Neanderpundit

This car is cursed

The Honda has occupied the garage now for several weeks straight. It’s going back together,. but very slowly. One part after another dies and ends up needing expensive replacement. Even my toolbox tries to commit suicide to get away from it.

I have some work I have to do in the city today, but as soon as I return I’ll be at it again, trying to hammer this beast into submission. I swear, if I never touch another honda again in my life, it will be too soon.

It isn’t bad enough that a friend of mine thinks enough of my troubleshooting skills that he WAKES ME OUT OF A SOUND SLEEP AT FOUR AM to ASK ME TO DRIVE FIFTY MILES to try to fix a PIECE OF MACHINERY THAT I KNOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT, but sitting in my computer chair while waiting for the FOUR A.M. COFFEE to brew, I begin to LOAD MY DRAWERS TOTALLY INVOLUNTARILY WITH NO WARNING WHATSOEVER, and by the time I MAKE IT to the crapper, I’ve already DONE ALL THE SHITTING I’M GONNA DO, AND IT’S IN MY DRAWERS. So I strip out of clothes I JUST PUT ON and hop in the shower. All this is in addition to shuttling and shuffling vehicles because the wife’s Escape is in the shop and we’re reduced to the Exploder and the wife’s old Civic, which fits me like a wetsuit.

That’s how my day started. Later, I stood in a junkyard pulling bolts from the head of a Honda so that I might finish reassembling my brotherinlaw’s car. The junkyard was adequately cold and windy that my testes have retracted into my abdomen and I fear only surgery will cause them to return to their former location. Less than an hour ago, I was looking for a magnet in my toolbox and turned my back, only to hear my entire 6′ toolbox fling itself onto the floor, scattering all my tools all over hell and creation, and actually bending drawers. Welcome to fucktard friday. I intend to go out later and look for a cliff to fling myself off. Unfortunately, this is the flatland and I will probably have to use a dumpster.

I read this book a thousand years ago, or so, and thought it was IT with a capital T.

As I’m now the proud owner of a motorcycle, one that even runs, I thought to revisit this marvelous book and see what I can glean from it. Remarkably enough, it’s now available online!

So I read. And I discovered something important: The icons of youth quickly show their clay feet. What a piece of insufferable garbage this is!

Now, there are moments, I have to grant. When he’s talking about the physical reapirs, about the importance of tuning the bike properly, etc. you get a sense that he has some clue. When he talks about education, about philosophy, about most other things, it’s obvious he’s making it up as he goes, and that he’s using the moonbat’s cookbook as his guide. When he talks about the “abolition of the carrot and whip system of grading” it makes me want to puke.

What the useful message of the book is, seems to be to go and find the best fit for yourself. And he doesn’t send that message, you learn it yourself as you read.

Shamefully, his son (with whom he shares the journey in the book) is killed in a brutal and pointless mugging twelve years or so after the book is published. You have to feel for his loss. Pirsig writes a sequel that deals with this, which is less readable than the original book, though still enjoyable.

If he’d have stuck to the specifics of maintaining the bike, and given that allegory, and left it at that, he’d have done fine. Maybe only twelve people would have gotten it, but they’d have gotten it right.

Meanwhile,the book is enjoyable if you can ignore the seminal moonbattery. No help for a motorcyclist, I think.