Adaptive Curmudgeon

Real world shit which I won’t discuss at the moment is poised to completely or intermittently preclude blogging. I may be off line several days or weeks or who knows how long. If it takes a while don’t give up on me. Thanks.

[Continued from earlier post]

I’m calling bullshit on music on motorcycles that breaks the spell woven by the motorcycle itself. I’ve put up some “sprit matching music” to go with each of my three very different motorcycles. This is my last motorcycle and the hardest to pin down.

I can only hope the Harley-geezer who forced us to endure Tiny Dancer has reformed himself and and will NEVER PLAY TINY DANCER AGAIN.

Example 3: Honda Pacific Coast 800

Description: 30 years ago Honda sought to expand the motorcycle market beyond people who enjoy engines and mechanicals. They built the perfect bike to get somewhere without drama. It turns out people love drama. They missed it when it was gone.

Honda’s utterly competent no-bullshit transport was a flop. People who can’t quite define “overhead cam” still want to see the engine anyway. Also they want to see chrome. It’s hard to can’t roll into town to the mental sound of electric guitars and screeching eagles if your bike is mechanically flawless and adequately powered without being ridiculous. The market didn’t want “adequate”, it wanted “overkill”!

Long suffering bastards, the poor Honda’s engineers did a great job of mixing form and function only to realize nobody cares. They soon turned back to the Goldwing which is scaled more like an Imperial Starcruiser than a two wheeled vehicle (and is so successful it’s practically a license to print money).

The PC800 is proof that you can build something awesome and perfect for its intended use, only to get kicked in the balls by the market. It’s the Betamax of a world that has long forgotten VHS.

On the other hand, I get to have one and it was cheap. The universe made a motorcycle just for me! How cool is that?

The Pacific-Coast is quiet, clad in plastic, and looks more modern than most bikes on the road (despite being 34 year old technology). If you know what you’re looking at, it’s slightly unnerving. It makes you question your core beliefs about machinery and the true definition of “motorcycle”. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, you assume it’s a small Goldwing and wonder why I don’t have a stuffed animal strapped to it.

Appropriate Soundtrack: If you’re going to ride a Tupperware clad antique you’ve already proven you don’t give a shit what the crowd thinks. You’re a nerd because you didn’t freak out about the missing chrome. You’re so deeply unconcerned with societal norms it’s amazing that you remembered to wear pants. Are you wearing pants? You’d better check!

The PC800 is massively uncool. Anyone weird enough to buy one probably won’t know what cool would look like even if instructed by the TV (which he doesn’t watch). The soundtrack for an oddity like this should be technological, dated, and odd.

The interesting thing about this bike is that it can pass through the uncanny valley of oddness and emerge into coolness from a different dimension of time and space; but only if you’ve got an open mind. It’s like when you listen to a bitchin guitar riff and then realize it was played by Prince. “The little purple dude played this? Huh!” The Pacific Coast was made when “Silicon Valley” was a new idea, for people who don’t want the cruiser look and have more practical uses than sportbikes. The Pacific Coast 800 won’t get you laid but you knew that the instant you looked at it.

The Pacific Coast is a motorcycle for people who read too many books. Here’s my selections for the PC800:

Whip It, Devo:

Now whip it
Into shape
Shape it up
Get straight
Go forward
Move ahead
Try to detect it
It’s not too late
To whip it
Whip it good!

She Blinded Me With Science, Thomas Dolby:

Ha! It’s poetry in motion
Now she’s making love to me
The spheres are in commotion
The elements in harmony
She blinded me with science
(She blinded me with science!)
And hit me with technology

(Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto – you’re beautiful!)

Bike, Pink Flyod:

I know a mouse, and he hasn’t got a house
I don’t know why I call him Gerald
He’s getting rather old, but he’s a good mouse

Space Oddity, David Bowie:

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do

Bonus Classical Track, Dance of the Sugar Plum Faeries, Tchaikovsky. (Don’t worry about what to play while riding with a “club”, you’re a club of one.)

[Continued from earlier post]

I’m calling bullshit on all music on motorcycles that wrecks the whole motorcycle’s soul! Either turn off the radio or play something that matches the spirit of your ride!

Here’s my second post where I put up some “sprit matching music” to go with each of my three very different motorcycles. This post is for “cruisers” and cruisers practically come with their own soundtrack so it’s easy to see what I mean.

I can only hope the Harley-geezer who forced us to endure Tiny Dancer is crying in his sleep as his expensive motorcycle mocks him and runs off to party with the hot new sportbike downtown.

TINY DANCER IS NOT OK!

Example 2: Honda Shadow 1100 (applies to all Harley-Davidsons and most “Cruisers”).

Description: Cruisers are contractually obligated to the universe to have styling cues dating to the 1940’s. This is weird because 1940 was a long time ago. It’s not like there was some massive engineering revolution that has remained unchanged the ensuing 80 years but it is what it is.

The form factor is so strongly established that many people don’t even know there are bikes with different characteristics. I’m mystified that people continue to buy bikes modeled aesthetically after a time that passed before they were born; but I have one.

Cruisers all have a v-twin engines, gobs of chrome, and ample displacement. A few cruisers (like the very cool Honda Valkyrie and the unique BMW R 18 Classic) differ slightly from the formula but such exceptions are rare. It is a known fact of the universe that if Harley-Davidson ever makes a 4 cylinder motorcycle, Milwaukee will be burned to the ground by people who weren’t alive in 1940 but spent their Social Security checks on an Electra Glide five years ago.

For all cruisers, styling is key. Chrome is added whenever a spare dollar is detected. This doesn’t mean I hate cruisers. I have one. It’s a Honda Shadow (not the one in the photo). A Shadow has everything to look like a Harley-Davidson while being built entirely differently. Long suffering Honda engineers were beaten with sticks to accomplish this. They carefully disguised every good useful feature like liquid cooling, shaft drive, reliability, and economy.

The arrival of metric cruisers pissed the establishment off royally! Shadows (and others) were subject to the protective “chicken tax”. Shadows were subsequently made in Ohio. Shadows were sued all the way to the supreme court because they sound like a Harley. All of this did nothing to stop them because metric cruisers are built like brick shithouses. They cannot be killed.

Bikes made by Harley-Davidson were once sketchy quality but that’s years ago. Now they’re just as good as anything made by Honda or Suzuki and they cost only twice as much.

I have ridden my cruiser through most of the continental US and many conditions that were pretty extreme (such as Death Valley), but that’s not common. A cruiser’s natural habitat is a bar within five miles of the owner’s house but only on sunny summer weekends.

A photo of a generic metric cruiser is below:

Appropriate Soundtrack: If you’re gonna have a bad ass bike… be a bad ass. Every note and sound should be pure testosterone… it should be the kind of music you can play loud enough to drown out the money you spent on those Screaming Eagle pipes.

Look for electric guitars, heavy metal, any song with a powerchord, ideally all three. Music themes should involve riding, fucking, and battle. Yes, we know you’re a dentist from Des Moines but leather up and go with it! Much of the music is dated but that’s ok; the whole scene was obsolete decades ago and nobody cares. (*I don’t mind being obsolete so don’t take this personally.)

It’s important to note that TINY DANCER IS NEVER OK.

Ride With Me, Steppenwolf:

And I, I, I’m so confused
Which way, which way to choose?
Ride with me baby ’til the end of the day

Macho Man, Village People (No power chords but this is clearly a cruiser mating call):

You can tell a macho, he has a funky walk
his western shirts and leather, always look so boss
Funky with his body, he’s a king
call him Mister Ego, dig his chains
You can best believe that, he’s a macho man
likes to be the leader, he never dresses grand

Immigrant Song, Led Zepplin:

The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, sing and cry
Valhalla, I am coming

Come Out And Play, The Offspring (For the 1%-ers)

If one guy’s colors and the others don’t mix
They’re gonna bash it up, bash it up, bash it up, bash it up
Hey, man you talkin’ back to me?
Take him out
You gotta keep ’em separated

Pretty Fly (For a White Guy), The Offspring (For the dentist who wishes he was a 1%er)

You know, it’s kinda hard just to get along today
Our subject isn’t cool, but he fakes it anyway
He may not have a clue and he may not have style
But everything he lacks, well, he makes up in denial

I’m Too Sexy, Right Said Fred (If your bike is what I call “overchromed” this song is in your head every single mile ridden).

I’m too sexy for my shirt
Too sexy for my shirt
So sexy it hurts

Bonus Classical Track, Flight of the Valkyries, Wagner. (Only to be used when you’re riding with your “club”.)

Part 3 coming up…

I test drove an excellent 5th generation Honda Goldwing (GL1800). Among other irrational complaints, I bitched about the radio; first because it played Tom Petty and then simply because it existed.

I ran screaming from the excellent bike.

Rather than follow the path of normalcy, I purchased (for about half the cost) a weird market failure half-scooter motorcycle in disguise. It’s a Honda Pacific Coast 800 (PC800) and it’s weird and yet perfect for me. The looks are a bit funky but it duplicates the GL1800’s core touring ability with less than half the displacement and a feature that I cannot live without… it has no useless gadgets.

The GL1800 was an engineering marvel but the sea of buttons and dials and screens and software and faffing doodery broke my connection with the ride itself. The gadgets actively pissed me off.

The PC800 has not one single button that isn’t absolutely necessary. It’s a motorcycle “interface” that “gets the hell out of my way”. To my odd outlook one of the best features of the PC800 is that it doesn’t have a radio.

Thinking of music and motorcycles leads to the nest part of this story:

Physics means that a motorcycle radio has to be loud. It must blare from the handlebars, over the roar of wind, penetrate the rumble of the engine, and drive itself through a helmet. When a rider is listening to the radio, everyone else is too. On the open road this is fine. Nobody hears a bike’s radio when it’s blasting at 80 MPH on the interstate in Wyoming.

When you’re in town it’s a different story. The sound is shoved up the ass of everyone nearby! Just like the “thump thump thump” of some ghetto dweeb’s 90 watt pre-amp in an overtuned Honda Civic forces us to digest their shitty rap (and it’s always rap), so to does the stereo on a motorcycle.

I took a vacation near the home planet of the cruisers; Sturgis, South Dakota. One day a chromed out Harley Davidson colossus rumbled past a breakfast joint in the middle of a little mountain town where we had holed up. We were eating on the porch. We heard every note blaring from the radio as some geezer duckwalked past us at 20 mph.

The song? Tiny Dancer, by Elton John.

Ballerina, you must’ve seen her
Dancing in the sand
And now she’s in me, always with me
Tiny dancer in my hand

THIS IS NOT OK!

I’m not anti-radio. I’m anti-bullshit!

If you’re going to rumble your $30,000 chromed bagger through town with the radio blaring, it had better be something better than a fucking gay ass tune about a ballerina!

I’m calling bullshit! Music on motorcycles that breaks the spell of the motorcycle is just fuckin’ wrong. Goddammit people, this isn’t rocket science! Either turn off the radio or play something that matches the spirit of your ride!

I’m not trying to be negative. I’m here to help. Every type of motorcycle has it’s own “essence”. For this and two more posts, I’ll describe the broad outline of a bike or type of bike. Then I’ll put up some “sprit matching music” to go with it. I’ll do it for each of my three very different motorcycles. I’ll add a few snippets of lyrics and a link if I can find one.

I’m doing this because I want the world to be a better place!

I can only hope the Harley-geezer who forced us to endure Tiny Dancer (!!!) puts down his AARP newsletter long enough to read this. EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW THAT TINY DANCER IS NOT OK.

Example 1: Yamaha TW200.

Description: A small, chunky, slow, unstoppable, crude, workhorse meant for dirt trails and cow pastures. Designed as a cheap “farm bike” and “ATV killer” it does anything an ATV does at half the price (but not as effortlessly).

The TW200 will go anywhere and do anything, except the highway… it’s slow. TW200s in their natural habitat are alone in the middle of nowhere; maybe running fence lines, maybe checking deer blinds, sometimes on a trail, sometimes bashing through the brush, sometimes sputtering down a forest service road, sometimes on a log skidder’s path.

Mine is bristling with enough gear to go full Mad Max. All TWs were built at the molecular level to be unkillable. It’ll ramble anywhere from country roads to swamps that make the Darien Gap look like a fun hike.

The plucky TW will never win a race or get you laid. But it’s perfectly normal to ride one with an elk quarter strapped to the back.

A small contingent of fans use them as urban transport. This includes women who took the motorcycle safety foundation (MSF) class on them and liked the little bike because it’s “cute”. TWs are often pictured hauling ridiculous top-heavy loads of agricultural products on winding mountain passes in Southeast Asia.

The TW200 has been in continuous production for 36 years. It has had almost no changes since its inception. Here’s a picture of mine:

Appropriate Soundtrack: Redneck noise! A TW should be accompanied by the sounds of redneck backwoods tomfoolery; shotgun blasts and banjos. TWs are good at being goofy so think of gasoline being thrown on fires, rope swings into lakes, and beer cans crushed into foreheads. They’re also work machines so chainsaws are appropriate (many TWs have a saw mounted somewhere on them). Some people tweak with the muffler but they’re nuts. The engine sounds like a lawnmower so I don’t get the point. Do not follow a TW into the forest any more than you’d follow a grizzly into the brush… it belongs there and you probably don’t.

Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams Jr.:

We’re from North California and South Alabama
And little towns all around this land
And we can skin a buck; we can run a trotline
And a country boy can survive

Good Old Boys, Waylon Jennings:

Just’a good ol’ boys
Never meanin’ no harm
Beats all you never saw
Been in trouble with the law
Since the day they was born

Staightnin’ the curves, yeah
Flatnin’ the hills
Someday the mountain might get ’em
But the law never will

Horse With No Name, America:

I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain

Legend of Wooley Swamp, Charlie Daniels Band:

Well, if you ever go back into Wooley Swamp, well, you better not go at night
There’s things out there in the middle of them woods
That’d make a strong man die from fright
Things that crawl and things that fly
Things that creep around on the ground

Amos Moses, Jerry Reed:

Now all the folks around south Louisiana said Amos was a hell of a man
He could trap the biggest the meanest alligator and just use one hand
That’s all he got left cause the alligator bit him ha ha ha
Left arm gone clean up to the elbow
Well the sheriff got wind that Amos was in the swamp trappin’ alligator skins
So he snuck in the swamp gonna get the boy but he never come out again

Part 2 will go live soon…

History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. – Unattributed

The Curmudgeon stands on his soapbox:

Doomed? Maybe for a while. Give up? Impossible!

I’ve been told I’m doomed before. I got used to it. I’m still here.

People who can’t do a damned thing are the doomed ones. They’re crosswise with reality. They refuse to fix themselves. They could become a person who works within reality but they chose pretense over substance. Self-improvement requires acknowledging you aren’t perfect already. Thus, they can’t improve.

They want me to feel hopeless. They think it’ll make me like them. It won’t. I can’t be hopeless because I’m not helpless.

Their mistakes are willful. Their failure is inevitable.

It must be hell.

I observe (from the greatest distance I can muster) a nation writhing in misery. It sweats and curses through the long dark fever dreams of change. Reality refuses to comport with the internally contradicted mindscape of an “elite”. Something has to give.

The “elite” is neither skilled nor honorable nor accomplished; in fact they’re anything but elite. Mere courtiers, our “elite” can do little to help the fevered nation; if indeed they even want to. They can censor or delve into the minutiae of fashion but they can’t deal with debt, inflation, restore the rule of law, or even plant a garden.

They avoid introspection with the brittle anger of the corrupt. Surely, if the rule of law were restored, their network of spiderwebs, intrigue, and corruption would fall at their feet… returning them to their proper status of irrelevant. When you pretend to be elite it’s a hard lesson to find out you’re not even average.

Their fear is poignant. What is a failed human to do? Withered cat-ladies and corrupt paper pushers the world over stare into the abyss. They have built nothing. They’ve torn asunder all they touch. They must cling to their fake beliefs or reality will burn them to the bone.

Through all this I’m uncharacteristically optimistic. I’ve seen incompetent morons screw the nation into the ground. I’ve seen it rise again. Can it do so forever? Probably not. Can it get off the canvas one more time? I think so.

I’m GenX. My lot is the ignored generational rounding error that grew up feral during a childhood of being told we were doomed. Do I sit on my ass bitching about it? Nah, it’s just a thing that happened, no need to let it hold me back. A childhood of impending global thermonuclear war, oil crises, bad music, and worse leadership caused us to be cynical and hard but we’re not beaten.

Like current GenZ, we had society’s original sin laid directly on our shoulders. We too were told we’d eat bugs. We too were told Communism would defeat us all. We too were told the climate was our fault. GenX was told our very existence meant an unavoidable Malthusian death spiral to famine and death. GenZ had an autistic Swedish high-school drop out shrieking at the UN. She said basically the same shit. Of course, the human wastes at the UN gave her an ovation; how could they not?

I remember reports from New York City in 1970s… or any city really. I hear of them today. Eerily similar. It sounds to me like regression to the mean.

When I was a young man, sporting an excellent mullet and dreams I’d somehow own a car during the future oil famine, there was a song. “A Country Boy Can Survive”.

It took my cohort by storm. We were, after all, country boys.

Notice what we wanted? Survive. That’s it! All we wanted to do was survive. Just doing that… surviving… was a goal and a rallying cry.

Ours wasn’t the screaming malice of a purple haired, pierced, tattooed, human slurry of social justice warriors. We weren’t hell bent to change the world. We didn’t want to burn history to the ground. We didn’t want to bring about a Utopia in our image. We wanted only to persist.

Oddly that was a rebellious concept. It was a big shock that we might actually do it… to persist.

I sat by a campfire with similar aged friends and we sang happily “a country boy can survive, because you can’t starve us out and you can’t make us run, because them old boys raised on shotguns”. Then, because we were kids before the safety Nazis, we threw a disposable lighter in the fire to see what would happen.

So, that’s GenX. The cynical ones who persisted. We’re oddly optimistic because we’ve seen waves of bullshit come, crest, and then ebb. Especially this is true of rural GenX; the rounding error of ignored flyover country. When Hank Williams Jr. ranted “you only get mugged if you go downtown” he wasn’t saying he was happy that the cities were a mess. Only acknowledging they were.

That was 1982. We were wading through Fauchi’s first epidemic freakout called AIDS. Right now the nation is still reeling from his second round. (Covid is like Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior. The sequel was far more powerful than the initial movie.)

My young self saw inflation as does the nation today. I knew it was baked in the cake sometime in 2008 but then again so did an entire political movement.

I could go on, with examples from foreign affairs, societal upheaval, corruption in government, etc… but I’m going to cut this short and focus on a silly little song. Hank Williams Jr. did his best to encapsulate a rural people who’s stability, honor, and even survival was threatened… and added to it a war cry “you will not defeat us”.

There’s a new song for our current movie of “Fuckery Part 2, Clownworld Strikes Back”. It’s called “Try That In A Small Town”.

Is it a perfect song? Nah. Is it a small piece of GenZ doing what a small piece of GenX did? I think so.

Incidentally, I can skin a buck but I prefer a crankbait to a trot line. And I have survived.

Take a deep breath and observe the world’s ways. Losers are always doomed. Losers always hate self-reliance. Losers kill hope when they can. This is nothing new.

Read the best car ad ever written: Best of Craigslist 1999 Toyota Corolla.

In case it gets memory holed, I posted some excerpts below:

You want a car that gets the job done? You want a car that’s hassle free? You want a car that literally no one will ever compliment you on? Well look no further.

The 1999 Toyota Corolla.

. . .

Let me tell you a story. One day my Corolla started making a strange sound. I didn’t give a shit and ignored it. It went away. The End.

You could take the engine out of this car, drop it off the Golden Gate Bridge, fish it out of the water a thousand years later, put it in the trunk of the car, fill the gas tank up with Nutella, turn the key, and this puppy would fucking start right up.

This car will outlive you, it will outlive your children.

. . .

When this car was unveiled at the 1998 Detroit Auto Show, it caused all 2,000 attendees to spontaneously yawn.

. . .

The event is chronicled in the documentary “Bored to Death: The Story of the 1999 Toyota Corolla”

. . .

This car is as practical as a Roth IRA. It’s as middle-of-the-road as your grandpa during his last Silver Alert. It’s as utilitarian as a member of a church whose scripture is based entirely on water bills.

When I ran the CarFax for this car, I got back a single piece of paper that said, “It’s a Corolla. It’s fine.”

Let’s face the facts, this car isn’t going to win any beauty contests, but neither are you. Stop lying to yourself and stop lying to your wife. This isn’t the car you want, it’s the car you deserve: The fucking 1999 Toyota Corolla.

The mystery is solved… cocaine in the White House appeared through undetectable magic. It’s utterly beyond the ability of our law enforcement agencies to figure it out. It may have been aliens. It may have spontaneously generated. Bigfoot can’t be ruled out.

Here’s how I sum it up:

It’s a mystery that will be a mystery for as long as it needs to be a mystery.

One week ago I wrote this:

“Speaking of Hunter being a snake, cocaine turned up in the Whitehouse… because of course it did. As you’d expect, nobody has the slightest idea what it means and it’ll fade with time.”

This one faded FASTer than a gay mass shooter! Merely six days later I read the Epstein suicide announcement:

“The Secret Service has concluded its investigation into the small bag of cocaine found at the White House and has been unable to identify a suspect, two sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.”

It’s concluded. It’s over. Nothing to see here. Quit thinking about it because it’s forever unknowable. An illegal thing happened, it happened in the Whitehouse, there’s absolutely no way anyone anywhere can ever figure it out, so stop asking rude questions. The Secret Service has tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.

Of course this is all very silly. I’m sure coke has been in the Whitehouse before (oddly Trump was drug free but most of the last 50 years there’s been the possibility of illegal drugs). If JFK didn’t leave a stash, Obama didn’t have a “choom room”, or Bush Jr. didn’t have “youthful indiscretions” I’d be shocked.

Perhaps the real miracle is that we even heard about the cocaine. What can we read into that tiny bit of truth?

Meanwhile, the press tells us that Joe Biden’s Whitehouse is as pure as the driven snow. Because of course it is.

While you’re at it you might as well repeat the undeniable, unquestionable, legally actionable, enforced at length, complete totality of truth that Joe Biden got more votes than any other candidate in history.

Say it! Say it out loud! Make your lefty friends say it. Make them turn off NPR, look you right in the eye, and say “Joe Biden got more votes than any other candidate in history.” Make them say it again next Tuesday. Make them say it when cluster bombs are shipped to Ukraine. Make them say it when groceries cost another $100 a month. Make sure to look the situation head on… especially amid those who are uncomfortable with it. Do this because to tell the truth is good and to unearth and expose a lie is also good. We are almost literally required by law to accept that statement. So make damn sure it’s front and center every day.

Don’t forget Biden has political poisoners to prove it his righteous claim!

Pay attention to political prisoners. The only difference between you and them is that you’re not yet in jail. You’d like to think you’re not in jail because you’re law abiding but what is this “law” are you talking about? Is it the same law that allows someone (?) to drop cocaine in the Whitehouse? Ask Trump about the protection we have under rule of law. You aren’t out of jail because you’re law abiding and on January 2020 avoided stupid people doing stupid things. You’re out of jail because you’re not yet in jail. Nothing written on paper will protect you if it doesn’t protect them.

Further, if the regime wants to investigate you it will… for as long as it takes. Again, Trump can tell you all about it. Or General Flynn. Or Rudy Giuliani. Even if they’re all flaming assholes, what matters is that we all need law not “law”; including Biden’s political prisoners. Unlike the mystery of spontaneously generating cocaine that lasted a couple of weeks, Biden’s been chasing Jan. 6 protesters for two years. “[T]wo years after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, prosecutors have now charged more than 1,000 people in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.”

Got that? Two years, 1,000 arrests, endless funding to lawfare anyone and anything for as long as it takes. Now that I think about it, they never found weapons or cocaine on January 6th. The DOJ went after every Bank of America record nationwide harder than the Secret Service checked a plastic baggie of physical proof.

This doesn’t mean I think all is lost. Far from it! I think we’re at a juncture a lot like when Churchill said:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

It’s not over, but you can sense the desperation. They will continue to try to make every American say “I have no doubt that Biden’s record breaking vote is unquestionably perfect” but their heart isn’t in it anymore. They have slowly given up on establishing either real legitimacy or the appearance of it. Now, all that matters is what they can do. Whatever they have done, is so far what they can do. This seems to be breaking up. The tide turns slowly.

Unlike the fairy tale, the spell isn’t broken as soon as everyone realizes the truth. When the king has no clothes and you know it’s true… then what? Sometimes the truth is irrelevant. Sometimes the king keeps marching around naked… even when everyone knows the king is a buck naked moron.

Enjoy the ride! Breathe deep of what persists, even if it is of inertia. So far the grid is still up, inflation isn’t yet hyperinflation, and there aren’t tanks on the streets. Enjoy that!

Ours is an interesting time to be alive. One of your tasks is to remember the “before times”. Folks in the future may need to know what it was like before law became “law”. Be ready to tell them. And, maybe it won’t go that far. I saw the Berlin Wall fall without a shot fired. I watched crowds chant “let’s go Brandon”. Trump fills stadiums bigger than anything Elvis could do… and he does it while under indictment. Who expected that? It may be a time of chaos but not yet resignation.

Having no idea what’s next may be this era’s blessing. You’re free. You’re free of expectations. You don’t know what comes next. Nor do I. Savor it.

Until COVID, I thought county fairs were boring. Now, when I see one that’s “allowed” to happen I appreciate it. County fairs were not stopped for WW2 but they were stopped by panic just three years ago. How weird yet beautiful is it that they’ve returned? How much more do I appreciate the little things?

Nobody knows how much corruption can be stacked up in public before it matters. We know how much corruption has already been verified. We’ve got an idea what will be verified next. But we don’t know how deep the rabbit hole go before it matters. So enjoy your county fair.

The big one won’t even hit for a few years yet. We don’t know if the next election will be an election or an “election”. Lucky us; we will find out!

The best you can do is keep your soul clean and ride the wave. Keep your head on a swivel, avoid crowds, and trust nobody. If the world crawls up it’s own ass that’s the world’s problem. You don’t have to follow.

Make popcorn and laugh about mystery cocaine. The third act in the greatest of shows may be on stage soon.

This post was supposed to be typed into an Alphasmart Neo during a campout. It wasn’t. It was typed during a “campout absence picnic / dry run”. The campout idea isn’t dead; far from it! (Plans only truly fail when you quit trying and I haven’t quit.) In fact my progress is (given the circumstances) making me confident it’s all going to work out.

Over the last few years I’ve been “camping by Dodge”. A far cry from the rugged and awesome camping I once preferred but still a good thing. I toss a bunch of heavy but comfortable gear in my huge truck, drive somewhere pretty, and get my head back straight amid the trees.

Very quickly “Dodge camping” expanded. The truck was drafted to lug a battered utility trailer, first laden with a tiny homemade boat and later with Honey Badger (my Yamaha TW200 dirtbike). This isn’t the true wilderness experience I often crave but it’s pretty good. Look around at all the nutcases out there. How many are sitting on their ass bitching about Twitter when an evening by a campfire would soothe the soul?

“You can contemplate the universe from a glorious inaccessible mountain cliff. You can contemplate the universe while sitting on a tree stump overlooking a cow pasture. The “Universe” doesn’t care about the details and neither should you.”

Starting with “State and National Parks camping” gradually drifting into “dispersed National Forest camping”, I’ve been getting my groove on. Even so, I intended to expand my options. I wanted to camp from the motorcycle itself. From tiny Honey Badger this is no small feat. I’m no longer 19 and bulletproof. Had I become reliant on huge cots and large tents? Regardless, I’m no longer amenable to “sleep in your jeans on the dirt”. Peacefully and patiently, I pondered how to square that circle. More comfort means more gear which changes equations. Then again nothing is impossible. All is a matter of balancing opposing forces. This I’ve pondered to my own amusement.

Several times while I overthought things (but only in designated parks) I’d hear a rumbling Harley (or clone) come into the campsite. They’re always in groups or pairs. Like ATVs, kayaks, and horses, cruiser riders rarely ride solo. They’d camp from cruisers a few hundred yards away while I totally ignored them; so focused was I on my diminutive dirtbike.

Over the winter I took vast inspiration from C90 Adventures (who rides ridiculous things with a big smile on his face) and Some Guy Rides (who did the entire Trans America Trail on a CT125) and more recently ItchyBoots who’s wandering around Africa. (Last I knew she was in Liberia on a Honda CRF300Rally.)

One cold winter night I stumbled across HerTwoWheels. She’s a lot tamer than the globe trotting adventure beasts but also a gentle reminder that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. If a Harley bagger in Ohio can go camping what’s my problem? She finally got it through my thick head that any motorcycle can be used for camping (provided you have reasonable expectations). I was embarrassingly slow at that obvious thought.

My cruiser’s luggage rack had literally collapsed from heavy use a few years back. So it wasn’t easily pushed back into service as a camping rig. In fact, I did the opposite. I stripped off the pillion seat, the luggage rack, the sissy bar, and the auxiliary fuel tank (which were all shot). This turned it back into a more basic bagger. (No worries, my cruiser has earned its chops. A long time ago I camped from the cruiser at Sturgis with mixed results but I’ve also ridden it coast to coast with full luggage more times than I can count.)

This spring I shook things up. I decided to get a “before the collapse bike”. Not the Mad Max equipment you’re thinking. It was more about getting a used “basic” machine before every motorcycle out there is a wheeled laptop with payments.

After a few test rides (and a near mental collapse brought about by a Honda Goldwing GL1800), I picked up a 1989 Honda Pacific Coast 800. It’s a cheap serviceable oddball and I love it! (Act within the next few years if you want motorcycle bargains. I got a whole motorcycle for the cost of a few payments on a new tourer. This won’t last forever. The “cash for clunkers” mayhem that gutted the used car market didn’t affect motorcycles but “electronic mission creep” will!)

My “new” (34 year old) Pacific-Coast 800 was slated for its inaugural test campout in June. Choosing to allocate time elsewhere, I ran off for a few weeks. This delayed the campout but was a great vacation. (At Mrs. Curmudgeon’s wise insistence we “camped” in a rented cabin. Even so, I spent plenty of time outdoors. I actually trailered Honey Badger to the cabin for a few pleasant day trips.)

The next campout plan was Independence Day. Unfortunately, I was knocked flat in a NyQuil haze. These things happen. The next plan was this weekend. Alas, I’d “let slide” several weeks worth of homestead chores. Also, I was still on the mend from a cold.

So I did the next best thing. I did a “test run” picnic. This soothed the soul nearly as well as a real campout but got my still sniffling body back home by nightfall. Also it was a good dry run of some gear.

Just look at that silly bike! It’s absolutely ridiculous looking if you expect “standard design”. Yet there I was having a picnic without the slightest hassle. If the silly bike did all I needed completely flawlessly then it’s not silly.

Having experimented a bit, how do I think an “antique” PC-800 work for a basic campout?

Superbly!

The cargo area is a “bedonkadonk”. I filled one half just to see what fit. Here’s the empty “half bedonkadonk” for scale. (The grain bag is some sort of anti-mouse stuff that was in it when I bought it. I’ve no idea if it works but my homestead does have a mouse problem so I left the stuff in there.)

A camp chair, a camp table, and a small cooler with a few cold sodas (too sick for beer!) all fit in HALF of the bedonkadonk.

It was easy! I could have packed plenty more if I put effort into it. (The tool set and bike manual ride on that side too.) To put a “half bedonkadonk” worth of junk on Honey Badger would  basically use up most of Honey Badger’s capacity. While I was noodling around I found a “dome light”. Those geniuses at Honda thoughtfully installed a “dome light” in the “bedonkadonk” and I didn’t even know!

Here’s the stuff I was “testing out”:

I still had the whole other half of the bedonkadonk. Plenty of space for food and camping stuff (and a Neo). Incidentally, the chair (of the single “backpacking chair” I’ve physically found for sale I bought it) is pretty comfortable.

Here’s the chair:

The table (a gift from Mrs. Curmudgeon) works well too, though I think I assembled it a tad “wrong”. I’ll have to revisit that again in the future.

What’s the next piece of gear I need to get ready? “The miracle”! The miracle is a set of two free drybags sent to me by a reader of this blog. Thank you so much!

The drybags didn’t go with me on the picnic but they’re primed for use!

I posted a while back asking for advice about dry bags. An awesome reader sent me two dry bags that he no longer uses. What a nice thing to do! Goodwill like that that gives me hope in humanity.

During my vacation I was near “civilization” so I picked up some RokStraps to go with my “new” dry bags. I couldn’t find RokStraps in physical presence within 100 miles of my house! I literally carried empty dry bags into a bike shop a zillion miles from my house to check what size RokStraps I’d need. (I’d read about them but never seen them personally.)

I even tested the dry bags to see what they’ll carry. The smallest drybag is absolutely perfectly shaped to hold my smallest tent (with a little room to spare). My smallest tent isn’t ideal for motorcycles but it has a very useful feature; I own it. (It’s a Teton Sports Vista 1. I’ve had it a few years. Link goes to Amazon.)

The larger drybag should hold plenty of clothes and a sleeping bag and so forth. (A note about sleeping bags; I had a really cool Big Agnes sleeping bag with integrated pad but time snatched it away. It was properly stored but the pad deteriorated and has a zillion leaks. I think it’s toast. The sleeping bag and air mattress are both out of production so a replacement pad isn’t possible. Being prepared “now” doesn’t mean your ass is covered for the entire “future”. I think I bought the bag in 2009 so I got my use out of it.)

I’m sure the two drybags that should hold all the gear I’ll need and I’ve tested them too. Oddly, I’ve tested them not on a bike but on a trailer. Returning from my vacation, I strapped them to my motorcycle hauling trailer as I hauled Honey Badger back from a rented cabin.

Did I mention I’ve replaced my nearly collapsed utility trailer with a purpose built motorcycle hauling trailer? Well I have! It’s slick. I’m not sure I blogged about it before but I’ll post more in due time.

The trailer was expensive but I expect it to last many years. It sure tows well. Unlike my long suffering utility trailer this time I deliberately got a small trailer. It’s tiny behind my huge Dodge but that means I can tow it with my wife’s diminutive hatchback or my other 4×4 which is slowly inching toward road worthy.

I may need that “small trailer” ability sometime; “Please bring the trailer, a first aid kit, and a bottle of Ibuprofen to the location marked by my SpotX. Shit happened and I’m not self extracting from here.” (Plan for disaster and be happy when it doesn’t happen!)

During my vacation I also picked up a small air mattress. (no photos of that yet.) Hopefully I found the right compromise between “old guy’s sore back” and “pack small”. The air mattress has an inflation bag (something that wasn’t invented when I had my Big Agnes sleeping system) but Mrs. Curmudgeon got me a sweet little inflator that’s practically a magic wand. The air pad won’t be as nice as my trusty and huge Teton XXL Cot (the best damn cot I’ve ever owned!) but it should be “good enough”.

I took a few photos of my “test run”. I typed this very post on the Neo (which was also carried on the bike). Then, because a true campout will have to wait, I came home.

Get out there and enjoy nature y’all!

A.C.

Didja’ notice? I’ll bet you didn’t! All hell broke loose and none of it mattered. How awesome is that?!?

OK, it’s a trick question. I went off line two weeks ago and so my sense of timing is different than yours. I noticed the ephemeral nature of concerns because I had distance to look. I needed a vacation so I took one… completely. This was followed by an illness… which apparently fate decided I needed… and so I did that… completely. The thing I got from all this ignoring of modern bullshit was a delightful sense of peace. Everything that happened in my absence was both comical and predictable. I consider it an experiment with solid empirical results.

So back to the noticing. Over two weeks all sorts of shit has happened. Most people lived every moment. I’m sure it seemed rather significant. Yet, all of it… every last bit… followed a basic script that wasn’t particularly realistic. I could have typed it all out before I wandered off to play in the woods. I wouldn’t have been perfectly accurate but I could have covered the general situation.

The big event that my hypothetical script (probably with talking squirrels) would have addressed is the ongoing (since 2014 and especially since we bugged out of Afghanistan so haphazardly) Ukrainian situation. The timing was right for something weird to happen… thus it must.

Whatever weird thing I might have imagined is just a McGuffin in the a story. Predictably both sides would use the “weird thing” to proselytize, but in the end nothing would have happened. After the “weird thing” the fog of propaganda would be so thick that nobody really knows what actually happened. The only constant being politicians on both sides will not experience the horror of war actually inflicted on soldiers in what should be boring wheat fields.

So what happened in the real world? Piecing together as best I can brings up these facts in roughly this order. First, somehow – and I’m not clear on how – a little over $6 billion (with a “B”) appeared on the Pentagon’s books. Second, the long awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive continued performing exactly like a nothingburger. You don’t have to be a genius to predict that. But I also predicted a third part. Something weird must happen.

Like clockwork weirdness happened! The Wagner group flaked out and started marching toward Moscow; only to change their mind almost immediately. As far as I can tell, the whole thing lasted less than one day. Start moving at dawn, capitulate by sunset. Is that a real thing? I’ve no idea. It seems less like a real revolt than a colorful flourish. Regardless, it was weird.

Not only is it weird but our impression is probably fake. Sifting through week old news tells me it evaporated fast. It took about eleven minutes for one side to cite it as proof that Putin is Hitler in drag and doomed to failure any millisecond. The other side had kicked the whole thing in the balls by sunset; so chalk it up to a 12 hour delay? Suppose I wrote the story with talking squirrels and extreme greeters? Would it have been any less realistic?

That kerfuffle, which lasted a day but gave talking heads a week’s worth of pontification, blocked out other kerfuffles. In a sane world, we’d have a month of Hunter Biden jokes based on the last few weeks. He got his child support reduced. He got a slap on the wrist for having a pistol and a coke habit simultaneously. Not to mention tax evasion that would land us in Federal pound me in the ass prison. The president’s grandkid won’t get to use the last name “Biden”. A bunch of verified information (including text messages) emerged that both implicate then vice president Biden but look like flat out extortion. Apparently there’s a video of hunter driving very fast… possibly while high. All the things I said actually happened. I didn’t make any of that up.

It was memory holed fast. Actual information was subsumed into the stream of propaganda so quickly you could barely sniff the stench. I don’t know if a Wagner Group flakeout and a Biden covering action were timed that carefully or it was just luck. I guess it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t know Hunter was a snake by now you’re working hard to not know. Also President Biden got more votes than any other candidate in history and he’s got the political prisoners to prove it.

Speaking of Hunter being a snake, cocaine turned up in the Whitehouse… because of course it did. As you’d expect nobody has the slightest idea what it means and it’ll fade with time. Rational people like me assume Hunter is desperate for help. You can’t fuck up that bad without trying. Even JFK had the perception to avoid leaving random bags of drugs lying around. The guy is desperately hoping for a correction that will never come. He’s filmed and documented himself doing every dumb thing possible in a forlorn hope that someone will stop his mess… alas more stupid shit is always allowed to happen. Law enforcement is mystified by this bag of coke because they’re officially ordered to be mystified. They’d be mystified if Hunter showed up naked and high, raped a wombat on live TV, and tattooed a list of Epstein’s underaged victims on Nancy Pelosi’s forehead at gunpoint. At some point there are no more levels of obvious.

In the last few weeks courts said obvious things too. The President doesn’t have a magic wand to “fix” student loans. Rules about “ghost guns” can’t appear out of thin air because a bureaucrat so wishes. Choosing a college applicant solely based on their skin color is just as gross if the racist is Al Sharpton or Archie Bunker. Collusion with social media to do censorship is censorship. All this came down in the last few weeks… some in the last few days. None of it is particularly shocking.

My point is, propaganda can have you sitting on the edge of your seat like it’s life or death but you already know where things are going; at least in the broad strokes. Hunter has been a lawbreaking shithead forever. We saw solid evidence in 2020. Do we really need to freak out if the DOJ covers his ass three years after it’s a known thing? Did we need the distraction of the Wagner group scampering about in Eastern Europe to know picking fights with the Russian Federation is a sketchy plan?

I try to think of something that surprised me in the last two weeks but it’s all knowable in advance. Disney’s latest movie sucks. Inflation persists. Lawfare is waged on Trump. France is on fire. Meh…

On this very site I’ve posted The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling. Anytime you want to know what the next few weeks of news will be, read that instead.

Oh, one thing did surprise me. I stayed in a hotel and watched cable. Holy Fuck! I had no idea how many drug ads people are exposed to! I had no idea AIDS has become a revenue stream. So that’s the thing I was surprised by. Let it never be said I can’t learn new things.

That was a great segue into the second half of my absence. I woke up one day with a scratchy throat. Since I’m not the kind of tool that’s been brainwashed by cable TV ads, I didn’t freak out.

“Ask your doctor if Glaprodorf is right for you. Side effects are severe loss of money and cranial-rectal inversion.”

I assessed a cold as a cold, took some NyQuill, and slept for several days. Did it suck? Yes, being sick sucks.

Did I lose my shit, invert society, crash longstanding institutions, nuke the economy, and threaten to imprison anyone else who didn’t take my illness seriously? No, because I’m not fucking insane. I rode out an unpleasant cold like a normal adult would do in the before times. In a couple more days I’ll be right as rain. Can you imagine how different 2023 would have been if more people had done the same in 2020?

Well that’s enough for now. I did have happy fun times on vacation and as always “pics or it didn’t happen”. I’ll post sometime next week with a happy stories about Honey Badger and yours truly.

Have a good summer.

A.C.

P.S. And for God’s sake if you’re watching cable stop it right now! Set that infernal thing on fire before they’ve got you hooked on shit that even Hunter Biden wouldn’t take!

I can add nothing to the world’s most perfect video.