How not to record video while riding a motorcycle

Mount a GoPro or something. Don't fumble around with an iPhone in your clutch hand.

© Pseudocognitive

Zen Place 48: Somewhere overlooking I-5 in California's Great Central Valley

I won’t say where, exactly, because I forgot. It’s just a parking lot on top of a hill on the western edge of the valley. You can drink some water, if you brought some. It’s hot up there in the summer, and if you did not bring water then you should just keep going, unless you are falling asleep in which case get the hell off the highway because the life you save may be mine.

© Pseudocognitive

California's Sierra Nevada. Highways 4 and 108.

Update: Last rode these roads a while ago. Did Hwy 4 this summer, one time. Hwy 108 last year. My rides now number in the low to mid single digits each summer due to circumstances.

On this occasion, there were not many other vehicles. Encountered fewer than ten on the high elevation section of 4. A little bit of gravel in a couple of the hairpins, but nothing problematic if you're watching for it. Mosquito Lake now completely ice-free. National Forest Service employee drove by and offered us water when we were stopped by Silver Creek. Saw some senior citizens walking along the roadside in that stretch. No pedal-bikists in evidence. No deer observed either (although one did cross some other road on the way up--I forgot which). Saw no cattle in the roadway this time. Charlie Sheen did not attempt to run us over as he shoved his car with an urgency of hurt, slicing and bludgeoning his way through space and time, following old wheel ruts left a century and a half ago by foolhardy citizens who ate their neighbors’ thighs and tender parts. VERY nice weather up there; about 60 degrees and sunny at around 3pm. This was in mid-July; I have no idea about right now. Avoid the small town of Markleeville. That is all.

© Pseudocognitive

Tunnel through banality

Nothing new to report here, nothing to see—yet. Keep moving.
If necessary, go faster. 

Bypass consideration of the inherent banality of tunnels. Fool yourself; embrace the standard symbolism. Your passage out of comfortable amniotic insulation into the ultimate big air. Transition from one role or station into another. Attach some meaning, or you will suffer despair. Ride into the light. No, not the hypoxic endorphic light touted by anti-agnostics. The actual light. It's time for lunch.

© Pseudocognitive

Not nailing down reality on Morgan Territory Road. And a vulture.

Morgan Territory Road snakes its way over dry ridge lines and through a brief respite of shady oak woodlands and past old chaw-cheeked rednecks fixing you with menacing but impotent stares from astride their half-dead tick magnets. After a final stretch lined by homes of millionaires, Morgan Territory joins the terminus of Marsh Creek Road--a more interesting path in its upper regions--and dumps you unceremoniously into the town of Clayton. Nothing happens in Clayton worthy of examination; in that regard it is almost worse than Petaluma.

A full examination of this road would cover a lot of ground, but I favor prosciutto-thin slices of real-space, and if you require more I suggest that you get some travel brochures or go to a blog that people actually read. I don't try to understand or describe a road's true nature (if there even is such a thing). It would accomplish nothing to emphasize any particular aspect of what I think it is, or what it says to me about our place in an impersonal cosmos, or how it relates to the Way of Ants Crawling on Oak Bark.

This turkey vulture did not want to leave Morgan Territory Road just to provide me with an opportunity to record him as he took to the air. I don't have a GoPro or any other mountable camera. Riding while holding an iPhone in one hand is stupid. This is what we have, then--a stubborn carrion eater, a fixed wide angle lens on a cell phone, and a road. Infer nothing else. Sometimes, the search for meaning renders it moot.

© Pseudocognitive

ADD vs OCD

I do not ever see my typos until after I’ve hit the “publish” button. Read a post a day or two after it goes up and it should be a little less bad. I can’t see those typos or those clumsy sentences in real time, just as I didn’t notice this wrong-way driver until I looked at the iPhone picture I’d snapped. I am obsessed with errors, but I can’t pay close enough attention to see them in the moment. Hellhound on my trail.

© Pseudocognitive  
A respectful nod to the Immortal Robert Johnson.

A clumsy search for Zen

Apologies to Steinbeck

Big Oak Flat in Tuolumne County in California is not a poem or a habit or a dream. It does, however, emit a definite stink if you stand too close to the portable toilets in the gas station parking lot, and if you happen to be there at just the right time on a fine spring afternoon, the quality of light may indeed evoke a peculiar nostalgia for a time when you still believed  that making sense of life was something  in the ballpark named Possible. That’s about it, though; as far as deep philosophical pondering and the like, no matter what knothole you look through, I doubt you’ll come away with any insight into the human condition beyond what you already have. In fact, I am not at all certain that new insights have been possible since about 1945. So if you do look through that knothole, you’re just gonna see the same old wooded area behind the fillin’ station that’s always been there. Bring your own Zen in a sturdy steel vacuum flask tucked into your right saddlebag.

If you were to ask me how it was that I came to lose my mind, I might give you some obfuscatory answer like, “Don’t burden me with your extraneosities.”Or “Melvin eats blubber.” Or “Define mind.” Maybe I’d even try to answer truthfully, but the sad fact is that I simply do not know. So if you were to ask me that question—how did I lose my mind—I would simply say, “Yes.”

I came to terms with my loss of that which cannot be empirically proved and subsequently grew tired of my old gig—the one I’d been working at for a quarter century—so I quit and decided to become a private investigator. Not an officially licensed P.I. like Thomas Magnum, but one who looks into things without the strictures of state oversight or the constraints of having to answer to a client, or of even knowing what it actually is you’re investigating.
I decided to start this new line of work immediately, so on a brisk Saturday morning, I and my brother left Herd City and headed up into the hills. I will spare you any account of the places I have excessively described before, save for the mecca of western hemisphere truth-seekers, the wall at the Shell station in Jackson:

After searching in vain one last time for any small vestige of the old  Honda dealership where our dad bought our first dirt bikes back in '67, we left Jackson and headed south through some other wide spots. San Andreas was one of ‘em. We didn’t see much there except some tourists from Canada, and we were “aboot” to mock their vowels as needing to be voided, but I figured that would just be mean.

Southward, on to Sonora, and the mood there was edgy.
A kid in a straw Stetson flagged us down and said there was gonna be trouble in the center of town any minute, so we headed there directly. It turned out there was no trouble, really, just a few folks who took their talk radio a little too seriously and had trouble tracking reality (we were not yet familiar with their puppet masters, the Koch brothers, nor did we know the full extent of the vitriol and outright treasonous elements their movement would support in the near future). On this day they were just a small crowd jumping around trying to get vehicles to honk if they supported their bizarre cause.

It took us about ten minutes in heavy traffic to pass through town. I heard two people sound their horns, but one of them was just impatient at a couple of gawkers slowing down the line.  Most passers-by either ignored the protesters or gave them what is apparently the foothill version of the Bronx cheer. We put this case in the easy-solve column and concluded that although there are a few eccentrics (like anywhere else), most folks in Sonora are pretty level-headed. Little did we know then that nationwide, the numbers of the Koch brothers’ minions would continue to swell.

We got to Big Oak Flat later that afternoon, after stopping off in the Old West town of Chinese Camp to look at some deserted buildings. After filling up the bikes, we rode to the back of the lot to make use of the facilities. Ever since the big biker riot of ’06, the proprietors of the Big Oak Flat gas station have made customers use the outhouses.
I can tell you with near 100% certainty that these particular outhouses are the filthiest, most disgusting portable toilets on the west coast.

An old guy from the Goldwing riding club decides against opening that door.

The proprietors of this establishment will never get one more dime from me. If Tuolumne County could afford a health department, I’d call ‘em in on this. Sincerely. The one redeeming quality of that particular destination is the fence in the back. There you may find several different and conflicting views of the woods behind the lot. A comparison between these may yield higher truth. Or not.  Probably not, because I don’t think any of us can ever really know precisely where we stand on any continuum at any given moment, and the context we seek is, by necessity, embedded within contexts perceived and modified by countless others.  Still, pondering such things is what keeps me alive.

Post and photos © Pseudocognitive, with profuse apologies to John Steinbeck (and apologies of a medium nature to Robert M. Pirsig)

Your Feets Too Big

Your pedal extremities really are obnoxious.
One never knows, do one?
—The Immortal Fats Waller

Photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

Bob’s bobber

Bob rides his bobber. He had some guy build it and now he finally gets to ride. He took off early from his briefcase job in a stifling high rise. He’s waitin’ on his patch he ordered special from some outfit in Hong Kong—twenty bucks on eBay. He intends to be one bad bobber-ridin’ Bob.

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.