I never got around to publishing the intro on here because sometimes I’m too darn lazy. But it’s usually okay to skip the introduction of a book, and Harley Fat Boy Diaries is basically a book in video format. Or at least it’s the rough draft of what seems to want to grow into a book. I hope you enjoy it.
Orange Blossom Road is such a beautiful ride. The footage is my ride back to Destino from The River's Edge restaurant (https://the-rivers-edge.business.site/) in Knights Ferry. It's a great place to have lunch.
The story's growing, and the title keeps changing. It's a story, and I'm no longer sure what's real and what isn't. Below is the first four pages of a notebook that is full. I'm a few pages in on notebook number two now.
Harley Fat Boy Diaries
1. The Dream Begets Reality
The poetics of anywhere.
I was in Destino in my dreams last night, at my parents’ house. The Fat Boy is hibernating in their garage. I want to say I was in the kitchen talking to Mom, but that may be wishful thinking on my part, wanting to see my mother’s face, and then, of a sudden, I was in the garage floating by the door that leads into the house, into the laundry room. Both garage bay doors were up, and four young kids were cleaning a new VW van. A girl with light hair in a short bob and wearing a sports bra was hanging out of the front of the van through where the windshield should have been and running a rag over the van’s roof as if waxing it. She stopped wiping and turned toward me, giving me a friendly wave.
Then I noticed my Fat Boy wasn’t in the garage. The Fat Boy was gone! My heart somersaulted, and I flew to the corner where we kept a 32-inch Louisville Slugger from my long-ago baseball days. I picked it up and took a couple of practice swings. I turned to the kids – they were in their early 20s – and asked them where my bike was. The girl’s eyes grew big, and the three boys, in various places in and around the van, started waving their arms and telling me to calm down, that they had moved it to the backyard.
That’s when I woke up, feeling like a bad man.
I can’t get over that Sebastian, or Basti, has left his life behind. What the hell is he going to do in the US? Basti can’t even legally work there. He says he wants to work on Harleys, but he knows even less about engines and all the other parts than I do, and I know diddlysquat. But maybe a seasoned veteran of life can learn new tricks – he ain’t an old dog.
Basti’s been playing the game every day for more than half a century plus half a decade. He’s well beyond a midlife crisis: he’s having a two-thirds-of-my-life’s-down-the-shitter crisis. Considering that people live much longer these days than they did when Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot James coined “midlife crisis” in 1965, he’s still only got 20 to 25 years left if he’s lucky, which was probably about the same for a 40-year-old man back then. It’s basically always been a two-thirds-of-my-life’s-down-the-shitter crisis, but midlife makes it sound like there is still time to right the ship before it sinks. When you hit 50 and look back at the previous 25 years, you cannot kid yourself that the next 25 won’t also be a blur. Even if you somehow manage to right the ship, it’ll still be at full sail.
It was before the pandemic that Basti and I first talked about touring Cali on motorcycles. It may have been four or five years ago, around the time when one of us had turned the big five-O. We were at a restaurant, and the whole Wandergruppe was there, all eight of us, and we were drunk on red wine and life.
It was a table of people with all the answers. Life’s secrets were everywhere, scattered about us like broken fortune cookies. That evening, someone read this to me from one of those little pieces of paper: “Add turmeric to your scrambled eggs for glowing skin.” So much wisdom is imparted when you’re drunk. The world finally makes sense, and the universe is an ally instead of being standoffish and neutral. It’s Chet Baker playing his horn, a tasty Bourbon after a day of riding. The voices around you make sweet music, and everything is so warm and fuzzy you could cut off a slice and taste heaven, like when you pull a juicy peach from a tree on a warm afternoon and give it a spit shine before taking a bite.
It was late, in the early hours of the next day, and Basti said to me, or I said to him, or we blurted it out together: “Let’s take a motorcycle trip! We have to do it before we get too damn old.”
You’re forever young when drunk, a furry peach hanging in the sun. Just avoid mirrors at all costs. Celebrate the illusion! And celebrate we did. We raised glasses of red wine for the next hour, toasting our adventures to be, the places we’d see, how cool it was going to be cruising on the open road like a couple of outlaws, and we’d be free of our daily lives, and the bullshit we pretended was meaningful. You can escape it all when you’re drunken and convince yourself that come tomorrow, no matter what harebrained idea you’ve had, you’ll get to work on transforming your life. You’ll be on the way to realizing all that potential.
But the next day, you’ve got a headache and are shaky on your feet. Even if it’s a sunny day, the world looks dull and abused, the entire city in disrepair, especially your apartment and your face. The plan you came up with the night before, those people you were going to call to get a new ball rolling, that new you that you had promised yourself you were going to make, it could wait another day. It was easier to continue shoveling the same bullshit because the bullshit was familiar and didn’t require much effort. Just go through the motions and waste another day. And if you heard Coach Finch in your head, you tell him, “I’m not wasting my life. It’s just one day.”
