My daily YouTubin’ ain’t what it used to be. The “premium” plan I’d been enjoying was canceled (or allowed to lapse, I’m not sure which), and now the videos I watch are preceded and interrupted by mindless, woke ads.
I try not to let the annoyance get to me. There’s no way I’m gonna ante up $14 a month.
I still tilt toward the educational. Lately, believe it or not, I’ve been binging James Condon, who publishes loooong videos documenting his restoration, resurrection and rebuilding of decrepit small engines, mostly portable generators.
He’s clear, thorough and relatable. I’ve learned a lot.
I did watch the last day of CPAC 2025, including Trump’s stemwinder. My favorite moment, though, was the fireside chat between Mercedes Schlapp and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my governor.
After coffee and a long shower yesterday morning, I had some routine errands to run, beginning with a trip to the laundromat in Gassville. I gathered ten days’ worth of my dirty clothes and collected the dogs’ blankets from the living space.
It was warm enough, I figured, that they could do without ’em for a few hours.
Then it was on to the post office to pick up mail (nothing as consequential as what I found there last time) and ship off my oldest Benchmade knife for warranty service. I made the mistake two years ago of handing it over to a guy who said he knew how to sharpen it, and he proceeded to wreck the blade.
Since I was running low on certain grocery items, I stopped at Harps before returning to The Mountain.
I expect to be back at the post office again tomorrow for a shipment of dog food.
If you surmise from recent blog posts that I haven’t worked on the cabin since it was wired and cleaned up, you’d be right. A week of bitter cold had a lot to do with that, of course. I also had reasons of my own for stepping back.
Next will be plumbing, insulating the walls, and building the propane shed. I want to bring the gas stove out of storage soon (I’ll have to swap five or six orifices to accommodate LP) and mount the convection microwave.
The weather is becoming more agreeable.
“ooolo99ikl;i.,pyknulmmmmmmmmmm“
Nell Pirsig (1984)
The copy of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I read most often is an original paperback. I also own other editions, including one commemorating the tenth anniversary of the book’s publication.
I’ll never forget the first time I read that edition’s afterword, which included this stunning revelation:
“Chris is dead.”
Robert Pirsig’s son and traveling companion, 11 years old at the time of the journey chronicled in the book, was integral to the narrative.
“He was murdered. At about 8:00 P.M. on Saturday, November 17, 1979, in San Francisco, he left the Zen Center, where he was a student, to visit a friend’s house a block away on Haight Street.
“According to witnesses, a car stopped on the street beside him and two men, black, jumped out. One came from behind him so that Chris couldn’t escape, and grabbed his arms. The one in front of him emptied his pockets and found nothing and became angry. He threatened Chris with a large kitchen knife. Chris said something which the witnesses could not hear. His assailant became angrier. Chris then said something that made him even more furious. He jammed the knife into Chris’s chest. Then the two jumped into their car and left.
“Chris leaned for a time on a parked car, trying to keep from collapsing. After a time he staggered across the street to a lamp at the corner of Haight and Octavia. Then, with his right lung filled with blood from a severed pulmonary artery, he fell to the sidewalk and died.”
A father’s anguish was evident in the next sentence:
“I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.”
For over two decades, he lived for his son. He sacrificed for his son. And then, suddenly and cruelly, his son was ripped from his life.
Ever the philosopher, Pirsig sought perspective. His quest for answers prompted wrenching questions.
“Where did Chris go? He had bought an airplane ticket that morning. He had a bank account, drawers full of clothes, and shelves full of books. He was a real, live person, occupying time and space on this planet, and now suddenly where was he gone to? Did he go up the stack at the crematorium? Was he in the little box of bones they handed back? Was he strumming a harp of gold on some overhead cloud? None of these answers made any sense.
“It had to be asked: What was it I was so attached to? Is it just something in the imagination? When you have done time in a mental hospital, that is never a trivial question. If he wasn’t just imaginary, then where did he go? Do real things just disappear like that? If they do, then the conservation laws of physics are in trouble. But if we stay with the laws of physics, then the Chris that disappeared was unreal. Round and round and round. He used to run off like that just to make me mad. Sooner or later he would always appear, but where would he appear now? After all, really, where did he go?”
His rational, analytical mind, leveraging the ancient Greek ethos, arrived at this:
“What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.
“Now Chris’s body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn’t find anything. That’s probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to center itself upon.”
He says more, but that’s the gist.
What Pirsig lays out in his afterword isn’t exclusively about grieving a death. It’s about processing any absence, any loss, any inexplicable silence — finding a place for what’s departed, gone missing, taken away. Though I don’t now grieve in the conventional sense, I know his anguish. I feel the heartache.
The pain we endure in such moments, if we take Pirsig’s lesson, comes from our unwillingness to separate what’s missing from what never can be ripped away.
Unless we quit, that is. The patterns we cherish live as long as we do.
I believe that’s an incredibly valuable way of looking at loss. For the foreseeable future, I expect to read and re-read Pirsig’s afterword daily until I can call the perspective my own.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable