Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

I've been banging away on my bass today -- more than usual. Working out some bugs in a simple piece of music which, like so many simple pieces, is easy to play but damnably hard to play well. (The Beatles' "Come Together" if you're interested. Easy piece, but getting those slides and hammer-ons just right; getting that tone fat enough -- well, remember, Paul is a much better bassist than he is given credit for.)

In essence, really, that is the bass in microcosm. 

Oh, I adore Victor Wooten and Steve Bailey. Like every bassist, I worship at the altar of Clarke. I study Jamerson and Radle and could (and do) listen to Jaco's recordings for hours. I stand in awe of Gary Willis. But Lee Sklar is my hero. Perfect notes, perfect tone, at the perfect time. There is a reason he's on over 2,500 albums. He just plain makes the music better.

Simply.

I remember when I truly fell in love with the bass. I was just a kid -- very early teens -- but already committed to the drums, when I heard Paul Chambers playing with Miles. "Someday My Prince Will Come". Chambers was playing bloody whole notes, for goodness sakes, and I thought I had never heard such expression and beauty in any music ever. 

Anyway, got to thinking about the "Boys from Liverpool" as I was playing their music. About how good they were together. And that got me to thinking about how they broke up. And that got me to thinking about The Button.

Somewhere pushing (good Lord!) 20 years ago, my little girl was living in Portland, OR, as was I. She was working in some funky little shop, in Southeast I think, and came across -- and gave me -- the button you see above. I immediately declared it the most perfect button in all of the history of the world and knew I would have it, close, for the rest of my life.

It is, in fact, at this moment sitting where it always does -- right under the monitor of this computer.

The Button is perfect on several levels. Naturally, as my daughter gave it to me, it is precious (heck, I still have the collection of rocks, in its entirety, she picked up and gave me on a Christmas hike of the Grand Canyon when she was 6 or so). But, The Button is also cooler than cool and may just very well contain not only the Great Truth but the reason for all the worlds ills as well.

Think about it. Yoko doesn't mess up John's head -- well, anymore than it was already messed up at that time -- and maybe, just maybe, the Boys stay together. I mean, who knows what they might have come up with?

Yup, the way I see it, if it wasn't for Yoko Ono, we might not have global (sic) warming, would have solved hunger and quite possibly have achieved world peace.

Ah, well, on that note, time to get back to the music (a pun worthy of Takei?).

But not to worry, kids, the more I play, the more I'll remember that I'm

Still

Pissed

at

Yoko.

Aren't you?

It All Started with a Photo.

A view from the hill: Antenna Valley and the Song Thu Bong.

This is supposed to be about motorcycles. And journeys. But, though I ride everyday, sometimes those journeys are in my head.

Sometimes I time travel.

So it was last night. Don't know what started it. I was on-line, looking for something -- truth be told, I don't remember what -- and saw a link. That took me to another; about a Marine and his time in-country (Viet Nam). Seems he was on a little hill. Hill 300 the Marines called it in '67, when he was there. Out in the middle of way-begone and nowhere, it just happened to sit dead astride three things: the north end of the Antenna Valley; the largest coal mine in Viet Nam and; the main northern branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. So the Marines decided that there ought to be an outpost there and they plunked some boys down and began to build a camp.

Quiet place. Surprising when one considers that Antenna Valley, though not as famous as the Ah Shau, was just as nasty a place from a combat standpoint and that the trail in that area was running steady with NVA Regular Army.

Quiet place. At first.

I guess Clyde (The Viet Cong or "Charlie" were irregular guerrillas. NVA Regular Army we called "Clyde". A much more serious name for a much more serious and professional soldier) took that as a throwing down of the gauntlet or just too much to pass up.

After a while they hit those Marines and they hit 'em hard. Hellova battle on that hill. I do believe one of those Marines won "The Medal" in that one. 1967. The hill was empty once again.

None of that had a damn thing to do with me.

But, in '68 the brain-trust decided we really needed a presence on that hill. And, as luck would have it, they just happened to have a Special Forces OD-A (Operational Detachment - "A") with nothing much to do as in May of 1968, their camp - at the other end of Antenna Valley - a place called Kham Duc, had gotten overrun by two divisions of that same NVA. So they took the surviving members, added a few more and sent Detachment A-105, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, to Hill 300, known thereafter by its real name: Nong Son Mountain. And they set about finishing the camp the Marines started but never got to complete.

That's where the time travel begins. In that link I followed, there was another link. To a photo taken by that Marine who wrote his account of the battle for Hill 300. Of the camp under construction. Of the camp as A-105 knew it at first.

See, A-105 had this skinny little 1LT Executive Officer for a time. Harper, Timothy F., 1LT, INF, MOS: 31542 (Special Forces/Airborne/Ranger Qualified, Infantry Unit Commander). And that mountain was my home for what seemed -- and quite possibly was -- a lifetime.

It was not a quiet place.

We used those trenches you see as the way we got around camp. Stick your head up -- take fire. Most of the camp, that we built with the Sea-Bees, was underground. The view I don't have is to the west. There was a huge ridge line there and they had snipers and .51 Cal. heavy machine guns that fired anytime they had a shot. Hell, we kept an M-1D sniper rifle in the crapper. It faced that ridge line and had no door so you could return fire while you did your business. I shit you not (pun intended). And all this was in camp. Operations were, to say the least, interesting.

The AO was all a mass of NVA and, damn, they were fine soldiers. Those boys were tough -- and good. Though, while I admire their professionalism, I guess, as we used to say, we were tougher and better. I survived, those I faced didn't.

The hard math of war.

So this picture took me back in time. Saw things I hadn't in over forty years. That Marine took that picture from the exact spot where I read the "Dear John" letter from my fiancee, Susie. I remembered how narrow that little "Dogleg left" of a camp was. So narrow a Huey on the helipad had the tail-boom hanging over the edge and I saw pilots drop backwards off the hill (it was about 4,000' straight down on three sides) and kick pedal to get it turned around just to get through translational lift. I remembered all the friends, Vietnamese and American, who made it and who didn't. I remembered bulldozer races down that twisty, narrow, little road we cut in the side of that hill with the See-Bees during monsoon season, when the mud was calf deep and you had to use opposite controls because the track you locked up would skid faster than the one still turning. And one of those bulldozers taking a 3,000' swan dive (the See-Bee Chief dove off in time) because the Chief missed a turn. I remember the little assault boats we had. We kept them down in the town for running river Ops. -- which we never did, but they had big Johnstons on them and swivel mounted M-60 machine guns on the front, so we "requisitioned" a slalom ski from some REMF in Da Nang and would roar up the Song Thu Bong cutting tight turns because they were shooting at us from the banks and the guy up front would return fire. I remembered my students when, as a Viet Namese linguist, I was able to teach my English classes down in the local school and how the kids giggled when I would get up on the desk and roar like a tiger to teach them how to say "R". I remember our rations arriving each month. Three live pigs (squealing in a cargo net below a helicopter), ten cases of dried mackerel and a hundred 100 lbs. bags of rice. To feed the 700 we squeezed onto that hill. Eight Americans, 32 Montagnards, 10 RVN Special Forces and 671 Vietnamese CIDG.

I remembered that skinny little 21 year old 1LT standing in the mud in '69, wondering how he was going to fill the shoes of the finest officer he ever knew as CPT Earl J. Stewart left the team.

    

I remembered it all. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. The the sublime and the horror. 

And, after a very long night, I remembered the most important thing of all. Right or wrong, good or bad, valid or not that war may have been -- but, I kept the faith. My country called. I and those fine men with whom I served, answered. My OCS, Jump, Ranger and Special Forces school classmate Roger Lee Johnson, kept the faith. Special Forces kept the faith. Let those who hate us and think us fools do so. They will never know what it is to have: Kept. The. Faith.

And on those long nights, that is enough.

For: Roger Lee Johnson, 1LT, INF, Det. A-105, 5th Special Forces (ABN). KIA: 28 SEP 1968, Nong Son, Quang Nam Province, Republic of Viet Nam. 

Forever, Brother.

My Little World

I have my own little world.

Not some alternate reality or anything (though, as it's mine --  one could make a case...), just my little studio where I spend about 80% of my time. I love it; I'm  grateful and fortunate to have it, but -- sometimes a hundred twenty square feet gets, well,  small. What saves it of course, is that it's really not just a room  -- it's a gateway. It is where I write, work, play music. And when I do those things the walls go away and I'm transported to the places that one goes when pursuing dreams. Kind of wonderful, actually.

But. It does have one downfall.

The Chair.

The Chair has been mine since new, somewhat over 20 or 25 years or so now and if I've learned anything about it, it is this: it is a sleep machine. Don't think I've ever known anyone who can sit in it for more than five minutes and not fall asleep. Damn, I love that chair. I know, one would naturally think: "So, what's the problem?". The problem is, I'm loosing several hours a day to that chair. I'll sit down to read or think or rest -- just for a moment -- and next thing I know, it's two or three hours later.

I'm 66 years old -- I don't have three hours a day to give away. I've music to play, blogs to write, Masonic and Motorcycle Club business to handle and housework to do. Stuff, Kids.

Gotta take care a bid-niss, knowhatimean?

This blog is a perfect example. The Chair really gets in its way. I'll be ruminating on life the universe and blogs and -- just as I'm doing now -- will kind of end up in The Chair. All good intentions, and then ikindasit downandZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Coming Back

I know --- been a while. I've really no idea why this starts and stops so. 

Actually, I do, several reasons.

The Geezer really did start the downward slide into inactivity; it's just not as soul fulfilling and, well, cool as the bobber. It's a big road bike -- just loves the "I" -- the Interstates -- and the long leg, cruise control, satellite radio blaring runs. Oh, I run the back roads on it. Run the twisties in the hills on it (truth be told, it'll out-corner the bobber all day long), heck, I've even run off road -- not entirely, I must admit, on purpose -- with it.

Bottom line is, the damn thing does just about everything and it does it well. But. 

But.

I'm a denizen of the sleepy by-way, the lost town, the old run down country store. I'm a bugs in the teeth, no windshield and "yeah, motorcycles can be uncomfortable -- what was the question?" guy. So while I've been on those by-ways, found those towns and swapped lies with the owners of those stores while runnin' the Geeze, I always have felt that because I was on that big, fancy scoot I wasn't really on a motorcycle run. That, somehow, being on a scooter that I see so many old, fat, RUBS on made it less of an experience.

Never said I was sane, Gang.

Or smart.

Another reason is that I'm going back to music. A lot of the free time and creative energy used for the blog now goes into bangin' away on those basses. Jeez, I do love it. Music has been a constant in my life since I was four years old. It's good to be playing again.

So, yeah, I could give you reason after reason why this sort of petered out. I could tell you how, after that last post: "Heat", things sorta blew up in the Club with several of the Brothers and a lot of stuff went straight to hell. I could tell you I had a few health problems (I'm OK). I could tell you lots of stuff and it'd all be true.

But I had me a RE-VEL-A-SHON t'other day (OK, maybe it wasn't of that magnitude, but rather an epiphany for someone normally as monumentally obtuse as I).

Blogs, it seems, are an interactive medium.

Now while a number of you younger folks are saying: "Duh..." (the height, for many of you, of your grammatical abilities), recognize that we older folks wrote stuff longhand or on typewriters and then abandoned it to an editor or publisher or whomever and maybe, if we were lucky, got some comment upon it somewhere down the road. Blogs, residing within the medium and context they do, are dependent upon comment and response. It is not only necessary -- it is their completion.

I came to this realization just the other day. I have two Daughters-in-Law who are inveterate bloggers. I've always enjoyed the blogs, check them every other day or so, but never really tumbled to the role the comments played. I just viewed them with my 66 year old frame of reference and was disconnected from that which was supplied by others.

OK: "Duh...".

What happened was, our oldest son got his dream job in Virginia. They're moving from here right after the first of the year. Tiffany, his wife, a dancer, writer and all round artiste, is not only a blogger, but does Twitter, Instagram and every other social networking site one can imagine. Now, as Facebook has somewhat softened the miles between my Daughter, Grandchildren and a number of my family members and me, I thought that getting on those other media would help keep up with what went on in Chris' and Tiffany's life, as well.

And so I discovered the power of comments and the role they play in this new media of ours.

Ya' see, the whole time I was writing this blog, I had about six comments. Not much. It was as if it was just out there in space, not much different than the "old" media where the written words really were the "flies in amber". But that's not what this is. It is a blog. It needs you -- not just as a reader, but as a participant.

That's how it works.

So I'm gonna start writing this thing again. Maybe daily, more likely every few days, maybe every week. It'll vary. But I now know that I need your help. Your insight. Your contribution.

Heck, Kids, I still have hills to ride, back roads to run and old stores to visit. I got lies to swap with the folks in those stores.

Who knows -- might even tell ya' some...

Heat

I said this morning there might be stories. There really is only one. Heat. Broiling, inescapable heat. So darn hot it beat us up and broke up the crew.

We rolled out of Tehachapi at 0800, fairly mild temps and blue skies. Looked like an easy day runnin' the big road into Needles and on to Flag. We just didn't count on what the Mojave had in store for us. And that can be a nasty desert. It gave us some of it's primo stuff today, that's for sure.

We busted into the desert and with every mile the temps just climbed. We peaked at about 115 according to my fancy little magic box on the Geez. At times the bikes were struggling, bit of popping and wheezing now and then -- we all struggled the whole day. It was like riding into the mouth of a blast furnace. As Bassman put it: "At one point I thought I was going to watch the skin on my hands blister and peel away.". Kinda says it all.

Getting into Needles, we pulled off and got to say hi to Scoot. He's the State Captain for Arizona and one of my best friends in the Club. He can't make it this year (first time in 5 years or so), but it was good to see the boy.

Then the miracle occurred.

Maybe not quite on a par with Lourdes, but close.

Seems the only place close to eat was Denny's. It was just too damn hot to go looking about for something else, so despite the fact that Denny's can screw up cornflakes, we decided to eat there. And I had one of the best damn grilled chicken sandwiches I've ever tasted. The meat was thick, juicy, hickory grilled to perfection and topped with caramelized onions worthy of a good French kitchen. The lettuce was crisp and fresh, the tomato ripe, the bun perfect.

I may just have to call the Catholic Church and have them send a priest to investigate. Or an exorcist.

After lunch, Pizan decided to hole up in Needles and run out early tomorrow morning to catch up with us in Flagstaff. The heat had just gotten to him. And it was a good thing he did. After Needles the desert got serious. And any of you that have been in the Mojave know that when that place wants to lay it on you -- it don't play.

So we baked until just past Kingman, where it started to cool down. Hit a little 10 minute thunderstorm; didn't gear up -- we just let the water soak into our thirsty skin and reveled in it. 2 minutes later we were dry.

We kept climbing towards Flag, and topping 7000 feet, we  began to feel alive again. On into Flag -- so cool and the air so sweet. Realized later it was over 80 -- but after 115 it felt like a New England fall, crisp and clear.

So here we sit in Flag. Waiting on Pizan, enjoying the morning. Ready to see what the Goddess has in store for us today. Maybe heat. Maybe rain. Maybe stories and lies and magic. We'll find out when the tires are on the pavement, eatin' up the miles.

The great wonder and joy of our lives: the Road is always there.

Waiting.

Seasons

Truck drivers say there are only two seasons: Winter and Construction. On California Hwy 99, there's only the latter. What I fail to understand, is that with all the constant "improvement" on that road -- why the heck it's still so screwed up. That is one rotten piece of pavement. Populated with idiots.

Good. I feel better now.

Hit the road about 0730. Damn, the scoot's running fine. Took some advice from Bear, who's ridden these big Geezer Glides more than I, and did some asymmetrical packing. The primary on these things weighs a ton, so packing heavy on the right side really evens things out. Damn thing's tracking straight as a die. It was one of those great mornings: still, quiet, cool but not cold. Didn't even turn the radio on. Too peaceful for that. Just wanted to run the road in silence, thinking about the miles and experiences to come.

Hit Pizan's house by around 0915 and we were on the road again by 10.

Really -- I don't want to bore you with Atwater to Tehachapi. Flat, hot, mostly 99. It was, as I said in an earlier Post, really just a positioning run.

We expected it to cool down once we got some altitude but it's stayed hot even on the mountain. The A/C in the room was a joy to step into.

It's now 0600 on Monday. Pablo got in last night at about 1700, Bassman about 0530 this morning. Gonna grab a bite and start headin' East. Looks like Bassman's got a leak in his primary -- so we'll need to keep an eye on that. I've got tools and Pablo is a pretty good Harley wrench, himself, so if things go south we'll get it fixed -- at least enough to get him to a shop.

Takes me back to the old days when wrenchin' on those things, especially on a long trip, was simply de rigure. We'll get were we're goin', be it by bailin' wire or duct tape.

Time to grab some chow and get rollin'. The boys are down there now, and I can tell they want to hit the Concrete Goddess. Lot of long, hot miles to run today.

Maybe, hopefully, even some stories.

Holding Patterns

Time does drag when a run's coming up.

I sent my old bags off to Bassman so he could use 'em on the run. He's riding an old school FX, so they should work as well for him as they did me. Starting to see all the Brothers getting ramped up for National. Putting hookups together; giving each other tons of crap about everything -- a predicate for all the smack talkin' that'll go on in the Ozarks. I can tell everyone is in the same place I am:

Time to get on the road, but; it's still a week away.

And that's for the crew out here in the West. Little over 2,000 miles for us to the Hub, so we're pretty much the first to hit the road.

Back in the day (as the modern expression goes), when I was flying the New York TCA, we used to make a lot of circles in the sky. Holding patterns they're called and every pilot hates 'em. You hit a fix (beacon usually) run for about a minute, make a 180, run back the same amount, make another 180 and do it again. And again. And again. If you're a big boy you can get 10 mile legs. Big deal. Kinda like NASCAR, only you go nowhere faster.

In the military we called it "hurry up and wait".

The Geez is ready. oil's changed, tightened everything up, tires look good. Packing doesn't take long -- my standard daily uniform in multiples: 6 t-shirts, 3 pairs of Levis, extra socks. All the rest is "what if" gear for cold and wet. Tools, rags, assorted junk. Got so much room on this big bagger I ride now that there's no art to it anymore. Easy as pie. Roll everything up, stuff it in the pull out bags, slide them into the hard bags, fire it up and roll.

Old guy's dream.

Now it's Monday and I can start to feel it. Just want to be on the Concrete Goddess headin' somewhere. Need that feel of the wind, that hum of the tires and that rumble of the big V-Twin. Need to see Pablo in the mirror, steady on my 8 or 4, runnin' hard on the big road. Need to have that "weather eye" on the horizon, figuring what's coming and how to get by it.

Need to be gone.

Don't get me wrong, I'll miss everyone here -- but heck, I'm at that point in life where I start every long run knowing it could be my last. Don't know how many miles are left in this old tank and, on this road, there ain't no more gas stations. That's not fatalistic, just a recognition of the fact that I get much more mail from AARP, Medicare and Social Security than from friends these days. Definitely more from AARP. And I'm not even a member. I know -- I've got friends in their eighties who are still runnin' the road and I might be at that age, too -- but there are no guarantees. So I savor each run now as I never did when I was young -- it's been said before: "Youth is wasted on the young".

As it should be.