Well, I started to write a post about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance this morning, on my laptop. It was even fairly cleverly written, but being done directly on the Blogger screen. So, when this flaming piece of shyte from Microsoft crashed again, for the n’th time in the past week, I was pretty pissed off.
Robert Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the sixties I believe. It achieved the same certain sort of success that the Motorcycle Diaries movie did recently. It wasn’t at all about motorcycles, but that was the framework of his book.
One of my brothers is a journalist, and he’d interviewed Pirsig. I’d read the book, and thirty years later the only thing I can remember is that he was working on a BMW, and the front forks needed a shim. You could buy it from BMW for high cost. It was aluminum, of a certain thickness. I think it had a knurled top on it. Or, you could carrot-top a beer can and, as it happened, that was precisely the same materials and dimensions as the BMW part.
Form over function, or function over form? Which part would YOU choose.
Now obviously, if I’m riding a thirty year old bike, it’s possible that I’m just an afficianado, or it’s more likely that I ride it because that’s what I can afford.
So, when my daily commute goes awry because the bike malfunctions, I’ve been faced with some decisions. Put the freaking thing away in the bottom of Puget Sound, maybe by pushing it off a ferry late some night? Or, get down into the guts of the thing and figure it out.
That's all well and good, but have you ever been in a carport down on your knees with wrenches while it's a howling blizzard? I moved my old woodstove out there for psychological support, because it surely doesn't contribute any heat, but at least the snow's not on my head....More to come, gotta run
