The Dark Years – Why I Learned to Hate the Killer

The Dark Years – Why I Learned to Hate the Killer

From post number 2, you can begin to ascertain that there is an underlying cheapness in my being.  Funny, as I was in financial turmoil for most of my young adult life.  So it is either I am a horrible cheapskate or just plain crackers and shouldn’t be around sharp objects or open flame.

Whatever it is, with motorcycles comes that odd moment when you are developing a love for an antisocial behavior and begin to seek that social network that are your riding friends. Basically, it is an activity that you can hide form the world within your helmet and no other humans can be in your head, yet you are most likely going to try to find similar miscreants to share the destination with.

I fell into a gang of tuffs.  They were a grizzly bunch with little time for shiny objects that adorned some garages.  Their hours were consumed with maps, efficient riding through the night so that in mass, they could converge on sacred locations like Precious Moments Park and Chapel or Laura Ingles Wilder park or John Hardy’s BBQ.  Fueled by BBQ, Burritos and Dr. Pepper, these pale riders scoured the country side for the obscure, hard to get to, difficult to find and more importantly, why does it even exist.

Fuel, Light, Speed and Stamina drove them from place to place. I never quite figured out that equation. Enter the KLR 650. Cheapness led me to her.  She was affordable as if to say no one else wanted her except for the purely cheap.  Over the years the KLR platform only successfully fulfilled the Fuel with a larger than typical tank and a motor that sipped fuel so your range in turn was wonderful.  She lacked in light, both mass and projection of.  “Dim” was used to explain both headlight and rider. Speed…not a chance and even if it was fast, the brakes on the KLR 650 would be comparable to stopping on a dime as a barge captain on the mighty Miss.  Speed and Singles tend not to be synonymous. Stamina, the KLR would go the distance until that fateful day when Idiot With a Wrench (IWW) proved more than the KLR could handle.

Motors are living beings.  The battery is their brain.  The wiring harness is their nervous system.  There is food and oxygen in the breath of carburation. Oil of course is their lifeblood. As an 1/8 o’ ton rider on a single 650 motor, pushing the bike at 65-70mph always felt as if I was beating my mule.  On this day I had spurs in its’ haunches, a riding crop on swat and mother natures pushing back on us with a significant headwind and 36 degrees in the air. It was as if I didn’t care for the beast. And my little donkey finally failed.

Over time a motor burns some of its’ oil.  As a motor wears, that oil consumption can become great or small.  My little donkey has a small thirst, just enough to stain the tail section with soot but not enough to make me nervous every time I pushed the “go” button. This human had not considered the cold and the head wind and an urge to end a 36 degree / 6 hour ride as quickly as possible as a significant event that required additional giving a damn. In Two Harbors, Minnesota I looked at my riding companion’s eyes as they glanced in horror to the sound of metal marbles, broken steel and the quite prevalent rattle of Idiot as we pulled up to the stop light.

The above photo is the last place this motorcycle ran with its’ original heart.  Over that following winter a replacement heart was purchase from a land far away.  It arrived upside down, drooling oil that the junkyard had left in it all over the floor of the UPS facility in which I picked it up.  It was not delivered due to this drool and there was a moment of terse if not course customer service as I was told I would be responsible for the mess the new heart left on the floor of the truck.  After a few minutes of “I’m not the one who failed to ship it properly.” and “I’m not the one who failed to see the arrow and the ‘this side up’ on the side of the box” I was on my way.

IWW spent the next few months cleaning and transplanting the new heart into the chest of the once proud mule.  IWW had a win.  This can only lead to trouble.  Give an Idiot a glimpse of success, and he believes he can only be successful from this day forward…

Exhibit B…a new project:

The Patient:

 

The Wound:

Next – Gumption Traps – I did everything right, how did this end so wrong?