So the slacker sets up phone posting...

I've been really busy with a lot of crap. Health, money and time become dear as you sprint past racers and obstacles in the race of life. Maybe posting from the phone will help get me back a bit more regularly!

Brothers helping brothers

Was planning to go to Bear's last night to jerk the Heart of Gold from Freakshow's ass. Had to do some graphics work for a building automation start-up in Boston and it was going to be a late night between the two....

....so I bailed on the VW thing, worked...napped....worked.

I'm flat on my back in bed watching a double feature fantasy on the inside of my eyelids when I get an email and, being programmed by a career of pavlovian response to electronic summons in all forms, I open the email from Bear and the above picture is attached.

Bear did the motor-ectomy. Brothers helping brothers.

Tonight, I'm bringing the whole family over to his place to share a meal together and we'll tear this thing down and see what we see.

Thanx, Bear!

Evel Knievel once said....

Man, blood, sweat and tears going into the revival of Freakshow, the 1971 VW Westy Camper that has returned to the family after a whirlwind tour of other owners. When I got it back, it ran with some overheating and a sound like a diesel. Found some loose head nuts and figured a topend job would do it! Many grease-covered hours later, Bear and I stabbed the motor in his driveway and fired it up to the same noise. It's bottom end. It's money. So we gotta wait.

I wanted to get this done before Bags' birthday this Monday and I'm not gonna make it. Right now, her Superbeetle is at Matt's house waiting on a re-machined steering box install.

Epic fails on all fronts.

Evel Knievel once said, "A man can fall many times in life, but he isn't a failure until he refuses to get back up." So I keep going in the right direction not sweating that I'm not at the finish line, yet. Just keep pluggin'. Everything falls into place your way if you keep moving your way.

Don't have the answer to this little setback, but I will keep moving in the right direction (looking for the money tree) and things will fall into place my way.

Just so's ya know.......Freakshow!

Freakshow, our old departed '71 VW Baywindow Westphalia Camper, was in the care of the niece of one of the most powerful forces in the universe (Bear) when she decided to go the more modern route. Bear let me know and BAM! Freakshow comes back to the family to reverse a mistake made a few moons (and air-cooled VW's) ago.

Here she is today:

We're going to have fun bringing her back up to Tripendicular Hippy status for Bags and Ed to cruise in in style. These things are fun. Genuine simplicity where visceral motoring and righteous vibes blend in a symphony of whoopee! Getting waaaay pricey. Check out this link to look at current asking prices from around the world:  http://www.thesamba.com/vw/classifieds/cat.php?id=7

Got a thread going at the Air Coolers site, too:  http://www.aircoolers.org/v/showthread.php?33366-Freakshow

I've been up to my elbows in my boy Ed's "band of brothers", the Boy Scouts and this Bus. Want to get back to blogging when I get my head out of reality for a moment. Not hooked on the internet blogging thing, yet, so I let it lapse.

Shake it up....

Every once in a while, no matter who you are, no matter what your life is like, you need to unplug and channel your inner Viking. You know, that hairy beast with no pretense and a lust for action and fun. Unleash the beast.

For me, that's "Camp Boogie", a gathering of old bikers and new at Harley rallies or one of our homes over BBQ, bikes, booze, belches....and whatnot. Invariably, for these occasions, I'm the rolling "whatnot".

Like kids running to the icecream truck, I have my buds hanging out at the "Geezer Glide" which I ride right up to the stage (ya know, where the dancing is). Knocking back Patron with beer chasers is a good way to wipe the slate clean for all that life that happens between the "Camp Boogie" weekends. It's not always intense, but when it is.....them's some good memories made!

Kuhon started the whole deal with Queef and added Bear, Midnite, myself and a few others over time. It's getting to be a pretty big thing. If you like huge porkchop steaks served hot from the grill on the end of a knife blade passed around, you'll fit right in.

Here's a shot of Kuhon leaving the line on his 11-sec Sporty. He's a 3-time cancer survivor who'd been told to pack his bags, so seeing him hard at what he loves best brings us all together.

Little picture, but you get the idea.

Every once in a while, you have to get out and let it all hang out.

I'm minding my own business, see......

I'm not all that superstitious, so I'm not sporting one of those little gremlin bells that ward off the evil spirits of mechanical failure for the travelling vehicle like St. Christopher is said to do for the travelling soul.

So the plan is to jump on the bike with the boy and ride through a semi-sunny 77deg morning to Guitar Center and try out the latest goodies, hit some place for a snack or munchie or some such and then ride to the house and yak to Mom about what a great day we had so far.

I swing a leg and go to fire the bike up and it's live at the dash....dead at the starter.

Hmm... I've had this happen before and thought I'd found the culprit with the corrosive blue powder forming a conductive short between posts on the plugged in starter relay. I found that while romping with the righteous at a rally a while back. Was pretty smug about the whole thing, too. Well, let's see what we've got now.

The bike in question is my first foray into rolling lazyboys. I wouldn't have picked it, but it fell in my lap....followed me home.....was really cheap....made sense at the time. It's a 1996 Evo geezer-glide and I've grown attached to it while waiting to find someone to trade me a Shovelhead for it.

Camp Boogie 29APR12

Our gathering of the faithful that we like to call "Camp Boogie" occurred again this past Sunday.

We all rode off to Queef's to ressurect Chuck's '61 Sporty. Dang, that's one fine ride. He tore it down to do tin paint and pretty it up and life kicked him hard in the ass so he had to put it aside to deal with things. We'll help him deal with the bike. Need some parts, though.

Fugly

I have a fiesty grab-bag of electronics and 2 generations of someone's idea of good headlight wiring. Every once in a while the bike dies electrically. Off comes the fairing skin whilst I wiggle this and that and reseat the other and somewhere along the line break the short or make the contact. I'll be redoing the main power and the headlight wiring here shortly......

Proud of my boy

My boy Ed blows me away. Kicks butt at school, jams on the guitar, rises to some pretty big challenges....and a snappy dresser, to boot. He loves to get dressed up and I love that that makes him feel good. His imagination is boundless and his sense of humor is off-the-wall. He's like his dad in that he thinks quicker than he articulates, but he's got the tools in his noodle to do fine in this world. I gots me some good kids.

An idle mind

You know what they say about an idle mind. I've been troubled by my inactivity in some areas and I've been looking at what I'm actually doing, it's yield and the "net productivity" I get from my efforts. A kind of personal process audit to look at what I'm doing with the grains of sand in my personal hourglass. Every grain has value, so every grain should yield, right? ROI on another level.

I don't do some things because I do some other things that have an opportunity cost. You do this at the expense of that. You do that knowing there is an obligation to prep or recover so allocated time goes up. More time spent on A and less time left for B. Opportunity cost.

The tricky part of life is that you train yourself over time to engage or eschew activities relative to thier "fit" with other activities or obligations. I don't get home from work and tinker because it's dinnertime with the family and then it's dark where I'd work....I'll just sit my fat duff at the computer and wait on the weekend. When the weekend comes, I might spend more time at the computer because that's what my pattern has become.

Next thing I know, months have gone by and while I have done many productive things with my time, I have not done the elective things that I set goals for and that give me joy.

Sloth of some sort. I want to think of that so I can change that and have more to show from my time. When something comes up for someone else, I'll rise to the occasion and go help and enjoy my time spent and the accomplishment of the task. Quality meets joy. On the other hand, when I have the time to meet my own recreational goals.....I don't always rise to my own occasion. I fix what's broke and I handle what I'm confronted with, but I don't pursue my own liesure activities anymore like I did "in the good old days".

Like everything else, I think the answer is reprogramming yourself. Shift your personal paradigm.

Call me nutso, but I think the following:

Your self image is personal and unique to you. Meaning you see yourself in ways no one around you automatically shares. You don't know what they think of you. You interact with them as though you are what you think you are and that they agree with this. You can imagine that they really don't. It's not malicious, it's just that they apply different views to common experience. That's why 2 family members will have different "versions" of the family history when they talk about it. Different views because their mental wiring makes 2 different people receive the same data in different ways and then interpret it differently and then store memories of it differently. They see you differently than you see yourself. Who's right? Perception is reality. Perception is based on assumptions you apply to your interpretations of external stimuli based on self image, coping skills, advice, previous perceptions....many things.

If you made it through that last paragraph without calling the loony bin on my behalf then I have enough time to write a few more paragraphs before one of you wises up and does so.

So take this:
If perception is based on assumption....and perception is reality....it may logically follow (and may not) that assumptions form reality, subjectively. Not events, but the chronicalling of events and the forming of concepts from those chronicalled events and the linking of concepts to the assumption of their fit in your experience. Viola; preconception-perspective-mindset. We all develop our own realities and make them fit in each others' patterns of life. We avoid conflicting realities and are attracted to accomodating or complimentary realities.

Mindset. Mindset based on assumption. Assumption of my own creation and my experiences may have tuned my receptors to channels of bias that may not promote my well-being which skews my assumptions and "harshes my reality".

Crap. Is it that easy? Can I just assume things don't mean what they seem? Can I change the evidence (my perception of the external stimuli) to fit the conviction? Can I change how I see things to change how things seem so as to affect what I think they mean?


Billions of dollars per year are generated by motivational speakers telling you this is possible. I'm telling you why I think they're on to something.

If I think of myself in the way I wish to be I will act accordingly and percieve accordingly over time and become what I see myself as already. It will require me to make positive assumptions about things I normally allow to "sully my joy". It will require me to shed counterproductive patterns as one who just doesn't acknowlege the pattern anymore. I just don't do those things. It's not "me" as I see myself and want to truly be. I "am" this way because it's who I am and see things this way and they affect me this way so I know/assume/feel this way.

But how do you do all that with checks and balances to ward off the deep plunge into goofy-noodle land?

I am in conflict with my true nature when I don't follow the patterns of my self image....and I suffer accordingly.

Now to figure out what is next.