Need editing more to say about this passage.

[stilltrucking]

ZATAOMM
Part One, Two and Three


I took this machine into a shop because I thought it wasn't important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details and maybe having to order parts and special tools and all that time-dragging stuff when I could get someone else to do it in less time...sort of John's attitude.

The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, "Oh yeah. Tappets."

Tappets? I should have known then what was coming.

Two weeks later I paid their bill for 140 dollars, rode the cycle carefully at varying low speeds to wear it in and then after one thousand miles opened it up. At about seventy-five it seized again and freed at thirty, the same as before. When I brought it back they accused me of not breaking it in properly, but after much argument agreed to look into it. They overhauled it again and this time took it out themselves for a high-speed road test.
It seized on them this time.

After the third overhaul two months later they replaced the cylinders, put in oversize main carburetor jets, retarded the timing to make it run as coolly as possible and told me, "Don't run it fast."

It was covered with grease and did not start. I found the plugs were disconnected, connected them and started it, and now there really was a tappet noise. They hadn't adjusted them. I pointed this out and the kid came with an open-end adjustable wrench, set wrong, and swiftly rounded both of the sheet aluminum tappet covers, ruining both of them.

"I hope we've got some more of those in stock," he said.

I nodded.

He brought out a hammer and cold chisel and started to pound them loose. The chisel punched through the aluminum cover and I could see he was pounding the chisel right into the engine head. On the next blow he missed the chisel completely and struck the head with the hammer, breaking off a portion of two of the cooling fins.

"Just stop," I said politely, feeling this was a bad dream.

"Just give me some new covers and I'll take it the way it is."
I got out of there as fast as possible, noisy tappets, shot tappet covers, greasy machine, down the road, and then felt a bad vibration at speeds over twenty. At the curb I discovered two of the four engine-mounting bolts were missing and a nut was missing from the third. The whole engine was hanging on by only one bolt. The overhead-cam chain-tensioner bolt was also missing, meaning it would have been hopeless to try to adjust the tappets anyway. Nightmare.

The thought of John putting his BMW into the hands of one of those people is something I have never brought up with him. Maybe I should.

I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds.

The question why comes back again and again and has become a major reason for wanting to deliver this Chautauqua. Why did they butcher it so? These were not people running away from technology, like John and Sylvia. These were the technologists themselves. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. There was no obvious reason for it. And I tried to think back into that shop, that nightmare place, to try to remember anything that could have been the cause.

The radio was a clue. You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that's more enjoyable.

Their speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them. More money that way...if you don't stop to think that it usually takes longer or comes out worse.

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.


Not only did these mechanics not find that sheared pin, but it was clearly a mechanic who had sheared it in the first place, by assembling the side cover plate improperly. I remembered the previous owner had said a mechanic had told him the plate was hard to get on. That was why. The shop manual had warned about this, but like the others he was probably in too much of a hurry or he didn't care.

While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the digital computer manuals I was editing. Writing and editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of errors, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense out of them. But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that "Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions -- " and so on. That's it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual's toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.

On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don't want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

I suddenly notice the land here has flattened into a Euclidian plane. Not a hill, not a bump anywhere. This means we have entered the Red River Valley. We will soon be into the Dakotas.

[Barry]

I think I follow you on this, truck. Pirsig doesn't seem to be talking about detachment as a goal here at all, does he? It almost sounds like he's saying detachment is the problem.

Maybe some of us have gotten it all backwards in our hip, modern pop-Zen way of looking at the world, huh?

Peace,
Barry

[stilltrucking]

Detachement?

I don't know jack s*it about Zen Barry, just some bits and pieces I have picked up here and there from Jimboloco and Cecil, and SooZen among others.

They say there is a way of Zen called "The way of not getting it."

That must be my way.

Motorcycles are one thing.

Medicine is another.

I am hoping someday someone will write a book called Zen and The Art of Medicine for sophomore pre-med students.

Sadly there are many health clinics and doctors offices that are much like that motorcycle shop.

A long dreary story that I don't want to go into.


Camus has been a pretty good zen master for me too.

"What I wish for now is no longer to be happy but only to be aware." Camus

[constantine]

i can relate to the camus quote, and was thinking the same myself. the mechanic story reminded me of the movie - the hospital - with george c. scott.

[stilltrucking]

A hell of a movie that.

I heard a TV preacher say Camus was a suicide. Which is a lie.

I had the most amazing French instructor at the night college of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Read The Stranger in French.

I don't know what The Stranger has to do with this thread. Thinking about detachment maybe?


I have a feeling of tender indifference when I look up into the night sky.

And I felt ready to live it all again too; for the first time , in that night alive with stars and signs, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I was happy again

[Barry]

I don't know jack s*it about Zen Barry

You know, truck, I don't really know jack s*it about Zen either, just a few bits and pieces I've picked up along the way from books. But I know one or two things about attachment and detachment. And these are things I've learned through direct experience; always the best way to learn, in my experience.

I worked in repair shops for over ten years. I know the ones Pirsig refers to. I always got hemheroids working there. Too attached to everything but the work. Too detached from the work.

Maybe the way of not getting it is my way, too. Because I just don't get the whole "no mind" thing. I've spent all this time crafting my mind; why would I want to pour it out now? I just don't get that. Isn't that what the kill your television people say, that TV makes you mindless? Or are "no mind" and "mindless" totally different?

Peace,
Barry

[stilltrucking]

I got that bit about "the way of not getting it" From the website of a woman's Zen center. Her teacher told her "women can't get enlightenment.

I may have misread it cause when I went back the page looked different and I could not find "the way of not getting" when I did a text search.

And these are things I've learned through direct experience; always the best way to learn, in my experience.

"as for the rest of life, the so called experience, who the fuk has time enough for that?" Frederick

"---Ray" Nitzke the greatest middle line backer in the history of the National Football league. Paraphrased from geezer memory.

Zenberry, sounds good. Zenberry crunchy breakfast cereal. I think I will have a bow.

[stilltrucking]

Nietzsche had a sense of humor. So did Christ.

And god knows Buddha did too.

[mtmynd]

Barry:
... Because I just don't get the whole "no mind" thing. I've spent all this time crafting my mind; why would I want to pour it out now?

Invitation to a Stream :

http://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3026

[stilltrucking]

Warning this post is rate PG-70

Thanks for the link Cecil

I used to have a board on litkicks
Well I started a thread called me being a Peckerhead.

I kicked that old stream from four years ago to the top of your Sunday Stream Columns
I feel like streaming today. Because I got nothing more to say about monkeys with typewriters.

You can wait a long times
sometimes
for what you think is coming next
what you think you need
thanks for refreshing my memory.
It is
a good time to kick that old stream from four years ago
surfer mike had a word
for it
digging in the archives.
looking for custard pies.

I love custard
my mind is still loaded
my empty mind is in the wind.

a good stream bears repeating
thanks

[stilltrucking]

so many words to talk about what can't be talked about.

"the truth is a crown I feathers "I have heard'

Maybe it is a time of life issue
I don't know.


My first aha moment came when I was twelve years old.
And I have wandered so far from it.

thinking about a bit I read in Genesis Angels .
about William Burroughs undoing the consciousness that brought him to the moment of his wifes death.

[mtmynd]

Thx, truck, for drivin' this train.

I'm diggin' the view from where I sit.

[stilltrucking]

We got to ride this choo choo to Satori land
when everyone is awake at the same time
then the great pumpklin will return with chocolate easter eggs for everyone

thank you cecil.

at least you stopped calling me an old fucking fool
but I still think you were right about that.

my monkey likes to type
don't mean nothing
I am reaping the whirlwind of my profligate ways
mustard seeds
on stony soil
and all that
but I never met a fig tree I did not love.

we almost the same generation
amigo.
Glad you are digging it
me too.

got to go get my new pussy
but not for long
I knew she was going to try and stick that cat on me.
later
pater

these are my missing years
I think I died and went to hell for a while

I miss foolish pater aka marksman45 too
such a wise young one
a better man
than me.

[mtmynd]

((yeah... my words were uncalled for... they sounded too cheap... i apologize.))


i'm just screwing around shooting the clock waiting for 3:30 to come around (2:48+ now)... i went to pick up my prescription for my plavix when the gal at the counter told me my prescription expired, even tho it was shown to be good for another 2 months. she dug into the computer a little deeper and found the same drug under a different prescription number that will keep the plavix flowing for another 90 days. "Pick it up in two hours, sir" ...."Thank you!"

((i'm the old fucking fool, truck... honestly. just ask those in the know... they know... and they'll tell ya'... ))

[stilltrucking]

that was seven or eight years ago and you were right
what was jacking my jaws was something else that happened last year.

got to move fast
a line from kerouac I think
something about walking an earth that is disapearing under our feet.

Stumbling on you guys at litkicks the best thing that happened to my karma since i found the Quakers or they found me.

I wrote some crazy stupid stuff on litkicks, that is why I am sorry so much of those boards disapeared. And here on studio eight. 12,000 posts. I am going to take some time and read through them bookmark the dumbest ones start myself a "me being a dick head" thread the way I did on litkicks.

You know Cecil I have not even considered, even for a moment, killing anyone since 1984.

My life on the net in the 21st century
footprints on a beach
and the tide rushes in.

I think I feel a new sock puppet coming on

Myrna Minkoff


RE: PM

You been a good teacher for me. I want to keep as much of our dialogue as possible publick

I am sorry I mentioned it.

we got a long way to go and a short time to get there.
but
"if we fill every moment with love, the time will see that it is done"---jitterbug.

I am superstitious Cecil, I root against my team because I am afraid I will jinx them. That is why I think I was so sure McCain was going to win.

Now my superstition is for Obama's safety.

hammer hammer
to satoriland.