Stopping By Woods (with apologies to Robert Frost)

Whose woods these are, I think I know.

These are my damn woods. Heh heh. That's pretty cool...

Details and background on "Song of the Sausage Creature"

A long time ago, in one of my very first posts, I quoted a passage from Hunter S. Thompson's essay, "The Song of the Sausage Creature. I noticed that the link I posted to the full text is broken, and it's getting harder to find a good source to link to, so I figured I'd cheat and post the full text below for posterity's sake.

But in looking, I also came across a great Cycle World article from December 2012, written by the poor woman whose job it was to try and get a publishable piece of writing from Thompson to CW's editors while he possessed their brand new, very expensive, very exotic motorcycle. Here's the article about the essay.

And here's the original "Song of the Sausage Creature" from Cycle World, March 1995:

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."

"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it... For that we need Fine Machinery.

Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find... I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....

And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."

...Sweet jeebus. That's how you write a product review.

"...He has given us a secular version of a sacred text."

Nice write-up on some of the back story and present-day significance of Robert Pirsig and ZATAOMM .

Quoting the greats:

"The thunder draws its breath from lungs of pine and oak, and prepares to pound the mountains and hills in short order. In my memory, there are always thunderstorms over the mountains."

A Moment, 2012

The sun rises on Main Street on the longest day of the year. What do you see? What do you smell?

Halloween 1979

The cold comes on suddenly on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom, where it never really goes far away. It lurks just out of mind all the time, and drops in impulsively from time to time just to assert itself, lest anyone doubt its primacy.

In late October cold is a given, and the frost was truly on the pumpkins. It destroyed the faltering vines and left ember orange fruit naked and exposed across the roadside fields. Worse luck for the farmer, it was a hard freeze; hard enough to seize up the flesh of the large succulent pumpkins and slowly rend it with a million tiny daggers of ice. The larger the pumpkin, the worse it fared. They sat ruined in the midday sun, slowly deflating into mottled puddles of pulp and seeds, beyond resurrection at the point of their greatest glory.

But here and there, scattered throughout the field, a careful observer could spy smaller pumpkins that survived the cold. Fleshier, drier varieties, with less moisture to freeze and better insulated by their own mass, they managed to pass the cold unscathed. None larger than a man’s head, some as small as a softball, all perfectly shaped and brilliant orange.

The field was a total loss, not worth the farmer’s effort to glean even as feed for his cows and pigs. We had free rein to gather what we wanted. Yet I could find no one among my jaded and aloof compatriots to share my enthusiasm for the task. So I set out alone, walking the dusty shoulder of the road to the farmer’s field with my empty sack over my shoulder and the late afternoon sun warm on my face.

I filled the sack with a half-dozen or so pumpkins of varying size and description, and stuffed two more smallish gourd-like fruit in the pockets of my army jacket.  My shadow stretched long and far before me as I returned to my room. There was still time left before nightfall, if I worked without delay.

As short walk and a brief stop in the general store later, I settled in the communal kitchen with my pocket knife and began the work of transforming the lowly pumpkins into Jack-o-lanterns. I did the best I could with the time available and tools on hand; no simple triangle eyes and square gap teeth for me. A Jack-o-lantern must have a personality of its own, and its native shape of course determines its personality. So a certain amount of deliberation must take place in the span between the initial craniotomy and innard scooping, and the final flourish of rind striping intended to release the pumpkin’s inner demon.

The sun was just set, the cool evening air settling rapidly. I now had six Jack-o-lanterns, where just a few hours earlier there were only orphaned pumpkins abandoned in a field. It was time.

I walked briskly and purposefully down the winding gravel lane to the old farm graveyard, sack slung over my shoulder now filled with Jack-o-lanterns. It was a short walk, less than a mile through the rolling hills and fields, but the light faded quickly and stars appeared faintly overhead.

Within the bounds of this tidy plot lay a score of graves, most sharing the name of this ancient farm, and a few others represented as well. I found the boundary stones marking each corner of the sanctified ground, and gently placed a Jack-o-lantern on each, face to the cardinal points of the compass. The others I placed atop the tallest gravestones, facing east. I lit the small candles inside them, and then climbed up the hill behind the graveyard and sat among the balsam fir as the eerie glow countered the deepening twilight.

Hubris

9th Interrogatory—In what manner have you estimated for that portion of the work, which will be tunnelled? In what time can said Tunnel be constructed? Must not your estimates for said Tunnel be conjectural? And may not a difference in the formation through which said Tunnel passes, vary the expense many thousands of dollars—that is to say, should the formation be entirely granite rock, will not the expense be much greater than if it should prove to be of clay, limestone, slate or coal?

Answer—With the same care that we have used in forming other parts of our estimates...A difference of the formation would of course, affect the expense: it might increase, or it might diminish the cost, several thousand dollars. I can say that it is not only improbable, but that it is impossible that we shall meet with granite in the constructions of the tunnel, the geological character of the country forbids it.

10th Interrogatory.—Upon what description of formation or strata have you based your estimates for the tunnel, and what certain reasons have you to suppose, that particular formation or strata exists, upon which you have based your estimates?

Answer—Our estimate is based upon a formation of clay, slate and sandstone, in layers, alternating; and occasionally earth, clay, slate, predominating. The Direction of the tunnel and that of the strata form an angle of about 29 degrees. We cannot, I think, be mistaken in the strata that we expect to meet with. The Potomac, for a few miles above, and for several miles below, has its channel back and forth repeatedly across the strata in the direction of the tunnel, these strata we find invariably in the same relative position, parallel to each other, and in the same continuous lines. (Emphasis added)

LOC

The Library of Congress is so far beyond awesome that you can't even see it with the Hubble Telescope from awesome, because it is moving beyond awesome faster than the speed of awesome rays.

We Are Fortunate To Have Wendell Berry

I first read Wendell Berry about thirty years ago, and was profoundly impressed and moved by what he had to say. He is our poet laureate of the soil and a national treasure, and his writings never cease to amaze me for their wisdom and insight whether reading his poetry or essays.

He is still at it, and the December issue of Harper's features an article entitled "The Necessity of Agriculture" taken from a speech he gave in May of this year. The entire piece is a must-read, but I have tried to pull the best lines out below; it was a hopeless task because the whole thing is just amazingly insightful and spot-on. A sampling:

"We seem now to be coming to a time when we will have to recognize the love of farming not as a quaint souvenir of an outdated past but as an economic necessity. And that recognition, when it comes, will bring with it a considerable embarrassment."

“Policy makers…are hoping newly unemployed young people will help revive Japan’s dwindling farm population...‘If they can’t find workers over the next several years, Japan’s agriculture will disappear,’ But this effort is falling significantly short of success because “many young people end up returning to cities, unable to adjust to life in the countryside.” To their surprise, evidently, farming involves hard work, long hours, and getting dirty—not to mention skills that city-bred people don’t have. Not to mention the necessity of loving farmwork if you are going to keep at it."


"And in Japan, as opposed to the United States…They even think agriculture may be a good thing for a nation of eaters to have."


"If agriculture and the necessity of food production ever penetrate the consciousness of our politicians and economists, how successful will they be in job-training our overeducated, ignorant young people to revive our own aging and dwindling farm population?"


"What will it take to get significant numbers of our young people, white of collar and soft of hands, to submit to hard work and long days, not to mention getting dirty?"


"… the necessity of agriculture will not be widely recognized without the sterner necessity of actual hunger."


"…our informal but most effective agricultural policy has been to eat as much, as effortlessly, as thoughtlessly, and as cheaply as we can, to hell with whatever else may be involved."


"But we, who have decided as a nation and by policy not to love farming, have escaped it, for a while at least, by turning it into an 'agri-industry.'”


"But agri-industry…has given us massive soil erosion and degradation, water pollution, maritime hypoxic zones; destroyed rural communities and cultures; reduced our farming population almost to disappearance; yielded toxic food; and instilled an absolute dependence on a despised and exploited force of migrant workers."


"We have ahead of us a lot of hard work that we are not going to be able to do with clean hands. We had better try to love it."

Go read the whole thing. It's all of about two pages long, and it's probably the best thing you'll read this month. The quoting of "Faust" is worth it all by itself.

Postcard from Montreux, from slow-moving Walter, the Fire-engine guy

Yesterday I heard "Smoke on the Water" on the radio for the umpty-umpth millionth time (Okay, actually it was the live version, which I don't think I had ever heard before, but still...). Of course, it features one of rock's most immediately recognizable and distinctive opening riffs, one that has been parodied countless times and is heard daily in every store in the country that sells electric guitars. Ritchie Blackmore insists the actual riff is a lot more technically complex than what gets played by beginners, but it's what beginners are irresistably compelled to play when they are trying on a new guitar. I think it's the law.

It occurred to me that despite my having heard it so many times before, I had never really paid attention to it.  I realized SOTW is actually a pretty decent little bit of narrative writing—a concise telling of a true story that would fit on a postcard or in a five-minute radio song.

Deep Purple went to Montreux to record an album in the Montreux Casino complex in December, 1971. During a show by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, a fan fired a flare gun into the ceiling, starting a fire that destroyed the Casino complex. Having reserved the Rolling Stone's mobile recording truck, the band was forced to improvise recording space in the nearby Grand Hotel, using empty rooms and hallways as necessary. What they recorded became the album "Machine Head," one of their biggest successes, and later SOTW was released as a single, reaching #4 on the Billboard singles chart in 1973.

An interesting and unusual story, told simply and concisely. The title comes from their view of the Casino fire from their hotel across Lake Geneva (Deep Purple did not attend the Mothers concert) as the smoke drifted. Everything you need to know about it is right there, in a way you might hear an interesting story from a friend over a beer.

PS: "Slow-motion Walter, the fire-engine guy" is a misheard lyric from the Barenaked Ladies.
PPS: Claude Nobs, Director of the Montreux Jazz Festival, a.k.a. "Funky Claude," actually did pull concertgoers from the burning building.
PPPS: The Guinness world record for the number of guitarists playing the SOTW riff simultaneously stands at 6,346 and was most recently set in Poland in May of this year. There's a joke in there somewhere.

The Little Book of Shattered Expectations

I think anyone aspiring to creative writing would do well to get themselves on the mailing list of the Vermont Country Store. Their catalog starts showing up in our mailbox around the same time as the stinkbugs, and continues appearing as frequently and predictably. The VCS catalog is a staple—nay, a ritual—of bathroom reading from early fall to mid-winter, about the point when it slips its staples and finally falls apart.

It is a paragon of tautly-crafted manipulative prose, each product description a compact haiku-length dissertation cleverly crafted to push buttons you didn't know you had.

Each item in the catalog is worthy of a massive piling-on of scientifically selected adjectives and adverbs, each one specifically designed to trigger the release of repressed memories of a common idyllic childhood we never shared. The house was bigger, the windows frostier, the rooms cheerier, the beds both higher and cozier, the breakfasts heartier, the hot chocolate richer, the sledding swifter, our parents wiser, kinder, happier and more beautiful, the Christmas Tree taller, the tinsel brighter, the goose crispier and the presents more wonderful than we could ever have hoped.

I will confess we receive this epistle regularly because we purchased items from this land of make-believe in the past. And the thing is, once the goods arrive on this side of the catalog—reality chasm, they're just...stuff. Stuff like you could buy pretty much anywhere.

Sure, a lot of it is hard to find—but most of the time that's because people stopped buying it years ago and people stopped making it years ago because, hey, in truth back then it was crap, and by golly, it's still crap now.

Nostalgia does not by and of itself validate things; in most cases it's just stuff, like it was back then when we didn't buy it the first go-round. The items are, for the most part, things you have probably walked past in your regular rounds of shopping time and again, with good reason. (Creamed Chipped Beef, anyone?) Yet from their testimonial copy, each item means something special to someone out there, enough for them to resurrect it or recommission it in some cases and to make an effort to stock it at least for a little while. As they say, there's no accounting for taste.

I don't think I have ever gotten something from the VCS that didn't come packaged with its own certain tiny measure of disappointment. It may be that the VCS catalog's greatest value lies in its ability to gently teach children how to gracefully accept disappointment, how to read between the lines of artfully crafted marketing prose, and to understand in a simple way that things aren't always what they seem.

But I gotta say, the catalog itself never disappoints. I love the writing—the unrelenting Rockwellian optimism, the naive cheer, the three or four coats of bright shiny adjectives, the perky and artfully dated design sense, the creation of a whole world within the slick covers. The arrival of the first catalog marks the beginning of the imaginary season they taught us about back in second grade.

Get on their mailing list, if you aren't already. Read the catalog. Throw 'em a bone from time to time, just to prop that imaginary world up a little while longer. There's no harm in playing along.

Addendum: If you're ever in Vermont, you owe it to yourself to check out the brick-and-mortar VCS, which is actually made of wood & stuff. It's the real-life version of the catalog, and as I recall, there are at least two or three of them salted throughout the state. Visited the one in Weston on the grand Vermont tour of 2001, and it was worth the side trip.

Something I wrote thirty-five years ago

This is something I wrote about thirty-five years ago, and it still interests me for a couple of reasons. First is that I think I wrote it when I had just finished reading ZATAOMM, and was blown away by it as the first philosophical book of any kind I had ever read (it shows pretty directly). Second, it shows an early incarnation of my feelings about hiking versus driving, which have translated into motorcycling versus driving. Third, I now find myself living within sight of the mountain in question, and seeing it pretty much every day—it's what I look at as I drive down the lane to home.

I cringe a little bit when I read this, because it is probably my first real attempt at putting my thoughts down on paper. But the persistent threads fascinate me, and the underlying themes are things that still fascinate me.

"Travelling in a car is the least forgiving way to go. Forgiving of the crime of caring, of wanting to know more and see deeper. You see something different, and it excites or interests you. But you can't just stop; the car won't let you. So after this happens many times, you get calloused; it hurts to lose a good thought. So many people just give up seeing things. When you're walking, it's better, but you still have a destination to reach, and that's what you're there for. Not to see clearer, because you can't plan that."

"This idea came to me while I was looking at a mountain. It wasn't the first time, though; many years ago I knew this. This mountain was a backdrop, a shelter for [the town of] Flint Hill, and it seemed such an essental part of the town that Flint Hill couldn't exist in any other context."

"Flint Hill, without knowing it, belonged to that mountain more than anything else..."

A Work in Progress

Hans was fledged in the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, and died at its turn. From his ashes emerged Michael, so named for the Archangel: “Prince of the Heavenly Host, The Conquerer of Lucifer (…ironically, the Bearer of Light…) and of the Proud, who wage war against God and the Church.”

All that Hans had been, Michael was not. Michael was formed imperfectly, yes; but perfection was his object and goal, where complacency was Hans’ resting place. Michael sprang fully formed from an imperfectly-shaped moon, rising full but not full over a greyly mountaintop, a warm buttery-colored disc pulling through the cold ragged wintry clouds with a mysterious notch eaten from its corner like an eclipse, but not an eclipse. It was full but not full. In the deep dark dead of a winter’s night, that ragged moon said to all who were seeking illumination in that moment “Fear not! The warm sun still shines! See it shine upon my face! Look for it where I look!” That moon rose and fell, and when it was gone, it took Hans away and left Michael behind to take his place.

It was a good trade for all concerned, but especially for those upon whom the moon’s rays shone that February night. The rising of that moon closed the door of time on an era of turbulence and confusion, of cloudiness and misdirection, of prolixity portraying profundity. Indulgence was the word, and the word was made flesh, and that flesh was Hans; and the Lord looked down upon his creation and said:

“Shit.”
“What was I thinking?”

And the Lord turned his back on his creation and walked away, leaving him to his own devices. But being that it was The Age of Aquarius, that time of all possibilities and all creations, Hans flourished for a time, because time was mostly what he had. Hans burned through his birthright, and squandered most of it on trivialities, and then went looking for more things of little consequence to satisfy his appetite and amuse himself. And Hans found many others who were in some ways like himself; they too had been created on a whim by a restless and easily distracted God, who set them down somewhere and then forgot all about them. But this is not really about Hans, not so much.

On that night, Michael took shape, mostly as a name in a dream, at least at first. The name kept recurring, floating to the top of consciousness again and again, yet without association; for it was yet unconnected to a person, because of course, at that moment the person that name was meant for did not really exist. There were many, many Michaels around, many known personally to the dreamer of this dream and viewer of this moonrise, and of course countless more known at more degrees of separation. The name did not associate itself until Michael himself was actually formed; and at that instant, the name and the man became one, and this time, there was no God involved in the act of creation to muck it up with his lack of attention to detail and what-not.

And of course, in order for Michael to be formed, Hans must first be made to go away.
The irony was not lost on Michael that he was in fact the bringer of light; the long association of his name with that of Lucifer and the battle in heaven and the fall was a familiar country to him, and he knew its highways and back alleys well. The novelty had long since worn off, and he had heard the joke made too many times to count, had forgotten so many ways to act like it was the first time he had heard it.

But here is the thing: Michael was yin to Hans’ yang, black to his white. In all aspects, Michael was the opposite of Hans. Physically taller; lighter; where Hans had fat, Michael had muscle. Michael was resolutely clean-shaven whilst Hans was matter-of-fact about it, often going days without a shave and weeks without a haircut, though Michael in fact had a full head of hair and Hans’ hair had begun to abandon him some time back.

Hans was second-hand tee shirts with band logos; Michael was crisply-ironed shirts with buttoned-down collars or stays, and always a tastefully appropriate tie. Where Hans was faded jeans with torn knees, Michael was creased khakis with cuffs.

Yet the irony of their differences was that Michael became invisible in his elegance, camouflaged in plain sight, his presence unmistakable yet the details indefinable. Hans, despite his studied casual demeanor, was inevitably conspicuous, and bore with him some indelible and constantly-replenished stain, not unlike the pavement around a diesel pump.

The problem with Hans all goes back to his being misbegotten. Some little error in his initial conditions spun out over countless iterations, some detail left out, some bit of coding done wrong, a zero when it should have been a one—what did it really matter? He was misbegotten. It was built-in; a feature, not a bug, as they say. It wasn’t like he became this way somewhere along the journey. Except for the part about the Age of Aquarius, it was all pretty much set from the get-go. Had he come of age in a different time, the details would have been changed, the extent of his—wrongness—might have varied to one degree or another. But the basic flaw that was Hans was there from the beginning; it defined him.

Hans dragged an anchor behind him for his entire life, barely aware of its presence or even its existence. Without a helpful Marley to point it out to him, he simply went on from day to day, oblivious to the “…weight and length of the strong coil…heavy and as long…a ponderous chain!” He knew something was there, yet he never stopped for a moment in all his years to disentangle himself from its damping embrace. Hans swam like a shark in a sea of self-loathing, in constant self-defeating motion, ever onward towards a new self-destructive end. This was perhaps the primary distinction between Hans and Michael: Michael was utterly free from such pointless distractions, and Hans was utterly enamored of their sour savory tang.

Michael was formed with his eye on the prize, a calm gaze above and across the obstacles in his path, and his gaze never faltered. In contrast, Hans felt fealty to failure, and never stopped at the finish but always one step short. This perhaps most self-destructive behavior was at once reflexive and irresistible; he acted as though his committing completion would close the circuit that initiated Armageddon, and so he reliably steered clear of any final act.

Hans’ meandering life was littered with the nearly-finished hulks of ten-thousand different efforts, most simply needing one last coat of paint, a touch of caulk, a reworded clause, a bit more research, a trim piece refitted just so, another thought. It didn’t matter the scope or scale; what mattered was that they all remained unfinished, with an almost religious devotion and dedication that Hans did not bestow on anything else. It was his mark.

His bedside displayed a score of partially read books, dogeared and flagged with all manner of bookmarks. Somewhere past the halfway point but at a safe remove from the conclusion, Hans’interest inevitably waned and he set off in search of a new topic, in most cases never to return; his personal best might have been Joyce’s Ulysses, the opening chapter of which he must have read two dozen times, with the opening of ‘Moby Dick’ a close second.

Hans lived from day to day with what he believed was a certain ‘carpe-diem’ dedication. But the line between ‘carpe-diem’ exuberance and fin de siècle desperation is a fine one, and in reality, Hans danced the tarantella of despair more frequently than he tripped the ballet of joy. To his growing horror, the future kept arriving at his doorstep one increasingly terrible day at a time, mounting year upon year, in unrelenting defiance of his limited expectations.

In a way, Michael was sent to clean up Hans’ mess and wipe clean the trail of litter stretching back through the decades. In one grand sweep, Michael would be able to tie up all those loose ends without measure, to render complete that which Hans had struggled so mightily to leave undone. Perhaps Michael could ring in the Apocalypse by his actions, and reveal himself to be closer in spirit to Lucifer that he would like to believe.

Summer Reading List

"Blue Highways," William Least Heat Moon
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Robert Pirsig
"Far Appalachia," Noah Adams
"Pilgrim At Tinker Creek," Annie Dillard
"On The Road," Jack Kerouac
"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" Barbara Kingsolver

Discuss.

I told you I would, didn't I?

"People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful...The narrow mechanical things I concern myself with are in the service of an activity that we recognize as part of a life well lived."

"Shop Class as Soulcraft"

Matthew B. Crawford

Phrase of the Day:

"..Shit-colored bike cheese..."

"Shop Class as Soulcraft"

Matthew B. Crawford

Warning: I'll probably be quoting this guy a lot in the near future.

Everything which is complex is unusable

French polymath Paul Valéry (1871-1945) once said poems are “…never finished, only abandoned.”

Recently I remembered a project I abandoned decades ago and forgot completely about.

My father died at the age of sixty-four, when I was twenty-one. [As a footnote, I quietly celebrated the exact moment when the days I have had with my son surpassed those I had with my father, and have marked on the caledar the same milestone with my daughter.]

In a muddle after his passing, I struggled to find a way to reconstruct him and hold on to his essence. So I contacted as many of his peers as I could locate—his remaining brother and sister, childhood friends, former co-workers, neighbors and associates, and simply asked each to provide whatever scraps of remembrance or ephemera they could. I would then try to assemble these bits and pieces unedited and unexpurgated into a coherent whole that shined some light on my father.

I was dismayed by the results.

Not like comparing apples and oranges, but more like comparing apples and aardvarks, like comparing the sound of a wild goose’s wing on a moonless night with the smell of a bag of damp gym socks. Childhood clippings from his hometown paper; an article he had written for a trade publication; a letter about him which seemed strangely generic; scraps of old personnel files. Such disparate data points; I could no more recreate a notion of my father from them than I could stitch a cozy comforter from slices of pizza.

I pored over them time and again, unable to find a starting point from which to build the portrait I so badly wanted to create. I still have all the responses somewhere, dogeared and yellowing, stuffed in a folder in a box on a shelf in a room. I don’t even recall what they look like or who all bothered to respond, and I still feel pangs of guilt in recalling that I promised everyone who responded I would send them a copy of the finished product. I supposed I haven't actually broken that promise—yet.

But recently I realized in hindsight (having read Zinnser on “writing well” ) that what I really needed to do was sit down and interview each and every one of those people. I would have been able in that moment to extract exactly what it was I wanted from them, to precisely plumb their remembrances and tease out the threads that meant the most to me. Instead, I asked them to read my mind and heart, and answer a question I wasn’t even capable of asking at the time.

I am not a good enough writer to yet create a coherent narrative from those bits and pieces; I doubt I will ever be, and the urgency and sorrow that propelled me in that effort has diminished and dwindled over the decades. The loss has subsided and life has, in its richness, helped me to fill in that gaping hole. It makes me sad to realize how little remains of my father, how much has evaporated and been lost to time, how little of him I can still recall.

But then Valéry also said: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable.”

Postscript: The irony is that if I want this project to come to fruition, I will need to bootstrap it by creating a remembrance of my father to bring order to creating a remembrance of my father...how circular.

Vending machine

He slid to a stop by the vending machine. Panting, he realized this might be all the food they would have for miles, maybe days. He pounded frantically on the glass panel flat-palmed with the universal gesture of the short-changed and the gypped.

He grabbed the molded plastic chair from below the wallphone. He swung it against the blank face of the machine with an impotent fury unrealized before that instant. The windowed face of the machine magically transformed into a white wall of ice chunks, then collapsed inwards with a sigh of resignation and loss.

“C’Mere! Help me” he shouted. She came over, breathless. “Here—take as much as you can…we’ll want it all.” He shoved glass crumbs aside with exaggerated delicacy, liberating the motley packets from their pigtail prisons and tossed them to her waiting hands. Chips, pretzel, candy bars, gum, lifesavers—all of them. All his. And hers. Things he would usually never eat in a million years. This was just his lucky day.

They grabbed as much as they could make room for—what with everything else they were already hoarding—then crammed their pockets with what was left; she stuffed some kind of gooey bar in her mouth for good measure and threw the wadded-up wrapper into the machine's empty belly. She bolted for the stairs, smacking the panic bar on the door and bursting through it shoulder-wise in one sweet move like a linebacker, then disappeared up the stairwell.

Looking back over his shoulder, he started to run, then faltered and sighed. He stumbled to a stop and shuffled awkwardly back to the ruined machine. Pack sliding off his shoulder, he fumbled with his greasy wallet. He looked through it studiously, thumbing through the mess of tattered papers it had become—a delicate, dainty action all the more ludicrous under the circumstances. Grabbing all the bills between thumb and middle finger, he tossed the wad, all of it, onto the galaxy of glittering stars in the dark and hollow heart of the machine. Five dollars, five hundred—what difference did it make? He wouldn't be needing them.

“Sorry. For your trouble...” he said to the silence. Then he bolted to the stairs, slamming into the door just before it closed again. He could still hear her footsteps, racing up the stairs ahead of him.

Such good timing on my part...

After many decades, I will finally complete my academic career (...begun well back in the previous millennium) sometime in the next year or two by graduating as an English major, right about the time words in english will have finally and completely lost any meaning.

Omphalos: For A Case of Beer

For a case of beer, unobtainable by his own devices
edgy the lad liberated the truck from its red brick barn,
Where it slept awaiting that clamorous call
The call that rarely came, the horn that cried in the night
Awakening the village men, tossing them from various slumbers
With unassailable urgency

But not today. It came occult, on covert occasion,
To serve us in our own special need—
Where the pale concrete children scampered and squealed
Among moss fallen cabins, we labored long in that broad white hole
Snowblind in the heat, chilled by the dark mountains’ fogs
Long days melded into evening’s aching labor
we reached the day of judgement—

The truck equal between shore and broad white hole
Snout draughts deep of the chill lake
From its side the mighty snake emerges, flat like the nightmare parasite
Drapes the weedy sward, broad bronze mouth perched over the hole,
secured by stones, and rope, to a plank—
That was in its turn, secured against the fearsome coilings

On our command the lad loosed the power he brung:
Rumble, then a ripping sound like I have never heard
Before or since, dances across the grass to me
The snake hisses, bucks, belches, heaves, disgorges
a plume of emerald, splays across the hole,
washes away, conceals what we have made

I cannot resist—climb in—our mutual baptism in this moment
A sacrament unsanctioned and unknown
I meet the plume arms outstretched, back turned in greeting
crucified against the pounding column, laying back
embraced and held close by this most substantial of ephemera

You would not think such a thing possible, but I saw it with my own eyes
For three straight hours the snake spewed. It filled the hole with emerald
opaque and unknowable, unfathomable
At its center, a froth-flecked gyre, a foot or more below the unwavering edge
Though I watched it for hours, it stayed, undiminished
Such moment does not easily surrender
Omphalos