Turn It Off

@MarkDePue: The news channels have mastered the art of cramming one hour's news in an 8 hour cycle. ~Jim Koval

Realms Beyond Reason

"I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there." ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Loneliness

"It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways, jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First, the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV." ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Paradox

"Nothing personal in it." Here is a paradox. On the one hand, to be a good mechanic seems to require a personal commitment: I am a mechanic. On the other hand, what it means to be a good mechanic is that you have a keen sense that you answer to something that is the opposite of personal or idiosyncratic; something universal. In Pirsig's story, there is an underlying fact: a sheared off pin has blocked an oil gallery, resulting in oil starvation to the head and excessive heat, causing the seizures. This is the Truth, and it is the same for everyone. But finding this truth requires a certain disposition in the individual: attentiveness, enlivened by a sense of responsibility to the motorcycle. He has to internalize the well working of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. The Truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators." ~Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

The New Basis of Civilization

"In a wholesale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto "Be frugal and free," the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending. One symptom Lears points to is a 1907 book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization,by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the disciplinary (emphasis mine) process. As Lears writes, "Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in a harness, meeting payments regularly." Robert B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

Mechanic's Feel

"There's what's called, "mechanic's feel," which is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe to those that don't; and when you see someone working on a machine who doesn't have it, you tend to suffer with the machine." ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A Moral Victory

I had an awesome week away for a little Western UP snowmobiling and friend time which is always a therapeutic exercise. My time upon the return before heading back to the saltmines today was spent largely examining my bellybutton and trying to gird for my return to the ranks of the gainfully employed. I did allow myself a little shop time Monday to mock the motor into place on the hardtail project. I set an old superglide tank on just to make the bike look a little more like a bike for imagination's sake. The plan is to run 3.5 gallon tank shift fat bobs but setting the motor in place made the process seem a lot less impossible. I'm happy....