Coming Along, I Hope

I'm about 2/3 of the way done with scheduling my old Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly column history into this blog. It has been a few years since I've looked at this stuff, even though it was always archived on my own website with Comcast for years. Comcast doesn't offer website space for new customers and, sooner or later, I'll become a new/old customer and the website will become history.

Funny how technology and communications "evolves" and changes the way we humans communicate. For years, I was convinced that I'd find a way to "monetize" my websites (I had several and at least a couple of them were intended to attract business.) Several friends and ex-corporate drones had figured out how to make a killer living as "consultants" and I figured I could dip into that pie, too. I had this sneaky angle that "nobody else figured out," simple explained as being a contrary old guy who solved problems without massaging the egos of the corporate CEO-CFO-whatevers. 30 years ago (Yeah, it was that long ago when Americans made stuff that people bought without government subsidies.), I managed a small manufacturing business. That company went from being a money-loser to knocking out a substantial profit on a substantial gross income in a decade and I had a lot to do with that evolution. I imagined that I could pedal that experience into a fairly regular income, after abandoning my last Misfortune 500 disaster area. I didn't image this strongly enough to count on it and I did my usual thing of cranking up a half-dozen "businesses" and waiting to see which panned out/paid out the most. Having done the for-hire consultant thing for 6 months in the early 90's, I knew how phony most of the crap was and how unlikely it would be that I'd actually find a business owner who wanted to build a business instead of scrap the assets into his pockets and run away before the buildings collapsed on his employees. The one skill Americans have lost above all of the rest of our problems is the ability to manage anything for long-term benefit. We just don't know how to build anything substantial any more.

And I was right. Business and manufacturing consulting turned out to be a non-starter. My income ended up coming from a collection of much less ambitious and mostly-recreational music and small business customers doing acoustic consulting, audio forensic work, and electronic design and repair work. The websites, including the website for the above businesses, didn't do squat for me. Everything I did came from referrals.

Now, I'm told that blogs are "old fashioned." I should be "communicating" on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or some other limited-text, attention deficit resource. "Nobody wants to read a whole thought," seems to be the direction humans are heading. I am sixty-five-fucking-years-old. I do not care what cliff humanity is driving towards. Like H.L. Menken said, "I write for the same reason cows give milk." There is probably a similar reason why I ride a motorcycle, but I can't think of it. (Of course, I didn't originate the Menken quote either.) If nobody reads what I write, I still write. It's a compulsion. That partially explains why I have a "resource page" where all of the crap I've written is held for publishers to pick-and-choose from that is always about 20 essays-full and I have at least another dozen mostly-written and waiting for a bit of editing before they are also added to the slush pile.

If you haven't caught the "code" yet, if there is a number ("#1001," for example) in front of a Geezer blog entry, it's an old article being archived to this blog. At first, I thought I'd just add the stuff from Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, since that magazine's current website status was the impetus for moving my stuff from the website to the blog. Since I got started with the process, I have decided to put everything I've had published here, too. That will include a couple of Motorcyclist how-to-ride articles, the Rider's Digest articles (in original form), and every bike review I've done in whole (rather than the published and edited versions). That will amount to about 200-and-counting articles, so the blog will be "busy" for a while (I'm up to #41 and that takes the blog into February of 2014).

I joked that, at this rate, I'll be publishing stuff on this blog long after I'd dead. My wife did not think that was either optimistic or funny. I do not come from a long-lived male heritage, so if the old stuff keeps the blog alive beyond 2015, I'm betting on the blog. And this time, my money is somewhere tangled up in this bet.

Writin' Reviews

I sent MMM's editors an article suggestion a few weeks back, "I think it would be cool to do an article about reviewing motorcycles with everyone putting in their two cents about the experience. Since hardly any of us like reviewing cruisers, that would be a principle part of the article; why we hate reviewing cruisers from everyone's point of view. On the plus side, everyone could talk about what they'd like to review and why." The editors resisted my "why we hate reviewing cruisers" suggestion for obvious (advertisers and money) reasons, but they were somewhat open to "a story on the challenges about trying to rude/write/review objectively." I think that's an interesting article, but I like my original idea better. So, I'm going to do it here. 

The hard fact is most motorcyclists dislike incompetent engineering. Bikers will ride any damn thing they think makes them look cool, but motorcyclists just want to go somewhere on two wheels with as little pain as possible and as much fun as they can stand. Fun is not a component of riding a cruiser. The damn things are just too awkward to even be considered motorcycles, let alone competent motorcycles. They are style-before-function toys and, as such, leave a lot to be desired in the riding-somewhere department. Currently, MMM has two people on staff who enjoy a day in a gynecologist's chair; editor Bruce Mike and new writer Michelle Moe. In a more rational world, that would set the magazine up for all of the cruiser reviews anyone should ever want to read. But there is a perverted strain in humans that insists everyone take a turn in the torture chamber. Hence, my two turns on cruiser crap.

An even odder fact about some of us at MMM is that we aren't all poor, young, starving writers desperate to hang on to our writing gigs. MMM doesn't pay squat for the written word and most of us are doing what we do for the magazine because it's fun. Opposed to the glossy magazine writers who are scratching out a living writing about motorcycles and desperately aware that practically everyone on the planet and on two wheels can do that job as well as they are doing it. To get some of us to review a motorcycle, it has to be worth messing with. For example, me. I have a 2004 Suzuki V-Strom 650 and a 2008 WR250X Yamaha. Nothing special there, but those two bikes do almost everything I can imagine wanting to do on a motorcycle. In fact, the only bikes I can imagine stuffing in the corner of my garage with the current two would be a relatively modern trials bike or the Zero DS. Otherwise, nothing made or imported into the US is as fun to ride as what I already own. That makes me less than excited about blowing a day or two on a motorcycle that I wouldn't own if I didn't have any motorcycles.

My lessened excitement level does a couple of things to and for the reader. Unlike those desperate kids, I say what I think not what the bike supplier wants me to say (and think). If I don't like a bike, I say so. Sometimes the magazine chooses not to publish what I say but I still said it and most readers find the hints of the bits that were cut in what's left. My general lack of enthusiasm for the Holy Grail of Motorcycling can be a downer for kids who desperately need a cheerleader. I played football. I was not a football cheerleader (like G.W. Bush or the other Texas nancyboy Perry). I don't do cheers for anyone or anything, except my kids.

Every once in a while, I get to ride something I like and when I like it I say it. The Honda CBR250R in the current issue, the Kawasaki Versys, the Suzuki Gladius, both of the KLR650 (2002 & 2008) models I reviewed, and the 650 V-Strom that I liked so much I bought one. The reviews that have attracted even more attention are the reviews that didn't make it into MMM but ended up here and on my website like the Suzuki TU250X. I'm really unfiltered on my own blog.

So, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Funnier than Comedy

The boys, Trey and Matt, explain their rationale for "The F-Word." It's even funnier than the original show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gYIAudAzjo.

Those dudes are an inspiration. Years ago, I read a Guitar Player Magazine interview with Tom Petty. He was talking about "maintaining an edge" in a world where every comfort, every desire, every thing he might want was available because he was a rich, famous rock star. In that world, writing about things that matter to real people is damn close to impossible. Petty said all he had to do to find something to write about was to look out a window (plane, train, tour bus, hotel room, or whatever) and look at what's going on in the real world. He'd find something to be pissed off about and go at it.

Matt and Trey are the gods of finding shit to be pissed off about. Role models for any writer trying to say something worthwhile.

Benchmarks and Standards and Mortality

I'm lucky. Mostly, my friends have managed to stay alive. Most of my family has been pretty healthy, outside of a few car crashes and the usual infirmities that go with passing 50 without collecting anything more than $200. I made it to 62 when I always assumed I'd die in some fiery rock & roll death or something equally painful before 30. I'm not broke. I live where I want to be living. My wife has stuck with me for 42 years and she still tolerates me. My kids don't say awful things about me to my face and they let me hang out with their kids. I can still swing a leg over a real motorcycle (although not a real dirt bike) and ride to work every half-decent day. I can even think about taking yet another idiot two-wheeled trip across some part of the country that I've never seen or want to see again.

There is nothing about any part of the above paragraph that was under my control. It's just luck that I ended up here from where I started off. Where my trip started was Dodge City, Kansas. I was born in eastern Kansas, but made it to Dodge when I was 2 and left when I was 17. Some of my family, including my parents, lived most of their lives in Dodge. "Get out of Dodge" has always had a special meaning for me. I am a bit of a connoisseur of Dodge City history, but I'm not much of a fan of the place, itself. The place has too many feedlots, packing plants, and corporate farms and too little respect for what makes a town a community. Dodge, like most of small town Midwest, is an example of what happens when lazy rich people convince hard-working middle-class and poor people to vote against their own interests.

A bit of my string of good luck came to an end this week. Sunday, my father died and my step-mother died almost a year ago, making my father a widower twice. Dad was almost 90 and had been pretty miserable for almost a decade. He'd survived a heart attack when he was 60-something and cancer around the same time, but surviving wasn't the same as thriving. He was incredibly active until his mid-60's and by the time he was 80 he was tied to an oxygen tank and more-or-less housebound.

Only the fact that he wasn't able to play tennis, first, and golf, finally, bother him about being stuck in Dodge. WWII was all the traveling and adventure Dad wanted to suffer. He was an LST pilot for the invasion of Italy, Normandy, and ended up venturing across the South Pacific on aircraft carriers for the end of the war. Most notably, in his mind, he and his gun crew were "famously" pictured watching a Kamikaze pilot miss their ship, the U.S.S. Petrof Bay, by a dozen feet or so and crash into the ocean. If you find that picture, zoom in and look for the dark haired young guy in officer's uniform with his mouth open. That's my father. Dad said they shot everything they had at that plane and didn't put a scratch on it. The pilot just missed a ship the size of a half-dozen football fields and missed landing on my father by a whole lot less distance.

Until he was in his 70's, Dad didn't talk about that war at all, ever. He had a chest full of Navy mementos, a few patches and medals, but it wasn't part of the world he shared with us. In fact, he didn't share all that much except his income, discipline, and humor. He loved teaching and, especially, coaching high school and he worked steady 80-90 hour work weeks doing that. He was very much the quiet, damaged war veteran that gets a bit more attention today and was expected to man-up and rejoin society without a hitch or complaint in 1946.

In 1966, I became a Vietnam War protester and we found ourselves permanently on opposite sides of politics. He could not understand my opposition to all-things-Johnson-and-Nixon and I was mystified by his disinterest in the foundations of that invasion. When he began to talk about his WWII experience, his loyalty to chicken-hawks became even more mystical when I learned that he was a dedicated non-combatant and only volunteered for Navy service with the personal and declared condition that he would never shoot at another man. The men who ran the guns under his "command" were completely in charge of what they shot at because he never ordered anyone to "fire." He just tried to keep them safe and supplied.

With that background, you might have some idea why he always asked, "What did I do to raise such an idiot son?" Whenever I took off on some harebrained motorcycle adventure, he was convinced that I had lost what few marbles he'd managed to pass to my collection of genes. He wasn't any more in favor of--or understanding of--my backpacking, ocean kayaking, bicycle racing, or the places I chose to live (especially California). He wanted to be as far from "excitement" as he could get and Dodge was definitely a place like that; outside of occasional tornadoes and flooding.

When he was hospitalized for cancer, Dad lost enough of his eyesight that he was unable to read normal and oversized print. I bought him books on tape from one of my favorite authors, David Halberstam, about one of Dad's favorite subjects, baseball; Summer of '49 and October 1964. Dad loved the Yankees his whole life, especially the Mantle/Maris Yankees. He barely listened to either books because he was so upset that Halberstam chose to print the uncensored language of the players. He was especially disappointed with Mickey Mantle.

Being the Midwestern-guilt ridden son that I am, I've always had my father and his morals and his personal standards in the front and back of my mind. Hard to believe, I know. My writing laptop's desktop picture has a collection of my whacked hobbies and the motto, "Write as though everyone you know is dead." It's an attempt to free myself from the constraints of disappointing those who love me; mostly my father. All of my favorite writers have, most likely, disappointed their parents with their subjects and language. It's almost a requirement for anyone who makes any kind of attempt to accurately reproduce or create believable characters.

Dad's reaction to Halberstam and Mantle made a mark on me. I have at least 3 books almost to the easy-to-finish stage that I've abandoned because I couldn't write them with Midwest Methodist censorship standards and couldn't stand the idea of re-writing them with that constraint. So, consider this fair warning. While everyone I love is far from dead, the one who influenced what self-censorship I obeyed is gone. It could get pretty honest from here on.