So my powertrain is making this wierd noise. I know it's gotta be that, because I don't hear it if I clutch. Sounds like it's coming from the right side, and it only gets audible around 60+mph. C______ always says whatever to all the little voodoo magic, but I think he got away with that because he's always been driving cars before.
The reason that there is all this uncorruptible idiosyncrasy in every bike, and every car, is because the modern Otto engine was the first machine ever to function like a living thing. Oh, sure, you can talk about coal and steam, but my generalized bludgeon of a statement is going to plow through it. This is because the engine in my bike carries the fuel on its back, and must function when all of its internals are safely hidden. And only when they are fully assembled and closed. It also activates itself. All you have to do to push start a vehicle is push it.
On this strange creature I sit, the ECU adjusting it, my throttle, clutch, and brake adjusting the ECU, and I'm wondering about determinism. The ECU sits in the same place the brain does, in this loop. In between everything. But what's silly about this is that the motorcycle holds itself up in a mostly straight direction. People lean the bike over.
So that's what I convey to it. Changes in my intention. Bends in the road.
The next machine that people made to eventually function in this bizarre way was the "personal computer."
If I'm screwing up my explanation of this, it's because the whole situation wierds me out so much I can't even talk about it. The point is, my bike is making funny noises, and all the training in the world wouldn't do a damn thing for you unless you had the experience of hanging around bikes for years and years. Because they're kind of alive, in the way that some of the things we've created have become.
And I'm not sure I'm really into it anymore.
(Into machines and electronic information, and whether or not any of those things are alive, that is.)
When you're playing Go, it might be a good idea to make "the biggest move possible." You don't play a move that changes the score one point at the beginning of the game. And so airy, agile, potential sketches of structures get played, whose flaws at first don't even exist, and then are eventually exposed and cut by their interactions. In a way it's a test of which catastrophe you want to manage at which point.
Similarly, every move you make, you try to have armored against every worst possible move by the enemy. It's a little bit gratifying to see moves you made minutes before, fifty moves ago, arrive just in time to aid you.
But if you think like this, all the time, your guesses and emotions are all wrapped up like Schroedinger's cat. You're biting your lip at the same time you're clenching your fist. And you click, click, click. Sometimes, playing like you don't give a damn and just railing on each other is more fun. But if you're always thinking towards the next fifty moves, you're in line with this.
Crouched under the windscreen.
Of course, this is only what the game looks like at 14kyu to one person. It looked different starting out at 30kyu, and I know it'll be different at 5kyu.
This is how to talk about the things I'm not saying.
And I remember when I used to -enjoy- unthinkable thoughts...
...At the bottom, your junk, rattling around in the space you can't seem to use.
Covered by clothing, folded and rolled and crammed into position,
and all of your afterthoughts on the top.
I've remembered everything I'm going to remember, and forgotten everything I'm going to forget. Which means I'm ready to go. Back on the road for real.
Leaving somehow doesn't seem to bother me, which always bothers me. Bothers me the way it bothers me to be too 'effective,' like a certain someone I'm reminded of, makes me edgy, that maybe I'm doing -too- well. Well, all the sayings about the great and the small dying the same way, well, they cut both ways. And people are only touched by your humility when you're -winning-.
This is a state that names everything names like Kickapoo, Lincoln, and Cairo. Those are the three kinds of names in I______. Going down a county road I was amazed was in as good a shape as it was (insert your own meaning here), wondering if I'd gone the right way at all, I realized something about my family that I'd never really thought about.
So there was my grandpa, hardworking (five am, milk cows before school, walk to school, pay attention in school, do farmwork, do homework...) and young, in the middle of rural Illinois. Rural Illinois is actually a phrase in its own right. There he was, child of a bitter moonshiner, and a gifted but locked-down mother, just kind of cranking along. But his sharpness pierced the veil of his lifestyle, and he was not only sharp, but diligent. Looking back, I see one more thing. I think I've told this story before, but let me tell it again.
Around the time he was, what, nineteen? Seventeen? He was trying to suggest vitamin supplements for the pigs, and buying formulated food instead of slops. Nowadays, this may seem a given, considering what other things livestock get pumped into them now. Well, my great-grandfather got pissed and wouldn't hear a word of it, as they say. So, my grandpa made him a deal. He'd take the runt and take care of it, and my great-grandfather wouldn't have to hear a peep out of him until the time came to take that pig to market.
Well, that runt grew up to be the happiest, healthiest pig in the county, and won some kind of awards. I don't know how this works. I've never been to a farm fair. As it goes, my grandpa was vindicated. However, vindication in this case meant he had to hightail it out of there before his dad did something he probably wouldn't regret. I don't know what kind of words were exchanged in the years leading up to this, but I imagine not all of them were good.
So my grandpa booked it on out of there, and stuck his thumb out. Hopped a few trains. Got to California in two weeks. In, what, the 1930s? Crap. That's amazing. Picked up a job as a short-order cook, flipped hotcakes and eggs over easy for a while. Wrote his mom. Remind you of anybody?
'Course, he eventually went on back. Couldn't leave his mom alone like that. And then, there was the war. And the war came before college for him, that way. Not before marrying the girl he felt he needed to. And then he rode a truck to a place where they made him do push-ups and taught him how to navigate and drop bombs. This is not a story about the war, but I'll tell you he wasn't a man who enjoyed bombing anybody. Always felt like he had to apologize to German folk, and I don't know if I fault him. He -is- my grandpa.
So, he got back, got himself a killer job nights at the foundry, and went to law school by day. Became a dramshop attorney (cases alcohol-related) and went on to serve with distinction. Basically the way he did everything. I'll skip a few things here, because his life got a little more messed up from here. Just the same, my mother was the middle child. We're getting there.
It's an oversimplification to say my mom's the black sheep of the family. But in the explosion that went on while they were growing up, they were the splinters hurled in three different directions. One into knee-jerk conservatism, one into strange urban lifestyle, and one westward. Because in the end, my grandpa could never get out of Illinois. For an excessive number of reasons.
So when I was three, he went in to get a tumor cut out of his brain, and never really came out. The way anaesthesia is measured, I'll have you know, is the most overanalyzed SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess) rule of thumb ever. A statistically processed set of curves that are basically just measures of your level of awareness, from perky, to trapped but awake, to knocked out, to coma, to dead. Well, they put my grandpa in a little too far, and he slipped into a coma. And eventually, my mom said enough torturing him and let him go the rest of the way. He'd seen my brother get to eleven, if memory serves. He was real proud of us, even then. It surprises me, that tears are coming out of my eyes, remembering wandering around his lonely house in Springfield among his stacks of legal papers. Playing with his electronic typewriter (It was amazing! It wasn't a computer, it wasn't a typewriter!). But I have to stop. That's not what this is about. The point is, he never really got out of there. Out of here. The state I'm in now.
Two years later my mom decided she was sick of C_______ and managed to do something I didn't realize was impressive until many, many years later. She managed to force change on all of us, and brought me to see the land she'd run to when she had her chance, after college, instead of before, the way my grandpa had. She'd run to T_____, to S______, to B________, to Show Low. You know these names, don't you? All the way from I_____ in a Pinto, learning how to drive manual the whole way.
My uncle is still in Pe____. He's kind of a dick, but all my memories of him are just of a happy man, living out his life the way he wants to, so I have nothing to say about that. I have no memories of my aunt. I hear she's a successful lawyer floating her husband, somewhere in the Midwest or the grassy whereabouts.
But my mom brought me to the desert. And damn, it was thorny, and it was hot! Holy shit! I'd have said that if I'd known how to when I was five! But I didn't. So instead I learned how to avoid teddy bear cholla (you know they follow you, don't you?), how to wear shorts all year, and how to make new friends myself. I had my own problems, for one thing, I'm too much of a feisty dick to be as diligent as my grandpa. I'm fairly sure his sense of duty was more clear-cut than mine, although I think that they're equally strong.
But I grew up, and ran away too. This time, instead of running away before or after college, I ran away -to- college. I guess it's the -most- responsible thing to do out of those three. And, as it so happened, I also headed west. But I was almost out of land, and so I had to go, well, you know where.
Here in I_______, with the apparently congenital itch to get the hell outta here pulsing strongly in my veins, I was witness to something becoming clear in my head. I'm so incredibly thankful for my family being that way. For my grandpa hopping a train and heading to California 'cause he was sick of this shit. For my mom driving out to A_____ to see the land that suited her. And then dragging us. And I bet I'd be thankful for the crackpots in Europe who pulled this shit with the Atlantic Ocean, too.
All of us, we got the blood of the land we came from. And then we got the blood of the land we got to. That's why I have a French nose, but I have high cheekbones. Why I have bushy eyebrows and a love trail, but my eyes crinkle up into crescents and my uncle can eat poison ivy.
So where I go from here, well, is wherever the hell I want. I was only talking about the initial push that three generations all seem to have made. I'm just the only one slackerly (Matt #1's word, not mine) enough to keep doing it.
Okay, okay, I'll stop beating around the bush, and I'll spill it. The one thing I'm thankful for, more than anything, for all this happening, is that I got to meet You.
Everything else would have been a universe I wouldn't want to be alive for. And funny how it works out like that.
I know, I promised I wouldn't bring it up, but it's what my world is made of.
I love you.
Now at least I have something to say to my grandpa's grave.
Thanks.
Love, joy, and admiration,
and a lot more,
whether you like it or not,
-T.
"Picadilly Lilly"
368th BSQ, 336th BGP
8th Air Force, US Army - Air Corps
41 missions, navigator - bombardier, WWII European Campaign, 1944-45
Lieutenant Colonel James A. Frederick
Aug 1 1919 - Aug 13 1991 USAF Ret.
"He did his best for his family and his country"
"Lifelong Cubs fan"
And, um, may he rest in peace. Thanks, Grandpa.
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