The meaning of Valentine’s Day

We went out this morning,

My wife and I,

To do a little job.

A post in the fence on the greenbelt,

Where the coyotes howl in the moonlight

And nature pushes at our back gate,

Was rotted off at the base.

It was typical of that sort of job –

Cut the nails with a sawzall,

Push the fence out of the way,

Then grunt and sweat the lump of concrete

That failed to protect the treated post

Out of the ground into the light of day.

I could tell her knee was bothering her,

Just not enough to slow her down,

As she matched me, grunt for sweat

To put the new post in the ground,

Then join the sundered sections

That keep the wild world at bay.

We make a good team.

She moved the vegetation

I set out the tools.

I mixed the concrete

And poured it where she said.

She did the finish work

While I screwed the boards back on.

After all the work was done,

I put the tools away,

Then staggered off to take a nap

For the rest of the day; I was done.

While she went on to her next job -

Making an apple tree stand at attention

With the help of a stake, and some rope.

I can’t keep up with this woman.

Honey, I can’t believe my luck,

That joined me to you along the way.

I don’t know what I did to deserve you,

But I’m sure glad I did it.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Shovelheads

Ya gotta love the old shovelheads, and the old guys who ride them.  There’s a direct connection between them and the earliest motorcycles in that they are known for arbitrary breakdowns and vibration-assisted spontaneous disassembly, and the resultant skills and improvisational fixes their riders come up with to keep them on the road.

A case in point is Ron’s ’77 FXE, which he recently resurrected from exile in some garage where it was being used as a clothes hamper.

We decided to take it on the Dave run for a shakedown cruise.  That is an annual run organized by Big Dave that always features a mixed bag of bikes of all types, with skilled experienced riders that tend to go fast.  This year, for example, we had a Victory Vision, a Honda Sabre, a Kawasaki Ninja, three Harleys - my FXR, Ron’s FXE and a Lucky’s chopper that was in theory a 1983 , a BMW, a Vulcan, a Yamaha Super Tenere, that sort of thing.

We gathered at the Black Diamond Bakery on a Saturday morning for the usual pre-ride ritual of coffee, carbohydrates and cholesterol, then launched ourselves in a loose pack down the OK highway towards Mount Ranier.  The eventual destination was the Columbia river via that cool road on the back side of Mt. St. Helens.  We made it all the way to Eatonville before something  fell off the shovelhead, one of the nuts that holds the gas tank in place.  We should have seen that for the omen it was.  So Ron and I sent the rest of the pack on ahead, while we looked for an auto parts store to buy a nut and washer.  We never did catch up with the rest of the guys, but we had a great ride anyway, as it turned out.

After we fixed the gas tank, we headed out the Eatonville cutoff, thinking to jump ahead of the pack that went the long way around on Highway 7 through Alder.  We holed up in Elbe at the tourist trap in the middle of town with all the train cars and such, one of which sold a blackberry smoothie that I recommend highly.  No sign of the boys, so we headed out on the projected route down Skate Creek road to Packwood the back way.  This road is as beautiful a twisting windy country road as you could wish for, but it gets pretty rough up near the top, after you pass the “End County road” sign outside of Elbe.  Somewhere past the top there was a chuckhole with a perfectly square sharp corner that took the spoked steel rim of Ron’s front wheel and put two perfectly matching dents in the rim that peeled the rim edge back from the sidewall neatly and made the wheel into one that was round on three sides and flat on the bottom.  So we thump-thump-thumped into town and stopped at a gas station to figure our next move.  Yay, innertubes!

One thing that has happened to gas stations all over the country is that they have turned into convenience stores, and the concept of a “Service” station with the skills and equipment to keep your car running has fallen by the wayside.  Walk into one of them and ask the clerk behind the counter racks of cigarettes, candy and junk food for a hammer and they look at you like you’re from another planet.  Fortunately, there are a few old time stations left, often in small towns, and you can usually find one if you poke around.  In Packwood, it’s the old Chevron on the west side of town, the one with the fuel pumps that are so old that the numbers physically spin around on the dials while you pump, and the clerk has to come out with a square key and reset the pump manually between each transaction.  This particular clerk was a wizened old guy who had obviously been kicking around town for many a year, so we softened him up by buying some gas, then put the hammer question to him.  He came up with a 20 oz. claw hammer and a 12 oz. ball peen.  Ron took the claw hammer and did the nicest job I’ve seen in a while of beating a steel rim back into shape in the parking lot with precise blows at the correct angle and force while I held the front end steady and offered cogent advice like, “you missed a spot.” “Hit it harder” and  “Ooh, did that hurt?”  Soon the wheel was round enough to hit the road again, and off we went.  Another problem solved.

We decided to go up and over Cayuse pass and stop at the Naches Tavern in Greenwater for lunch.  That’s where the next little problem happened.  This time, as we pulled into the gravel parking lot, Ron’s front exhaust pipe just up and fell off onto the ground.  The engine was still running, and it made that blup-blup-blup sound along with the whistle-chirp-chirp you get when the hot exhaust valve is open to atmosphere.  Ron laughed the laugh of one who knows he can fix it somehow, and picked up the truant pipe and leaned it against the bike to cool while we went in for beer and ideas.

The problem was down at the muffler end of the pipe, where the slotted bracket welded to the muffler fits against the hanger bracket, and the nut and bolt was still tightly fastened, along with the shards of the muffler bracket that had fractured from the heat and vibration, which let the muffler hang down, only connected at the head bolt, which soon vibrated loose and fell out somewhere between Ohannapecosh and Paradise, and left us stranded at a tavern with good beer and food, not even close to the worst case scenario.  So even if we could come up with a 5/16”-18NC cap screw ¾” long somewhere in Greenwater to secure the pipe to the head, we would still have to find a way to secure the muffler to the hanger, given the current state of the shattered bracket on the muffler.  We needed wire, lots of it.

Sitting in the booth at the Naches Tavern I looked around.  The high wainscotting around the great room was full of odds and ends of logging equipment on display, blocks and tackle, peavey and pike poles, along with the occasional buck saw and mule harness.  Directly above my head was a cast iron valve body, held together by a couple of 5/16”-18NC cap screws about 3 inches long, with about ¾” of thread and a nut holding the body together.  I whipped out my trusty Gerber stainless steel multi-tool, don’t leave home without it, removed the nut and pocketed nut and bolt.  We could screw the nut all the way down the threads on the bolt, then screw the bolt into the head until it bottomed, then jam the nut against the head pipe, and voila, one problem solved.  I walked out into the back yard of the tavern and looked around some more while Ron put Plan A into motion.  There was a guy back there taking a break from the kitchen, and I told him my story.  He suggested I look at the burn pile around the corner, where I saw a section of hog wire fence.  Out came the trusty Gerber, complete with wire cutting jaws, and soon part of that fence was rendered back into its original configuration, that of wire.  It fit neatly into the hole and wrapped through the remains of the muffler bracket just right, and twisted tight behind the muffler, so it was invisible.

So it was, and so it worked, and so off we went down the hill to home.  I kinda like the looks of that long bolt in there, and suggested we install another one in the rear head, then drill the heads and safety wire them to each other.  You could hang Christmas lights off the safety wire.

As for the wire on the muffler, why not just leave it there?  At least until it breaks again?

Which we know it will do.  With a Shovelhead Harley, you know it’s only a matter of time.

Nowadays, all the new bikes are computerized and complicated, with trouble codes for everything and Electrical Diagnostic manuals an inch thick to help the mechanics figure it out.  When you break down, you whip out your cell phone and call AAA or MoTow and then you sit and wait.  Hopefully near a beer place.  I guess that’s progress, of a sort.

I can’t help thinking, somehow, that there’s a place in the modern world for the old machines that go blup-blup-blup , and that, when they break, and you fix them, you kinda feel better about yourself.  It’s like the smooth, painless rides are over and soon done, and the memories fade like an old Polaroid, while the adventures that include some challenges, some adversity, those are the ones you remember and talk about.  That’s when you’re really living.  :-{)}

Memo to Donald

To: Donald Trump

From:  Alan Brittenham

Subject: Saving Your Ass

Hey, Boss,

I know you’re busy and all right now, got a lot on your mind, but I thought I would drop you a line to let you know I figured a way out of the little shit-storm I see you sliding into right now.

I know you told us that Obamacare was a total disaster, and that job one when you got elected was to repeal it, and that was a popular thing to say at the time, cuz everyone’s rates were going up faster than the price of liquor on Blue Sunday, and it might have helped get you elected, and they’re kinda on your ass about all those promises, and this looks like an easy one, but wait a second before you make your mind up.

Down here at the trailer court, it turns out darn near all of us went ahead and signed up for that there Obamacare, and it turns out to be a pretty good deal, too.  Of course, most of us got the subsidy, so we don’t pay anything, cuz most of the folks around here are on Social Security, or Disability, the ones that are all busted up, or the single moms who are mostly on welfare, cuz their old man done run off or is in jail, so we get to go to the doctor these days, instead of waiting till there was nothing to it but to go to the emergency room.  Maizie’s grippe is much better now, and old man Hoss got a whole new knee out of the deal, and ain’t he the spring chicken now!

Now the thing is, Boss, these folks are exactly the ones that voted for you, you know.  One of your folks came around one day and signed everyone up to vote and request one of those absentee ballots, and, when they came time to vote, every dang one of them had your name on it with a big x next to it.

So if you turn off Obamacare, you ain’t doing nothing less than throwing all those good folks who listened to you, who believed in you, and who voted for you out in the street, and don’t for one moment think they won’t be pissed!

So you got yourself between a rock and a hard place, and I can help you get out of it.  It’s simple:

You just take the name off of it, and call it Trumpcare!  That’s all you gotta do!

Oh, sure, it has to look a bit harder than that, you have to razzle dazzle them a bit, but that’s nothing for the man who sold Trump University, not to mention Trump steaks.  You can come up with the fancy words, I’m sure.  And that thing you said in your speech about how companies been ripping us off, that will tie right into it.  You can go after the pharmaceutical companies for overcharging, and tell Medicare to start negotiating drug prices like they shoulda been doing, and roll the whole thing in a new ball, without removing anything!  Call it the American Health Care Freedom Act, or some such, and it will sail right through, I’m sure.

Anybody bitches, threaten to switch to Single Payer and they’ll shut right up.  By the way, that single payer system actually looks pretty good if you look at it close, you might want to keep that in the back of your head for now.  Good luck.

You know, I’m a good American citizen, and I’m always ready to help you out.  I got a couple of other ideas if you get in a jam.  Don’t hesitate to call.  I’ll do it for free.

Your pal,

Big Al

Click Bait!

Oh, My God!  The Jolie-Pitt Divorce is getting Ugly!  Nobody saw this coming, but we’re all going to watch it go away, aren’t we?

Oh, My God!  Look at Tiger Woods with no shirt on!  I wonder what he’s advertising?  Have women forgotten that he’s a dickhead?  When you have that much money, does it matter?

Oh, Look!  That lake is mysteriously disappearing!  Wait a minute, haven’t we already seen that?  Like, about a dozen times?

Oh, Look!  The DEA has listed Charlotte’s Web as a Schedule 1 drug because a company wants to monopolize it!  Wait, No!  That’s wrong, the story was a lie!  Gee, what if Facebook looked it up on Snopes before they ran it, rather than leave the work to the readers?

Oh, Look!  Over on the side of my Facebook page!  3500 people are talking about Earl Thomas!  4,000 people are talking about Sarah Michelle Gellar, and two hundred and forty thousand of them are talking about Elton John talking about George Michael!  Don’t any of them have anything better to do?  How does Facebook know who we’re talking about?  Oh, Look, there’s More!

Ooh!  I must do this quiz, to find out how smart I am!  Oh, Look!  There’s a puzzle!  A Survey!  Why is it 2:00 in the afternoon and I’m still in my bathrobe?

I don’t have time for this shit.  Especially since it is becoming all too obvious that George Orwell got it all wrong.  The dystopian world he pictured in 1984 did not look beyond the TV screen and see the Smartphone waiting to give us even more Big Brother than we could have imagined.  Beyond that, they’ve found a way to make us like it!  Here, click on this, Like that, Share that with your friends!

This is no dreary world of shortages, unhappiness, and gray concrete.  This world is full of color, and sound, and action, right out of Shakespeare: “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!”

Meanwhile, the planet continues to spin on its slightly wobbly axis, the bombs continue to fall, and people continue to die under them, like always.  And, of course, we’re paying for everything.

We’re picking up the tab for those bombs, and the jets out of which they drop, and the training of the people that fly them and do the dropping.  We’re paying for all the click-bait on Facebook, too.  Every time we get sucked into an attractive headline, or a picture of an attractive person with much skin exposed, somewhere a cash register dings.  The cost of those ads is called “overhead”, and is rolled into the price of the goods.  Quite often, if something is advertised on Facebook at a discounted price, it turns out that is a rip-off, the actual identical product can be found on Amazon or elsewhere for half the so-called “discount”.  So, the corollary rule to the one that says the Lottery is a Tax on Those Who Are Bad at Math is this:  Facebook is where friends go to find a product that brings them joy, but they want to pay even more!

I like to use Facebook to keep up with the friends and extended family, see what the kids are up to, what milestones have been born or celebrated.  I also like to use it to share my own stories from time to time, at the risk of inviting comment or criticism.  What I don’t like is when a useful app like Facebook becomes an avenue to distract me from the truth, or tell me lies, or feed me bullshit, or cost me money.

What I realize is that it’s up to me to control what shows up on my page.  When one of my friends continually dumps bullshit or fake news on my timeline, they get unfollowed.  When ads pop up that annoy me, those companies get blocked.  And above all, I recognize Facebook for the ultimate time waster that it is, and never, ever click on the bait that appears, the pop-up ads, the sponsored posts.  Each one spawns a dozen.

The other thing is that, scattered among the click bait and fake news, there are posts from real people telling the truth about what is going on in the world.  And that is the other thing that Orwell did not see, that instant electronic communication can also enable massive change in the world, can keep us talking to each other and sharing our truths.  It gives one the hope that a revolution in the sense that we can decide as a people to stop dropping bombs on each other, and that the world does not consist of us and them, that the shared best interests of all humans include peace and freedom and a right to happiness can come about because we all share the truth as it happens, and we don’t have to kill each other to do it.  That’s where our friends come in.  We trust each other to speak the truth, and share it when we find it.

I think, at the end of the day, that is what it’s all about.  :-{)}

Two plus Two equals What?

So it looks like this is how it works:  A few days ago, President-elect Trump tweeted that the contract with Boeing to build the next two Air Force One planes was, “...too expensive, 4 billion dollars!  Cancel It!”  Boeing’s stock took a nose dive, and publicists and politicians all over the globe got in front of microphones and bleated endlessly, with some agitation, that it was not true!  Boeing has only been working on a lousy $150 million project to talk about it.  They don’t have the specs yet to even start asking how much, so somebody pulled that number out of their ass.

Despite that, given the level of response to that single tweet, and the wide-spread nature of the response from all directions, would it surprise you to see on the front page of one of the scandal sheets on display at the checkout stands of our local grocer (all but the “family friendly” ones, anyway) a headline that shouted, “Trump Cancels $4 Billion Air Force One Project!

My first thought was, “Are you kidding?  Do you not know that all of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Fox News, CNN, and all the rest of the chatterverse has been debunking that story within the hour?”  Then I realized; they don’t care.  Their audience doesn’t read anything they don’t already know, and don’t care to start now, thank you very much.

My second thought was, “Who exactly do we have in this country capable of designing, building and flying what will probably be the second most complicated flying machine this side of the Space Shuttle.  I mean, besides Boeing.  Nobody, right?  So you really are full of doo-doo to even suggest it, right?  So, who are you trying to fool?”  The answer is:  the same people who elected him.

I supported President Obama, and to this day believe he did as good as he possibly could given the level of attack that started the day after his first election from all sides.  He ran a clean ship, and got the trains running on time, at some level.  All the bullshit they threw at him was based on lies, the new currency of politics in America.  At the time, most profoundly expressed on the night of his inauguration, the spirit that flooded the airwaves felt like a sign that a change was gonna be here.  It gave me hope.  Still does.

But it occurs to me: Now, the shoe is on the other foot.  The pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme.  However, the process is the same, just for a different group.

Obama gathered the poor, the dispossessed, the young, college educated ones, some of the working class and built an organization on their efforts, Organizing for America.  Trump made those people the enemy and built his winning coalition on the backs of the scandal sheet readers, the Fox News quoters, the haters and the fringers on the opposite side from the radical left.

Obama got his money from the lawyers, and the rich liberals.  Trump got his from the capitalists, and the rich conservatives.  And here’s the thing:  Just like Obama in 2008, Trump in 2016 has given his followers hope!

You can see them everywhere, the Trump folks.  “I’m with Her” is a message that has disappeared from the bumpers of America, but Trump rides everyone’s ass these days.  They walk with a form of victory strut, the one we did when Obama won, he was our man, and we grinned from ear to ear.  Now it’s them, and we look away.

But in the back of our minds, we are thinking:  He promised a whole bunch of things to a whole bunch of people, and now he’s gotta come through for them, and he’s got four years to do it.  He’s gotta build a wall, then deport a bunch of nonwhite people.  Then he’s gotta start my mine back up, or my logging crew, or my auto plant job.  He’s gotta slap China around, even though they buy so many of our T-bills that if they quit buying them we’d see the full faith and credit of the United States of America go up in smoke faster than you can say leveraged buyout.  He’s gotta slap the Russians around, even though he personally owes them millions, we hear.

And all the time, we’re going to be riding his ass like a loan shark on payday.  All those liberals and progressives are still here (you saw the vote totals), and we’re not having any of this, thank you very much.

The difference is, we’re going to fight back with the truth.  We’re not going to pass on fake news, that’s their thing.  We’re going to ignore his wife, as long as she stops plagiarizing, and his kids, who will hopefully sit down and shut up for the next four years.  We’re going to talk policy, and facts; we’re going to insist on reasonability, and cooperation, and building community, and shining a light on things going on around us.  When they go low, we’re going to go high, just like Ms Obama said.

What else can we do?  :-{)}

Granddaughters

“Poppy, come play with me!  I’m bored!”, she said.

I’m the last resort, these days, if there’s nothing better on TV, and her cousin isn’t available to yammer endlessly over the facetime phone.  I accept my lowly status, knowing the near future will reveal to her my true nature as a dork.  I’ll take what I can get.  She’s ten now, and we all know what happens to them when they turn fourteen.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said.  “Let’s make a bet.  We’ll play UNO, and the first one to win two games wins the bet, and the loser has to be their servant, until mommy comes home.”  “Done”, I said.  “I’ll shuffle the first round.”

Of course, she had to summarize the deal in a written contract, with signatures in duplicate.  I explained that one signature was in cursive, one was printed, and she liked that, because it gave her a chance to show off her flowing signature.  This kid likes to nail down the details.  She’ll go far.

She won the first game in record time, before even half the draw pile was exhausted.  I complained bitterly about the obviously poor shuffle, until she pointed out that I had done it.

I came back and won the second game in grand fashion, having a run of blue cards left after she pulled a wild card and declared for blue. She complained that I must have cheated, somehow, as I went into my victory dance.

But it all fell apart on the third game.  I got stuck on blue and had to draw endless reds, greens and yellows before I could match the one on the pile.  She seemed to take particular pleasure in showering me with penalty cards that made me draw even more cards.  Her victory dance when she UNO’d out with a pile still in my hands circumnavigated the living room.

Now I was in thrall for the next several hours, and it did not look good for my dignity.  The first thing she did was write out a script for a scatological self-denunciation that she had me deliver as a rap tune, followed by singing a Christmas carol, all the while being recorded on her cell phone.  Heaven help me if it hits Youtube.

Then she handed me a puppet, a theme, a setting and a problem, and commanded me to invent a puppet show on the spot that fit.  Fortunately, my hand was too big for the puppet, so I wound up operating Harley Hog, the leather-jacket-clad yellow pig, as he engaged in a confrontation with said puppet, a fearsome dragon with big eyes.  We lost, of course.  In the nick of time, her mother showed up, and I was saved from further indignity and abuse.  I tell you, it’s hard being the adult around here, sometimes… :-{)}

The Hawaiian Beach Mystery

I worked with a guy once, Otto was his name, back in the ‘70s when I was an apprentice machinist at the logging yarder manufacturer on Harbor Island.  He ran the Bridgeport section and the screw machines, making all the pins and small rollers on an old mechanical forerunner to today’s CNC lathes, his hands constantly bathed in cutting oil that flooded the tooling as the machine ran.

He told me about how he worked at Paccar after the war for 17 years, and how, for all of those 17 years he ran the same horizontal boring mill every day on day shift, and how for all of those years he made the same part, a winch housing for an Army tank, over and over again.  He said, “Every night when I go to sleep I close my eyes, and I can see every hole in that casting, its size and tolerance, and the distance between it and all the other holes on the part.  I can literally run that part in my sleep, and I will carry that with me into my grave.”

He had been stationed at Pearl Harbor during the war, where he worked in a chrome shop, which brings me to the heart of the story.  Somewhere along the way he picked up an old military 45 Harley Davidson and, over the course of a whole year, he chromed every single part on that bike.

“I used to keep it under a tarp on the beach,” he said.  “The shop was near the water, and the barracks was over on the other side, so nobody went there much.  I worked the night shift, so I started out by tearing that bike down right there on the beach, everything, down to the motor, where I just pulled the covers off both sides and the cylinders and heads off the top.  I did pull every nut and bolt and stud off and chromed them, too.  I started with the frame, then the front end, the wheels, every spoke.  It was really something.”

“So what happened to it?” I asked.  “Ah, well, my time came up, and I was ready to get out of there by then, so I sold it to another grunt, and then I came home.  That would have been about 1946 or so.  I imagine it’s still there, somewhere. I think he gave me $100 for it.”

I imagine it’s still there, somewhere… sounds like a quest to me!  Next time I get to Oahu, I’m gonna start poking around, finding old timers to talk to.  “You ever hear about an old flathead 45 with chrome everything floating around?”  You can drive every road on the island in a day if you push it.  It’s gotta still be there somewhere, right?

And if I find the person who owns it now, have I got a story for them! :-{)}