I Quit

    I walked into band class one day and there was a stranger at the podium. The only band teacher we had ever had was Mr. Miller.

    I put my trombone together and took my seat. I heard people talking about the man at the podium. He just stood there. He was holding his chin and turning the pages. He didn’t look up.

    The final bell rang. Chairs scooted around while stragglers took their seats and the man still didn’t look up.

    Buzzing voices became a murmur and eventually turned to silence. When it was completely quiet the stranger looked up and introduced himself.

    This was weird. Normally, when the final bell rang our instructor, Mr. Miller, would trot to the podium, flip through the scores, tell the class what song to play. Then he’d raise his baton and drop it.

    Those who were ready to play would galumph their way through Paint Your Wagon or The New World Anthem. The stragglers would noisily settle into their chairs. When they were settled he’d stop the band and say, “Thanks for joining us.” He did it everyday.

    The new man introduced himself as Mr. Jones.

    Mr. Jones told us that we would be playing To The Summit. The trombone part was one page. It was the shortest piece we had. He raised his baton, then dropped it and we were off.

    I watched his face as we stumbled and blatted our way through the song. He seemed concerned but stayed the course and kept us going until the final note was played.

    This was odd. Mr. Miller never allowed us to play all the way through a song. At the first mistake he would wrinkle his nose. The second mistake would have him throwing his head back and gritting his teeth. The third mistake and he would toss his baton over his shoulder out of exasperation. Then he would wave circles in the air, which meant, stop playing. Maybe forever.

We were the reject band so Mr. Jones’ work was cut out for him. 7th hour was thinly populated. The trombone section didn’t even have a 3rd chair. Just me and Dan and he hated me so he spent the entire hour with his head down on his music stand. 

Today, because there was a new guy at the podium, Dan paid attention. When the baton came down he actually played.

Mr. Jones stood in front of the clarinet section and had them play through several parts. Then he would single someone out and have them play it solo. When the problem was resolved he would head back to the podium and he would have us start over.

Mr. Jones didn’t call the clarinet section the ‘clarinuts.’ He didn’t call my section the ‘boners’. He didn’t call the saxophone section the ‘sucksophones’. Mr. Miller did that. And if he singled out your section he did it from the podium so everyone focused on you and your mistake.

For the entire hour Mr. Jones had us work on that one piece. It was boring. Mr. Miller’s short attention span had us bouncing around different songs for an hour. You never knew what was going to happen next.

As the class was nearing its end Mr. Jones told us we had time to play it all the way through one more time. He said, “Keep going no matter what! If the bell rings or if the person next to you bursts into flames, keep playing!” His baton swept down and we were off.

I’ve been playing instruments since I was 8 years old. I would pull out my dad’s mandolin and learn to play simple songs on it. I never needed a conductor and I was suspicious of their role in a band. Rock bands didn’t have conductors. I saw them in front of orchestras but what was the point? Couldn’t you just use a metronome to keep the band playing together at the same speed? Isn’t that what a conductor did, just keep time?

As I watched Mr. Jones swing his arms around he would emphasize problematic sections and we could tell, when we played that part successfully, that it made him happy.

Then I got it. I understood the point of having a conductor. He wasn’t there to keep time. He was there to encourage you. To lift you up and cheer you on. To make you believe that you could do it.

By the time we finished playing To The Summit Mr. Jones had tossed away his baton and was lazily flapping his arms as if our music was causing him to soar high above us. He was in heaven and we had put him there.

That day I did something I hadn’t done in a long time, I took my trombone home with me. I wanted to practice.

The next day, when 7th hour rolled around, I was excited thinking we might have Mr. Jones again. When I walked into band class there was no one at the podium. Hm. There was a questioning buzz. I wasn’t the only one wondering if Mr. Jones would be back.

We got settled and as the last bell rang Mr. Miller came trotting out of his office. He had a large bandage on his thumb. I was disappointed. I had really hoped Mr. Jones would be back.

Mr. Miller answered a few questions about his thumb, then he chose the first piece for us to play; not To The Summit, and we were off. He was no different that day than he was the day before Mr. Jones had come to our class. We blatted and blooped and missed our cues. Dan kept his head down like he always did. And Mr. Miller would show us just how mad we made him when we screwed up.

Eventually we got around to playing To The Summit. I was excited. I wanted Mr. Miller to be impressed with how well we could play that piece.

The baton came up, the baton swept down and we were off.

We were only a few measures in when I heard the first mistake. No big deal, I thought, just keep playing no matter what! Then the second mistake and Mr. Miller was gritting his teeth. By then I think we realized that it wasn’t going to happen. The energy in the room was different.

Mr. Miller tossed his baton over his shoulder and waved circles in the air. We didn’t get to finish To The Summit and we never saw Mr. Jones again.

Over the summer I decided to quit band. By then I was a pretty good guitar player and playing in a rock band.

I shoved the trombone in my closet and mom didn’t notice it until my senior year was half over. She asked me why I wasn’t taking it to school.

When I was 10 mom took me to the high school for a concert sponsored by a musical instrument company, hoping to sell trumpets and clarinets to the parents of elementary school kids. I didn’t ask if I could play an instrument and was baffled as to why my mom and dad wanted me to play one. The only music we listened to had guitars and drums in it.

I found out years later that my dad wanted me to play in the band in case there was another war and another draft. One of his brother’s was nearly killed by a 15 year old Vietcong sniper and he wanted me to be in the band and not on the front lines. Apparently, if you could play a brass instrument, you would never see combat.

I didn’t know that the day my mom discovered my trombone in the closet. All I knew was that I was tired of disappointing Mr. Miller, playing music I never cared for in the first place. If I was going to play an instrument I didn’t choose, it should be for someone who enjoyed it when I played it well. It should be for someone who wanted me to succeed. Someone who believed in me.

I was on my way out the door when mom asked about the trombone. I was embarrassed. I knew it had been a big investment for them, but all I could think about was Mr. Jones soaring around, our music lifting him above the clouds.

     I wanted to tell mom about Mr. Jones. I wanted her to understand that I didn’t know that I had had a bad band teacher until I had had a good one. All I could say was, “I quit.”

Mom was surprised. I think she was wondering how I had done that without consulting her.

In the end, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Okay.”

I drove off in my car to go play with my band. With musicians playing instruments and songs they wanted to play and telling each other how great they sounded.

The Uncanny Valley

I floated this blog title by my buddy Gary and he didn't buy it. He didn't know what The Uncanny Valley was and when I explained it to him, as best I could, he said, 'nope.'

I'm using it anyway. I want to talk about the healthcare system and I think the title sounds like it should fit. So, if you're pissed that I used this phrase to describe a phenomenon related to humanistic looking androids, well, I'm sorry. I'll give you Gary's contact information and you 2 can howl about my hubris in bending a euphemism to my will. (Alright alright, whatever you call the damn thing. Metaphor, syllogism, parallelogram . . .)

The Uncanny Valley states that androids can't bridge the gap between being a robot and being a human. It's that sense of coldness; that jerkiness or slickness of movement that causes you to know deep down that they are not human: a homosapien. The human feels repulsed.

There is a character on Star Trek: The Next Generation that seems to bridge the Uncanny Valley. His name is Data and he's an android, but in real life he's a human pretending to be a robot.

I want to talk about healthcare because I'm being directly affected by the system right now and it's one of the most divisive topics we have in politics today.

Last Monday I had an operation to correct my umbilical hernia. I'll be off work for three weeks while it heals and I'll be on light duty for three weeks after that.

Though I won't be able to earn money for three weeks I'll be okay. I'll have to use all my savings and maybe even buy groceries on a credit card for a little while but I'll make it. When I had the operation I had four days of vacation left, so I cashed those in.

I'm currently avoiding my Family Medical Leave Act paperwork, which I have to fill out in order to keep my job; to justify the time I'll need to take off.

I went online and read about the FMLA because I'd never heard of it before. It protects you from losing your job if you have to take time off for medical reasons but your company is not required to compensate you, even if the time off is work related. My company provides zero sick days, because they don't have to.

I can't blame them. If they aren't forced to do it, why should they?

There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when the story followed Data the android, after he gets off duty. Like a human he had a cabin, but I never thought about what that might be like. Since he didn't need to sleep he didn't have a bed in the bedroom. It was festooned with scientific instruments because, in his off time, 'he' would measure the distance between up quarks and strange quarks or whatever an android in the year 2375 might be curious about that hadn't been recorded somewhere else by someone else.

Seeing Data off duty increased the chasm of the Uncanny Valley for me. He attempts humor. He plays music. He has a pet cat. He made love to a woman but he doesn't pretend to have what might be considered the flaws of human physiology. Maybe that's the problem. His pursuit of humanity isn't flawed.

What motivates Data? Is it a need to be loved? To be perceived as human? To fool humans into thinking he is one of them? That doesn't seem to be it. He has a flawless memory. He doesn't sleep. He has no need to eat or excrete and he doesn't hide it. Yet he has friends. He even had a lover. He is a competent StarFleet officer who might be said to have empathy, who could probably be a decent star ship captain if androids were allowed to do that. (I don't know what the rules of starfleet are regarding androids in command. I mean, Data is a commander but can he really outrank a homosapien?)

I work with a guy who has a 21 year old daughter that he calls his miracle baby. She was born with lots of issues and he and his wife were told that she might not make it. It cost nearly a million dollars but she is alive and doing reasonably well, today, and he has only recently been able to say he is free from all those medical bills. It took 21 years.

He and I have wildly differing views on politics. His dad hated Jimmy Carter because he blamed him for the high mortgage rates in the 70s and since his dad was a home builder, those high mortgage rates affected his ability to support his family. Not a lot of people build houses when mortgage rates are hovering around 20%. They called it stagflation. I understood why my friend might not like Jimmy Carter.

My mom and dad bought our house in 1967 with a VA loan and dad had a union job that paid very well. He was able to support us all on one income. We didn't have anything against Jimmy Carter. He'd taken office after the VietNam war was over and he was soft spoken, so none of us thought he'd get us into another war.

Then came Ronald Reagan who was infamous in union families for breaking the Air Traffic Controller's union. It was a big deal because a lot of high profile unions, who normally supported democratic candidates, supported Reagan and he betrayed them. He promised he'd be on their side but when push come to shove he stabbed them in the back.

Within the terms of two presidencies you can see how blue collar workers might find themselves on opposite sides.

But let's talk about me for a minute. I had a pretty heinous looking belly button. It was an outie having been herniated a few years ago. My intestines pushed their way into my belly button through a tear in the stomach lining and made it stick out. It was gross and ridiculous at the same time.

It had been this way for a few years but I didn't give it any mind because it didn't hurt and there was no nausea involved; both of which are symptoms of something going wrong. I would just wear a t-shirt when I went swimming or wear overalls to work so it didn't look like I had a nipple in the middle of my gut.

Besides, I'm a single dad who has refused to date until my youngest can take care of herself. No one's going to see me naked for a long time. Since it didn't hurt I did nothing about it. I ignored it.

I had been a single, dateless, single father for 10 years when my youngest kid turned fifteen. She's a year away from being able to legally drive a car and for some reason I started fantasizing about holding hands with a girl wearing a sundress and skipping barefoot through a meadow filled with wildflowers, but when we got to the swimming hole where it was understood that we would go skinning dipping I couldn't bring myself to do it. I watched the girl pull off her sundress and jump in. I could only stand there with my head down and my hand covering my belly button.

So it was time to get it fixed. If an opportunity to go skinny dipping with a girl ever comes up again I wanted to be ready.

I made an appointment with a surgeon who was in-network to my insurance. He took a look at my ridiculous belly button and told me it didn't look too bad. He could probably fix it on an outpatient basis.

First, he said, he wanted to see a CAT scan of my torso. Apparently that's fairly standard. One of the guys I work with got one before his own umbilical hernia operation.

We set up the CAT scan appointment at the surgeon's office. I paid my $20 copay and left.

A few days later I got a call from Centerpoint Hospital. They were doing my CAT scan. They asked me a bunch of questions about pre-existing conditions. Then spoke to me about my insurance and told me that I would need to bring a $1000 with me to the CAT scan appointment. That would be my portion AFTER my insurance paid their part.

I was so shocked I couldn't speak.

Those of you who've read my previous blogs may know this already, but a few months ago I was going to buy a motorcycle, then my A/C went out and I had to spend most of my savings replacing it. After that I still felt I needed a motorcycle so I scraped $1000 together and bought an old Honda. My savings had taken quite a few hits but I was still above water.

Riding my motorcycle made me happy. It felt like I had found the missing piece to a puzzle. I felt good. Like my old self again. Which was why I wanted to skip through wildflowers holding hands with a girl and maybe go skinny dipping.

After the silence on the phone got uncomfortable the disembodied voice asked if I was okay. I said I supposed I was but I had to ask her if she was serious about me bringing $1000 with me to get a CAT scan.

After a few back and forths she asked me how much I could bring. We finally agreed on $500. Which was still a lot of money; far more than I thought I would have to pay after the insurance had paid their share. When had anyone ever been asked to bring that much money with them on the day of a procedure unless they didn't have ANY insurance? I had very little experience with the way modern health insurance works. It felt like I didn't have insurance at all yet it was still being deducted from my paycheck.

My insurance is 'provided' by my employer. I have money deducted from my paycheck for an insurance plan that I did not get to choose. It's the only one they offer. There are no levels. When I buy car insurance I can buy as much or as little as I need. I can choose my yearly deductible and how much coverage I have. Why am I not given that choice with health insurance?

Talking about my experience with those I work with is frustrating. All of them think Obamacare, or the ACA, is a ripoff and should be repealed. None of them can tell me why they think it's bad, except that they hate the 'individual mandate'. So I tell them that there is no individual mandate anymore and they still think Obamacare should be repealed, they just can't tell me why.

I don't think they know what it actually is. I don't know everything about it, but I know more than they do. There is not just an uncanny valley in our understanding but in our interest in knowing the facts as well. It's astounding just how little they care. They have been told it is bad; evil and that's what seems to matter. They base their opinion on faith. We are now in the era of faith based politics.

When I moved into this house a lot of people helped me. One of them was a 20 year old woman. My sister and I had a conversation with her about getting health insurance because she didn't have any.

I have a large round magnet on my refrigerator from the 2012 Obama campaign. The young woman pointed to my magnet and said, "I ain't get'n Obamacare!"

Like a lot of people, she thought Obamacare was a product: something libtards created and tried to make everybody buy. I explained that Obamacare wasn't something you buy, it was a set of laws that affect how health insurance companies do business. They can't deny coverage to someone who's already sick. They have to cover people on their parent's insurance until the age of 26. And lots and lots of other boring, but essential stuff.

I asked her, "Does your mom or dad have insurance?" She said they both did, so I said, "ask one of them to put you on their insurance."

She thought I was trying to trick her into buying Obamacare against her will.

This is the uncanny valley between what would benefit an individual and what she believed was a very bad thing; maybe an evil thing and there was a vast chasm between her knowledge that Obamacare was a bad thing and what made it a bad thing. She thought she was being tricked into socialism and she couldn't even tell me why socialism was a bad thing.

I gave up. I told her it wouldn't cost her mom or dad very much to include her on their insurance and she could have health insurance tomorrow, then I walked away. I could not continue to try to save this woman from herself. I refused to keep telling her that Obamacare wasn't evil nor was it socialism.

I'm pretty sure she succeeded in not buying Obamacare.

I ran into another instance where the person had no clue what Obamacare was. He was a racist and was not shy about expressing it with vile language. He came up to me and said, "What did that 'man' ever do for you?"

I put quotes around ‘man’ because he used an epithet that has been directed at Americans of African descent since the days of slavery. He used it proudly and intentionally offensively.

I reminded him, once again, that I have cousins that are black, Mexican and Filipino and if he insisted on using that word I would beat the shit out of him, even if he was my supervisor.

It seems odd that I had to remind him that I'm not a pussy just because I'm a progressive. Next time I should punch first and explain later.

After my supervisor rephrased his question I told him that Obamacare saved my oldest kid's life; they had been suicidal but Obamacare allowed me to put them on my insurance until their 26th birthday and get back to the psychiatrist and get medicated.

My supervisor got really quiet about the president and his health care law after our conversation. I found out that, as we were having that conversation, his 22 year old kid was in the hospital. She had been in a horrific car wreck and didn't have health insurance. He didn't know he could have put her on his insurance until he'd gone on his racist rant.

How could he not have known? How is that uncanny valley so deep that someone I worked so closely with for 45 hours a week or more didn't know something so basic and important as this huge change in the health insurance laws?

I understood why our insurance company didn't promote it because it would cost them money and the new law didn't make them do it. The company that employed us didn't promote it for reasons I can't fathom. The news sources that my supervisor depended on wouldn't promote it because they were too busy comparing the president's new health insurance law to slavery or the rise of Hitler in Germany.

Throughout the course of Star Trek:TNG

Data becomes a beloved character. He wants to fit in. He wants to excel, not because HE wants to but because he was programmed to want what humans want. And throughout his lifetime he's learned. He has accumulated experiences and he has become flawed compared to what he once was due to his understanding of and wish to become human because humans, by their very nature are flawed.

I hand over 500 smackers and the technicians at Centerpoint insert me into what appears to be a device used to squirt unsuspecting, underinsured deadbeats into a different dimension. They called it a CAT scanner. I go home and wait for my next call from Centerpoint. It comes and hey ho, they ask me to, I'm not kidding, bring $2000 with me on the day of the surgery.

When I tell them there is no way on God's green Earth that I can possibly bring $2000 before I get this operation, they say okay, bring what you can.

I considered a home equity loan to get the $2000 but I thought, "Has it really come to that?" I saw a documentary called SiCKO where Michael Moore filmed people who HAD health insurance but lost their homes because they couldn't pay their medical bills. How did we allow this to happen?

I gave Centerpoint $200 and I was mad at myself for bringing anything. I didn't think the hospital would turn me away but I didn't want to take that chance. After all, by the time they asked me for money I was wearing nothing but a smock that gave everyone a great view of my assets and they had given me the first round of pre-surgery drugs. I was down the rabbit hole and my son had taken my clothes and my phone with him to wait at home for the call to come pick me up.

In one of Star Trek movies called Nemesis, Data the robot encounters a creature representing a terrible threat to the human race: The Borg.

The Borg are humanoids networked by computers. When the humans board their ship they're ignored because they're not seen as a threat. The star fleet officers sneak around with their weapons drawn while individual Borg units are standing still, plugged into the network. If you've ever walked into a living room full of teenagers watching TV with their phones out you'll know exactly how those officers felt.

The purpose of the Borg is to assimilate all species of life that they encounter and to use their technology to advance the Borg's ability to conquer more species and assimilate them.

The Borg are pragmatic. They don't make threats. They tell the humanoids they're about to conquer that resistance is futile. "Just relax, this won't hurt a bit."

The Borg finally figured out that, when they run across a pesky group of Earth humans from the good ol' USofA they're gonna get a fight. Because American Earth humans don't like to be forced into thinking as a group just to benefit their species. Not unless they're gonna be on TV or get a chance to win a million dollars, then all bets are off.

To address this lapse in the Borg hive mind thinking, they create an individual to talk to these American humans. A woman. A badass who'll do anything to get them pesky Americans corralled.

Anyone that knows Star Trek will know that the humanoid crew on the USS Enterprise 1701-D are not supposed to be American humans. They're not even supposed to all be Earth humans, but the show was created in the good ol' USofA so the crew are rabidly individualistic and rebellious.

Being a smart race of hive minded humanoids, the Borg don't approach the crew of the Enterprise directly. Their Borg queen captures the humanoid robot, Data. She figures she'll be able to bring him to her side because he isn't a human but he really really wants to be one.

The Borg queen whips up some android magic and gives Data something he's never had before: a sense of touch.

Data has always been able to tell when he's touching something or something is touching him, but apparently, for all seven seasons of the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation; even while he was being intimate with Tasha Yar, he has never been able to 'feel' anything. Not in the physical sense.

Data did get a taste of emotional feelings when his evil twin (of course Data had an evil twin!) installs an emotion chip without his permission.

So the Borg woman installs, without Data's consent, a patch of skin on his arm. It looks like human skin with hairs and everything. You might think of this little patch of skin as an attempt to bridge the Uncanny Valley from the other side: from android to human.

Then the Borg queen leans down and gently blows across that patch of skin. Data throws his head back and gasps with pleasure.

The director kept the camera squarely on the Borg queen's face as she blew across Data’s arm, but if they'd just stayed on his face and let her head drop out of the frame . . . that movie would have grossed a billion dollars a year from repressed nerds all around the world who could imagine the Borg queen blowing on something else she had installed instead of that little patch of skin.

Anyway.

How do you talk to someone about fixing a healthcare system that they would agree is flawed when they think you’re the enemy? They think I’m trying to trick them into some form of communism.

No one complains that Medicare is a socialist program (which, it could be argued, it is) yet they bristle if someone mentions Medicare for all, which is the same system, with the age restriction removed. The system is already in place, you just expand on what is already there.

I won’t know the cost of all my health insurance woes until everybody involved in tucking my belly button back into my gut has sent in their fee for services rendered. I’ve heard that hospitals have taken to financing those with decent credit and crappy insurance; which, these days, is everyone. So this will be something that haunts me for years.

I’m not asking anyone to pick a side. I’m not trying to win and make you lose. The healthcare system will never get better unless we can talk about it like we’re all in the same boat, because we are.

Summer Beauty

   It’s the day after my umbilical hernia operation and I’m sitting at my computer desk saying little prayers that I won’t cough because it feels like someone shoving a pitchfork into my belly button.

The operation went well, even though it was performed at Centerpoint, a hospital which I’ve heard nothing good about. I was given something called Propephal, so when they wheeled me into the operating room, plugged it into my IV and told me to count backwards from ten, 3 seconds later I woke up in the recovery room with an hour and a half sliced out of my life.

I ascended slowly into consciousness passing the time with the recovery nurse, Cindy, who showed me pictures of and told me stories about her cat, Artemis. With a cat named Artemis I realize I’m making an elaborate assumption in how I spelled her name. It could as easily have been spelled Syndi but I know I’m phonetically correct and that’s good enough for me.

A month ago I bought a 1981 Honda CB900 Custom motorcycle for $1000. It was cheap being 39 years old and a trade in at the local BMW Motorcycle shop. I found it while looking for a BMW in my price range of $4000.

    I didn’t buy it right away. I had no intention of buying that bike until the A/C went out on a hot night and I had to spend my $4000 motorcycle budget replacing it. I was desperate for a motorcycle so I scraped together another $1000 that I probably shouldn’t have spent, and bought it.

The CB900 Custom wasn’t my first choice. What I was looking for was a vintage BMW motorcycle but they’re difficult to find within my price range. I had owned a 1975 BMW 600cc motorcycle in the mid 80s that was prosaically named R60/6 and I loved it.

I bought the BMW after owning a heart breaking chain of stylish but incredibly factory flawed British motorcycles. A company called Lucas Electrics had a monopoly on supplying the ignition systems of all British motor vehicles at the time. The legacy of Lucas Electrics was brilliantly illustrated at a motorcycle swap meet by a t-shirt depicting a knight in full battle armor, with the name LUCAS emblazoned above and below a caption saying, “The Prince of Darkness.”

Riding a BMW R60/6 was like driving a two wheeled station wagon. It had a fairing and a long flat seat. Girls thought it was ugly until they sat in the saddle and took a ride. Over long distances with my friends who brought their girlfriends, all the girls wanted a turn on my bike because it was so comfortable. They wouldn’t let anyone take pictures of them on it, for good reason.

I like old BMWs because they’re simple. Function over form. Famous for being reliable, easy to maintain and being driven for record setting numbers of miles before needing to be rebuilt or retired. The maintenance to keep them happily puttering down the highway is simple; barely more than what’s required to keep your lawn tractor in tip top shape. I use the lawn tractor as an example because my dad heard me driving my Beemer down the street and he said he could have sworn someone was coming over the hill on their John Deere lawn tractor.

The 70s BMW motorcycle was as ugly as home-made sin. They were tall. I owned a 1975 R60/6 and had to tip-toe at stop lights and I’m 5’9”. The cylinders poked out the sides which made them very wide, so you won’t be doing a lot of lane splitting but those cylinders were in the wind for a reason: insanely efficient cooling. They never overheated. They were just asking to be abused and neglected and because the cylinders were horizontally opposed in a ‘boxer’ formation, it was the smoothest twin cylinder motorcycle you would ever ride.

If you own a BMW motorcycle the one thing every experienced owner would tell you is that you never start a riding season without adjusting the valves. It’s a simple thing to do and all the tools you need are in a bag in a bin in the easily accessible under seat compartment. It was like a little trunk. You could change a tire or rebuild the engine with what was provided in the factory tool kit.

Being the man that I am, I rolled my old BMW out to prepare it for the first ride one spring. Knowing how unpredictable Missouri weather is, it could have been mid January. Anyway, instead of taking off the valve covers and adjusting the valves as I should have and have done for many years leading up to that day, I decided to see if it would start. I knew better but I kept telling myself that, if it started I would shut it off before it got warm and adjust the valves. After all, it only takes 20 minutes.

Of course it fired up immediately. Because it had so eagerly burbled into life, I decided to ride it around a little before adjusting the valves. The weather in Missouri changes fast. It might drop down to zero degrees that night and I might not get to ride my bike for another month. So I threw a leg over the saddle, blipped the throttle, opened the choke and headed to my sister’s house for a visit.

About ten miles into my ride, a grin spread wide across my face as I whizzed north on I435, something whacked left my knee very hard. It felt like a baseball. I began to suspect it had something to do with my motorcycle when it immediately began to splutter and cough.

When I pulled to the shoulder and rubbed my knee I noticed that the left side spark plug wire was dangling in front of the cylinder. It was odd that the spark plug wire would pop off. That had never happened before. So I tugged it towards me thinking I’d plug it back in and continue my ride. To my dismay the spark plug wire was still connected to the spark plug.

I thought maybe it had just come loose, but I found out it had been forcefully blown out the spark plug hole, destroying the threads in the head. I was screwed. The exhaust valve had collapsed and when the piston compressed the exhausted gases against the closed valves it forced the spark plug to blow. All because I wanted to ride before adjusting my valves. It was a mistake I would never make again.

So I ran over to the BMW shop and plunked down a $1000 for that old Honda before I lost my nerve. Having been a single father for so long I knew fortunes changed quickly and if I didn’t get a motorcycle right now it might never happen. The A/C going out may be the first in a chain of catastrophic events (like a world-wide pandemic) and I might never own another motorcycle again in my life.

My son Zack took me to the shop while I negotiated the deal. When I was sitting astride my shaggy bike I told him to head home, that I was going to cruise around a little.

The bike had a fairing and a windshield with the added bonus of what are called ‘lowers’. ‘Lowers’ attach to the bottom of the fairing and divert air away from the shins so you can stay warm while riding in cold weather. What I didn’t know about ‘lowers’ was that, at least on this motorcycle, they divert the warm air passing through the engine directly between your legs, which is a bonus in cold weather, but it was 90 degrees that day. I wouldn’t be able to cruise for long, vowing that the first thing I would do when I got home was remove the ‘lowers’ until the weather cooled off.

After removing the fairing ‘lowers’ I checked the oil, only to discover that it was more than 3 quarts low. In a bike that only holds 3.75 quarts of oil that told me a lot about the guy who traded the bike in. I happened to have some oil so I topped it up. Because it was so low I decided to change the oil. I was disappointed because I bought the bike just to get me through this riding season. It had been 15 years since I ridden a motorcycle and I needed a fix.

In my search for a new oil filter for a 39 year old motorcycle I discovered that you’re supposed to use a special motorcycle oil. I was skeptical so, of course, I had to research the reason why I was going to spend double the price per quart for this special oil.

It turns out there is a good reason. It’s because the clutch is submerged in engine oil for constant lubrication but, because a clutch requires friction to operate properly, the oil can’t be TOO slippery.

Jeez mon.

I didn’t realize this was going to be such a long ride, so, if you’re still with me, you might wanna pack a picnic basket.

In my search for an oil filter I ended up being forced to go to a local shop owned by a woman I despise. She and her father bought the shop a few years ago and I vowed to never spend a dime there, but it is the ONLY shop that caters to dorks with old motorcycles. I won’t go into details, but the woman used to sell my wife cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine.

I could have easily found what I needed on eBay or Amazon but I needed to get things done quickly. As all native midwesterners know, the weather here changes fast. I needed to get my face in the wind quickly, while I still had a chance.

When I entered the shop I could hear the vile woman’s broken reed tenor sax voice from 50 feet away while she sat at the parts counter and prattled on about a TV show.

Because I’m fat now and fully bearded I was sure she wouldn’t recognize me until I handed over my debit card which has my very recognizable name emblazoned in all caps across the front. Had I been in my right mind I would have stopped at an ATM and gotten cash so she might never have known I was there.

It was only mildly reassuring to see that this woman was likely not going to see her 70th birthday. She, honestly, looked like she had already gotten passed that birthday and maybe a few more though I knew she was my age. I was pretty sure she was still smoking cocaine and a variety of other chemical comforts by the jangled sound of her voice, so she might not mind not not seeing 70. Getting old is boring if your only hobby is television.

So I changed the oil. I was trying hard not to get too attached to this bike, thinking that, once my finances recovered from my recent woes, I would budget for the bike of my dreams, again but I made the mistake of asking my son to give it a name.

My son Zack is very much into learning Japanese and about its culture and this is a Japanese motorcycle. In fact, he rather liked its style which surprised me.

After a few hours he told me that her name would be Natsumi. It means ‘Summer Beauty.’ I think that tells you all you need to know about what Zack thinks about my new/old motorcycle.

And now I love the damn thing.

The bike has hard bags that are great for carrying a few bags of groceries and a 12 pack of beer, so I rode it everywhere. I had no reason to drive my van unless I was taking more than one person somewhere or it was raining hard and after I’m able to get a rain suit to store on the bike, that’ll change.

When you drive a bike everyday you begin to notice things. Because I tinker with things I am always tempted to set things right if I think there’s something wrong. As I’ve stated a few times in this ever expanding document, this bike was to be a Bic lighter. It was to be cheap, functional and, ultimately, disposable.

Natsumi (sigh) has a four cylinder engine and a shaft drive. It’s the most low maintenance motorcycle that I've ever owned. You really don’t even have to adjust the valves unless the bike has lots and lots of miles on it.

Natsumi does have a lot of miles on it. Sort of. It’s within arms reach of 60,000 which normally wouldn’t bother me but the crankcase was so low on oil when I bought it that I think those may have been some very hard miles.

But I rode her to work everyday. I rode her to the grocery store and to doctor’s appointments. After a few weeks I didn’t even check the weather preferring to take a chance that I might get rained on.

I was so happy.

I didn’t buy the bike to be a racer. I would get it into top gear and go the speed limit. I would exceed it by a few miles per, just to stay with the traffic, but I wasn’t a speed demon. But I knew what she was capable of.

Driving home from work one day I ended up at a light behind a drugstore cowboy on his iron hobby horse. He was one of the new breed of Harley Davidson cultists who thought you can buy a seat at the cool kids table by spending what amounted to a home loan on a new motorcycle that sounded like it was assembled in the garage while his parents were on vacation. It sounded like the time the muffler fell off the wife’s mini van.

As a good, law abiding motorcyclist, I pulled up behind him at the light. Not next to him, but right behind him. And, as a typical Harley rider with those cool riding gloves on, he kept twisting the throttle so no one would forget that he was the cool one, not even for a second. I kept seeing him eye me in his mirrors when they quit vibrating.

When the light changed I allowed him to blast his way a few hundred yards ahead just to stay out of the wake of his unfiltered exhaust. When the left lane cleared I signaled and passed him. I wasn’t speeding. I had my feet up on the crash bars and casually rode past him.

Before I could pass a few cars and get back into the right lane I heard a clunk and a roar and the Harleyist blasted past me in MY lane on MY right side. Unless you know each other and are riding together, you NEVER ride past a stranger in their lane. Big no no.

I tried to ignore Ratso Rizzo on his factory rat bike but he wasn’t gonna let me. So I asked Natsumi for a little more juice and she gave it politely and willingly and I blew past the guy without downshifting. I think he was shocked because he didn’t hear me coming.

Ratso tried to catch me for a little while but I just kept twisting the throttle, just enough to keep him in the mirrors. Eventually he fell back, probably thinking that he might exceed the factory limits on his motorcycle in an attempt to prove that no ancient rice grinder was going to outrun him.

Because Natsumi turned out to be such a pleasantly accommodating motorcycle I decided to look into the reason the top end was so noisy. Because it had been run so low on oil I figured it needed attention.

And in the process I broke the engine.

I’m not going to go into the details because every step I took makes me cringe. Hindsight being 20/20 and the year being 2020 I should have known better. I should have left well enough alone. I keep my fingers crossed that a microburst doesn’t pass through and knock a tree down onto my beloved Natsumi.

Because my funds had been nearly depleted I decided to do something I haven’t done in more than a decade: I used a credit card. I searched for and found a used engine on eBay that had less than 20k miles on it, with good compression. It cost me $765 dollars to have it put under my carport.

Because I had an operation scheduled that would limit my ability to lift heavy objects for a time, I needed to pull the old motor and install the newer motor into the frame. I didn’t have to get it completely finished, just get the heavy lifting out of the way. When the pain has lessened I can install the exhaust pipes, carburetors and connect the starter. I should be on two wheels again in a week or so. I’m not going to push it. This surgery is going to end up being expensive and I don’t want to screw it up.

And that’s the news from Lake Woe-is-me, where the kids are lazy, the house is a wreck and dad is stuck at his computer while he recovers from surgery . . . which is where he is most days, anyway.