Adaptive Curmudgeon

It’s random story time here at Curmudgeon Compound…

I got to the doctor after a little bloodletting. By now my stern outlook had been sanded down. Nice people are a calming influence. I was feeling positively civil.

The doctor bustled in followed by a nurse with a computer on a rolling table. Apparently doctors have stenographers now?

It starts out as I fear. He ignores me and starts clicking at his database. He’s trying for small talk and I suck at small talk. Somehow he focuses on a Disney-ish castle on a poster. “What a pretty view.”

“It’s Neuschwanstein Castle.” I say, immediately regretting it. Nobody wants to be “that guy”. I don’t deliberately try to be an asshole… it just comes naturally.

“Ever been there?” He asks, missing (or choosing to ignore) my rudeness.

“Nah, I once passed through Germany on the way to X. That’s it.”

“Oh X? Is that a nice place to visit?”

“It was OK but kinda’ third worldy.” I pause, thinking my own thoughts. “You know, that was 30 years ago, America is a lot more third worldy now.” I wave around as if our modern Clown World can be summed up with a gesture.

“But we do OK up here in our corner of nowhere eh?”

What’s this? A fellow human? Someone who’s been seeing things happen? Wow!

“Yeah, it’s OK here.”

“I worry sometime I’ll drop by <City Z> and it’ll be a crater. I’ll be on a weekend trip to buy Christmas presents and the place will be in mid collapse. People are nuts.”

“Me too.” I’m wondering where this will go. Ours lives have been so “Sovietized” that when someone has similar views (especially in real life) I’m surprised.

He chuckles and points at the database. My deplorable failure to get the vax is highlighted in red. “Want that?”

“You and five of your best friends can try to force it. See what happens.”

At this he lets out a guffaw. The stenographer / nurse is giggling. She’s seen this give and take before. I’m not sure what’s going on, is this guy a Fed? Am I about to get framed as a badthinker?

“You made a very good decision.” He nods approvingly.

What. The. Fuck?

This dude is a doctor. As far as I know he either got the shot or got fired… but then again I don’t know if that was a strictly enforced policy up here in Bumfuck Egypt. Maybe in Bumfuck Egypt they never got around to enforcing weird shit? The nurse is smiling. Are these people refugees from madness elsewhere? Or is this homegrown common sense still rooted in the soil?

“They threatened to fire me!” I grumble.

“Pointless.” He clicks on the database. “Your weight back then wasn’t bad. Stats looked good. You were getting exercise?”

“Three days a week.” I swell with pride.

“Covid wouldn’t have taken you out.” He waves at the helmet. “A bike might have killed you but not the ‘vid.”

“I know.”

“Me too. Firing people… such a bad idea!”

The stenographer isn’t writing any of this down. I’m gradually feeling at ease. The doc checks my blood pressure. The earlier nurse had already checked it but what do I know?

“Look at that.” He winks to the stenographer / nurse. “Five points lower just letting off some steam.”

Holy shit, my blood pressure (which was OK but not perfect) is now 5 points “better”!

Stress matters and the doc knows that. I’m impressed. The doc starts picking away at my data and I’m shocked that the blood test from half an hour ago is already on his screen… plus the new blood pressure he’s typed in. The stenographer / nurse is tapping away as we discuss my diet, the meaning of all those chemistry markers, some vitamin details, etc… The doc actually knows the difference between continuous and discrete variables and how that matters on the blood test results. Wow!

It’s the first time in years I’ve had a doctor that appears to care if I live or die. Not only that but he’s on the ball. Doctors used to be drawn from a population of smart cookies but then they suddenly started acting dumber than a sack of hammers. This is an old school doc. He knows stuff. Where there’s uncertainty he says so. He’s happily moving back and forth through my data from different time periods looking for long term signals.

Where did this man come from?

Somehow the topic goes back to firings. “You know,” he adds, “Mayo fired something like 700 nurses.”

I’m dimly aware that Mayo clinic is somewhere important. Top of the line place probably. Like Johns Hopkins or whatever. A place where millionaires and Senators (who are inexplicably millionaires too) get treatment… and I think they do medical research. (Though I wonder if there is anywhere that does legitimate research anymore.)

“That sucks, they had to replace 700 experienced people with 700 n00bs. That’s a setback.”

His eyes turn cold. “Not a setback. A loss. You never come back from that.”

We’re both silent for a bit. Damn. I see the world though new eyes. It was hard for me. Must have been harder for him. He’s clearly top notch and paying attention. What’s it like to be a skilled doc in a world on the verge of Nuremberg crimes? How did he survive the last 3 years? Is this where he landed? Was he fleeing elsewhere? Was he at Mayo?

“Well,” he concludes, “it doesn’t matter to you.” Just like that, the terrible setback is registered as just a societal loss and nothing we in our remote world can change. Stay in shape if you can, because you must. I’ve seen other people think the same thing. “You’re doing pretty well. You could use the gym again but who doesn’t need that? Stay away from vegetable fats, Crisco, margarine..”

“I eat a lot of steak. Wild game…”

“That’s fine. Drag an elk home and eat it whole… still better than margarine on wonder bread.”

“I’d guessed that.”

“You’re right. In general, if it didn’t exist 200 years ago, don’t eat it now. And don’t let them stick you.”

“Of course.”

It was the best Doctor’s visit I’ve ever had!

As I’m getting up to leave, someone rushes in. “Doctor, we need you car keys! Bob noticed you left your window down, it’s going to rain.”

He handed over his keys. I was impressed at the human kindness. “They noticed your car? Great staff!”

“People are OK up here.”

I wanted to hug him!

One more post to follow…

It’s random story time here at Curmudgeon Compound…

I rode my motorcycle to a medical appointment. Thank God for motorcycles! It was good to get some sun. I enjoyed the ride as much as I dreaded the visit.

Having ridden to what I will always think of as “the scene of the crime”, I strode through the door with the attitude I’ll have from 2020 until I die; acknowledging medical personnel did evil. Having witnessed it, I know they’d willingly do evil again.

Were they cackling supervillains bent on destruction? Nah, that would engender more respect from me. They did, as they’ll explain away to themselves as they try to sleep at night, mostly “minor” evil.

Weak people are always willing to do what weak people always do.

The word “trustworthy” excludes the weak.

Evil at the behest of a bureaucracy? Sure. Evil to keep their jobs? Sure. Evil because that’s how the incentives were stacked? Sure.

Doesn’t matter to me; it’s still fuckin’ evil. When they strapped grandpa into a ventilator even though it was an unwise choice they did it because money was tied to ventilator use. Initially, some of them may have believed that was the best treatment… which makes them merely wrong. But that only excuses those first few weeks. There’s no sin in being wrong. Sin comes from doing wrong after witnessing clear evidence that it’s harmful.

Depending on how carefully they observed victims of their treatments, doctors and nurses gradually fell on a spectrum from utterly incompetent to forcing lingering death on helpless people for a subsidy.

I wonder what the subsidy was? The best I can sort from muddled sources is an extra 20% on the top for any hospitalization with the word “covid”. That’s a full 20% extra on the already high base rate for a ventilator. 30 ounces of silver is worth a little under $700 in today’s dollars. How much did they get from grandpa’s death?

I reserve my harshest thoughts for people smart enough to know it was bad medicine yet willing to do it anyway. Might as well throw puppies into a wood chipper. To injure the innocent is unforgiveable. Sick people trusted them!

At a less esoteric level they withheld ivermectin and bitched that it was horse medicine. A  safe, cheap, well tested treatment. Even if it didn’t work, who gives a shit? If an adult American citizen wants to try it, why the hell not? In a world of face tattoos and expensive car leases the thing “too risky” to allow a Citizen was a dose of malaria treatment? I call bullshit.

I walked in that door knowing medical people did what they were told… even if people suffered. They complied first and didn’t bother to treat illness except as an afterthought. TicTok morons have the attention span of a mouse. They’ve ret-conned their memory and “let it go”. I can’t.

Doctors and nurses took the first step on the path to cattle cars! Until I see Fauchi’s corpse in a gibbet I can’t be sure it won’t happen again.

Have you guessed my mood?

I strutted past seven (count ’em SEVEN!) long ignored placards about Covid. All I needed is what they call “annual checkup” and I call “the vig”.

A “vig” is the fee charged by a bookie for accepting a gambler’s wager. Personally, I’m wagering a healthy if grumpy asshole benefits from minor routine medicine in a manner that outweighs the risk they’ll fuck up and kill me. I bet otherwise most of the last three years.

If I hit the gym more often I’d probably stay away entirely. Like everyone at the doctor’s office I wished I was working out more. I bailed on the gym in 2020 and got complacent. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

Now it was time to get “serviced” by a doctor. Doctors don’t have it easy. Their nuts are in a vice. They’re indentured servants owned by the medical complex. They’re trapped in a system of pimps in suits managing credentialed hoes in labcoats.

I fuckin’ hate ’em!

The woman at the front desk (for reasons only known to HR there has never ever been a man at the front desk) greeted my sweaty, armored motorcycle jacket wearing, grim self with an absolutely radiant smile. Actual humanity? Wow! You can’t fight kindness! I smiled back; which probably looked like a hyena getting ready for dental work but my heart was in the right place.

“Riding today?” She prompted.

My first thought was to be a wiseass. “I carry a helmet in case I need to pilot a jet”. With effort I reign myself in and let small talk ensue. “Yep, nice day out.”

“They say it’s going to rain.”

“Then I’ll get wet.”

She ignores me and continues beaming. “Labs are on the right.” Her giant smile is obviously well practiced. It borders on a superpower. She should give lessons!

Labs? WTF! I don’t like surprises in medical buildings! Regardless, it was about the only thing that wouldn’t piss me off too much. I’ve got plenty of blood to spare and I love properly administered diagnostic chemistry! I trust chemical detections (if not interpretations) more than I trust the monkeys administering “medicine”. (Don’t get me started on weirdly misused covid detection methods. That was  damn near divination as far as I can tell.)

At the lab, a bubbly woman takes blood and tells me all about her plans to have a Harley-Davidson. There are motorcycle riders and people who like Harleys. Occasionally someone is both. If a person loves motorcycles and just happens to choose a Harley as one excellent choice among many good options that’s a rider. The opposite is someone who’d die of misery if handed the keys to a perfectly good Suzuki or Triumph. Many Harley owners “buy in” with a Harley as the price of admission to join a group. The group can tolerate only one brand.

She sees a helmet and probably knows nothing about motorcycles. Thus, she can only conclude I’m a “Harley person”. She’s super happy. If I mentioned that my “American made iron” is a Honda that was built in Ohio she might cry. For that matter it looks new but it’s 24 years old. I let it go. See how nice I am?

I’m not loyal to any company. I have a Yamaha and a Honda. (Admittedly the Honda is a flat out rip-off of protectionist era Harley-Davidson styling. But it’s laden with the sweet sweet engineering of Japanese perfectionists. Honda wisely kept all the good stuff carefully hidden but I appreciate it more every year.)

I’m shopping for another Honda. I don’t tell her that. She might not know Hondas exist.

I wonder if she has a Harley tattoo? Everyone that age has a tattoo of something. No way to ask without sounding creepier than I already look.

I wouldn’t buy a Harley unless it was half the going market price and came with a free Suzuki on the side. This is mostly due to preference but also I’m a cheapskate. I find myself wondering how a nurse (phlebotomist) can afford the most expensive brand this side of a Ducati?

Her story develops and I soon know. It involves someone who had a Harley. That guy kicked the bucket, the bike persisted, passing through a series of cousins or whatever until she nabbed it. She relays the story of how she drove it into a ditch and I get the idea she probably doesn’t have a motorcycle endorsement on her license. She says it’s all ok because her husband will be the main operator. Hmm… someone else paid for it, customer base roughly the age of dead, not a chance of an empowered female solo rider…

Holy stereotypes! She’s checked every box in the Harley playbook! She did it in less than 5 minutes. I’m impressed! The only groups more devout are Mormons and Packers Fans.

She does a great job with needles and such. I watch to make damn sure she’s extracting blood and not injecting anything. I wish her well. I really mean it. I sincerely hope she winds up having a great time wearing rebellious black t-shirts like all the other people wearing black t-shirts; ideally at Sturgis. It must be cool to have a “tribe”. She has joined something. I cannot.

“Looks like it might rain.” She says as I move on.

“Yeah, I’m gonna’ get wet.” I chuckle.

Now for the Doctor… stay tuned.

My last post mentioned spring; the season of renewal. I wish I’d said it as well as Adam Piggott:

It is with great gratitude that I find myself here at this time. We are suffering in a time of great upheaval but the beauty of the world is still there if we care to look. And I like nothing better than walking in the rain, a sometimes lit pipe in my mouth, and the faithful hound trotting along beside me, happily wet and bedraggled.

We are all engaged in writing many words recording our great disappointment with the world as it stands. But there is also need of joy, of acknowledging the gifts which we have been given.

Having considered Adam’s lofty words, I made the time to appreciate the wonder of my derelict homestead. Here goes…

I’ve no quarrel with dandelions. They look pretty, they grow very fast in the spring, they hold the soil in drought, and free range chickens love ’em. These will be mowed in due time (which never seems to hinder them much), but for now I’m too lazy to hitch the mower deck. I’ll give myself another week to enjoy the colors.

The old apple tree never ceases to amaze me. It’s older than dirt yet every spring it blooms like a champ. Bees and hummingbirds swarm the old tree.

All rural men have a few “I’ll fix that later” bits of yard art. It’s tradition and it’s good.

This is a ’41 Allis Chalmers that hasn’t moved for a while. Someday, if I find the time before it rusts out, it’ll run again.

The old tractor had a surprise for me. Do you see the fleeing wing on the right side?

The robin’s nest will make a mess of the distributor but I can live with it. Just look a the color of those eggs!

I’ve been posting less frequently this spring. Why? Partly because everything political is propaganda. It’s increasingly hard to know what is true; so why comment on the unknown? But there’s something more. This is a moment when I choose to step back and look at the world as an overall whole. Here I am, surrounded by a million trees, have I seen the forest? Have you?

One part of the forest I have seen is this:

For some individuals it is spring, for others it is autumn. Everyone’s clock runs differently. The grasping and myopic think it all ends with them. In their autumn, they cruelly infect the vigorous with their own decrepitude.

Many years ago I coined a phase of mismanagement. I observed it in the Soviet Union’s decline:

“The boss is fit and healthy right until he was dead two weeks ago.“

I can’t remember which of the many geriatric geezers piloting the USSR’s empty husk in circles brought about that observation. Maybe it was Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev? It was a long time ago. I remember videos of men who were at best teetering. These were narrated by newscasters uttering words as if the paper thin beings on the screen were lions. (In modern times nobody sane gets “news” from TV. If you do; stop.)

Even now, if you Google Khrushchev or Brezhnev you’ll see a photo of their handsome youth. You won’t see their weakened and declining state. (That applies universally, if you type Dianne Feinstein into Wikipedia you’ll get a carefully composed photo that’s 19 years old.) As for Khrushchev or whoever it was. I’m remembering his autumn and it was a very bitter one. In just a few years their 70 year old Marxist bullshit-fest would collapse for good.

For me, it was spring. I was a youthful American Curmudgeon enjoying Pac Man and Cola Wars. All through that fine spring I was told I’d get incinerated in unavoidable nuclear hell. Why? Because geezers had deemed it necessary.

It didn’t happen.

Nobody apologized for spending the first twenty years of my life bitching at me about geopolitical destabilization. Why did they do it? Did they think some kid on a Huffy bike was somehow responsible. Did they think I’d weep when they shuffled off their mortal coil?

For that matter I’ve been bitched at about “the end of the world” my entire time in the world. It never happens… or rather it ends for some and is born anew for others.

Younger generations know nothing of my youthful “end of the world”. “Mutually assured destruction” is just a plot device in that old move where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a bad ass robot… you know the first one, before they made a fake and gay CGI / geezer remake.

Today’s youth have their own “total upheaval”. Their school was shut down, they were socially isolated, they never got to swig a cold brew illegally by the campfire, and if they notice a girl is hot they’d better watch their ass if HR is around (assuming of course they have a job at all). They were injected, masked, and spent two years pretending to learn by laptop. Fauchi dumped theoretical hellfire on them just as much as Russkie nukes dumped on me.

For the weak and evil, their declining cold dark autumn is always looking for a sunny spring day; in hopes of ruining it.

The assholes that do it never recant. As nobody apologized to me, nobody will apologize to Millennials or Gen Z.

Back in my springtime I felt the pity at the very old when they seemed, for want of a better word, driven or unfulfilled. The end of Pope John Paul II’s time seemed tragic to me. I’m not a catholic, I’ve got no horse in the race. Maybe the guy was awesome. Maybe he was a jerk. Not my call. However, I remember feeling sad when they wheeled an obviously very very tired man around. I felt like maybe he was in hell.

I pictured a Pope’s job to be contemplating God’s wonders. Shouldn’t he be resting peacefully in a garden, enjoying the wisdom of religious understanding and passing on what benevolent knowledge he could? Whenever I saw him it looked like the poor bastard had just spent all week in a board meeting sorting out administrative squabbles. Suppose you’re the direct conduit to the almighty, in your last years should you be in a garden or harnessed to a desk? This was in the time of widespread sexual abuse within the church (or at least when it became known). Did he know? Was it the same as the travails at the Kremlin. “It’s all a house of cards… God help us.”

What do I know? I’ve more humble life goals than ruling the Soviet Union or the Vatican.

Because I’m Gen X, I have to mention Fidel Castro. He spent the last decade of his life sending out press releases that he was fit as a fiddle. Everybody and their dog knew he was barely kicking; it was embarrassing. More recently Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a rock star of “Judicial Activism” was actively castigated by her faithful… for dying in office. A few years before that, Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond burned through a human lifetime to more or less die on the job. If the grim reaper hadn’t clocked them out they’d still be there; human dust grasping power at a committee meeting.

The boss is fit and healthy… no matter what.

I see that cycle again. Consider President Biden, of whom it’s is legally unquestionable that he won more votes than any other candidate in history.(It is literally unquestionable, as in you risk finding your ass in jail should you ask too many questions.) The man is in excellent health and guiding things with the mental acuity of a chess grand master. Everyone looks forward to his upcoming 18 months of many popular campaign events before adoring crowds. This will be followed by 4 more years of wise and successful service.

Suuuuure… Look at him. Does he look happy? He looks like he shit his pants and got lost looking for the podium. No pleasant time to relax in the garden for that guy.

A small shadow of a bigger shadow, U.S. Senator John Fetterman is in the same boat. He suffered a stroke before his election and spent a good portion of February in the hospital. Some people’s clock runs fast. Such a shame. Fetterman can barely read a sentence and he stumbles in ways that would get you a C- in “public speaking 101”. It is his autumn. As our Chief Executive demonstrates, oration is not necessary; a pulse and a ballot is enough.

Fetterman is a train wreck. Dude just stands there like Lurch, dressed worse than a college freshman, looking confused, and likely just as confused as he looks. Like I said, he’d barely pass a required freshman public speaking course at a flyover state agricultural college. Yet there he is, a Senator. Or rather a supposedly fit and healthy meat puppet in the service of whomever does his thinking. If my head were scrambled I might want to stay off stages. Perhaps go fishing or just sit on the beach watching the waves; but that’s just me.

Senator Dianne Feinstein was hospitalized for “minor” issues and emerged looking remarkably like Darth Sidious; except more confused. We pretend this is totally normal. I’d pay good money to watch Biden, Feinstein, and Fetterman have a conversation amongst themselves.

My point is, at least some of a person’s fate is made by their own hand. Part of that is to let go of the wheel when you can no longer drive.

We are to be “led” by geriatric meatheads who refuse to accept time. It results in the absolute dipshit leadership were seeing. People who haven’t had a new idea since the internet was a toy for nerds aren’t going to suddenly rise above. If they had wisdom, they’d have already used it. They’re going to create problems and then use the same damn solutions they’ve been using since they were sentient.

What’s worse is that they’re broadcasting their futile struggling against mortality onto the rest of the world. We, who are living and thriving and growing, must wriggle our way through the human mulch. As we do, it’s important to learn what not to do. Remember the old decaying sad being that shit on the young? Don’t be that guy. Be the one that smiles at children and appreciates the trees.

The trees are flowering. For them… it is spring.

I’m hunting for a used motorcycle. Motorcycles aren’t merely utilitarian. Thus, owning one is not fully logical. Owning two is even more illogical. The two I own are so awesome I want to own three. There’s no end to this circle. Don’t fight it, grok it.

I have a Honda Shadow ACE. It cruises all I’ll ever need to cruise. I also have a Yamaha TW200 that’s basically new despite me beating the shit out of it. That stout little critter happily pack-mules my ass into all the fun I can handle.

Yet I feel the need to add to the stable; less a thought than a calling. I sense this is a time when I can get a heck of a deal on a kind of machine that will never exist again AND it’s also a good moment to do what one “ought to do”. (Define “ought to do” anyway you wish. I’m still working on it myself.)

The world emerged from a COVID fever dream only to psychotically drag itself into the trash. Whatever motorcycles our future cockroach /AI / technocrat overlords allow to exist in our future of mud huts and electric vehicles won’t suit me. For now, the supply of old yet well maintained bikes continues existing, however improbably. It won’t last forever.

Shit often looks the worst right before total destruction fails to happen. The future is likely brighter than it seems right now. But maybe not. The only certainty is that things are increasingly uncertain and a good bike doesn’t fit with the kind of mind that eliminates incandescent lights and gas kitchen stoves.

If you knew… really honestly knew… shit was going pear shaped… would a good clean motorcycle be among your plans? Hard to say. In mine; maybe. It feels like it should. Motorcycles are freedom! Who doesn’t want a nice stockpile of freedom? (Before you rush to comment, all the stacks of ammo in Bert Gummer’s basement can’t substitute for the joy of flying over pavement in pursuit of the horizon.)

Well anyway, that’s my theory. I said it wasn’t logical.

The first bike I checked out was a Honda GL 1200 Goldwing Aspencade. It had 60K on the clock and was going for two grand. I didn’t expect much. I was correct. It was in rough shape, serviceable but tattered. Not what I was looking for.

Here’s a random photo of a GL120o Goldwing Aspencade from the internet. The one I checked out looked like this… but after you rolled it in a cement mixer for a while.

I was attracted to a single line in the ad: “Reason for selling, 82”. There’s something very poignant about that. I met the man. I hope he has many years left. I lingered too long and hated to leave. I’d have happily listened to his life’s story.

His bike started and idled perfectly. Alas it was crufty; switches that don’t work, a hole drilled in the faring for reasons that probably made sense when a switch was mounted in the hole, the odd wire that goes nowhere, well worn aftermarket bling that was lame when installed decades ago, a corner of the LCD was dead, etc… The bike’s mechanicals could probably warble happily for another 50,000+ miles but it would never look “clean”.

I didn’t take it.

There was a dry spell after that. I live in East Bumfuck Nowhere. Local markets in anything are slim. Searching for a 30 year old gem of a motorcycle on the cheap is expecting a lot. I’m aware it may be an impossible ask. Patience is merited.

Then I had a road trip. I had to go to a place to do a thing. While I was there I sniffed around for more bikes. I found a gem indeed!

I found a BMW LT1100. Just a little under 30 years old. Less than 4oK on the clock. It was offered at just about twice the cost of the clapped out ‘Wing. Still within my cheapskate budget.

This machine was perfect! Clean as a whistle. It left the factory with much less extraneous gadgetry than the ‘Wing and it’s old age everything functioned flawlessly. It had ABS which is pretty cool for that era.

Mostly I liked the motor. The BMW transverse inline 4 is a good design. I  wanna hug that motor!

It had a full maintenance history and was obviously well cared for. There was no weird shit bolted to it. It was like I time traveled to the late ’90’s and rolled it off a showroom floor. I had no doubt I could hop on that bike and cross three time zones without the slightest hesitation!

Here’s what an BMW LT1100 looks like:

The guy was more than willing to let me take a test drive. I’m nervous just looking at another guy’s bike. Also I’m from the social class that doesn’t even set foot in a BMW showroom. But I figured “if I drop it, I’ll buy it” and that chilled me out. Test driving a $30K BMW would give me a stroke, test driving a beauty I can afford is less stressful!

I’d been traveling with Mrs. Curmudgeon. She happily waved as I rolled away on that sweet BMW; leaving her and the truck behind.

About a mile down the road I was like; “Did I just abandon my wife as collateral on a used vehicle test drive? Is that rude?” Then I was like “Nah, it’s fine, she can handle herself.” Soon I forgot all concerns and focused on the immediate “this is a sweet ride!”

It purred like a kitten, every gear was great, every shift flawless. It was a little buzzy at 4,000 rpm but it was scarcely noticeable. I meant to ride slow but the thing was so smooth and capable that I found myself going way faster than I expected. It might be a speeding ticket machine!

Tragically, the ergonomics of putting a grunt like me on that sleek engineering marvel was a mismatch. My inseam is too short for the tall BMW. I could fix that with a lower positioned seat but that’s only the start. The whole ergonomic package was integrated and it was completely off kilter for my Neanderthal body. I wound up leaning too much on my wrists. I mashed my nuts into the tank. On my cruiser I sit “in” the bike, on the BMW I perched “on” it. I guess I’m not a “perch” kind of guy.

It felt tall and gangly. I wanted laid back and chill and this bike was just too awesome for that. It wanted to go. It was all cheetah and antelope where my next bike is meant to be badger and napping dog. Does that make sense? Is this why wine descriptions devolve into stupid analogies? (“Despite the bouquet that hints of apricot, the body suggests leather and the aftertaste is tax reform.” Wine guys… I get ya’ now.)

I wicked it up a little and it went from great to superb. That’s what it was built to do. I leaned a touch in a few curves and gave it a fraction more throttle. It held traction like it was bonded to the planet. What a great bike!

But already my back was starting to ache. It’s a great bike but not for me. A chiropractor could buy that bike, give it to me free, and make a profit off my future visits.

Such a shame. Someone is going to get a hell of a deal, but that winner won’t be me.

Still, I call it a success. It was proof of concept. I had the proposition that under $5k can get a bike that’s all that and a bag of chips. The Beemer was  stupendous; mechanically perfect, well maintained, appeared bulletproof, and ready for a road trip right now. Very close to the target.

There are unicorns out there. I just have to find mine.

If you think I’m going to write about current events, you’re wrong. I’m going to write about time.

Long ago railways phased out cabooses. Like puppies and cold beer, everyone loves a caboose! (Get your head out of the gutter!) I’d read somewhere you could buy one cheap. I recall something like $500 or $100… I’m not sure. It was along time ago. Probably 30 years I think?

I remember that moment. I drove to a train yard and looked upon a huge array of old cabooses. They really were for sale! How cool is that?!

Of course there’s more to a thing like that than the initial purchase. There was the issue of shipping the behemoth… and I didn’t have any land upon which to plant it. I was a broke ass kid. The logistics were beyond me. I shrugged my shoulders and let the moment pass.

If I could regain that moment I’d love it! If I could have a caboose at that price and from that time magically transported to my homestead I’d sprain my arm throwing money at whomever offered it. Alas, it was a one time opportunity.

Our household’s cars are aging. Among three main vehicles I estimate we’ve accumulated 600,000 miles on various odometers.* They’re all still fine but we had a close call with a deer a few months ago. We nearly lost one of three.

That got me thinking. Being a belt and suspenders kind of guy, I’d love to have a “beater car” as a backup. However, “beater car” has gradually become a concept from a time before.

When gasoline was made of gasoline and carburetors still walked the earth, a Buick cost eight grand, you could pay it off in 4 years, and maintenance was constant but cheap. That sort of vehicle also drove like a potato, burned a lot of fuel, lacked things like electric windows or AC, and had half the lifespan of a modern EPA compliant space vehicle.

Back then odometers “rolled over” at 99,999 miles.

A ten year old Buick of that era is what I’m thinking about but I don’t live in that era. I spent my youth in rusty pieces of shit. I bought them cash, drove them a while, and then swapped to the next one. I was a bottom feeder. Cars of that time rarely “rolled over” twice.

Here in 2023 that’s an old timey geezer idea. A cheap ass “backup” car that can be bought with spare change and will get to town but not much further has been replaced by a laptop on wheels that starts with an 8 year payment plan and runs a quarter million miles before something big goes out that’s too expensive to repair.

Cars are immensely more expensive/complex and that changes everything. They’re superior in many ways but they’re also big ticket items. As a result, Americans keep their cars running as long as they can… we follow the trail blazed by highly regulated worlds; such as Cuba and private aviation. (Ever wonder why the “logbook” on a 50 year old Cessna is almost as valuable as the plane itself? Ask the FAA.)

Does it matter. Nah! I’ve got plenty of years and miles left in my “fleet”. I don’t need to pine for a type of car that existed in an economy that’s long gone. There might be a few out there but the market itself probably fell on the altar of “Cash for Clunkers”.

I’ll shrug my shoulders and let a moment pass.

But wait! I’m here to talk about a moment that’s not passed. Used motorcycles right now are undergoing the transition that’s mostly over for used cars.

If you walk into a modern motorcycle stealership you’ll see the most amazing, cool, powerful, technologically advanced, motorcycles. They’re awesome! They’re fuel injected, have ABS, come with navigation, want to engage in bluetooth tomfoolery with your cell phone, etc… Motorcycles are the last of machines piloted by people who can use a clutch but even that is fading. Honda is already shipping Golwdings with automatic transmission. (Groan all you want, from what I’ve heard Honda has nailed it.)

Modern flagship bikes are incredibly cool but they’re also inhumanly expensive!

YMMV but I also think they’ll be a stone cold bitch to maintain in 20 years. Just as a modern car is totaled when the airbags deploy and a Tesla is junked if the battery is nipped, so to with the modern motorcycle. A $30,000 full dress bagger bought today is going to be very hard to maintain in 2043.

What can we learn from the lesson of cars? Forget what’s on the motorcycle showroom floor and consider the bike’s ancestors. My Honda cruiser was made in 1999. It lacks ABS, has two carburetors, and doesn’t have radios and navigation. What it does have is liquid cooling, shaft drive, disk brakes, and modern metallurgy. It was built like a brick shithouse; go Honda!

My bike runs like it did the day I bought it and has had hardly any issues. With basic maintenance it could last forever. If you couldn’t afford it in 1999 maybe now’s your time?

I dropped something like $8k on my bike when I bought it new. I probably added a grand in saddlebags and shit over the years. Used bikes exactly like mine are readily had for $2,000-$3,000. The difference between performance on day one and two decades later is nil. If you want that sort of machine, a few grand is a smoking hot deal!

I think there’s a sweet spot with the used motorcycle market and that moment is right now. History is like this: UJMs (universal Japanese motorcycles) of the 1970s and 1980s can be infinitely fixed and are great fun. They’ll hang OK in modern traffic but they’re a bit basic. By the late 1980s and 1990s many bikes were functionally equivalent to anything you’d need right now but they were still infinitely reparable. It’s hard to say when that moment passed but it did. I guess around 2010 is when they started the drift toward the not infinitely reparable.

Also, I might as well point out that motorcycle riders in America are fading too. Used vehicles are usually purchased by young people entering the market. With some exceptions younger generations are barely willing to walk outdoors where it might rain. The population of people that can swing a leg over a rolling engine and ride it to the horizon is us… not the youth who are afraid of their own shadow. You might as well capitalize on this!

That’s just my opinion, you’re welcome to mock me.

I am prowling Craigslist. I’m looking for… I’m not sure what. I’m looking for something that will be gone in 10 years and it’s cheap now. Something from the “infinitely reparable yet ready to ride without a wrench in your pocket” era. Wish me luck.

I already have a V-Twin so I want something different. I’m looking at old Goldwings. The GL1200 / GL1500 series had bulletproof engines but still had repairable carburetors and serviceable parts. No ABS, fuel injection is uncommon, etc… Goldwings have the best reputation for long miles. They’re sometimes infected with decrepit technology, faded LCD screens, stereo systems from the cassette era, etc… I’m looking for bikes with the least features; not the most.

There’s other candidates too, some Yamaha Ventures, the Kawasaki Concourse, I’m weirdly attracted to the goofy market failure that is the Honda Pacific Coast, I’m not sure about some of the inline engine BMW tourers (I may be too short for them), and Moto Guzzis look cool but they seem pretty rare. I’m not looking at Harleys. They don’t interest me.

What you do with this information is up to you. What I do with it is uncertain too.

All I can say is “It’s a strange time so recognize it”. If you want the biggest baddest most mile eating supertourer of 1988 you can get one in mint condition and plenty of miles left fir a high market price of $7k. I’m looking at the under $5k market and haven’t yet found what I want; but I’m patient.

Memento mori; remember you are going to die.

I just checked out a clapped out GL1200 for $2k. The bike would probably run another 100,000 miles but the non-mechanical stuff was pretty banged up. The motor was as smooth as silk but detached switches and stuff that doesn’t work were all over the bike. It’ll ride fine and the right person could ignore it all for an easy 50,000 miles for sure.

I decided I’d like less drama. Also, I’m a shitty mechanic. It’s wise to spend more up front to avoid future issues. (Also the local motorcycle mechanic’s pool is pretty thin!)

What really got me was the last line in the ad. It mentioned the mileage and various features and so forth. Then it ended with this:

Reason for selling, 82.

That’s it isn’t it?

The whole arc of mortality in four words.

I met the seller. He looked pretty spry for 82. He explained that his balance wasn’t what it once was. That’s is a biological certainty for all of us. Regardless, I hope I look that good when I’m that age.

The bike wasn’t what I wanted but I lingered, soaking up everything he had to say. He seemed a good fellow who’d done cool things. I heard a small sliver of a fascinating life story. I hung on every word. I can find another bike somewhere else, but I wish I knew the guy so I could hear more.

We’re all gonna’ die. In case you’re wondering that includes you too. When your time approaches you can be the guy standing in a garage telling a bearded stranger about your many motorcycle trips to Alaska. Or you can spend your time doing nothing and therefore have nothing to say. Your call.

On that happy note, I’ll stop typing.

Bye.

A.C.

*Ponder my accumulated mileage for a minute. A generic nobody of a blogger with some basic vehicles has traveled well over half a million miles. That’s just the current crop of cars in the driveway (I have owned many cars). I’ve no idea how many million miles my eyes have seen but it’s unfathomably vast. Compared to most humans in all of history I have lived larger than a king. The personally owned vehicle is freedom. Never let your gift from the inventive generations before you be seized!

Anyone who’s read sci-fi (or pondered the nature of consciousness) has reservations about true artificial intelligence. That said, I’m not too worried. I don’t inherently recoil in terror at intelligence different from or superior to my own. It’s a risky thing but I can live with risk. Also, I (possibly irrationally) hold the naïve opinion that if SKYNET is going to go genocidal then SKYNET is just as dumb as the monkeys that made it.

Speaking of dumb monkeys, the press is hyperventilating over Chat GPT. Having tinkered with it, I am utterly unconcerned.

Chat GPT reminds me of the formula.

When I was in American public schools they occasionally got distracted from warehousing and indoctrination long enough to throw a few hours of teaching at the clueless buckets of protoplasm they called students. This was calibrated to the level of the dumbest brick to occupy a seat. Considering the herd of morons corralled in a school, almost no learning happened (and most of that was by accident).

I dimly remember the formula for writing an essay; and yes it was a formula. Repeat the question, follow up with a simple thesis statement that won’t confuse the teacher, tell the teacher the things they want to hear, repeat with the conclusion. If the teacher was a stickler for proper form, string together enough source quotes to demonstrate that not a single bit of the concept was unique to your mind. Whatever you do, don’t think!

Like this:

Q: Compare and contrast the parallels between Romeo and Juliette and the NY Jets defensive line.

A: There are many parallels between Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette and the uniformed dipshits who play for the NY Jets. Notably, “they both doth stinketh on ice”. (Smith 1984) Both the Jets and Shakespeare’s protagonists use drugs as a solution to a challenge. Both fail at their stated goal. Romeo failed “to score with a chick”. (Beavis 1982) The Jets whine that “the team gave 110% but we just couldn’t beat the Raiders”. (Krugman 2021)

Influenced by Friar Laurence, Shakespeare’s protagonists engage in ill fated experimentation. This parallels when the NFL promoted Boogerhook McGinty of the 2019 Jets; a man who took so many steroids that “his nuts imploded”.  (Armstrong 2020).

As always, we must remember that teenagers in love act like spastic hamsters on crack while athletes have the same maturity and a bigger budget… …in conclusion, give me an A or I’ll key your car in the parking lot.

Boom! A-. It’s easy.

Schools want the formula. They literally can’t see anything but the formula. Everyone who’s been through college can do the formula. The formula is not thought.

An aside about grades.

Teachers didn’t want to offer a seething wiseass like myself good grades, but they had to. That’s why I usually got an A with a minus. I’d clearly followed the formula and I’d nailed it. Failing me would’ve meant failing most of the class; a price too high to pay just to rub my nose in it. But I was an asshole from the deplorable socio-economic class, thus the minus.

Not that grades are particularly relevant. Grades were basically known before anyone attended a single class. In my town, high school grades were a function of social class coupled with the student’s degree of obedience. A+ was reserved for the true sycophants. These losers uttered phrases like “this will look good on my college application”. A was for the future mid-level bureaucrat. A- was for the smart bastards that “didn’t apply themselves”. B was a large band reserved for the stampeding mass of human herd animals. B+ was for what Vox Day smugly calls “midwits”. B- was for Forrest Gump. C was for crack addicts. D was for subliterate cave beings. F didn’t exist.

Back to my essay, if you carefully scan for even one rational thought you won’t find any. It’s bullshit. The formula is bullshit. Whether it’s a finely wordsmithed A+ for the future Yalie or an incoherent C- for the person who sticks a butter knife in the toaster for fun, there is no intelligence inherent in following a formula.

I’ve dinked around with Chat GPT. I sense that it’s an averaging of what the internet says. This is sideboarded by things we are officially instructed to not notice. It’s not a fertile field for wise conjecture.

Imagine a space alien crashed in Baltimore and had to base all human interaction on Twitter threads. They’d sound like a human but have very stupid ideas. They’d believe many facts which are totally fabricated. They’d speak well enough to order a pizza but not to speak deeply about the real world and how it really functions. They’d pay triple price for unleaded while parroting whatever the president (81 million votes!) said about his new energy plan’s future of solar powered maglev trains. They would never surprise you. They’d never make a clever connection.

That’s why we all react to the human NPC meme. We see them all around us. You know more or less what an NPC will say on any topic. They’ll express strong opinions about shit that doesn’t matter. Shit that does matter will pass them unnoticed. NPCs school like fish. NPCs don’t “figure out” anything.

So, is AI dangerous? Maybe a little, but not much more than the bottle of tequila in your cabinet or the keys to your car.

Is AI going to take your job? It might, but only if your job is simple and repetitive.

That’s why the press has its panties in a bundle. They’re simple repetitive people who thought that they could fake it forever. They make a living arranging text according to the formula. They use language in ways that won’t scare the normies and will never surprise anyone. In AI the “pointless job” has met a new form of automation. They’re a draft horse sniffing a John Deere.

Do we care? Hasn’t the press been begging us to put them out of our misery for years? When’s the last time some “analyst” on CNN came up with a thoughtful and reasoned idea you didn’t see coming? When is the last time they promoted sanity and stability? Isn’t much of the verbiage on the internet already crap?

Word based NPCs won’t be missed because they weren’t providing a great service. Automation of what can be done automatically is often a good thing. Do you fret because Bart Simpson is drawn with a yellow pen instead of live-acted by an abused child? Do you fret when you listen to Megadeth from a recording instead of paying a quartet to play in your living room? How many people under 30 can drive a car with a clutch? How many of us bake our own bread?

Speaking of which, “learn to code” is in a similar situation. If your code is excellent you’re still needed; and you’ll still be paid on a scale calibrated by lowballing hacks from Bangalore. If your code is stupid and repetitive, AI will eventually do it as well as you. Sorry Bangalore hacks. Note: if you’re in Bangalore and simultaneously very skilled… you’ll just use AI as a tool to get ten times as much work done… with a 2% raise.

What would an essay sound like if it used intelligence rather than the formula?

Q: Compare and contrast the parallels between Romeo and Juliette and the NY Jets defensive line.

A: Your prompts are stupid and random. You’re a blithering fuckwit who went to teaching school because algebra was too hard. I’ve already keyed your car because I’m 17 and want the world to burn.

That’s it right there! Want to see the mind of a high schooler? I just showed it to you. Scary eh?

At Mrs. Curmudgeon’s nudge, I ran my prompt through a variant of Chat GPT.

A: I’m sorry, but I can’t compare and contrast the parallels between Romeo and Juliette and the NY Jets defensive line because there are no meaningful connections between the two subjects. Romeo and Juliette is a tragic love story, but the NY Jets defensive line is a group of professional football players who play defense for the New York Jets. There are no similarities or parallels between the two that would allow for a meaningful comparison or contrast.

Oh shit! Looks like Chat GPT has already exceeded the formula taught in high school.

We’re probably doomed.

My HAM radio is disappointed in me. It’s not the other way ’round; my most recently purchased radio is fine (probably excellent) and I’m glad to have it. The failure is on my end. I’m just too damn lazy to finish setting it up.

Last fall I picked up a new old stock radio (now that I think about it, I still haven’t paid for it!). I fiddled a bit with an old power supply I had hanging around and soon it was powered. I tested it with a crappy antenna and it seemed to work; so I ordered up a new antenna and…

…nothing.

Wading through a thigh deep snowdrift to fabricate a mount for an antenna translated to a whole lotta’ nope. Winter sucks and it seemed to never end. I had plenty to keep me occupied and left it at that. The new antenna sits in the corner… judging me.

Other people are more productive in the HAM world than I. Recently, UnidentifiedHam sent me a message. Check it out:

The evil, manipulative, powerful world of cell phones may have dulled your amazement so let me elaborate. This photo was sent from the forest to me, mostly through radio. This is not a cell phone selfie. It was not filtered through a cell tower. It was neither transmitted from a cell phone nor received by one.

At any time prior to about 1996(?), a message like this would be impossible to a normal consumer. (HAMs don’t count, they’ve been doing shit like this since forever.) The methods used to shift that photo from a rocky chunk of forest to yours truly is closer to a 1980’s “news van” reporting from the scene of some sort of event. (Remember the old days when news mostly reported things that actually happened in real life? Pepperidge Farms remembers. But I digress.)

I’d like to say the message was relayed entirely “off grid” but that’s not quite right. The better way to think of it is that HAMs have a grid all their own. Their grid is different, better, weirder, more capable, more complex, sometimes parallel, and usually more dispersed than the network that turned your cell phone into a propaganda hub for the TikTok masses.

There’s a price to be paid. It’s a stone cold bitch to learn how to use the HAM’s “grid”. You have to have an FCC callsign. You have to buy and configure your own equipment. You need to be at least smart enough to sorta’ define watts and ohms. A monkey can run a cell phone but it takes skill to be a HAM

So enjoy it! In a world full of automatic transmission, join me to marvel at this stick shift image!

Warning: My explanation is Fischer-Price level. There are layers and layers of fascinating details I’m leaving out.

The grid that sent that photo from pine tree to yours truly and then on to this blog happened because UnidentifiedHam knew what he was doing, he used repeaters, WinLink happens to exist, and several technologies worked together. Oversimplifying greatly, UnidentifiedHam began by taking a photo. UnidentifiedHam used a cell phone but any digital camera would do.

Then, he (in his words) “spent about half an hour finding a winlink station that heard me well enough to quickly send the picture of camp”. Once he found the winlink station, he transferred the image via radio signal from his campsite to the station. From there the station handled the rest.

Here’s where I try to explain things HAM-ish without going down the rabbit hole. There are a zillion “radio bands” from which to choose. The band is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum which the HAM wants to use. Nature, because it’s awesome, handles different bands in different ways. Some bounce off the ionosphere, others heat popcorn in your microwave, some go very far, some go very short. UnidentifiedHam chose the 80M wavelength which impresses me as a pretty long distance “bend around the planet” sort of band. (I’m open for correction.)

Being a N00b, I use mainly the 2M band (a wavelength of two meters) which is pretty much sort distance, line of sight type stuff. (Note: Don’t be led astray thinking 2M is “beginner land” and therefore lame. “Line of site” is still powerful. I consistently hit repeaters 20+ miles away with a cheap ass Baeofeng handheld. Depending on elevation and the curvature of the earth, “line of sight” is more than you’d think. On the other hand, 80 Meters is way cooler.)

To continue our story, UnidentifiedHam fired up his radio at camp and started hunting the airwaves for a suitable repeater. The repeater heard his signal and responded on a slightly different offset frequency. HAM radios do a “send on one frequency, hear on the other” shell game without breaking a sweat. They’re good at it.

Once some repeater said “I hear you on XYZ frequency” and did this by responding at XYZ+/- a smidge, UnidentifiedHam used software which told the repeater (I’m paraphrasing) “I’m about to send a signal designed for use within the WinLink system”. The repeater knew then to turn it to an e-mail at its location (or some other location) and fire off the e-mail.

The Repeater said “right on boss”. (Obviously the electronic handshake isn’t “right on boss” but you get the point.) All this happened with beeps and boops and tones and maybe, but probably not, CW (Morse Code).

The handshake done, UnidentifiedHam fired off a 9 minute blast of radio information at a set frequency with a set structure. The repeater understood the data because of its format and metadata. The repeater digested it and properly converted the data to an e-mail. The e-mail went to yours truly just like any other e-mail.

No cell phones were harmed in this process… but I suspect their feelings were hurt.

Elaborating further, UnidentifiedHam’s contact with the repeater didn’t have to “go to e-mail” instantly. He could have told the repeater to forward the message along in various ways. Some repeaters relay the message further to other repeaters using roughly the same band but with more power. Others convert to different bands. Others are electronically linked such that I could send a radio frequency message to a repeater in Albuquerque and a linked repeater in Miami might rebroadcast the message three time zones away. (I’m picking locations out of a hat here as examples, not listing actual repeaters. Please don’t get caught up in the minutiae. Just know that two or more repeaters over widely dispersed geography might work together as a net.)

Oh, and one more thing. My side of the “conversation” was on a computer receiving e-mail through regular broadband but it doesn’t have to be that way. I can setup my HAM to receive e-mail via radio frequencies too. I haven’t yet done so, but it’s on my to-do list.

Also, it doesn’t have to be e-mail at all. If UnidentifiedHam and I had planned out agreed upon times and protocols we could probably send messages with repeaters in the middle but never dump the message “down” to the internet.

Furthermore, if we had sufficient signal strength between radios we wouldn’t even need the repeaters. It’s common for HAMs to send and receive messages thousands and thousands of miles. There are contests where a HAM (or a group of them) will try to contact as many dispersed places on the globe as possible, usually in a limited time and often with outlandish success. I won’t be contacting Micronesia from my homestead any time soon but there are people who do things like that all the time.

HAM is nerd stuff that goes so deeply down the rabbit hole that it emerges again in the dimension of cool. In a world where your cell phone tracks your every move and seems to serve mainly as a vector of miserly maybe you might enjoy a different way to communicate? My modest goals involve receiving an e-mail even if the power is down and even if my rural IP craps out. But I know there’s a frontier to explore and I anticipate more with time.

Can you get a modest 2M HAM (like mine) and do the same thing? You certainly can! (You might even level up to an 80M rig rather than staying limited to what 2M can do.) Can you buy gadgetry right now that’ll make it work? Yes, absolutely! How expensive is it? That’s up to you. You can start with a handheld Baofeng that’s the size of a TV remote and cheaper than a couple of pizzas. You can expand until your house is bristling with fancy gadgets that draw magnificent levels of power and give you the aura of a mad scientist. In between is a hobby called QRP where people fiddle with the very smallest bits of power. They’ll get by with a 9volt battery with some diodes and shit in an Altoids tin. With that they’ll send a message halfway around the world. (It’s not magic but is sure feels like it.)

You can start by chatting with the neighbor and wind up bouncing signals off the moon. (Yes, “moon bounce” is literally a thing HAMs can do).

UnidentifiedHam made my day. I hope you enjoyed it. I want to thank him for his positive reminder of the clever things people can do.

Progressives, or socialists, or whatever they call themselves this week like to say they’re on the “right side of history”. Nobody is on the right side of history.

To say “history bends my way” is to assume you are a God. “The universe must bend to me, because I am correct.” It doesn’t. The universe does no man’s bidding. Nor does it care how deeply you believe in your inherent perfection.

Nor does history inherently progress upward. For every wide eyed youth who expects Utopia after just a few committee meetings… and eventually a few executions…  there’s a equal and opposite generation of hunter gatherers that moved through time without ever thinking about time in a linear way. How many million generations grew old and died without seeing the other side of a hill at the edge of a traditional hunting territory? How many new ideas for bow design, or agricultural innovation, or cultural enrichment simply never happened. The mind boggles.

In the early 21st century, humanity looks like it is locked in a relentless upward climb to glory. It’s appearance without reality. The masses are not climbing. They’re driven rabid by instant communication. Our churning upheaval is another reflection of the twitchy sudden shifts that came about from the Gutenberg press.

Twitter is not real. Until the evolved ape holding with opposed thumbs a device of infinite power learns this, we are maladapted to the world we’ve built.

We’re prone to madness. We panic. We’re easily led. And we’re obsolete.

Already, the newest generations are a different human variant. For better or worse, they have brains rewired since birth by small glass display screens with dopamine dispensing media. They cannot think like the humans of before, just as the humans of before cannot think like them.

Thus, the frenetic spasms of modern life are just that; frenetic spasms.

Yet we sense inflection points in time. All my life this has been a thing I pondered. If you look, you will see. If you see you’re no longer the same as those who do not see.

The most advanced maritime explorers in humanity, the Polynesians, must have pondered the same eternal questions. At least some of them might have.

Some portion of that group, presumably the bravest of the brave, cast off from atolls and specks of land and explored all the way to extremely remote Easter Island. They arrived at the closest thing to the middle of nowhere our planet offers. Depending on who’s archaeology text you believe, this happened sometime in the 4th or 8th century.

Whenever it happened, the explorers found a place no human had ever occupied. They also found Paschalococos disperta (the Rapa Nui palm), an absolutely stellar material for boat building. Imagine the joy these sailing badasses experienced at the discovery of a large island with good resources.

By 1650 the palm was extinct. Modern man cannot understand that level of being stranded. I simply cannot think that way. Nor can you. Yet it happened.

The Rapa Nui imprisoned themselves on a remote speck of the planet they formerly explored. Collapse and poverty was fated from that point on. Captain Cook, an explorer from a culture that took a thousand years to catch up with the first arrivals at Easter Island, showed up in 1744. He found an impoverished people. They were literally the survivors of utter collapse.

We have words for such concepts but they’re inadequate. We speak by analogy, trying to muster the ultimate vision of a world or people that’s completely destroyed; Armageddon, Apocalypse, Mad-Max, SHTF. Call it what you want, on Easter Island it happened.

The thing I ponder is that some of them must have known their fate. Polynesian sailors weren’t fools. They knew how boats were made. They knew how palm trees grew. Some of them must have watched the dwindling stock of building materials with increasing alarm.

I’m sure they tried to avert this avoidable mess, just as we try to avert our current self inflicted messes. They failed. As we fail.

What did they think as the last ocean-worthy hull rotted away? What was their world for “Armageddon”? It must have been a long time coming. Some of them must have seen it happening. A few had to have known what that meant.

Most people don’t think that deeply. Surely most islanders were the same as all people in all times. Focusing on the mundane. Arguing with their neighbor. Pissed off about or enthralled by the chieftain’s expensive public works policy. Hoping to woo a good mate. Trying to keep the garden growing. Wondering if the new generation of kids were idiots. Etc…

But there were some who must have known the full horror of losing the last boat. The few, the wiser, the aware, they always know. They know because they pause, notice, reflect, and think. They use their big monkey brains to ascertain cause and effect. The building material for boats is gone. What have we done?

Did they stand furious on the shore of an island they would never leave and scream their soul’s torment into the universe? If not, then what? Can you imagine being in that person’s head? Can you imagine observing the fools in the village bickering about their little lives when the whole ocean had become impassible? Can you imagine knowing it’s all going to shit, it already started going to shit, it’ll keep going to shit for the rest of your life, it’ll be shit for your children’s life and their children too… for as far as your monkey brain can comprehend; nothing but a long slow dismal decline.

Imagine the weight of the universe in a single human mind. To stand there, feeling the sand, soft and sinking beneath their feet, and know there’s no solution. The resignation is heartbreaking. Humans are still new at thinking. There on that shore an evolved monkey looked at the sky and pondered to the limits of a finite mind amid infinite loss: Is this it?

When I was a boy they taught me the first European to reach the new world was Columbus, who, as Bugs Bunny sang, “sailed the ocean blue to arrive in 1492”. Like everything else I was taught in school, this was wrong. I don’t know if it was deliberate falsehood by bored teachers or oversimplification by ignorant ones.

L’Anse aux Meadows is a small spot in northern Newfoundland. It is firmly established (as it was when my teachers instructed me otherwise) that the Norse had a settlement there. Tree ring analysis puts it at the year 1021.

Imagine the vast gulf in time and space between Medieval Europe (itself a remnant of the long dead Western Roman Empire) and the Mississippian culture that was thriving not too far south of the point of contact. Medieval Norse explorers bridged the gap, or almost did, or perhaps they simply tried. Regardless of intent, they failed spectacularly in terms of joining the two.

Archaeology suggests that the Norse weren’t defeated so much as they retreated… never to return. They may have failed but they did manage to go home. That’s no small thing.

Imagine standing on that shore, watching your culture and the Norse parting ways. Those two paths in time wouldn’t meet again for 471 years. When Europeans returned again they’d make first contact in what is now Cuba, not what is now Canada. They’d inadvertently carry smallpox. They’d bring with them firearms. The Spanish would bring horses. Whatever incremental change that could have happened with the Norse became a landslide with the Spanish.

If you stood on that shore watching the last Norse boat leave you would have no idea that the rift would be half a millennia. It would be impossible to know that the strengths and weaknesses of both sides would change completely. Whatever happened at this contact, the next was very different.

Maybe they were happy the smelly dipshits were leaving. Maybe they wished they’d pried the secret of smelting iron out of their heads. Maybe they expected them to come back the next year. Maybe they were better off without them. Certainly a harsher, larger, irreversible contact five centuries and thousands of miles away could not have been foretold by anyone present at the time.

Thus it passed. Explorers came. Explorers left. The Norse left not much more than footprints. Their absence wasn’t the start of anything. It was a footnote leading to a gap of half a millennia.

I was born to the only culture that ventured past earth. My people walked on the moon. 

Then… they didn’t.

I was too young to experience that moment. Just a kid. I never saw a live moon landing on TV. It was done before I was old enough to remember.

The generation before me tried but failed to pave the way for mine. As a kid I had high hopes. America had high hopes. I remember being ecstatic when the Space Shuttle first flew.

Then… hope faded. NASA crawled up its risk averse ass and died. America recently seeks the same outcome.

Oh sure, there’s been progress. We have lasers and microwaves and cell phones and all sorts of cool new technology. But over the decades the spirit of adventure and the willingness to take risk has been systematically beaten out as many humans as possible.

Gen X that I am, I have always been standing on the shore watching options ebb. Twelve men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. In due time, I gave up hope that my generation would go where others had gone. I began to give up hope that any generation would return.

How different am I than my hypothetical Polynesian? He was trapped on an island without the resources to make an ocean going boat. How different am I than my hypothetical native? Are grainy black and white videos of men on the moon any different? It’s the same. The bittersweet and scarcely recognized loss of watching the secret of iron sail away toward Greenland.

I too remain at the shore; trapped in a little spherical human cage.

By 2010 the Chief of NASA said his agencies goal was to “reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” (Google it.) That’s when I really gave up.

So why am I telling you all this? Because resignation, despair, failure of the soul is never the right choice. The human soul is meant to soar.

Today the whimsical human parody Elon Musk, pulled another rabbit our of a hat. He used government money and his balls to do what armies of bureaucratic risk averse desk jockeys could not. Today was the first experimental orbital launch attempt of Superheavy / Starship.

The thing about Superheavy is that it’s on the verge of completely changing the cost of flight. Elon’s audacious goal is to make the per pound cost of putting objects beyond the earth’s gravity well an order of magnitude cheaper than it is now. He’s making good strides in that direction. He created an organization that’s doing what no other bureaucracy could.

His biggest challenge now is less a matter of gravity than the government (which funds him yet defaults to tying innovation in knots). This morning went well. A rocket with twice the thrust of Saturn V evaded both the bounds of earth and the red tape of man. It made it to the edge of space.

Then it exploded.

Adventure is hard. Everyone knew the risks. Watch the video. People cheered at how far they’d gone instead of lamenting that the flight wasn’t perfect on the first experiment. That is how you get to space! Cheers, not lamentation.

I have more hope today than I did yesterday. I may eventually be more than the guy standing on the edge. At this point I’m too old to go even if I could but that was never the point. I may once again be of the people who can land on the moon. That’s what I really want!

The link below is cued up for the launch.

A shorter video is here.

P.S. I’m sure I’ve told the Easter Island / Norse / Space story before. It’s a thing that’s often on my mind.

Sometimes I’ll hear folks ranting about enlightenment virtues, stoic philosophy, or religious belief but their spine vaporizes on contact with reality. They’ll emote over freedom of speech and rule of law and consent of the governed and then fold over lame shit.

If you think your moral and intellectual and spiritual world is on edge, then act like it. If a person considers what their friends will say on F***book more than their relationship to God or themselves aren’t fully engaged. That’s fine (and I might even envy that world) but actions matter and don’t think you’re something you’re not.

I think of this scene from the movie Brazil. Dude’s about to experience total hell and they slip in a jab about credit rating. Nice writing!

Consider our little Nuremberg experiment that officially ended just this week. How many people bellowed like they were ready to go to Valhalla yet submitted just to shut people up? Many unwillingly got the jab in anticipation of their inescapable fate.

If they’d held the line a few more months perhaps then… well whoops… that boat sailed and they weren’t on it. See how preemptive surrender works?

Note: none of this is to hold it against you if your back was against the wall. Nobody can know what’s in another man’s soul. If you were going to relinquish custody of your kids that day or get fired that day… well sometimes even the bravest man will chose to lose. But that’s a different thing than “there’s a memo going around that the boss will be pissed in a few more weeks” or “my girlfriend won’t stop bitching about it” or “I really want to go to my favorite bowling alley”. (Also, if you wanted the vaccine. Good on you. Mental anguish spared. Enjoy your good fortune.)

As for the guy in Brazil? He went all the way. He knew where the path went. When they strap you in the chair it’s to late to worry about your next loan to buy a Toyota!