The most important tool in motorcycle maintenance

A notebook.

Fixing motorcycles is an exercise in deductive reasoning and hypothesis testing. Failure to carefully observe and record your observations can cost you hundreds of dollars and long periods of time without the comforting thrum of a motorcycle beneath you. Your moves are only as good as your observations, and recording your observations has a multiplier effect, since you can watch trends. This is particularly true for electrical work and compression tests.

For instance, I've been puzzling my way through a mysterious electrical issue on the Noble Savage, in which the battery would slowly drain out, which would leave me stranded at any number of gas stations in the Hillsborough County area until I could get a jump start. Very frustrating. Fortunately life right now is simple enough that I can ride a bicycle to all my engagements.

Electrical issues on motorcycles tend to involve the following components/systems (in increasing order of complexity/cost-to-fix/pain-in-the-ass):

1. frame grounds
2. battery
3. wire connections
4. regulator/rectifier
5. stator

And electrical problems don't necessarily have to restrict themselves to just one thing. My observations suggest that my issue is a combination of battery (appears to be damaged) and rectifier (one of the wire connectors is fused and probably shorting the system). So my first step is to order a new rectifier and load-test/replace the battery. Fortunately the latter is under warranty, and I save receipts.

The problem a lot of people have in maintaining their own motorcycles is lack of efficacy. Motorcycles are relatively complex machines, and for people not familiar with the principles of internal combustion, electricity, fluid dynamics, and chemistry, cracking open a motorcycle for the first time is a scary experience. You're afraid of screwing up. Understandable.

Safeguard against that by purchasing a good service manual for your exact year, make, and model of bike (for reference and step-by-step instruction), and record everything you do in a notebook. Most service manuals leave a few pages in back blank for note-taking anyways --- so there you go. Use them wisely, so that even if you do screw up, then you phone a knowledgeable friend, you can say something more substantial than 'OMG I SCREWED UP HELP ME'.

The regulator/rectifier is supposed to arrive in a few days. I'm going to (1) bypass the fused wire connector block to eliminate any possibility of a short at that point, (2) check my connections and grounds one more time, (3) replace the battery if it doesn't pass the load test, and (4) install the new rectifier. If none of that fixes my problem, then it's the alternator --- expensive and a pain in the ass to fix, but doable with the tools and time I have available.

The problem with English.

If there's one thing I can say with some authority (as an anthropologist's apprentice, amateur linguist, and sometimes lover), it's that for all the words we've adapted from other languages, the fact that we only have one word for 'love' tells us something distressing about ourselves. Not that speakers of languages who more finely divide the semantic space occupied by 'love' are in any way more likely to be kinder, more compassionate, or selfless than speakers of English, but it makes you wonder about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and how much it might apply here.

For those of you who aren't huge into linguistics or the cognitive social sciences, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the language we use shapes our reality. It's overly simplistic to claim that because the Inuit allegedly have fifty words for snow (they don't), they somehow are more finely-attuned to the reality of snow than the experience of this Florida boy, who has only one word for 'snow'.

The word 'love' means a lot to me, but only because I'm so fascinated by it. Its semantic space --- the range of possible meanings --- is nothing short of breath-taking. I love my motorcycle. It doesn't mean that I'm somehow committed to it. But it does mean that I devote a lot of time and energy into maintaining that relationship, since it plays a large role in my daily life (it's my car, basically). And that's one possible case where I can use the word 'love': the result of having sunk a lot of time in keeping something up, and being glad for having learned something by that process.

More to the point, love means about a dozen different things. I love my mother, but not in the same way I love those who I call 'friend'. I love myself, but not in the same way I love the women I've smooched. I love having money, but not in the same way I love knowledge and wisdom. Love is tied up in questions of attachment, status, power, support, dependency, psychopathology, and biology, and yet we only have one word for it.

Weird, huh? We have to resort to borrowing words from other languages. CS Lewis did that when talking about the ancient Greek use of words like eros and agape. Pema Chödrön does that when she's talking about metta. Or using elaborate circumlocutions to describe the different kinds of love: I just did that in this post. Or transferring meanings to other words in our language: the New Testament does that a lot.

Love is all around us, but we can't easily describe it.

Give up your goals.

Give up your goals. You'll find that even if you do reach them, you'll never feel like you've arrived. It seems that we replace one goal with another as soon as we reach it, and that in part can be explained by how the reward systems in our brains work: in effect, it's an addiction. You need an ikigai, but that doesn't necessarily imply that you have goals. It just means you have a reason to get out of bed.

Give up your goals. Focus instead on directions. One benefit of that way of thinking is that you don't feel quite the same need to torture yourself because you set out to do something and continue to do so well past the point of meaninglessness. I liken this to the Buddhist monkey trap parable: a small hole is drilled into a hollow log, a piece of fruit is placed inside the hole, so that when a monkey grabs the fruit, he can't remove his hand from the trap without letting go. And he won't let go because he's attached to the fruit.

Another great thing about direction is that you can always change it when it no longer proves growthful. Or you can keep going down that road, even though you're suffering for it, because you recognize it as a growthful process and not some symbolic measure of your worth as a human being. Journey, not destination. You cannot fail when you abandon your goals and instead seek only directions.

Slash and burn.

I'm in Denver, mountains in sight from the hostel window. I've spent a lot of time lately in the peaks, since it's healthy to go there once in a while and shake off the dust from the valley. I've changed my social environment and my residence, slammed the door on a lot of unsatisfying relationships, and have not made any particular effort to foster new ones. That's fine. But I have to return to the valley sometime.

I had a thought just before I sat down to write this, so I went outside for a smoke. Ran into an old colleague I almost never see. The fact that she was happy to see me, someone she only sees once a year at most, lifted my spirits, and I walked back upstairs. An image came to my mind on my way back up: a meteor punching through our thin eggshell of an atmosphere at a window-shattering 40,000 mph, a small boy standing on a mountaintop with a baseball bat, poised and ready to knock that rock back into space.

I asked myself: whatever happened to that boy?

I call it 'slash-and-burn agriculture of the soul'. Akhilandeshvari, a relatively less well-known Hindu goddess whose name means something like 'never not unbroken', would likely appreciate this metaphor: what I mean by it is that people like me tend to push themselves very very hard in frantic hot-blooded pursuit of a goal, an ideal, a target, and burn their souls to cinders in the process. But like the ashes from acres of macheted and burnt scrub, these are times in my life that ablate everything that needs torn down and rebuilt. Friendships that need to fade, jobs that need re-defined, plans that need re-drawn.

When I got on the plane yesterday, I felt like my entire grad school experience was an unmitigated failure. And, taken from a certain set of standards, it just might be: I have no publications to my name, no awards won, no exotic adventures gone on in the name of ethnography. Anthropology was interesting to me for a while, particularly since it answered some key questions I had when I first pursued it, but dammit, I want to slay some fucking dragons, and anthropology hasn't inspired me to slay any dragons lately. It did when I first moved into the Birdhouse, and I wanted to be Philippe Bourgois. I played chess with drug dealers and shared shitty beer with people who have it way way worse than I do, as a white male (albeit from a less than economically privileged background). It was good. But that time has been over for a while.

As for what's to come now, who knows? It's exciting, like looking at your hometown receding in the distance from under the wing of an Airbus. I might see snow here tomorrow. That's exciting. I didn't bring my boots. That's fine. I'm here with the all the cool-headed detachment of someone who's already broken up with someone, but just hasn't pulled the trigger yet. I'm slashing and burning like crazy these days, and marveling that such green shoots can spring up so quickly from between the still-smoldering cinders. Let it burn.

Unlearning masochism.

I'm feeling myself slide into that all-too-familiar state of burnout. Like an engine run at redline a few miles without oil, I went from drumming along fine last week to being absolutely drained this week. A few weeks ago I began to notice this sinking feeling every time I sat down and planned out my week: "Who am I gonna screw over this week because I overcommitted?" My students? My advisor? The students she charged me with organizing undergrad research? My friends? It's almost always the last. Because it's a positive feedback loop: you cut social engagements because of your workload, and disappear from the lives of your loved ones for long periods of time. They learn that it's futile to call you because you never answer.

This is where you fight back.

Last semester I experienced full-blown psychosomatic revolt --- one weekend, my body refused to let me get out of bed. This semester, the rebels are threatening to burn down the presidential palace and execute me by firing squad if I don't concede to their demands.

It's too easy to replicate the way that your fellow grad students, co-workers, and bosses valorize burnout, as though it's proof you're a hard worker. It's not. It's proof you're a spineless idiot and a poor planner. Ironically, it's the grad students who served in the military that have the least masochistic attitudes to work. One I know works 30 hours a week while pursuing a doctoral degree, and still somehow finds time to bike across the country. Utterly, unspeakably badass.

The biggest valorizers of the burnout cycle seem to be those who still have something to prove. You know, like me. No more. No more.

Perfectionism and failure.

Hi. I'm Sven, and I'm a perfectionist.

Looking back, I know why: I got more validation from what I could do than from who I was. Key figures in my life made it clear to me the costs of being less-than-perfect. My grandmother was one of those people, and though I've cut her completely out of my life (for better or for worse), I still act in ways that originated in my frantic avoidance of missing her expectations. Not just her: teachers praised me for being really fucking smart. My peers too. That was all I heard when I was a kid, and I still wince when I hear that.

So perfectionism is why we fail. We internalize the abusive discourses of this society that compel you to avoid failure at all costs, and I don't know about you, but it's cost me dearly: I've run from relationships, turned down jobs, cancelled my grand plans, and am ruining my health. This cannot be my life anymore. Even if I 'fail'.

So what Buddhism has to say about my condition is that I'm suffering because I'm attached to striving. You can hardly blame me: my culture undervalues compassion in favor of efficacy, and tells us that without the approval of others, we are losers. Buddhism gently disagrees and offers a third way between mindless self-indulgence and the self-inflicted suffering of asceticism. Life sucks, and it's mostly because we make it suck for us and for others.

More on this sometime later, but I had a good birthday, and this string of bad days is really hammering some things home.