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on the paws of monococque kittens
May. 10th, 2009 10:44 amI'm off on vacation this week, and it's my favorite kind of vacation, the kind I always enjoyed long before financial panic brought the neologism "staycation" into common circulation. I'll be puttering around the house, cleaning and fixing things, attending to little tasks that I've let slide for too long, and heading out to West Virginia a little later in the week to attend to some of the needs of my slumping mountainside retreat there before it's time to go back to the day-to-day.
It's also the week my new acquisition will be coming home with me, after a lot of paperwork and title and tags and other bureaucratic minutia finally settle, and I'm making a specific and targeted effort not to be like a hyperactive little boy, vibrating like a tuning fork at the base of the xmas tree as he waits forevvvvver for his parents to haul themselves out of bed.
I've bought a jet-black year-old Genuine Stella motor scooter with a mere 502 miles on the clock, against all the advice and eye-rolling from my two-wheeled mentor, Old Bean, who's still convinced that I've made a tragic, expensive mistake. I've never really been a proper motorcyclist, at heart, my love of old machinery notwithstanding, but Old Bean managed to arouse my interest in the subject by virtue of being the kind of motorcyclist I'd have been had I had the resources and patience to approach the field with a skeptic's eye, simultaneously absurdly-practical and still a motorized romantic, an intentional and well-practiced Blake on wheels.
When I'm asked, rarely as it happens, what I believe in, I almost always opine I'm a clockwork taoist, which is to say that I know what I know of the world because of my sense and awareness of the way things flow when they're let to flow without fussiness and excessive intervention, even as I doubt the supernatural. Coming of age, especially in the last decade, I've found my truths in that flow more and more, and trusted, increasingly, in how the fluidity of being like a reed beats the hard and the unyielding, and I've slipped away from that understanding of late, so I've had to relearn some of the way of it—the watching, the waiting, the surrender of realizing that desire sometimes reflects that undercurrent and pull directing you back to the channel that was made for you.
The Stella is a ridiculous object. I fully accept that, and embrace it in the way I embrace all of the ridiculous things I adore. It's, oddly enough, the exact embodiment of the second motorbike to set me free, almost twenty years ago; a battle-hardened beast of a Vespa P200E that I took on insane, absurd adventures, and that felt like a part of me, a piece of hardware that was just right in every visceral way. They're built at a factory in India that used to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Piaggio/Vespa, built on the same presses, using the same tools, and are, down to a small handful of parts, intercompatible with any PX-series Vespa built from '78 until Piaggio went in more environmental, modern, and refined directions (which, for the record, I see as a pretty good thing, my love of cantankerous old junk notwithstanding).
For me, though, I love the stinkin', popcorny, buzzy wildness of the old beasts, right down to the little flaws, like how every vintage Vespa leans slightly to the right because the engine hangs off the rear axle on that side, and this is, possibly, the last chance anyone will have to buy a new example of such things.
Old Bean's right, in his way, to suggest that I'd be better off with something bigger, something that'll top the sixty mile-an-hour top end of an unmodified Vespa, and there will be a time when I take his advice, when I'm a little older, a little richer, and when the perfect bike emerges from the miasma. We've got so much in common, I think, and I have to have a little blind faith in the inexplicable in spite of myself when I see him with his bikes, either solo or in the loving chaos of the open-ended machine circus headed up by Wild Gears, because he sees it—as pragmatic, as classically stoic as he is, he sees the immortal hand and eye in the fearful symmetry of what should just be machines, no more or less. It's obvious to me that we met in the flow, in the currents of things that needed to happen, and that is a good thing.
Where we part is in this—I've started, more and more, to regret the smaller world, the endless highways, the instant communication, and the lust for more and more speed, the better to rush through the world with. Old Bean's not speed demon, except when he's on that damn Ducati, but he's still got the love of that, that thing that I lack, possibly to my detriment, in how I ride, or rather, in how I rode.
As much as I love to travel, to wind out the ways, whether it's on my shambling old Mobylette or my three-speed bicycle, or even the grand old ruin of my Citroën, which even now sits, calcifying into a fossil, in front of my house as a monument to a brief springtime of financial abandon that I no longer possess, it was always about stopping for me, and about turning away from the big roads, the familiar routes, and the easy access.
Maybe it's a sign of my scattered awareness, my ceaselessly dividing attention span, and that crow-like love of something new and shiny and distracting, but I drive to and from work lately feeling the flush of old memories, of what my old Vespa felt like, and how easy it was to just stop, to dart off the beaten track and down some little dirt lane, or gravelly side road.
If I was on a scooter, I'd have stopped there, my mind says to me, that hunting vision in full resurgence. There are stories there, and scenes, and colors and things I haven't seen, or ways to see I haven't bothered to explore.
And we talk about this small world, and set out to recreate the routes of famous writers, who went On The Road and learned Zen in their motorcycle maintenance, but it's not the same, not with unbreakably-reliable bikes and cell phones and GPS maps calling out directions. That's not a bad thing, either, per se, but there's something to be gained in constraints, in holding back from being a properly materialist boy scout, prepared for everything that might come with an accessory for every need. I'm just not sure I care to take a three thousand mile trip, averaging seventy the whole way, when I've taken hundred mile trips by moped, puttering along on the shoulder at barely twenty, that I still remember with biblical precision, from moment to moment to moment, each one full of something small and still wonderful.
I don't deny the joy in the high of the highway, but it's not the path that's calling me right now. I'm at the age, or rather, of an age, that's a common thing for those of us with XY genes, when I'm seeing that I'm on the other side of the mountain, having climbed and climbed and now seeing the valley below, all the way down, on the other half of my life, and I'll forgive myself the indulgence of surrendering to a familiar instinct of nostalgia and wanting.
I can call it all up effortlessly, of skidding sideways down a hillside, hollering, with my handsome friend Faisel hanging on as tightly as possible as we both expected to be flung face-first into the rocks, and how that grip felt, how instantaneous and comforting, even as we both screamed like little girls from the moment we hit the corner too hard. I can call up the way we laughed, the way you can't stop laughing, as we sat in the dust at the bottom of the hill, in utter shock that we'd somehow come down a hundred feet of rock without a scratch.
The instants and instances become a flurry, a storm of recollection.
My old Vespa chugging along, creeping down a broken concrete drive, still slipping, obnoxiously, out of gear because of a worn cruciform selector, rolling up at a walking pace alongside an immense ruin of a dead factory in rusting rural Pennsylvania like we were on a dock beside some half-sunk ocean liner there, and the quick duck inside, into the cavernous miles of the factory, lit by sunlight shining through broken skylights. I could hear each stroke of the engine, each d-d-ding-d-dung-ding of the engine echoing in the space, and smell the burning oil that's the signature of a Vespa, as I rode on the long-stilled metal plates of a conveyor that once fed the monstrous place. On an impulse, I tapped the horn, the tiny little beep lost in the space, and suddenly, every bird in the world was in flight, a swirling, chattering symphony in the air there, witnessed by no one but me in that way that makes you feel anything but insignificant.
The bike churning, cooking at its top speed when that top speed was enough for American highways, back before we all went mad with power, heading north for New York, back before I knew that you really don't take a featherweight motorbike onto the insanely high wind-tunnel of a bridge crossing the Susquehanna. The bike and I burst out of the hillside and the trees and onto that thread of highway over the distant river, and the wind caught us, flung us across two lanes and into the frighteningly-low jersey wall, where, for a millisecond that lasted for years, all I could see was down and the shower of sparks of my engine cowl skidding along the barrier. I jerked the handlebars, another novice mistake, and overcompensated my way across three lanes of traffic, where I recreated the previous experience, but from the other side, before getting off the bridge, pulling over, and hyperventilating until I was calm enough to cry like a little kid.
Scenes of us in the Holland Tunnel, back when you never saw a Vespa on the road, and certainly not there, or scurrying down the little narrow side streets of Philadelphia, or going to a town like Tuscarora, Maryland, for no better reason that it's a town called Tuscarora. These all unfold, over and over lately, and it's always possible this is just a lark, just a wild hair, and that I'll regret it and go on to something else, but that's not how it feels, and I've been too loyal to what I should do and what is practical to do for a little too long.
My mother and a group of my friends and family cringe at my building enthusiasm, imagining everything that can go wrong, but I'm not entirely sure that there'd be a big difference in damage if I went broadsides before a semi in my tiny four-door economy sedan or on a little black motorbike. I've got my gear, though, from my white helmet (statistics, my dear, not aesthetics) and my kevlar, leather, padding, and mesh jacket that looks like crazy overkill for a scooter, or like I'm suiting up to fight giant robots and leap canyons, but I'm not taking chances—I'm just working to manage them.
The eyes readjust, like leaving a darkened theater and a long, slow movie that didn't tell the story it promised to tell, and I wonder, in a way, what I'm doing, and where I'm heading, but that's only my choice to a point. I look out and around, and the endless roads start opening up, twirling out of their sleep like flowers unfurling, roots uncurling, reaching into the richness of the soil that's all around, and there's nothing to worry about but this moment, right now, and then the next, and the next, until it's all over, and that's all any of us can do.
Old Bean will just have to check his mirrors, slow down a bit, and keep an eye open for the little spark of the headlight on a pretty silly little anachronism chasing at his heels, but there are adventures ahead…oh boy. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, hang on a second, while I adjust my gear cables tonight!
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
Now hand me the offset screwdriver and that can of diet soda, will you?
It's also the week my new acquisition will be coming home with me, after a lot of paperwork and title and tags and other bureaucratic minutia finally settle, and I'm making a specific and targeted effort not to be like a hyperactive little boy, vibrating like a tuning fork at the base of the xmas tree as he waits forevvvvver for his parents to haul themselves out of bed.
I've bought a jet-black year-old Genuine Stella motor scooter with a mere 502 miles on the clock, against all the advice and eye-rolling from my two-wheeled mentor, Old Bean, who's still convinced that I've made a tragic, expensive mistake. I've never really been a proper motorcyclist, at heart, my love of old machinery notwithstanding, but Old Bean managed to arouse my interest in the subject by virtue of being the kind of motorcyclist I'd have been had I had the resources and patience to approach the field with a skeptic's eye, simultaneously absurdly-practical and still a motorized romantic, an intentional and well-practiced Blake on wheels.
When I'm asked, rarely as it happens, what I believe in, I almost always opine I'm a clockwork taoist, which is to say that I know what I know of the world because of my sense and awareness of the way things flow when they're let to flow without fussiness and excessive intervention, even as I doubt the supernatural. Coming of age, especially in the last decade, I've found my truths in that flow more and more, and trusted, increasingly, in how the fluidity of being like a reed beats the hard and the unyielding, and I've slipped away from that understanding of late, so I've had to relearn some of the way of it—the watching, the waiting, the surrender of realizing that desire sometimes reflects that undercurrent and pull directing you back to the channel that was made for you.
The Stella is a ridiculous object. I fully accept that, and embrace it in the way I embrace all of the ridiculous things I adore. It's, oddly enough, the exact embodiment of the second motorbike to set me free, almost twenty years ago; a battle-hardened beast of a Vespa P200E that I took on insane, absurd adventures, and that felt like a part of me, a piece of hardware that was just right in every visceral way. They're built at a factory in India that used to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Piaggio/Vespa, built on the same presses, using the same tools, and are, down to a small handful of parts, intercompatible with any PX-series Vespa built from '78 until Piaggio went in more environmental, modern, and refined directions (which, for the record, I see as a pretty good thing, my love of cantankerous old junk notwithstanding).
For me, though, I love the stinkin', popcorny, buzzy wildness of the old beasts, right down to the little flaws, like how every vintage Vespa leans slightly to the right because the engine hangs off the rear axle on that side, and this is, possibly, the last chance anyone will have to buy a new example of such things.
Old Bean's right, in his way, to suggest that I'd be better off with something bigger, something that'll top the sixty mile-an-hour top end of an unmodified Vespa, and there will be a time when I take his advice, when I'm a little older, a little richer, and when the perfect bike emerges from the miasma. We've got so much in common, I think, and I have to have a little blind faith in the inexplicable in spite of myself when I see him with his bikes, either solo or in the loving chaos of the open-ended machine circus headed up by Wild Gears, because he sees it—as pragmatic, as classically stoic as he is, he sees the immortal hand and eye in the fearful symmetry of what should just be machines, no more or less. It's obvious to me that we met in the flow, in the currents of things that needed to happen, and that is a good thing.
Where we part is in this—I've started, more and more, to regret the smaller world, the endless highways, the instant communication, and the lust for more and more speed, the better to rush through the world with. Old Bean's not speed demon, except when he's on that damn Ducati, but he's still got the love of that, that thing that I lack, possibly to my detriment, in how I ride, or rather, in how I rode.
As much as I love to travel, to wind out the ways, whether it's on my shambling old Mobylette or my three-speed bicycle, or even the grand old ruin of my Citroën, which even now sits, calcifying into a fossil, in front of my house as a monument to a brief springtime of financial abandon that I no longer possess, it was always about stopping for me, and about turning away from the big roads, the familiar routes, and the easy access.
Maybe it's a sign of my scattered awareness, my ceaselessly dividing attention span, and that crow-like love of something new and shiny and distracting, but I drive to and from work lately feeling the flush of old memories, of what my old Vespa felt like, and how easy it was to just stop, to dart off the beaten track and down some little dirt lane, or gravelly side road.
If I was on a scooter, I'd have stopped there, my mind says to me, that hunting vision in full resurgence. There are stories there, and scenes, and colors and things I haven't seen, or ways to see I haven't bothered to explore.
And we talk about this small world, and set out to recreate the routes of famous writers, who went On The Road and learned Zen in their motorcycle maintenance, but it's not the same, not with unbreakably-reliable bikes and cell phones and GPS maps calling out directions. That's not a bad thing, either, per se, but there's something to be gained in constraints, in holding back from being a properly materialist boy scout, prepared for everything that might come with an accessory for every need. I'm just not sure I care to take a three thousand mile trip, averaging seventy the whole way, when I've taken hundred mile trips by moped, puttering along on the shoulder at barely twenty, that I still remember with biblical precision, from moment to moment to moment, each one full of something small and still wonderful.
I don't deny the joy in the high of the highway, but it's not the path that's calling me right now. I'm at the age, or rather, of an age, that's a common thing for those of us with XY genes, when I'm seeing that I'm on the other side of the mountain, having climbed and climbed and now seeing the valley below, all the way down, on the other half of my life, and I'll forgive myself the indulgence of surrendering to a familiar instinct of nostalgia and wanting.
I can call it all up effortlessly, of skidding sideways down a hillside, hollering, with my handsome friend Faisel hanging on as tightly as possible as we both expected to be flung face-first into the rocks, and how that grip felt, how instantaneous and comforting, even as we both screamed like little girls from the moment we hit the corner too hard. I can call up the way we laughed, the way you can't stop laughing, as we sat in the dust at the bottom of the hill, in utter shock that we'd somehow come down a hundred feet of rock without a scratch.
The instants and instances become a flurry, a storm of recollection.
My old Vespa chugging along, creeping down a broken concrete drive, still slipping, obnoxiously, out of gear because of a worn cruciform selector, rolling up at a walking pace alongside an immense ruin of a dead factory in rusting rural Pennsylvania like we were on a dock beside some half-sunk ocean liner there, and the quick duck inside, into the cavernous miles of the factory, lit by sunlight shining through broken skylights. I could hear each stroke of the engine, each d-d-ding-d-dung-ding of the engine echoing in the space, and smell the burning oil that's the signature of a Vespa, as I rode on the long-stilled metal plates of a conveyor that once fed the monstrous place. On an impulse, I tapped the horn, the tiny little beep lost in the space, and suddenly, every bird in the world was in flight, a swirling, chattering symphony in the air there, witnessed by no one but me in that way that makes you feel anything but insignificant.
The bike churning, cooking at its top speed when that top speed was enough for American highways, back before we all went mad with power, heading north for New York, back before I knew that you really don't take a featherweight motorbike onto the insanely high wind-tunnel of a bridge crossing the Susquehanna. The bike and I burst out of the hillside and the trees and onto that thread of highway over the distant river, and the wind caught us, flung us across two lanes and into the frighteningly-low jersey wall, where, for a millisecond that lasted for years, all I could see was down and the shower of sparks of my engine cowl skidding along the barrier. I jerked the handlebars, another novice mistake, and overcompensated my way across three lanes of traffic, where I recreated the previous experience, but from the other side, before getting off the bridge, pulling over, and hyperventilating until I was calm enough to cry like a little kid.
Scenes of us in the Holland Tunnel, back when you never saw a Vespa on the road, and certainly not there, or scurrying down the little narrow side streets of Philadelphia, or going to a town like Tuscarora, Maryland, for no better reason that it's a town called Tuscarora. These all unfold, over and over lately, and it's always possible this is just a lark, just a wild hair, and that I'll regret it and go on to something else, but that's not how it feels, and I've been too loyal to what I should do and what is practical to do for a little too long.
My mother and a group of my friends and family cringe at my building enthusiasm, imagining everything that can go wrong, but I'm not entirely sure that there'd be a big difference in damage if I went broadsides before a semi in my tiny four-door economy sedan or on a little black motorbike. I've got my gear, though, from my white helmet (statistics, my dear, not aesthetics) and my kevlar, leather, padding, and mesh jacket that looks like crazy overkill for a scooter, or like I'm suiting up to fight giant robots and leap canyons, but I'm not taking chances—I'm just working to manage them.
The eyes readjust, like leaving a darkened theater and a long, slow movie that didn't tell the story it promised to tell, and I wonder, in a way, what I'm doing, and where I'm heading, but that's only my choice to a point. I look out and around, and the endless roads start opening up, twirling out of their sleep like flowers unfurling, roots uncurling, reaching into the richness of the soil that's all around, and there's nothing to worry about but this moment, right now, and then the next, and the next, until it's all over, and that's all any of us can do.
Old Bean will just have to check his mirrors, slow down a bit, and keep an eye open for the little spark of the headlight on a pretty silly little anachronism chasing at his heels, but there are adventures ahead…oh boy. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, hang on a second, while I adjust my gear cables tonight!
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
Now hand me the offset screwdriver and that can of diet soda, will you?
