Pavlov Must Have Been a Drag at Parties

Birthdays, break ups, the smell of fresh snow.  Time, distance, rarity.  I have always been amazed at how almost every thing we encounter can trigger gutwrenching responses in us.  I am also amazed at how these emotional responses can change when we least expect them to.  Finally, I am awed at the things we do to feel the ghosts of past emotions and find new ones.

A personal example:  I had a girlfriend who lived in a studio apartment with two cats.  She was not the greatest at cleaning out the litter box.  If you have ever had a cat, or known someone who has, that combination leads to a very strong smell, and possibly taste, that hits you in the face when you walk in a door.  At the start of the relationship, I complained about this state of affairs regularly, even cleaning the litter box once in a while to push back the odor.  As time went on, I began to smell that odor and realize I was home.  This was not because I fell in love with the cats, or the scents they left behind, but because as the relationship grew, walking in the door and smelling the cat piss and kitty litter that told me I was about to see the woman I loved.

Now if I smell that same odor, it comes with a wall of feelings: lost love, distaste for ammonia and cat fluids, lazy afternoons watching old television shows, regret, and a touch of happiness from what I learned about myself and life from my time in that apartment and with that woman.  A stew of nostalgia.  And now, in some strange way, I enjoy that smell while being revolted in the same breath.  I'll breathe it in a little bit if chance across it.  I am sure most of you can relate to this.  Once in a while you buy that shitty beer because it reminds you of an awesome summer of parties.  A Blue Jeep reminds you of that asshole boyfriend you couldn't quit, but you check the plates anyway, and you are just a bit disappointed when it isn't him

We even go out of our way sometimes to seek out these triggers if they make us feel good.   Pushing a workout past your saftey zone to feel the accomplishment for a few more hours.  Staying up that extra hour to keep the conversation going.  I've heard this described as nostalgia for the present moment, and it fills us with a wistful happiness that fades even as we feel it.  We do the opposite to avoid the painful feelings and memories as well.  Avoiding your ex's street to pass the pain of seeing her porch where you spent so many nights together watching the drunks and drinking until you both joined them.  Not drinking grape soda because of the time you got sick at camp.  But what interests me most is the when we seek out that which causes us pain.

Most of the people I know seem drawn to pulling back the scab of old wounds and even rubbing salt into the nerves.  This may be indicative of the people I know more than anything else, but I still find it morbidly fascinating.  Why do it?  What memory is worth that pain?  I am left to think that underneath the pain and sorrow we willingly go back to, the joy that bred the hurt is too tempting to avoid.  And that fills me with hope.  We endure the bad, because the good must be underneath it somewhere.   That happiness is something we will keep trying to find.  Something that we will hold on to and push through the world to find again.  God be damned if we aren't going to try and dig down through the shit until we unearth that one grain of diamond!

Engines Are Not Light..

I spent Saturday tearing Oliver apart after taking a boat load of pictures before starting. With a little help from the roommate, almost every part of the engine/transmission has been removed and is now ready to be taken apart, cleaned, and inspected.

Unfortunately I broke one of the two throttle flaps connected to the choke. But, better to find out they are in bad condition now than when it is up and running on the 405!

So, here is Oliver before the teardown:


And here he is closer to the end:
And the money shot - we got the engine out, so of course I had to hold it high and pretend to smile while trying not to drop it!
I estimate the engine weighs at least 90 pounds, and after holding it up for about 30 seconds, I need to hit the gym a bit more.

Now I am waiting on the shop manual to come so I can begin taking apart the engine and seeing how much work this project is really going to take!

Random Thoughts of the Last Week

A few things lodged in my head over the last few days:

• I am surrounded by oil:  The fork I use in the cafeteria, the keys I am typing this post on, massive amounts of plastics that sits all around me.  If I think about it too much, I feel surrounded by the melted, extruded, squeezed, and pressed bodies of thousands of dead animals that were dug out of the ground.  None of us find this creepy.  Now imagine a car or building or computer made of less decomposed and processed bones and bodies.


• I went for hike and climbed 800 feet in elevation.  Once I got to the top, I realized half of the hill I was hiking on was a landfill.  In order to escape the city, I went to a hill, but the hill only exists because it is the accumulated trash of the city.  In a few million years, will the hill become the building blocks of some new society's utensils and television analogs?


• I am enraged over the pointless squabblings on the news about all of the problems we are having.  As a nation, as a culture, as individuals.  I talk to friends about these things over and over.  Yet I haven't actually written a letter or gone to protest, or done anything.  How many people like me are out there?  How do we reconcile supreme apathy with intense emotion?  Is this some sort of inherent human trait, or is this a slow, societal decline of involvement?

Good luck to us all, I suppose.

Red Oak is Tough Stuff...

Over the holidays, I made my first piece of wooden furniture: A red oak corner desk for my room. I learned quite a few things along the way, destroyed a few drill bits, and now have polyurethane drops on my junker shoes.

A few lessons I can share:

• Smoking drill bits are bad
• Red Oak is hard!
• Measuring twice sometimes doesn't work
• Eyeballing sometimes does
• Everyone should own a miter box.

Here is the beasty, somewhat from start to finish.






A few problems did crop up - one of the legs is not straight by 5-10 degrees, and the mitered joints on the runners are not all flush. But all in all, I am satisfied considering this is my first real woodworking project.

The Siege of TPS Report Holdfast

While waiting on a few people to get back to me at work, I found myself with about 20 minutes of downtime. So I used the remnants of a late night coffee run to construct a catapault of stir sticks, straws, tape and a spoon.


The range is about 3-4 feet with a Hersey's Kiss, and the arm has a tendency to fly off as you launch anything. But now I can threaten my coworkers from behind the dubious safety of rickety siege weaponry!

Binding Fun

Over the holidays I decided to learn how to bind books. It turns out to be great fun, and rather relaxing. And you can drink while doing it! I started with some open stitched (coptic) bindings. After deciding that I do not have the sewing skill to actually bind those tight enough to be useful, I moved on to a simple covered binding. This has given much better results!

I have bound about 10 or so books so far, to various degrees of success. As gifts, hand made books work really well, and since you can put one together in a night after some practice, I highly recommend it.

Here are some examples of what I have put together. (These are gifts, no copyrighted materials have been sold to anyone, if any lawyers come read this!)




Look closely, and you can exactly what I was drinking while making this book.

Oliver has loaded!

This begins my attempt to restore my father's 1968 Honda CL 350. Oliver was loaded onto the back of a truck today, and should be arriving here in (not currently so sunny) Los Angeles next week.

This is the end of one project, and the start of a new one. Over the last decade or so I have tried to convince pops to fix the bike, let me fix the bike, fix it together, etc. Last summer I delivered a challenge: get the bike running in 6 months, or hand it over to me! He failed on his end, and now I get a crack at it.

Here is the bike (named Oliver, courtesy of Richard Hammond and the Botswana Special):




We put the parts together, and now it looks like a functioning motorcycle. Dad even polished it up a bit after I got some of the parts back on.




Oliver has been in parts and on blocks for fifteen years. Time to see if he can clean up!