Gremlins appeased and thoughts on motorcycle commuting.

The electrical gremlins that have been keeping me from riding seem to have been appeased for now. I replaced the regulator/rectifier unit, and now the charging system works. I'm still breathing a sigh of relief every time I hit the starter button and the engine rumbles to life. I was riding the other day to Home Depot, and a fuse blew, but I managed to walk to a gas station and get a replacement set. I looked at the blown fuse when I got home, and it was just corroded because the case was cracked. It probably hadn't been replaced since the bike was manufactured.

That's the thing with old bikes. Mine's a 2002, and it's been stored outside for a significant portion of its service life. So I worry about things like corrosion on electrical leads, frayed insulation, dry rot on tires and belts, gaskets degrading. Rust. You live in Florida, you're gonna get rust.

There's a persistent oil leak from the head that I've been keeping track of, since I don't have time these days to take off the tank, remove the head cover, and poke around in the engine. Fortunately, I know where the leak's coming from, and I've done this kind of thing before. I'm not going to sell the bike until everything's fixed.

After a year of riding, both as a means of commuting and as a means of recreation, I can say this: a bike is not a car. If all you need to do is get yourself and very little cargo around, a bike is a great way to meet your needs. If you have to be on time anywhere during the rainy season, budget fifteen extra minutes and make sure you have rain gear. I have a full set (pants, jacket, boots) and I keep everything in my backpack in a set of waterproof camping bags. I've ridden from Palm Harbor to Tampa in a thunderstorm and stayed dry.

But if you need to (1) commute long distances, (2) carry more stuff than can fit into a backpack or pair of saddlebags, or (3) carry someone else, a motorcycle is not an ideal commuter vehicle. I've made it work, but your mileage will most certainly vary.

Asking the Internet for answers

Sometimes I'm pretty sure the only reason I keep writing this blog is because I want to make up for years of typing my questions into Google and hoping it comes up with answers. This was a habit that I picked up during a particularly bleak time in my life, and like smoking, it's been hard to shake.

This isn't a question of the time wasted in trying to pick signal out of the massive noise that is the Internet; it's unhealthy because you're never going to find satisfactory answers from other people's questions. No one asks exactly the same questions.

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.

Of oil slicks and overreaction

The past three weeks have been very trying, and I feel I've learned some serious lessons, chief among which is 'calm yo shit down, motherfucker!'

Yesterday I installed a new brake caliper on the Noble Savage. The brake pads were worn down to the metal backing plates, and fortunately, I caught the problem before it could do serious damage to my front brake rotor. Because if there's a procedure I'd rather perform on a motorcycle, it's replacing brake pads over replacing a brake rotor. For one, I don't have to take the front wheel off, and for another, I only have to remove four bolts, and not those four bolts plus those for the axle (at least one huge bolt) and rotor (about five of those suckers). And if there's any truth I can impart about motorcycles kept outdoors, is that you're gonna have frozen bolts.

Lesson #1: (more like a reminder) a little foresight saves a lot of time and frustration. If I caught the brake pads before they started to blacken my brake rotor and make weird skiffing noises when I tried to stop, I could have avoided damaging my old caliper in an attempt to change the pads, and I could have enjoyed some seriously awesome riding over the weekend, instead of being cooped up at home waiting for my parts to arrive via USPS.

Now to overreaction. My brakes work well. Very very well. I not only put fresh pads in, cleaned the rotor, but also bled the brake fluid and put all new fluid in the master cylinder. So now my front brake responds to input with considerable alacrity; it's way easier to stop a motorcycle with brake pads than without them.

Riding to Kaleisia today, I was caught in the usual five-o-clock weekday traffic snarl on Bruce B. Downs. The thing about traffic snarls is that they tend to deposit oil on the roads: thousands of cars an hour leaking a few drops here and there tends to leave wild purple-and-blue splashes of motor oil on wet roads, and the intersection of Bruce B. Downs and 131st was something out of Timothy Leary's wildest hallucinations.

No good, I thought, frowning underneath my helmet as I coasted towards the intersection. I cautiously applied my newly-functioning brakes on the rain-and-oil slick roads, and felt the bike lose control. The front wheel locked up, and I started skidding. Fortunately, I was only going about 10mph, and I could arrest the motion with my boots. If it happened at 70mph, I would be typing this from the emergency room. Because if there's one thing that gives motorcyclists nightmares, it's losing traction, particularly with the front wheel.

Source: hellforleathermagazine.com

Rear wheel traction loss is a relatively easily recoverable situation: just release the rear brake, apply a little throttle, and the bike sorts itself out. Failure on part of the bike to sort its own vector out usually results in a 'low-side' crash, in which the majority of damage occurs to the bike and the rider's extremities.

Front wheel traction loss, on the other hand, is really bad. The solution to this is to release the front brake, and hope to the gods that the bike sorts its shit out, because failure to do so results in a 'high-side' crash, in which the rider is thrown from the bike and goes skidding on the road. And if there's one place I don't want to end up, it's skidding on a rain-and-oil slick road in the middle of rush hour traffic, 350-pound bike skidding right behind me.

Lesson learned: with enough training, you can be remarkably calm in life-threatening situations. The worst damage I could have sustained from that crash is some seriously bruised legs and maybe a broken bone or two. The part of my brain prone to overreaction didn't have a chance to put its vote in before the polls closed: my training took over and its only goal was to regain traction. Ten feet later, the front wheel stopped castering wildly and I was back in full control of the motorcycle. My pulse didn't go above 85 until I rounded the corner and realized: I could have been seriously hurt back there.

This brings me to training: in emergencies, you almost never rise to superhuman levels of competence. Instead, you fall back on your training. Training interrupts the processes inherent in us to overreact. It instills in you a reflexive sort of reaction that builds off of the experiences and reflections of those who trained you. We practiced locking up our brakes in motorcycle training, and I've almost never had to fall back on that training, but I'm glad I can access that training when it's necessary.

So, consider this: think about a time recently when you overreacted, and think about how you can train yourself (or be trained by someone) to not overreact next time. For me, it's largely in social situations when I overreact, particularly in dating, where my usual response is to hang on tight, even well past the red-flag-bestrewn path to misery and mutual resentment. Or to not react at all, because I emotionally get off on aloofly disregarding signals. Both arise from the same egotistical defensiveness I'm trying to train out of myself, one day at a time. Because it's just like riding a motorcycle: sometimes it's wise to hit the brakes, and other times, you're better off trusting to ballistics and friction.

Ikigai

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese word that basically means 'why you get out of bed in the morning'. I've been searching for mine ever since that word became a part of my lexicon, because without ikigai, life becomes a series of disconnected moments that don't make much sense, except in distantly removed hindsight, and usually then with some considerable regret.

I'm turning 27 soon: three times three. Three is a very significant number to me, because it reminds me of the uselessness of dichotomous thinking. Good and evil, love and hate, black and white --- these categories almost never apply in the real world. There's always a third option.

So, I submit to you, dear reader, my ikigai, a couple of years in the making: I want to map foodsheds. I want to be a net benefit to everyone around me. I want to love without expectation, care without judgment, give wisely but freely of myself in the service of those who come after me. All of this is linked, because all of this is my life.

Source: Columbia University

So back to mapping foodsheds: the reason I think this is a worthy reason to get out of bed in the morning is because we've always lived in a world of limited resources. I'm getting rather tired of hearing people talk about relocalization and alternative economies as though they were unmitigated goods for everyone. They won't be. The future will suck for almost everyone, but it'll be worth the fuss, because the alternative is Malthusian misery for all but a very vicious and lucky few --- and that's not the kind of world I want to see for those who come after me.

Peak oil and climate change have gone from warnings to realities. If you're under the age of 27 (and most of my readership is), you've never experienced a year that wasn't abnormally hot compared to the last hundred-fifty or so years since climate records started to be consistently kept. That's sobering.

These are realities, people, and this is what I'm going to do about it: I'm going to contribute to projects already underway to assess the agricultural capacity of arable land in the United States, and I'm going to come up with a figure, even a rough estimate, of what kind of life we can expect on what amount of arable land we have left. I can tell you right out: it's not going to be a pretty number. The seven billion humans on this planet only exist because we're afloat on a bubble of cheap energy, and we're coming to the end of that cheap energy. If others want to talk about relocalizing, then the least I can do is give them solid facts and figures to substantiate their discussions.

My work in food waste? Connected --- we want to minimize waste and maximize our use of what we discard, in order to support more localized and less energy-intensive food systems. Motorcycles? It's an unfortunate reality of American existence that unless you happen to live in New York or San Francisco or Boston, your life without motor transportation will be considerably limited, and I choose the less-expensive and riskier option. Growth and destiny in interpersonal relationships? In a resource-limited world, all we truly have is each other. No thought, word, or deed is isolated from context, and nothing is every truly futile. Good night.

Desmodromic

I ask the world:

Why did you send me?
She answers:
If you lay aside all your fears
And cut you own cords,
Then fighting will be like dancing!

My vision goes red.
My fists clench and I tremble.

She is beautiful.
She is. Beautiful!

I ask the world
Atop fire and steel,
Perched uneasy, hanging free.
She whispers:
If you went this moment
Beyond fate and fear,
Where would you go?

My heart skips.

I feel faint.

Where would I go?

Where would I go?

Now I'm the One That's Cool

I'm watching a music video right now making the rounds in various blogs (e.g. the Irritable Vowel, Hank Green's video blogs) called "Now I'm the One That's Cool". It's a song about how awesome it is to be a huge fucking geek, once you move past the marginalization that many juvenile geeklings experience growing up.

Not because society necessarily rewards us for intrinsically being obsessed with things (particularly if you use a very limited metric, like money), but rather because we know something that a lot of people don't: that one of the most effective tricks to stop feeling lonely and sorry for yourself is to get the fuck over yourself and think about something that's way bigger or stranger than your limited experience of being human and become all about doing that.

So: being a huge fucking geek is its own reward. And here's the fun part: your personal satisfaction, once you move beyond the personal insecurities bred by living in a world of social superficialities, you will probably attract others to you, because they're looking for the same thing and don't know how to get it. In certain limited contexts, that's called 'game'. You not only have a surprising control over how you turn out over time --- you can even control how other people see you.

And that's fucking cool.

Destiny/growth: the odds are good, but the goods are odd

So here's an interesting perspective from social psychology on the differences in motivations, goals, and beliefs in relationships: people orient themselves on a continuum between destiny and growth. In brief, destiny-oriented people concern themselves with determining the status and potential of nascent relationships from the beginning, while growth-oriented people emphasize the process, and place more energy into maintaining and growing the relationship over time, despite setbacks and challenges.

Growth and destiny: differences and definitions

Destiny-oriented people believe that relationships are 'meant to be', and move on very quickly when it their partners deviate from their ideals. They tend to develop feelings of love very quickly, but also move on quickly when their partners deviate from their ideals. They also believe that their personal qualities (intelligence, attractiveness, character) are relatively fixed. The sea being as full of potential fish as it is, they feel it's more worthwhile to abandon an unsatisfying relationship to risk the same with a new relationship.

Growth-oriented people believe that initial compatibility is not as important and focus instead on overcoming mutual challenges. For them, relationships are strengthened by challenges, and so they tend to delay their assessments of the viability of their relationships until they realize that no further growth between the two partners is possible. They are less likely to end a relationship of their own initiative, and are less likely to engage in casual (i.e. non-committed) romantic relationships than destiny-oriented individuals.

I'm taking these definitions, by the way, from this paper on the subject. It's a good starting point for anyone wanting to know more about how growth and destiny are interwoven with other personality traits, including locus of control over personal qualities.

The good, bad, and beautiful

But here's the catch: neither orientation is inherently good or bad. Putting on my anthropologist's hat for a second, it rarely pays to describe what people do as 'good' or 'bad'. It's far more useful and satisfying to understand the motivations and beliefs underlying people's actions and interactions.

So, destiny-oriented people can get caught up in an endless cycle of serial monogamy, moving from partner to partner in an endless quest to find 'The One', but people who lean more toward this orientation are also more willing to take risks, and sometimes, it works out. Case-in-point: my first serious girlfriend was a strongly destiny-oriented person. We saw some lovely qualities in each other, fell in love quickly, and were talking about possibly marrying each other when we graduated college. But when I deviated from her ideal, she left me and moved onto someone else later that week, someone far closer to what she was looking for. She's now happily married to that person.

Growth-oriented people run the risk of staying in unhealthy relationships well past the point when they should have moved on. My mother is a strongly growth-oriented person; her first husband (my biological father) was an abusive alcoholic, but she stuck with him right up to the point when he became a threat to our lives, and in subsequent relationships, she wound up with some pretty dubious men, put enormous amounts of effort in keeping those relationships going, and only moved on when those efforts jeopardized my sister's and my well-being. She acknowledges the imperfections in my current step-father, but they both have made it work for more than seven years, and there's something to be said for that.

Growth, destiny, and society

Both destiny and growth orientations are traits that are viewed positively in our society --- consider the connotations of the expressions 'love at first sight' and 'love will find a way'. Best is to find a balance between the two extremes. I, like my mother, am a strongly growth-oriented person. But I honestly can't think of any one of the relatively few people I've dated who I'd consider to be a growth-oriented individual. This is at least partly because my delayed social development means I have a relatively small sample size relative to my peers, which confounds analysis, and so I'm curious to see what would happen if I wound up with someone who's more into the 'love will find a way' side of things, rather than the 'love at first sight' trope.

Problem is, I'm drawn to destiny-oriented people. They tend to have qualities I find attractive --- optimism, initiative, transparent motivations, clear goals. If you and I have been between the sheets together, it's probably because I saw these things in you and wanted to learn something of these qualities for myself. Because it's all a wonderful learning experience for me, and I always come out a little wiser.

But I think about my close friends, and that's where my growth orientation is really obvious. If you and I are really close, it's extremely likely that when I first met you, I disliked you. In fact, I can't think of any one of my good friends that I initially liked. But you and I stuck it out, and I'm at a point now where I've put enough effort into enough such friendships that if I were to try and count the number of people I genuinely love and am loved by, I'd run out of fingers. There's something to be said for that, but I'm not sure I can figure it out tonight.

I'm gonna be in my bunk...

Why I do this to myself.

So I just got out of my first meeting with my thesis committee and it went wel---OH SWEET MERCIFUL BUDDHA WHY DO I DO THESE THINGS TO MYSELF?!? Why couldn't I get a job or a debilitating drug addiction or a couple of illegitimate kids or whatever normal people do? Because I don't know what normal people do! That's why I'm an anthropologist's apprentice: to find out.

So that still leaves the question: why do I do these things to myself? I'll tell you why: because I love knowledge am embroiled in a torrid affair with knowledge, one in which there are no safe words, and one in which I have abandoned all sense of reason, balance, and moderation. I am the sub, and Mistress Sophia is flicking my switch, and you know what --- that's knee-tremblingly hot.

Much in the same way that Hannibal Lecter could appreciate a fine Mozart sonata with his liver-and-fava-beans casserole (editor's note: please find better analogy next time), I find an inherent beauty to parsimonious explanations to complex and often incoherent realities regarding humankind.

That's why I'm in anthropology. It's not the dubious joy of explaining to people that I don't dig up dinosaur bones or hunt for treasure, and it's not the extra initials I get to put after my name after I've gone through the rites of passage, and it's not the ability to use polysyllabic words when I'm Boris Yeltsin drunk --- it's the scaffolding upon which I can hang my understanding of human beings, answer my questions, and use said understandings and knowledge to save the world.

I am an anthropologist. I am both an instrument to gather data, and a part of the sample from which I derive my data. I am human. I study humans. I'm studying you right now, in a totally ethical and non-creepy way. So open up, baby bird, because I'm about to show you the LIFE OF THE MIND!

So stay tuned.