildings.

But I, and many others truly saw Satan's face in the smoke of those collapsing buildings. It was the over reaching of unadulterated evil. The veil was ripped open that day, and the true face of the Adversary was revealed. And the sight was a dark epiphany that yanked me untimely from my moonbat worldview.

At first it seemed certain that everyone had seen it. But soon enough it became clear that not everyone had seen it. And as time goes by I find fewer and fewer who saw, and remembered. Because those who Saw it had their lives changed, and the needle on their inner compass was, from that day, drawn ineluctably toward God.

Others, when the shock wore off, began to blame the whole thing on America. The attack did achieve one thing. It drove a mighty wedge down an already widening rift in American culture, and politics. Red state/blue state was born. Early on a phrase came to me:

The alignment of sides has begun.

I believe the Alignment of sides is complete. The rift between left and right is no longer the see-saw of alternating Republican and Democrat administrations. It has come to represent irreconcilable worldviews.

Gagdad Bob has taught me, among many other things, a very good word: metanoia. Metanoia is like crow, only not quite so tasty. It has been a staple of my diet for the last eight years. I have little patience when someone comes by and tries to sell me on the ideas that produced this bitter feed.

Which brings us back to The Inversion. It's the second act, after The Alignment of Sides. And it's on.

And so it goes in the last days of the world as we know it... I did not want to get into this stuff. This is stuff I generally keep to myself, or reserve for one on one communication. But somehow it just came spilling out in a tumble. And so it goes.

JWM

Save Gaia Day Or Else!

2009-04-22T16:40:00.000-07:00

Zambot 3

The heatwave broke like a stick. Yesterday was enervating. Today refreshing. Cool, not too cloudy. You know how every now and then you feel like you're off by a day? The sense that time is out of joint. Like when a Wednesday feels like a Thursday, and you almost have to remind yourself what day it is. On rare occasions it works to the day's advantage. When a Friday feels like a Thursday, every time it occurs to you that it's Friday you feel better. If Thursday feels like Friday, then it's all to the worse. Anyway.

I've had that 'time out of joint' sensation recurring, only it's on a seasonal scale. I keep getting the feeling that it's late summer. That soon it's going to cool down, and the days will start to draw short. But it's the middle of spring. We're well past equinox, and hurling headlong toward the solstice. Summer is coming. Maybe it's part of The Inversion. Yeah, I'm still on that kick. It didn't take Sal, Ricky, Mushroom, and Walt any time at all to find more examples. And I got a bit of an Orwellian creep out today, speaking of The Inversion.

I woke up thinking it was Tuesday. But it was Wednesday, and I forgot to take the trash out. I got it in time, had coffee, and when Mary got back from her walk we had breakfast as always. She has a busy day on Wednesdays. I was getting ready to go out walking when the phone rang. It was eight O'clock. Couldn't be work. It was work. Can I get over to Stephen King Elementary? Yeah.

Today was Earth Day. Kids had sad Earth with frowny face shirts. Save The Earth Shirts. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. They made a giant mural- land, river, trees, out of trash. It looked like shit. Had all the charm of a grade school kid reciting political talking points. Classes came in to look at the giant mural. WOOOOOW! WOH, COOOOL. I think the kids knew how crappy it was, though. Hard to tell. It wasn't about creating anything. It was all about shame. Your plastic milk bag will last 100 years in the environment. Your aluminum can will take 500 years to return to nature. They don't seem to define "return to nature", but whatever it is, it'll take your glass bottle thousands of years to do it.

It starts to sound suspiciously like the immanent lethal, hideous dangers of second hand smoke.

Learn why it's bad to make trash. Make something ugly out of trash.

inversion

And the Mars Rovers? Perhaps they fade from memory, become rumors, and later legends to be dismissed as fairy tale.

OK- that's it.

I'm getting off this kick for now. Mary just got home. Screw Earth Day, today is our ninth anniversary. And we have had nine pretty damn fine years together. The best nine of my life, that's for sure. We're going for sushi at Sushi from East. Mary's friend Susie took us there for a wedding present nine years ago. It's still one of our favorites

JWM

Inverted Tuesday

2009-04-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

Mazinger Z

I promised I wouldn't gripe about the heat. I'm not. But it was hot enough that I didn't feel like going out and doing a six mile walk in the hills, either. I was content to sit home with the allergy making my nose run like a tickling faucet. You don't want to use the keyboard, here. Yuk.

Stuff has been bugging me as of late. The stuff that I usually make a point of not writing about. You know. Politics, and stuff like that. Mostly, it's the stuff like that that is bugging me. And it's one of those notions that people either don't notice, or if you bring it to their attention, they may even acknowledge it, but it doesn't register with them any more than a minor change in weather.

It's The Inversion.

The islamic/Arab world has fucked with our economy, murdered thousands of innocents, and made no secret of either its hatred for us, or it's desire to put all of Western Civilization under an islamic bootheel.

They came here. They murdered three thousand of us in a sadistic, and gruesome crime. And, to paraphrase the Marquis de Sade, What they did, is only the shadow of what they would have done. We should have nuked the bastards right off the goddamn planet.

We responded by sacrificing American lives to liberate Iraq from Sadam, and Afghanistan from The Taliban.

And America must apologize, and make conciliatory gestures to the Arab/moslem world?

inversion

It comes in smaller things, the inversion. Perhaps it's like gardening. Once you become a gardener, the world turns to roses.

But why should a contestant in a beauty contest be the target of lunatic hatemongering because she believes that marriage is between a man and a woman.

inversion

I do not watch television. But last week I happened to hear a snip of a news cast on one of the major TV networks. Definitely not cable. The report was on Obama's visit to Mexico. The report said nothing. Nothing but hope and change, that is:

Obama is bringing some hope and change to Mexico. The Mexicans want some hope and change, and they feel Obama will bring them some. The Mexicans like Obama, but they did not like Bush. Cue interview of English speaking Mexican: Bush did not bring us any hope and change, but Obama will bring us some hope and change. End clip...

I wish I was exaggerating for dramatic effect here, but once they said, "President Obama is visiting Mexico" they exhausted all the content of the segment. The rest was pure fawning. The news tells you nothing. It's a pebble of fact in an avalanche of bullshit. There is no truth to be found there.

inversion

Remember Dick and Jane from the primary school readers? Dick had a dog named Spot, and Jane had a kitten named Puff. Boys have dogs, and girls have cats. Not anymore. I see dozens of posters, cut-outs, and ready-made school system approved classroom decorations, and they all have boys with kittens, and girls with dogs. They show girls with baseball gloves, and boys playing quietly.

inversion

And suddenly progress is no longer cool. Pardon me for going all old fart on everyone, but when I was in grade school in the late fifties through early sixties we couldn't wait for progress. We were going to outer space. We would build giant bubble cities under the ocean, and soar to work in flying cars. What ideal of progress inspires today?

Green?

And what is the green ideal? That we all pay more and receive less. That the overall quality of everything be reduced while the price increases. Shrink. Cut back. Do without. And the return for this sacrifice? Maybe some abstract satisfaction that each of our individual lives is having less impact on the ecosystem. Sure gets my blood racing.

Compare motivators:

A) Go to outer space.

B) Lessen your carbon footprint.

Which one inspires? Which one is taught?

inversion.

OK, that's enough. End of rant. Is Truth being stood on its head, or run out of town on a rail?

Yeah, it is.

JWM

The Birds and the Bees, and Hellgrammites

2009-04-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

Getter Robo Number Three

Well, here it is. The end of a long day, and a short weekend. We got a foretaste of summer today- clear, hot, and hot. The boss called yesterday afternoon to ask if I could do the School by My House today, and I said, "yes". Must be a Molly Bloom thing, or something. The other thing he had was to go over there and check for a swarm of bees. I get all the cool assignments. I went over there, and found the bees. At any rate, I'm glad to be done with the night shift for a while, and working the day shift at an elementary school is eight hours of being busy with small, and mostly enjoyable tasks. The highlights of the day were a dead bird, and the arrival of the bee guy. The bees were starting a hive in one of the sprinkler valve boxes out on the main field. They were going in and out through the little opening in the lid, and there were hundreds of them buzzing around out there. The bee guy came out around ten. He uses a vacuum to gather all the bees. Just sucks them up into a box. He said he takes them to a guy who has bee hives up in Hacienda Heights.

And the dead bird was pretty easy to take care of. I got it with the picker-upper thing, and put it in a bucket. I was taking it out to the dumpster (no, we don't do bird funerals). The principal was coming down the hall, and she stopped, and wanted to see the bird. It made her shudder, and get all creeped out, but she wanted to look. Had to look. Twice. That's a really weird instinct that we all have. We always want to get a closer look at something that gives us the horrors. And I call it an instinct, because everybody seems to do it.

Some years back I was in West Virginia for the summer. I went with a couple of friends to visit a woman who lives on an island in the middle of a river. Getting to her house meant a ten mile bounce, and crawl down a dirt road through the mountains. Cool house, though. Much socialising went on, and we ended up car camping out there rather than risking the dirt road by moonshine.

We made a fire, and one of the guys had a lantern. We hadn't sat there long, when thpthpthpthpsnick! the biggest and most grotesque insect I had ever seen flew into the light, and landed on the nearest tree. Three people ducked, and yelled, "SHIT!" with one voice. Of course, we immediately had to shine the light on the monster, and crowd in to get a better look. The creature was damn near the size of my hand, and it looked like an evil cross between a dragonfly, and a scorpion. It had four paddle like translucent wings, a long neck, a big round head, and a nasty pair of mandibles that could surely draw blood. It clung to the tree for a while before flying away. Everybody ducked when the thing launched from the tree trunk, and we could hear the dry scaly flutter of its four huge wings long after we lost sight of it in the dark outside the campfire. I slept in the car.

The guys I was with were locals, but they had never seen anything like it. I asked around, and one old guy said, "What you saw was a hellgrammite." Well named, I thought. I ran across the term, "hellgrammite" somewhere on the web the other day, and put it into Google. It turns out that a hellgrammite is actually the larvae of the giant bug we saw. As soon as I saw the picture I recognized the monster in the woods. It is called a Dobsonfly. Mostly harmless. (you gotta check out the video)

Anyway. It was a good day, and productive. The forecast for tomorrow is heat, and slack. I won't complain about either.

JWM

Friday Arrives (and none too soon)

2009-04-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

Getter Robo Number Two
Click for Mekanda Robo /SOC private auction info

Once again I find myself typing words on the computer in the morning instead of in the afternoon. And just like yesterday the cat got me out of bed before I was really ready. And just like yesterday I have the long grind of the night shift waiting for me. And so it goes.

As long as I'm struggling with trying to come up with some content I want to thank both Walt, and Mushroom for their feedback and for their blogs. Walt has an uncanny knack for selecting tight pithy pieces of wisdom, and Mushroom's earthy approach to faith and scripture transcends cloying pie-in-the-sky platitudes, and delivers the grit of real world religion. Good stuff, gentlemen. Your words have meant much to me. Thank you.

And tonight will be the last night of this assignment. Monday, the new guy takes over the run. I wish him well. He's young- early twenties, and he wants to earn money to get back to college. Actually, I hope they hire him on full-time. He seems like a decent sort, and this position would give him the chance to make a decent income and stay in school at the same time. It's tough, but not impossible. I did it when I was in college.

And the good news, too is that there will be another position opening at the end of June, and that should slot me in for the summer. Of course, nothing is certain, but things have a way of working out just the way they are supposed to. You do the footwork, pray, and leave the results up to God. Oh, yeah, like that's easy. Easy like walking a tightrope. Just put your foot in the right place, and gravity takes care of the rest. Just put your foot in the right place. In the mean time, it'll be nice to resume a more slackluster routine for the next week. I have a lot of stuff I've been musing about, but I need the vacuum of empty time to put the musings into coherent thoughts, and the thoughts into coherent sentences. Sitting here as I am now, with one eye on the keyboard, and one eye on the clock doesn't work very well for me. And with that, I'm going to get some food, and get ready for the grind.

JWM

S.ure H.appy I.t's T.hursday

2009-04-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

Getter Robo One

This breaks routine. Normally I don't stop by the wfb until I've hit the other places on the bookmark list, and normally I don't feel like writing in the morning. Actually, that part isn't a break in routine. I still don't really feel like writing. I feel like going back to bed. But dear old Booger the Cat has her little cat sense of order, and cat order calls for me to be up and about before seven thirty. If I'm tardy, she'll jump up on the bed, and march from my ankles to my chest and back again, pausing to stick her cold nose in my face, swat me on the cheek, and cry. "weeow, weeow, weeow", until I give up and get out of bed. So it was on this cold gray morning.

I mentioned Wednesday that I was going to start a long term sub assignment- the brutal night run between Stephen King Elementary, and the Beachside campus. It would have meant steady work from now until September. Would have. I talked to the boss yesterday morning. I had initially expressed some reluctance about taking on the job. As I've mentioned, it's a brutal slog of a run. But after sleeping on it, I resolved to tough it out and give it my best effort. Besides, we really need the money. When the boss called, I told him I was up for it, and ready to go. He said I had the assignment, but he wanted to double check with the school principals, and he'd call back to confirm. He called back. They're giving the assignment to someone else- a twenty something year old who's trying to earn money for school.

Oh.

But would I be willing to finish out the week, anyway?

Sure. Be glad to do it.

And that's why I didn't get a post up yesterday. I was just too beat when I got home last night to even think about spelling a bunch of words on the computer. I didn't even want to read a bunch of words on the computer. Just too beat.

And this was an epiphany of sorts. At first I was beating myself for having been honest about my doubts on whether I was up for the assignment. Why did I say anything? Am I just being a lazy ass? Willing to work, but only so hard? Am I just wimping out? Putting my petty comfort level above the responsibilities of keeping up the household? Maybe I should have just kept quiet. But, you know what? It's no accident that the last two guys who have worked this job full time, just got fed up with it, and quit in anger.

No. It hit me like a ton of bricks about quarter to ten last night, when I was staring down the barrels of another row of rooms to clean, and the sidework, and the lockup yet undone. And realizing I was so damn tired I was aching, and dizzy. I'm getting too old for this shit. I'm in very good shape for a man my age. I like to work, and I don't mind working hard. But this was just too much. And I don't want to admit that to myself. The accusing voice in my head tells me I'm being a wimp. That this is a not a failure of strength, but of will. But I'm not inventing exhaustion for dramatic effect, here. I am up against the hard truth of being closer to sixty than fifty.

Welcome to life in the last days of the world as we know it. It's like encountering a boundary line, a border fence that just got moved in closer than it was the last time you approached it. This field used to be longer and wider. What happened? What do you mean, someone younger, and stronger?

Anyway.

As much as I was looking forward to making a little extra cash, and all, I'm actually relieved that they're giving the assignment to the younger man. I have tonight, and tomorrow night still to go, and this feels like the longest week in human history. But the week will end, and with it this assignment. I've done OK this month. I got more work this pay period than in the last two put together. All in all, there's still much to be grateful for.

JWM

Almost Wednesday

2009-04-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

Getter Poseidon

Twenty after eleven. This day is over, and I'm beat. Today was payback for yesterday. There was no call this morning, and Mary was off to visit her mother, so I figured I had the day to myself. It was just after noon, and I was just getting ready to leave for a walk, when then the phone rang. Work tonight. Stephen King Elementary. maybe. Can I do it?

I like to work. I am always happier when I'm doing something productive. But the shift that splits Stephen King Elementary, and the Beachside campus is long, tough, and tedious. There's a level of physical labor that is healthy, invigorating, and that I actually enjoy. But too much past that level, and it starts to beat you down. The needle on the strain meter for this job is way outside the green, and hangs in the yellow just a hair off the red zone. Plus I had some bad vibes from the day guy up there just last Tuesday.
"Yes, I can do it."
But it wasn't certain. The Boss said he'd call me by 1:00. That gave me an hour of feeling like I'd been pulled over for slacking, and was looking at eight hours of hard labor for my crime. Unless I was lucky, and got a suspended sentence...

The phone rang exactly at one O'clock. I was on for tonight, and possibly longer. Possibly very long term. The Kid who was the regular night guy split, and took off for Texas. The Kid was supposed to finish out the month, but he just said, "The hell with it", and took off yesterday. I guess he has a job lined up, there. I don't blame him in the least for just taking off. That's exactly what I'd do.

Just exactly what I felt like doing, to tell the truth. But I went in there, and I did it, and it mostly wasn't much fun. I talked to the Day guy over there at SKE, and he was cool. No mention of last week. I'm fine with that. He confirmed it. The Kid is gonesville, Daddy-O.

So it's the classic good news/bad news delivery. I have a rare opportunity to earn some much needed money. But earning it won't involve pastoral mornings on the dewy fields. Just a hard eight hour slog through dirty classrooms that runs until ten thirty at night. And maybe ending up posting on the blog after midnight, when I should be in bed.

JWM

Well and Slow on Monday

2009-04-13T18:49:00.000-07:00

Getter Liger

Usually I sit down to write in the mid afternoon, but I got a call for work this morning (a good thing) and afterward, the business of life got between me and, what now feels a little like a responsibility- writing something on the world famous blog. But dinner is over, Mary is out at a meeting, Booger the Cat is at my feet guarding the chair, and I'm all out of procrastination. It's kind of funny- the "world famous" thing. And the byline about fame and fortune. Of course, I meant it as something of a joke. I hardly expect this endeavor to actually result in either. But the 'world famous' part has come true. I get a few hits a week from off shore. I've had visitors from Europe, Asia, Even Australia, and South America. It's the toy pictures, especially the Bullmark pics from "Reflections on a Talking Robot" that brings them. I doubt they stay to find out what happens next in La Habra.

But like I said, I got a call for work this morning, and today it was at the school that's less than a block away from the house. It was the first day back after Easter, so that would have made it an easy day anyway. Usually the first thing you do when you open up, is to take care of the restrooms. That was done over the break. To boot, the day man over there actually showed up, and unlocked the plant before leaving, so even though the call came late, and I had to charge out of the house, it turned out to be an unhurried day. Once school had begun I just took the park patrol grabber thing, and a bucket, and worked my way out to the big field. It's quiet out on the grass in the morning. The field smells green, and sweet. I have the radio if they need me for anything, but other than that, the next three and a half hours are mine. Cool, and cloudy. The day couldn't commit itself to either being gray and overcast, or blue sky and clouds. The kids were subdued, as they always are the first day back. No bathroom disasters, and only one barf on the rug. Not much throwing and yelling during either lunch. The afternoon is busier than the morning: taking care of the lunch area, the kitchen, and then get the gates unlocked, and plant closed up at the end of the day. The afternoon is as busy as the morning is slow. It was all of a piece, and all rolling along at about seventy eight per cent capacity. Like someone turned all the dials back off of ten for a while. A slow Monday after Easter.

JWM

A Good Friday

2009-04-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

Getter Dragun

It's another one of those shadowless silver days, and it's well enough along into the spring that the graylight stretches out into the evening past when we're usually used to having dinner. And solstice is still over two months away. I can just imagine living in the far north where the darkness and daylight cycle swings from all day to none in the span between solstice and equinox. When Mary and I were on our honeymoon trip we stayed a couple days on Mackinac Island, courtesy of my most generous cousin- my mom's cousin, actually, but that's another story. Mackinac Island is on Lake Huron in the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. It's between the upper, and lower peninsulas of Michigan. We were there in May, and it was light well past nine at night. I can just imagine how cold and dark it gets up there in December.

Earlier on in the day Mary and I did a low effort walk- we ended up following the city crew down the railroad easement as they cut down the last of the tall grass, and weeds. It's less scenic now than it was a while back. From there we took the long away around, up Beach to Whittier Boulevard, and made a stop for lunch while we were up there. I have been blessed with a very good marriage. Later this month we'll celebrate nine years together. It seems like nine minutes- underwater. (just kidding- I had to use that joke, though) We just get along well. And the things that make it good are simple. Sitting on the couch together having coffee in the morning. Sharing breakfast and dinner. Riding the bikes. Walking. Walking most of all. If I could carry one single memory out of the world to remind me that life is Good, it would be walking with Mary.

We can carry on a conversation along the tracks, but the traffic on the street is too loud. We kept a fairly brisk pace up Beach , crossed Whittier Boulevard and stopped at another one of the minor food treasures in the neighborhood, Cilantro's. We always get their carne asada burrito: grilled steak, beans, rice, cheese in a huge hot flour tortilla. It's a pig out. The other addictive treat they have there is cucumber lemonade. Which is just like what it sounds like: they keep these four or five gallon glass crocks full of the fruit drinks- deep ruby jamaica, milky horchata, and the pale green lemonade with chopped cucumbers. It sounds awful, but it isn't. It's a good candidate for the most refreshing drink of all time, and it is the perfect complement to Mexican food. The stuff would probably make a dangerously tasty margarita.

As I said, the burrito there is a pig out. Fortunately, the place is close to home, so we didn't have far to walk to get back.

And that was the event of the day, on this Good Friday, the tenth of April in the Year of Our Lord, 2009. Another sweet pause in the last days of the world as we know it.

JWM

A little BS About Toys

2009-04-09T17:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted the picture of the black Evangelion figure, EVA Unit 03. The chrome one from the day before is unit 04. Notice that the chrome one doesn't have the power umbilical like the other five. That's because it was powered by the S-2 engine that blew up, and took out New Mexico, Arizona, and most of Colorado, if I remember right.

I started with the photo of Unit One, the purple guy, on the first of April. The red one is Unit 02. The yellow one with the shield is Unit 00, and the blue is Unit 00', the rebuilt model of Unit 00. All the figures come from the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is as strange a work as I have ever seen. The Wiki entry provides a decent synopsis.

"Evangelion", of course, is Gospel, and Genesis, is the first book of the Bible. But the twenty six episode story is not a Christian allegory. Rather Hideaki Anno, the creator seems to throw Biblical, and Christian symbols into the apocalyptic, enigmatic, and dreamlike storyline for the sake of enhancing the the overall weirdness that stretches from the plot, to the nature of the Bio-robotic EVA, depicted in the toys. Most Japanese robots aren't robots. They're battle machines driven by a human pilot, or team of pilots. The Evas are also controlled by a human pilot. Problem is, under the armor the Eva is a living organism- a giant humanoid creature that is cloned, and then essentially pithed, and kept alive artificially. The human pilot is entombed in a cylindrical metal capsule which is charged full of oxygen bearing fluid, and inserted into the creature's spinal cord. (see the yellow one in the picture- hatch open, entry plug exposed) There, the pilot develops a telepathic bond with the thing's brain, and takes it out to do hand to hand combat against transdimensioal "Angels" which take the form of everything from bipedal insectoid monsters, to giant crystals trying to bore into the headquarters of NERV, the clandestine ultratech military science unit that created the Eva's from genetic stock that they recovered from the giant monster that they found at the South Pole after following directions discovered in The Dead Sea Scrolls. When they found the monster, it blew up, and wiped out almost everybody. NERV passed the disaster off as a giant meteor strike, and created the Evangelions to fight off the giant monsters descendants, the Angels...

Sound ridiculously convoluted? It is. It's a deeply flawed work. Nonetheless, it's one of the most powerful stories I've ever encountered. And the Angel attacks- the monster fights are some of the most heart pounding action sequences I've seen. It is a strange, and wonderful piece. Definitely worth the twelve hours, and change it takes to watch the series. The toys are cool, too. They are from Bandai's Soul of Chogokin series, which usually focuses on re-doing the classic pieces from the seventies. Neon Genesis (1996) was popular enough that Bandai broke with tradition to produce these little gems. They are almost all metal, and incredibly well articulated, and well balanced. Actually, they're the only toys in the whole Soul of Chogokin series that are actually fun to take down from the shelf and play with.They can assume almost any pose that a person can. But the picture with the post tonight isn't from the Neon Genesis Evangelion series. It's a Rick Dom, Principality of Zeon, enemy mecha from the series Mobile Suit Gundam, which first aired in 1978. And it's not a toy. It's a model kit. Anyway- that's about all for this sweetly uneventful day.

JWM

All Things the Same

2009-04-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

We had rain before dawn, and it was still dark when I got up. But sunrise fired orange out of a clear violet sky soon after I sat on the couch with coffee, a comforter, and Sam the Cat. Mary has been getting up early to go walking with some friends of hers, so I had an hour or so to sit and just think.

Later on in the morning I went out on foot to do the walk up the hill. From the West heights you could see Catalina, the Spruce Goose dome in Long beach, and the giant cranes in the Long Beach harbor. Perfect morning - bright sun, white clouds, deep blue sky.

So I took the long way around, and walked down to the corner. John's shopping bag was tucked under the table just outside Starbuck's door, but John was nowhere around. The long way around adds up to about eight miles, most of it through hills. I was tired enough to just want to sit for a while. I got coffee, and took a table in the sun.

Among the features of most of the nightmare dystopia of the future type stories is that everybody- men, and women alike, wears the same uniform. Everything is colorless. There is no variety of style. It is sameness piled on sameness. Conformity of appearance, thought, and behavior.

I get on this tear every now and again- comparing the present to what I long ago thought/feared the future would be. Sometimes it just comes on me- I feel like I'm watching a movie, or something, but I start running down the check list. Like today as I sat at the patio just outside of Starbucks resting up from the hike. Stuff I couldn't help but notice- Slovenliness. Every man I saw wore shorts, or jeans, and every one walks around with their shirt hangin' out. Same for every woman I saw. They dressed no differently. And everyone was drab. olive. khaki. gray. With the exception of a couple of women who walked by wearing dresses, everyone there looked like they were ready to dig into some yardwork. And the two women who were wearing dresses wore wash 'n wear hairstyles, little make up, and went bare legged. In short, they looked like crap. Everyone did. I remember visiting New York City back in '87. One of the things that blew me away about the city was that people dressed well. Everywhere. Los Angeles is much more casual. But we've let the bottom fall out of casual, even. Now it's just- whatevar.

And yes, everyone's more comfortable. Men aren't wrestling with ties, and women aren't wrestling with pantyhose. No one needs the dry cleaner any more. But a great measure of civility, and beauty has been lost to the world. We have become comfortably drab.

And what was odd, too is that I noticed the drabness extended to the parking lot. There were three or so generic classes of vehicle- SUV type, sedan type, vans, trucks, but within those classes the vehicles were virtually indistinguishable. You couldn't tell a Ford from a Subaru, from a Toyota. Not only that, but I noticed how few cars in the lot came in any real color. Most were silver, white, or some variant of brown/beige. Some were redish, or blueish, but there was not a vehicle in sight that you could easily pin a color on. More drab. Like the music coming out of Starbucks. They don't have to turn pop tunes into Muzak any more. The musicians seem to have volunteered to provide insipid fare. And when you walk in there, the headlines in the LA Times echo the headlines in the New York Times, and they both echo the networks... More of the sameness.

I hate when this stuff starts to get to me. But sometimes it just does. After a while I got up, and left. I saw old John at the corner of Beach, and Whittier. He was standing in the island in the middle of Beach wearing bright kelly green slacks, a sea green jacket, and a yellow shirt. He had been across the street at Fresh & Easy. You can get their day old food quite cheap if you know where to look. John does. I waited for him, and then we walked back to the corner, and talked a bit. And that was the morning.

JWM

Waiting on the Truck

2009-04-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

Blogger always assigns the time for a post when you push the New Post button. That is- the time signature that appears for a post is the time when you start writing, not when you finish. So this one's going to read something like nine minutes after three, or somewhere thereabouts. At any rate, it's the middle of the afternoon. I made a good hike up the hill, took care of errands, and the only thing left between now, and dinner is to write something. And wait for the UPS truck. The tracking code lists the package as having gone out for delivery just after seven this morning. It is somewhere in a truck, on the street, and not here. Of course, the probability that the package will get here is pretty high. UPS does good work. But once I got a toy I ordered on line delivered to a house three blocks away. Nothing is one hundred percent certain. And it is after three, and usually they come by around noon. I'll sit here cooking up scenes of disappointment and disaster until the truck shows up. And then I'll be all relieved, decide that the world is not such a bad place, and forget about it until the next time I buy something on line.

In a way, it's fun. There's something of Christmas, or birthday in getting a parcel delivered. Similarly, there's something unreal about ordering something from an on-line vendor. You look at pictures, click the mouse, type in the numbers. If you feel the need for tangible evidence of your transaction, you can print out the confirmation e-mail. Nobody does. And then you wait. It's the waiting- the dead time between the last mouse click, and the sound of the delivery truck, that breaks the connection between buying something, and receiving it. That makes the appearance of the merchandise seem magical. It's a Santa in April thing. Unless it doesn't come. Then the connection is immediately reestablished. Because they already have your money. And you have nothing. So then it's phone calls, and e-mails, and all kinds of bullshit just to get back to square one. And now it's after four. And the wait continues, exacerbated by the time. Looking at it optimistically, the later it gets, the closer it gets to the time the package will be delivered. On the other hand, the later it gets, past a point, the more likely it becomes that you got skunked. And that's where the afternoon's writing project ends. Waiting.

And of course as soon as I got off line, the truck appeared. I'm all relieved. And the world's not such a bad place, you know?

JWM

Taxes, and Taggers

2009-04-06T15:27:00.000-07:00

First stop this morning was to get the taxes done. That has always meant a refund from both the feds and the state. Not this year. Even with the small income I've got, I ended up having to kick out over four hundred bucks more than what they've already taken. Bummer.

But the rest of the day was just too damn fine to let even that keep me pissed off for long. I took out some aggression on the weeds in the back yard, and now the yard looks better. After that some errands. Trader Joe's has these pita crackers that come laced with some weird addictive substance that got me weirdly addicted so I went over there to get my cracker fix, and copped a decent stash- enough to last for a few days if the wife doesn't find them.

Mary was home when I got back from TJ's. She was out back in the gazebo preparing materials for the pre-school art class that she teaches. She was measuring out red, yellow, and green colored sand, and mixing it with glitter. Booger the cat was there covered with dirt and dry grass, doing her cat best to be helpful. She sat on my feet as I stepped up to the table. I scratched her head, and she swatted me with her claws. That's my cat. I wanted to go hike, but Mary had too much stuff to do. And I thought better of going up the hill again, and took the easy way out with a stroll down the tracks. The puddles are dry; the mud is gone, and guys on tractors are mowing the four foot high weeds. That will pretty much end all the scenic beauty until next year. Nothing but bare dirt, and taggers from now until the end of fall.

Taggers. I hate the bastards. I'm actually not a total curmudgeon when it comes to kids getting crazy. And that railroad easement has been a place where kids have been 'getting away with stuff' for a long time. When I was in high school, we used to ditch out and go over there to get buzzed, drink beer, or just get away from school, sit under the low trestle, and have a smoke. Back in the day I enjoyed many a quart of beer, and not a few reefers along that weedy easement. But no one would have thought of painting all over stuff, thus drawing attention to the place, and what we were doing there. That would have been like advertising: "We're doing illegal stuff here! Ha, Ha, Ha!" I mean- what a bust, as we used to say.

Now, of course, every square inch of block wall, and even the discarded scraps of cardboard, and plywood that get dumped there end up tagged. Like the windows at Time Out Burger. Etched. Or the toilet seat in the rest room at the local supermarket. Or every dumpster, every trash can, every bus stop, every place where someone isn't vigilant about cleaning off the graffiti. Tagged. The city actually has at least one full time employee who does nothing but "graffiti abatement" as it says on the truck. He drives around towing a pressure washer, and carrying rollers, a camera, and tons of neutral paint. I asked him if they ever catch the taggers. He said yeah, they do. They match up the photos he takes with stuff they find at the high school, and in the possession of kids who get rousted by the cops. Sometimes it comes together, and they nab one. Sometimes. But mostly they just keep painting it over. Sisyphus, and the stone. And so it goes, on this gentle day. One more feature of life in the last days of the world as we know it.

JWM

Walkin' the Ridgeline

2009-04-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

all pictures click to enlarge

We went from a gray Friday to a hazy Saturday to a clear, bright, and windy Sunday. Mary and I went for breakfast burritos. She had machaca. I just had the potato and ham and egg. At any rate we both had calories to burn, and it was a perfect clear day so I grabbed the camera and we headed to the park. It seems like I end up taking the same pictures over and over: the tunnel like trail, a view from the hillside (which almost never comes out), or various closeups of flowers, or what have you. And year after year the same cycle: here's the view in April, in August, October, or December. The green hills followed by gold hills, gray hills, and then back to green. Still, it's always new, and always just different enough to notice changes from the last time I was there. This is still the green part. The first picture is the entrance to the park. It's a long steep downhill, which makes for a long steep uphill to end any walk on.
And since it was clear we decided to take the trail that leads up to the ridgeline, and the top of the hills.

Also steep uphill.See? Mary is sixty. I'm fifty six. But we made it without any trouble. Much to be grateful for, right there. Here's the view looking east from the top of that trail. Notice the hilltop with the antenna in the center of the picture. That's a former Nike missile site overlooking North Orange County. For a long time it was just abandoned. You could walk right up to the empty missile vaults.We took the ridgeline road west for a ways.

Straight north of us Mt. Baldy hangs on to the last cap of snow.

This is the view south to the ocean. That's a disorienting feature of this corner of Southern California- You normally think of the ocean as being to the west, but around here the roads to the beach run north and south.

It's exhilarating, being up on the top of the world there. We almost took the long way around to the bottom of the park. But that would have meant climbing the very long steep road to get out of the park. So we didn't. Good call. Anyway. Mary just got back in, Booger the cat is bugging me for some attention, and I have a barbeque to light. It's a gift, I'm tellin' ya.

JWM

One of My Favorite Songs

2009-04-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

One of the odd things about Booger the Cat is that she likes music. Especially pretty music. She's not too whippy about hard rock, but a lyrical melody, acoustic instruments, and voice has her up in my lap listening intently to the computer speakers. She really likes this song. So do I. This is not the sort of music that I generally like, but it's one of those rare tunes, and singers that I just fell in love with right from the first hearing. I first heard this song on the clock radio one morning in the spring of 1994. I was having a rare pleasant, and beautiful dream that gently took the shape of the opening bars of this song. I floated up into a half awake, half dreaming state, and the singer's sultry voice, the harmony from the backup voices, and the eerie, syncopated melody poured out into the room like a visitation of angels. As soon as the song ended I got up, and turned off the radio. I didn't want another piece of music to crowd it out. The song just haunted me all day. And I had no way in the world to find out who did it. Some months later I was sitting with the gang on the patio at Mimo's cafe in uptown Whittier. Dimitri, the owner was there having a smoke with us. And this song came up on the background music. The first bars grabbed my attention. I asked Dimitri who that was, and he showed me the album. The song was called "Reward" and it was recorded by Polish singer, Basia. Eureka!

Hope you enjoy.

JWM

A Short Hike, A Long View

2009-04-03T16:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes staring at the blank post window is intimidating. It's one thing when you have a definite idea you want to work on, or if something odd, scary, or amusing happened during the day. But when it's just another featureless day in the life, then the post window is like an unpaid bill. It's odd. Sometimes I think about firing off a screed on one of the many things that make me want to screed: the MSM, enviro-weenies, tattooed chicks, libs and leftards, Teh Preznit, nanny state laws, and on and on and on. But the line for that soapbox stretches around the block, and there are zillions of fine, angry voices railing against the idiocy, and the ugly. One of my older posts actually got linked on someone else's blog a while back. He described the wfb as a roadside park on the information highway. I liked that a lot. And maybe that's part of the reason I haven't used this small forum to go off on all the bullshit out there. It's not my gig, so to speak. Anyway.

Today I fell back on the routine that sustained me pretty well between the time when the artistic burn went out, and the heart thang punched the re-set button on my whole existence. It is a daily routine of polished slack. Coffee on the couch with Mary, and Sam the Cat. Breakfast. Internet. A few minor errands. A hike up the hill. A little straightening up around the house. Dinner. Especially good is the hike up the hill. It feels good to work muscles, breathe hard, sweat. It just feels good to be able to do it. I remember well the long frightening weeks before the angiogram, when I could barely walk around the block. Waking up at night with chest pain, and hoping it would pass so I wouldn't have to call 911. And how bad that short stay in the hospital, and the deceptively simple seeming procedure kicked my ass. Gagdad Bob gave me a good piece of advice after it was over. He said (paraphrasing, here) to look at every day as if I was playing in extra innings. That each one after was a gift. I try to do this, and much of the time I succeed. And much of the time I don't. Even now, some two and a half years later, I find that I get angry quicker than I used to. My whole range of emotion swings from pole to pole faster, and easier, too. So if I'm more easily moved to anger or depression, I am also more easily moved to appreciation, gratitude, and thankfulness. I guess it all evens out, sorta.

And today, as I pushed up the steep hill on Solejar Dr., I wrestled with a lot of emotion, a lot of decision, and a lot of uncertainty. Big decisions, and possibly bigger changes are right on the horizon. I started writing about this stuff yesterday, but The Voice just said keep quiet about it for now. So I sidetracked off, wrote about Booger the Cat, and left an incoherent mess of a post that ended abruptly as soon as dinner gave me an excuse to get off the computer. And I'm not trying to be coy, but I still need to just sit on this stuff, and pray on it for a while.

I've learned not to pray for what I want. Because what I want at any given moment is colored by my immediate circumstances. What I think I want is not necessarily the best thing for me. So I pray: It is not what I want, but what God wants for me; not what I would do, but what God would have me do. You see- I figure that God has a somewhat wider perspective than my own, and that God ultimately has my best interests at heart. And prayer works. That's why so many people rely on it.

Give you an example- I started the part time job with the local school district as soon as I was on my feet after the heart thang. At first working a full eight hour shift kicked my ass so hard that it took me two days to recover afterward. But I got my strength back, and by that summer I was digging out sprinkler lines, working a jack hammer, and pouring concrete. A full time position came open- the one I subbed for the other night at Stephen King Elementary. I put in for the job. I did not get hired. Instead, they hired the twenty three year old kid. I was pretty disappointed. Now I am glad. I can handle doing that night run on a short term basis, but as a daily grind it would have beaten me down. It wouldn't have been long before I purely hated it. I would have been stuck there, too. At my age I don't have the years left to go job hopping trying to start one last career before the clock runs out. So that was a case in point. Now, I'm not saying that if I would have prayed to get the job, then I would have got it. God works, as they say, in mysterious ways. But I did pray for God's will in the matter, and in retrospect I can see that things worked out better for me than they would have if I'd got what I thought I wanted at the time.

And this week will be Easter vacation for the schools, and this year there will be no week long project like last year. So it's a week of slack, adulterated only by the mundane tasks of life in the last days of the world as we know it. Not a bad thing at all.

JWM

Cloudy Day With Cats.

2009-04-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

Another one of those shadowless silver days, and a cold one to boot. It was the last day of school before Easter week. The first thing in the morning routine at Sweetwater is to lock the gate to the big field. The gate is up on a bank overlooking the plant, basketball courts, and playground. Except for lighting the green on the big L shaped field, the invisible morning sun just doesn't have enough energy to reflect any color. The school buildings, the surrounding houses, yards, trees, and the Puente hills to the north, sleep in shades of silver and gray. It didn't change all day. But there's a lot of change coming down the pike in the whole work thing, but I don't want to BS about work. Suffice it to say that I did it, and it was good. Now I'm tired. And that is how life generally clicks along.

Booger the cat just came in to the den, dug her claws in the carpet, and hunkered down by my chair. I've tried a few times to get a good picture of ol' boogies, but getting a good cat picture is harder than it sounds. She's a plump calico Manx, white fur splotched with striped patches of brown and black. She's a rumpy Manx, which means she's got a tail like a bunny. And Manx cats naturally have long hind legs, and short front ones, so Booger looks like a bunny cat. Too cute for her own good, actually. She's a cantankerous, often bad tempered critter. Don't touch her hindquarters. Most of the time, you just don't pick up the kitty unless you want to lose some skin. And you have to be careful petting her too. Other times the cat will beg for attention, and just melt on your shoulder. She spends the night on the foot of the bed, and wakes me up if I'm not out of bed just after Mary. Nicest old kitty ever. We got Booger the Cat from an elderly woman who Mary knew. Someone had just thrown the cat away. The old woman found the cat in her garage, cowering in a corner. She tried to keep her, but the Manx didn't get along with the other cats. Mary and I had had a cat, but it got eaten by a coyote when we were living up at Possum Flats. So we took the Manx.

I looked around a little, and found out that people actually pay money to get Manx cats. You generally won't just find one at an animal shelter. My guess on Booger the Cat's story is this. Someone bought the kitty, and gave her to a young child. Kitty is too cute for her own good. Kid snuggles too tight, won't leave the cat alone. Cat swats, and scratches. Kid 'spanks' kitty for being bad. Cat scratches one too many times, and gets a one way trip in the car. Just a guess. But that's how we got Booger the Cat.

We have another cat, a half Siamese named Sam, that my brother dumped on us. Now there's an unlikely story for a cat with zero personality. Sam belonged to someone in New York City. He was given to a cat adoption place, and that's where my brother got him, and another cat. My brother came out here for an extended stay a few years back, and brought the two cats with him. A couple months later, he went back to New York. Without the cats. Some cats get thrown away, others get plane fare. The other cat that he brought died a while back, and now we just have Booger, and Sam. They can't stand each other. But now I need to go get some food. And that is all.

Phone Calls.

2009-03-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

After Saturday's musings about working the night shift, Ben picked up on the theme of thankfulness, which is a close cousin to gratitude. The way I read the connotations, gratitude is almost always defined negatively. That is- we're mostly grateful for things we don't have to deal with. Like living in Gaza, having some god awful illness, being stuck homeless on the streets in some backwater slum in Pakistan, or- well you get the idea. It seems like we're most often grateful for the bad stuff that hasn't happened. Or that has happened. It's an all too common story- something that seems to be a dire misfortune turns out to have some great benefit hidden under the bullshit.

We're thankful, on the other hand, for the good stuff that we do have. Thankful to love someone. Thankful to put in a day's work. Thankful for a day of good health. Thankful for a decent camera, a cool bike.

Anyway.

Yesterday was one of those all day gray fests. Mary rented the Prince Caspian movie. Very enjoyable. I barbequed a steak, and we had a salad with almost no lettuce, because it was mostly avocado, and roma tomato.

See- more stuff to be thankful for. After dinner we did as we always do- came back to the den. Mary reads on the futon, and I start blipping through the various stops in the Coonosphere, and then make the rounds through the other fun places: Lileks, Vanderleun, Hewitt, Robot Japan, and the weather. Then Mary does her prayers, and that's when the phone rang. It was Mary's friend, Michelle from the Buddhist group. She, and her husband were at our wedding, well- what do you expect? We had a Buddhist wedding at the SGI community center, and all of Mary's Buddhist friends were there. And after the ceremony, Mary's friend Irene, and her brother, Charlie held the reception for us at Irene's house. Charlie drove me to the ceremony. And that's why Mary's friend, Michelle was calling. Charlie died last night. Cancer. Last October, his complaint was a sore knee. He was a genuinely good man. Mary called a few other friends, and then we went to bed, and I held on to her. And she held on to me. Grateful to be here. Thankful that my Mary is here with me.

The phone rang again at 6:30 this morning. The boss needed someone to cover the day shift. Right now. Would I rather do that instead of working late tonight at Stephen King Elementary?

JWM

Get Green and Save Gaia Now Or Else!

2009-03-29T10:40:00.001-07:00

Oh, holy shit! Did I miss it? Was Gaia hour yesterday, or is it today? I always forget the really important holidays, and this new holiday is probably the all time most important new holiday of all time, and maybe more! Save Gaia hour. What a concept. I'm sure it's gotta' be listed somewhere in the Book of the Dead, or maybe Druids or Wiccans used to do it too, or maybe not! This could represent a new awakening of the spirit of Mother Gaia, communicating to us, her illegitimate bastard spawn that we had better get back to nature before she puts us there!

I've been reading up on life in the rainforest, and it's nothing but tragic that we have become so alienated from from our earthly roots. Think how cool it would be to live in a totally organic grass and mud hut, running around naked, and feasting on lizards, roots, and palm grubs. You could pierce your nose, lips, and cheeks with really for real boar's tusks and bird bones, and make full body tatts out of shallow incisions rubbed with cold ashes. They even have totally natural organic hallucinogens out there, and no uncool cops to bust you for using them. But I digress.

The thing here is Save Gaia Day. We have to stop being pigs for an hour, or maybe throw a party or something. What to do? Maybe I can send a card. No, no. Sending a card would use up energy. So would a telephone call, or even an e-mail... Lemme think- That's it! I'll think some groovy thoughts for Gaia, and that will atone for all the damage my parasitic presence has caused! I'll think of some poor baby polar bear standing there hungry on an ever shrinking ice flow. Imagine there's no penguins- it isn't hard to do. Think of rising sea levels, and half of Upper Tonga under water- the last few indigenous souls crowded on a shrinking sand spit trying to snag some hapless dolphin for the community stew pot. Think of- Oh, wait.

Even thinking takes energy, and the energy I use up thinking was bought and paid for by the suffering of Goddess Gaia. You know- all those tiny oats crushed in their prime. The banana that should rightly have gone to some jungle monkey. The coffee beans ripped untimely from Gaia's womb... No, thinking won't do.

That's it. I won't think for an hour. I'll just sit quietly, and breathe. Except that means I'll be exhaling carbon dioxide, and that's what is causing the polar bears to melt. Maybe I'll hold my breath for an hour. I'm sure Gaia would thank me.

JWM

Station on Mellow. Saturday and Slow

2009-03-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

So here we are in the middle of another ridiculously beautiful day. I didn't start anything yesterday morning, and by the time I got off last night I just didn't feel like writing.

I've mentioned it before, but one of the nicer things about this area is the selection of good places to grab a bite to eat. Molcasalsa is one of the better ones, and it's just a couple blocks from here. Normally we start the day with oatmeal. I don't mind too much. Today we were out of oatmeal, which is where Molcasalsa comes in. You can get potatoes, ham, eggs, and cheese wrapped up burrito style in a big warm flour tortilla for 99 cents, if you can make it there before 11:00 AM. It's a cholesterol bomb, but every once in a while you just gotta' live dangerously. Walk on the wild side. Roll dice with the devil, and all that devil-may-care kind of daring that goes along with stuffin' your gut.

Anyway-

John was at the corner, along with a couple of other guys I enjoy talking to. And we hadn't sat there long, when Mike came by with his guitar. He's out of the group home, and staying with his folks again, up in the heights. The guy can play. I've heard him go finger picking through some spidery Renaissance melody, and then slide it into some good ass kickin blues. It was good see him back, and good to see that he's keeping it together. It would have been too easy lose half the day hanging out, though, and I had to attend to the small errands of the weekend. Which now have been attended to.

And I put out enough physical effort last night, that I'm not going hiking today. No. Chicken on the barbeque is the height of today's ambition. The last two nights were hard work. The night shift is always split between two schools, four hours to clean half of the first school, and four to clean half of the second. And since the rooms are cleaned only every other day, they're always in bad shape. And last night I had the late half at Stephen King Elementary, on the corner of Scream Road, and Ghoul Street. During the day, it's shady, and seems more like a park than a school. It sits on a dark corner of a quiet neighborhood right at the foot of the west end of the heights. Built in '57, the place has the architecture of a Chevy Bel Aire. Huge ficus trees brood over the classroom buildings. Everything is up hill. In the interest of saving Gaia, all the outdoor lights have been replaced with those evil mercury vapor, and poison gas corkscrew things. Those bulbs are to light what a microwave is to a barbeque. Just. Not. Natural. After dark, you're always in a tunnel of this harsh yellow glare. Outside the tunnel of glare is the void. You cannot see into the void. To boot, the ficus trees grow some sort of marble sized seed fruit, and spend the evening tossing them onto the sheet metal roofs, so there's always some noise, something skittering away just outside your field of vision. And there's a rabbit loose on the grounds, and you never know when the rabbit is going to show up. Always something out there. But it didn't get me. At least not last night.

And for all my complaining I was grateful to make the push through the night. I got all the stuff done, and left it looking pretty decent. And grateful to be able to do it. Last task of the shift is always to do the door check- walk the whole campus; pull all the doors. I came around the corner of one of the wings, and found three high school age kids sitting in the hallway. I think they were just about ready to roll one up, when I came around. I remembered one Friday night forty years ago, when I sat on this same campus with the same intention. "Hi, guys. I'm locking up, you'll have to go party elsewhere." They evaporated into the void. I heard the clinking of the chain link fence and they were gone.

JWM

Songs, Outlaw Stars, and Workin' Nights

2009-03-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

Usually I start writing sometime in the middle to late afternoon, but I got a call for work for the next few nights so here I am, hunting and pecking away at the ungodly hour of nine thirty in the A.M. morning. A call for work. With all the budget cutting and lay-offs and all, I should be grateful to be picking up a few nights. But I'm dreading it. I just got myself adjusted to not worrying about work. Now I have to readjust again one more time all over. I swear, I can find more ways to generate discontent than there are things to be discontented about. It's just the perverse nature of my head. I should be used to this by now.

At the end of yesterday's post I put a link to the song Hiru no Tsuke, which was the closing theme for Outlaw Star. I hadn't heard the song in quite a while- not since Cartoon Network had Outlaw Star on Toonami in the afternoons, and that was eight or nine years ago. It was long enough that hearing it again brought on that odd kind of time warp effect that only songs have. It conjured up the palpable rhythm of the days when Mary and I were newly married, and living in the drafty, opossum plagued garage apartment behind her folks' house. I was carving my way through one chunk of rock after another, sure that the next art show was going be the one that would score me a sale, and launch a profitable career as a sculptor. There was money in the bank, and we were doing fine on what income was coming in. The computer was a new toy. I had found robot-japan on the internet and was blown away at the notion that I was trading notes on Japanese toys with people all over the world. We were having more fun than we realized. But that's how it all too often is. You don't see how much fun you're having until you've had it, and it's over. The song brought it all up in a pleasant mist that still sort of lingers with me this morning.

Even though work hangs over my head like Doom itself. I'll be fine once I get in there, and start moving, but right now it still feels more like a sentence than an opportunity to make some much needed cash. Right now, I have other stuff to attend to. I'll pick this up later tonight when the shift's over...

Which is now. Ten forty six P.M. at night by the computer clock. And working the night shift wasn't so bad. But I still have the song, and the mood it recalls floating through my head. Odd how classical music doesn't have that quality of resurrecting scenes and moods from a particular time and place. I remember clearly when I was an avid classical buff, but putting on Beethoven's seventh, or Mozart's Requiem doesn't take me back to the seventies. Throw on Ramblin' Man, and I'm there. And what strikes me as I'm sitting here is how simple, and how difficult it can be to keep a proper focus on the joys of the present. When you look back everything has that sweet glow of nostalgia, and when you look ahead it's all full of latent potential, and anticipation. The present, in contrast, is always full of the problems of the present. Be here now. It is so very simple, isn't it? But simple isn't necessarily easy. Anyway. That's all I have for tonight. I'm going to take a look at the rest of the Coonosphere, and get some rest.

JWM

More Spitfire Stuff

2009-03-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

I'm falling back on an old way of patterning the day. As long as I have the time on my hands I may as well use it. So I made the six mile walk up in the hills this afternoon. Exercise just plain feels good. It clears up the mind as well.

I got rambling on about the Schwinn Spitfire yesterday- specifically the one they sold around 1977. You know- the classic cruiser style balloon tire one speed bicycle. Julie sent a link to her most excellent bike story, and caused me a head slap moment. I was going on about taking long lazy rides on the slow bike, and totally forgot to mention why I bought one in the first place. I got it to ride down the fire roads in the Brea hills.

Like a lot of major trends in my life, my love affair with balloon tire bikes started with a seemingly small gesture. I was out at an auction in Chino. They sold everything from entire estates worth of fine furniture and antiques, to backyard junk. There was an early 1960's Schwinn Co-ed in one of the lots. It needed tires, of course, but otherwise it was in good shape. I bid four dollars, and got it. At the time I had a friend who lived at the very east end of LaHabra Heights. Past his lot there was nothing but a few oil wells, and a Nike Missile site. And the fire roads. I got the notion that it'd be fun to take the old Co-ed, and go coast down some of the trails. It was way more fun than I had anticipated. About that time Schwinn came out with the Spitfire. The boy's bike frame is stronger, and much more stable at speed, and the late seventies version had extra heavy duty spokes and hubs, to boot. I've mentioned this before- that bike was steady, and comfortable at well over thirty miles an hour. There was one spot just past the old missile site where the road ran straight for the better part of a mile. It dropped down the hillside in three long smooth steps. It was a scary fast hill, but that bike rode it like a two wheeled surfboard. This was before mountain bikes, of course. It was like stumbling on to a hidden treasure. Nobody was doing this. And the few people I tried to tell about it sort of rolled their eyes. Nobody was interested in doing it. It was still fun, though.

Anyway.

Oh, yeah- totally unrelated to bicycles- I ran across this video on You Tube. It was the ending theme for the anime Outlaw Star, complete with the odd sci-fi artwork. Hiro no Tsuki.

JWM

Short on Comfort

2009-03-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

1961 Jaguar MK IV

The weather is embarrassingly good again today. Nonetheless, morning found me cranky. One of those days where everything sounds off key, and all things annoying seem to congregate beneath my window. Like fragmented sentences. Like Blogger jumping back to the 'Times' font after I repeatedly change it to Verdana. I have to look at the keys when I type, and I still type with some two to four fingers, but mostly with two. Every time I looked up at the screen the damn thing had changed font again. So I closed Firefox, and opened IE. Font remains the same. Good. Except I lost about half of what I had written.

So where was I? Oh, yeah. Like I said I just woke up with fingernails on my inner blackboard. So I got out the bicycle, pumped some air into the tires, and went out to burn off some of the toxins. Good thing to have done. I made a short loop- maybe five or six miles with easy hills, and it felt good.

I got the bike last year. Here's an example of the subtle PC of marketing. They politely call it a Comfort Bike, which is like a beach cruiser stripped of any pretense of cool. It's an old guy's bike, a 'socks and sandals set' bike. Upright riding position, telescopic front forks, shock under the seat. Low gears. Slow. I like it a lot.

It's funny- through the mid seventies, and early eighties I bought and sold quite a few Schwinns, both to obtain parts for the Classics I was restoring, and just to ride around. It never occurred to me that those old Chicago built Spitfires would one day be extinct like the Jaguar, The Starlet, and the B-6. Schwinn is now just a badge on bicycles imported from China. They're fine bikes, and all, but the Spitfire was American steel. (although the Bendix coaster brake came from Mexico)

The size, the weight, the easy handling of that cruiser made it the mechanical equivalent of a tennis shoe. One of my favorite ways to spend a Saturday was to take the old one speed out for an all day ride. Some times I'd pick off over fifty miles, riding out to the Santa Ana River trail, and following it down to Newport Beach at River Jetties, then Back down to Huntington, and then twenty some odd miles back up Beach Boulevard to LaHabra. Or the San Gabriel River trail, west of here. That one was fun because the San Gabriel riverbed is entirely paved, and the banks are smooth concrete slopes, some fifteen to twenty feet high. The Spitfire held those walls like a gecko. You could surf up and down those banks for miles. But the Spitfire just wasn't fast. A loop to the river beds was an all day proposition no matter how hard you worked at it. Just for the record, I actually made two or three such rides with the bike in the picture, but it wasn't easy. I haven't tried to do any serious distance on the comfort bike. I'm sure I could make it down to the beach on the thing. Getting home- I'd want a ride. But today was just a short loop. Enough to feel the workout. Enough to pick up a thorn and get a flat, despite the thorn proof tire liner thing. But the machine likes me. It didn't go flat until after I got home. No small thing to be grateful for.

JWM

The First Bright Day of Spring

2009-03-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was cold, gray, wind, and rain. Probably the last such day we'll see until next winter. Today was just the opposite- as perfect a clear bright day as ever was made. So I walked down to the corner while the morning was still cool. Old John was there, finishing up a burrito that Eddie had bought him a day or so before. I got a coffee, and sat down. John had been over to Trader Joe's the other day, but he lost his five bucks, and so he had to put back the stuff that he was going to buy. This morning he took twenty out of the bank, and was going to head back over to Trader Joe's as soon as the next bus came by. We had the sun on the table for the better part of an hour, but soon enough the edge of the patio shaded over and it got just cool enough to make me want to move. While we sat the bus came and went, so I walked back home and got the car.

The parking lot at Trader Joe's is way too small; every spot was taken, and people were stalking the rows like hunters waiting for a shot at a space. We gave it up and drove to uptown Whittier instead. Didi was up there working at Mimo's cafe, taking orders at the counter, and serving plates out on the patio. Mimo's in Whittier is a hangout like Starbuck's in La Habra. Didi, and her husband were two of the gang I used to BS with back in the early nineties. She keeps her hair dyed purple, even though you could make the argument that she's a little too old to keep doing it. No matter. She has that extroverted personality that lets her pull it off. I introduced her to John, but she already knew John. He comes up there to check the library used book sales. For an 85 year old guy without a car, John gets around. We got a cup, sat there for a while, and headed back over to Trader Joe's.

When we got in the car, John asked why I didn't try to put my artwork on the Google Network, and try to make some money. I explained that I really wasn't making any more art work. What I have is it. There probably won't be any more. I just lost the inspiration to do it. He understood. John said he hasn't been over to his storage spaces in quite a while. He has a pipe organ disassembled in one, and he's been gathering records, and sheet music for such time when he can afford to buy some land out in the desert to set up his studio again. He sets aside a little each month from his SSI check. Once he has enough he's going to buy some land out there, and let someone put a business on half of it, so he can set up his place in the back, and the business will pay him enough... But he's been getting a little discouraged.

Creative energy is a gift from God, he said. Because God Creates, and we are made in God's image. He is The Creator, and we are little creators. But once you lose that energy you're lost. Lost.

We got a parking place at Trader Joe's this time. They give you free samples of coffee over at TJ's, but they give it in little three or four ounce cups. John figures if you're getting it free you might as well get your money's worth, so he brought along his own paper cup. The staff there knows John, and lets him get away with it. I noticed that they gave him a pretty hefty free sample of the salad of the day as well. He picked out a couple or three cans of beer- enough to last him until later in the week. I threw it in with my order. We got out of there, and drove back to the corner.

JWM