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If this is art, I’m finger painting.

There’s a bit from a book that I’ve thought of during every frustrating repair I’ve tackled in nearly 20 years. This funny, dry little vignette that’s probably kicked off a million blog posts by home mechanics illustrates the relationships between meaning, abstraction and the physical world with the extraction of a single stripped side cover screw:

You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you’re inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It’s just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

Robert Persig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I dunno how many times the fact that there aren't any bridges nearby has saved the KLR from a watery doom. I guess I could dump it into the bay, but eight blocks is a long way to push the damn thing.

The latest issue has been the back bolts on the KLR’s luggage rack. The KLR's infamous for paint-shaker vibration that likes to back bolts out and scatter them along the highway, but the luggage rack bolts like to mix things up for the sake of variety by shearing off down in the recesses of the rack plate instead. You may not notice the first one going, but once the second does you'll sure as hell notice the first time you brake hard and the rack flips forward on its hinged front and catapults whatever you have secured to it right into your lower back.

"If this is art, I’m finger painting."Keep reading

Y’ALL. I met Elspeth Beard!

Yup. I met Elspeth Beard, the first British woman to ride a motorcycle around the world! My buddy invited me along to a local appearance for the tour of her new book, Lone Rider.

I ride alone almost all the time, but I was kinda startled that so many of the questions people had for her about riding by herself are the same questions I get 35 years later. I wondered if after all this time, with a family and fascinating career and all these amazing group rides around the world, she still rides by herself.

Could she have outgrown it somehow?

Could whatever it was that led her out on her own have gone away?

If so, would that happen to me someday?

Fortunately I had just enough beer in me to get over my shyness and raise my hand during the Q&A session to ask, “Do you still ride alone?”

“All the time,” she said. “I prefer it.”

I think I actually glowed.

When I came up to the signing table, I complimented her on her very fancy knit sweater and asked her if it was handmade. I knew it was; I could tell from the construction, but you can’t easily corner strangers to ask why their armscye looks so good. She beamed and told me her friend had made it years ago and that it was her favorite, and when I complimented her on taking such good care of it — it looked much, much newer than it really was, even though it was clearly well loved — she started turning her arms around to point out all the places she’d darned and mended it.

Of course the woman who disassembled and rebuilt her bike from the ground up twice mends her own knits.