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Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Zen and the Art

ZEN AND THE ART OF TAKING IT TO THE SHOP AND LEAVING IT THERE FOR A WEEK AND A HALF.

OR

ZEN AND THE ART OF JUST RIDING IT UNTIL IT BLOWS UP AND THEN BUYING A NEW ONE


Maintenance, of motorcycles or any other thing, isn’t exactly my strong suit. Much like I turn a blind eye to kitchen untidiness, I also ignore (or try to ignore) the less-than-state-of-the-art level of tuning on my three bicycles. All three of them work, but they have a few quirks. That isn’t being completely honest with you. Replace “a few quirks” with “potentially life-threatening flaws” and you are closer to where my bicycles stand in the maintenance department.

I can’t really get around to repairing them all now because the window to the Seattle bicycle season is open. I have to climb through it and fall two floors to the street to get in as much riding as I can before the monsoon season begins in October. I’m more of a bike rider than a bike geek. You can be both a rider and a geek. Being a geek requires a little too much curiosity about any given subject than I seem to be able to muster. I do have a lot of curiosity about one subject, but in that endeavor they don’t say geek, they say pervert.

I suppose that it wouldn’t kill me to spend a few hours a week making sure all of my bikes were in top working order, but that might cut into the time that I sit on my butt daydreaming about helping the Incas kill off Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadors. Bike maintenance might interfere with the time I sit at my piano thinking that, although I can’t play piano worth a shit, I could probably kick Chopin’s skinny little tuberculosis-ridden ass. You could put Mozart and Franz Schubert into the ring along with Chopin and I’d walk away after the first round without breaking a sweat. So like I said; I’m too busy to do my own bicycle maintenance.

Just like Robert Pirsig can find Zen in monkeying around with motorcycles, I can find Zen in being a lazy slob. I think there is definitely a Zen-like devotion that I attach to staring off into space for hours and hours each day. Daydreaming is like watching TV but without the TV. I rarely ask people, “Did you see that show on TV last night?” I do ask people dumb shit like, “If the Incas had kicked Pizarro’s ass at Cajamarca, how long do you think their empire would have endured?”

Just using the word ‘Zen’ in the title of a book has to be worth about 100,000 units in sales in our purpose-starved culture. If you want to call your geeky devotion to whatever it is you do ‘Zen’ then go right ahead. Two can play that game. Or, come to think about it, you can go play it by yourself. If you want to say that you want to be a Zen master at golf, that’s your business. I will just put myself into what you would call a Zen-like trance. I call it a nap.

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