RL441 - The Blessing of the White Dog

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: It’s not John’s tool, referring to John being on a motorcycle trip and being loaned a motorcycle that was way too small for him and that is what made the trip scary for him, not any lack of skills.

The show title refers to a dog that John saw in the fields after getting on a different motorcycle that fit him much better, and that he almost, but not quite got to come over to touch him.

When John answers the call they pretend that Merlin was John’s neighbor who was looking after John’s property while he was gone. Merlin sorted his mail, although John would sort it a different way.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Apple’s MacBook Pro announcement (RL441)

Today was the big Apple announcement. Merlin has a lot of other Apple podcasts like MacBook Weekly and MacTalk.org and John doesn’t want him to burn the top content on this show, but he is curious if the new thing is going to be the thing that makes it all worthwhile, and it is. The are releasing a MacBook Pro that is really good and fixes a lot of the shit that has been driving people crazy for a while. Every nerd’s wishlist was granted and it get two enthusiastic thumbs up from Merlin. John can’t wait to consume this new Macintosh product.

Matt Haughey (RL441)

John wants to change all his light bulbs to ones he can control from his phone. Matt Haughey tried that, and look what happened to him! John was down in Portland and somebody said that his wife does a thing with a wife that is friends with Matt Haughey’s wife. What are the chances! It was a strange exchange, but John has known Matt Haughey long enough and he knows he is like a bad penny, he is always turning up. The manhole cover is going to go up a little bit and there he is going to be, peeping out, going: ”Hey, try this USB-C cable!” Merlin had a gentleman’s phone call with him just last week. They mostly talked about John.

John’s motorcycle trip (RL441)

After last week’s episode John was just about to embark on a motorcycle ride (see RL440) and to Merlin it sounds like John is in good spirits and he is not calling in from an emergency patient facility. Merlin’s daughter was ice skating the other day and she ate it really hard. John might have a matching bruise on his thigh, but they have not come to a point in their relationship where they are on a sharing-bruises text thread. Merlin wonders if John would exchange butt photos with Merlin’s daughter if that was social media and what rules they would be bound by.

John is trying to figure out right now what constitutes social media in this day and age. Some of the people on his motorcycle trip are avid social media posters and a couple of them have Instagram accounts where they are riding motorcycles over fallen logs or they are balancing a hand-thrown pizza on top of their nose. TikTok hasn’t made the corner to this crowd yet. John appeared in some other people’s social media accounts this week and the people on those other accounts were like: ”Oh look, it is John Roderick! He is an adventure motorcyclist? Who knew!”, so the question is now if John is on social media, technically!

The motorcycle team

John has several motorcycle fellows, all with different online-handles and different skill-sets, they are actually different people. This was the third week-long back-country motorcycle adventure in the wilds of Oregon that John has taken in the last 5 years and all of them were initially spearheaded by friend of the show and architect Ben King from Portland, and largely hosted by motorcycle impresario Gregor Halenda who is a famous Internet celebrity in his own right, he makes fancy motorcycle gewgaws, his wife is an Internet tastemaker in the Portland food scene. It is a big operation!

They are all professional photographers and they are always documenting it both in a social media way and also in an old-school photographer way. They not only jump a stump with a pizza on their nose, but they also have good pictures of it. He is also a machinist with a machine shop and has a whole world of fans on the Internet who are primarily fans of his shop. They talked a lot about Adam Savage on this trip because a lot of the people are admirers of him and his ability to solve problems with machines. John and his daughter watched him just lathing some stuff and it got her excited about lathes and they spent a whole afternoon just watching videos about different kinds of lathes.

This gang is not averse to modern technology. They want the garment that wicks away perspiration, they want the laser, they want the drone that follows you, they want the tech, but they also want the classic thing to a certain extend. They want the old lathe that was in the old factory that was getting torn down, they want the old thing that is made out of metal instead of the new one, it is a nice blend. The first time John med Gregor he was dressed head to toe in technological fabric and John naturally didn’t trust him because: Where is your wool? Show me one cotton thing on you right now! He was a little too far forward for John’s taste, but later on he realized that he is spot-welding BMW Boxer motors from the 1960s, trying to turn them into a hovercraft.

The third person on this tour that has been there every year is Scott Rounds, who is a flat-track motorcycle racer from Vermont who is a little laconic, who doesn’t talk a lot, he is not going to discuss his marriage with you, but he is a super-personable guy. They are all cowboys! When they sit around the campfire and John asks who has ever had a bad dream they all stair at their tin coffee and one of them might say: ”I had a bad day once, does that count?” - ”No!”

Starting early with learning something so it becomes natural

At one point Scott pulled a tiny little beat-up Honda from the 1980s out of the truck that he got as a birthday present when he was 10 and that is how he learned to ride. John’s daughter is 10 and she can’t work a door knob, and he started talking about the first time he wheelied over a cop car.

Ben can fix anything and loves to solve problems, Gregor is the big personality who is running this operation and is trying to turn it into a motorcycle tour enterprise, he basically creates problems for Ben to fix later, he is breaking motorcycles and is setting forests on fire and Ben is methodically coming behind. Merlin wonders if Ben is like Scotty and Gregor is a like Kirk (from Star Trek). The thing is that it is a very egalitarian group and no-one seems to hold any rank over anyone else. You don’t give Ben King an order, you don’t even strongly suggest. Everybody just kind of stands there and then all of a sudden the problem is solved because Ben couldn’t sleep and got up in the night and rebuilt your motorcycle.

Scott is someone who can ride any motorcycle and solve any problem that involves kinetic energy. On those motorcycle trips you have a large and diverse group of people, but the diversity… they are all guys, so there you have a 50% diversity lack so far, but they are all ready to expand their horizons and anybody is welcome. So far it is all test rides and they are all motorcycle boys. One of the defining characteristics is that everyone is normal size. Like Merlin is 5’9” (175 cm) and change and most people on these motorcycle trips are between regular and slightly shy of regular.

Like being a fighter pilot or any other high performance individual that is going to experience a lot of G-forces you don’t want your limbs to be too far from the center, and you don’t want your head too far from the spleen so it goes lost in the clouds, you want everything in a compact package. When they ride these motorcycles there is a symbiosis. It came up a lot of times on this trip, the idea that when John was learning guitar there were so many guitars that seemed unplayable, and then a good guitar player comes along, picks it up, and starts playing music on it while you can’t even get your fingers to push down on the fret. Some people can pick up a Chapman Stick and start playing a song.

Merlin had his daughter playing with his fancy camera, doing little night-time photography trips, and he deliberately set it up to be a straight-forward setting, but still very challenging and she was learning above all else that he has to stand so still and hold her breath and squeeze the shutter, and when they came home she was frustrated how blurry many of the photos were, but she was getting it and the next day she was shooting things in the house and they were dead-sharp as a tack! Merlin told her that this is why she should be learning guitar on a shitty guitar so that you get good when you play a real guitar. John adds that if the guitar is too hard to play when you first pick it you will never want to be a guitar player.

John can play any guitar now, even those who are a piece of trash or guitars that are set up to be played with a slide, but if you have played guitar for years and years you find a way to make music on it. These guys are like this with motorcycles. Any one that you put in their hands, they are immediately off climbing trees with them. It is very natural to them, it is native, and they have been giving John a lot of coaching over the last 3 years being out in the forest with these motorcycles.

Nobody gave John a dirt bike when he was 10, he is not a native cycler, and it is like when you talk to someone who can do a standing back flip and they say it is easy and try to explain it, but that doesn’t help John because he already would have to be so different and so much closer to them. The problem is that from within the body of someone who knows how to ride motorcycles this well, they are so good and natural at it, they have lost the memory of the 10% that is furthest away from them, which is somebody who is on a motorcycle and can ride it, but isn’t yet into a place where going around a curve feels as natural as it does to John moving a stump in a creek bed, for instance.

Logging roads in the mountains of Oregon

They are out on logging roads way up in the mountains, and those dirt roads are just clinging to the sides of cliffs of mountains where the only reason a road got built there was because people wanted the timber that was growing up there and the only way they could get it out was by carving a road. The craziest people in the universe are logging truck drivers. If you are on the road at any point in time and you see a truck that is hauling logs, if you see a cab-over Pete with a reefer on and a Jimmy haulin’ hogs (lyrics from Convoy by C. W. McCall), just stay away from them.

There is nobody on these roads because the logs are gone and nobody else would be on them besides adventure motorcycle riders. This road is not the quickest way from here to there, it is not easy for even a truck to go on, a lot of them fall apart halfway up when it is too late to turn back, but what is interesting is that after you have driven so many of them you realize that they were not built by the Army Corps of Engineers, it is doubtful that they were even built by somebody with a protractor. One of the guys this time was a mechanical engineer who works at a apple harvesting company and at some point he said…

On a motorcycle you set a turn and then you hope that the turn carries you through the corner, and ideally you don’t want halfway through the corner to adjust the nature of your turn, you don’t want to brake or change your angle, especially if you are on gravel or wet gravel on the edge of a cliff. You do it and you get an appreciation of these roads and you wonder where they come from, up here in the middle of nowhere, but somehow they are holding season after season with snow and rain and wind. At one point John was remarking on that and somebody said: ”These roads were built by an old man with a dozer!”

The reason these roads are so good is that they have built so many roads that they look at the land and they just doze it until it is a road and they don’t have a map, they don’t have instruments, they are not doing it in any other way than the butcher that picks up the roast and knows exactly that it is half a pound. If you got a timber company you first send some fellows out there with the big boots who march around and look at the trees and decide to get these trees.

People down in the office who are securing the rights to those trees by manipulating the Bureau of Land Management or the US Government, doing deals. The next thing is to put some roads in here to get the people up there to cut these trees down there and the old guy with the dozer is right there at the beginning of this process. There are millions of acres of undeveloped land in Washington, Oregon, and California because you can’t even graze cows up there or goats, all it is is trees and it is high up. What you can grow is motorcycle tours.

John being scared before the motorcycle trip

John was down in Portland, getting ready for this motorcycle tour, and he was anxious and scared. It was raining and cold, he hadn’t been on a motorcycle in two years, he hadn’t been sleeping and had a months-old sleep deficit, he was groggy, every muscle in his body hurts even when sitting on the couch and having to go to the bathrooms. It hurts to book your book down! Earlier this summer his daughter’s mother decided they were going to play Tennis and John gave himself a Tennis Elbow the third weekend and it is still plaguing him now.

Also the last time they got back John had the feeling of: ”I survived that, this was the second one, we got caught in a snow storm, I went a whole week without really crashing, but there were lots of scary times, I have done it now a couple of times, and I shouldn’t do it again, I am 50 years old, I shouldn’t be trying to learn adventure motorcycling! There are other things I should be focusing on”, and that carried over to starting this next trip: ”What am I doing?” and a lot of people who heard the episode last week sent him messages: ”If I were you, I wouldn’t do it!”

The wonderful thing about adventure motorcycling is that any one of those dingdongs could have been hurt and medivaced out at any time because everybody is riding right at the edge of their level of incompetence. It is like working in a dot-com, where everybody is charged with doing something 2.5 levels above anything they have ever succeeded at before. You are going to push yourself a little bit, but you can’t be timid because then you will fall off the motorcycle. You have to be brave enough, you can’t choke in the middle of any of this because choking is just as bad as crashing.

Scott and Gregor are going around these logging road turns in full slide, kicking up big rooster tails of mud and things where they can’t see around the corner. There could be a Sasquatch, there could be a chicken in the road! Merlin wouldn’t want to die killing a chicken, but there is nothing for a chicken there above 4000 feet.

The night before John was in Portland in Ben King’s architecture office Stem Architecture and as he is trying to sleep on his bear cot with a Pendleton blanket on it, and failing, and he was telling himself he was 53 years old, everyone that listens to the podcast and is over on his Patreon site is telling him not to do it, ”What am I doing?” and he had that moment where… he only ever had one premonition where he woke up in the morning and said: ”Today is that day that I die!” It was on his walk across Europe in the Carpathian Mountains, and he had absolute certainty about it.

He spent the whole day with a matter-of-fact contemplation that he had woken up convinced he was going to die. He was of course trying not to die, but also there was an inevitability about it that turning around wasn’t going to affect. In the course of that day it was not necessarily a day that he couldn’t have died multiple times. It was a crazy day and each time that it looked like he was going to die, he didn’t. He put his foot out into the abyss and there was a rock there and the rock held, and by the end of the day he thought: ”I was supposed to die today and didn’t! What a day!”

John’s first anxiety attack

That is in contrast to a few of these days where at the beginning he told himself he should call today off, not a usual one where he just wants to stay in bed, but a big day where it all hinges on, and he thought he should get out of this. The first anxiety attack he ever remembered having was when he was sitting on row 2040 on a Lufthansa 747 from Seattle to Frankfurt (see RL280) that was completely full, back in the day when he would save $20 by booking a middle seat by the toilets. He was sitting next to a girl who was coming off of some drug and was fritzing and spazing and sweating, and on the taxiway he started to freak. He had never freaked on a plane before.

It taught him about the relativity of mental illness, in the sense that an airplane is an extremely stressful environment for everyone and we pretend it isn’t because we need to get from here to there in this airplane. There are people, John included, who will sit in his own comfortable house, and the fact that there is someone using a leaf-blower 5 blocks over, there are times when he will say to himself: ”This is intolerable! I can’t live another minute!”, but he will get on an airplane that sounds like someone is pointing a shopvac at his face for 7 hours.

He will endure it because he needs it. He is claustrophobic and he doesn’t want to be around people, he doesn’t want to be stuck in an place, he can be made claustrophobic just by someone walking across the sidewalk in front of him, but he will get in a tube and be pushed against people he would not choose and has never met. John sat next to Jesse Sykes on time on an airplane where she literally cried for 5 hours, but she was on the plane and did it and she survived because she needed to. The airplane is the thing that relativizes the phobias and anxieties we have because under any other circumstances even one of the conditions of being on an airplane could be found utterly intolerable, but most of us find a way to suffer 6-10 hours to fly anywhere interesting in an environment where there are 6-10 of these factors cranked and somehow we master them.

John sat in the back of the Lufthansa and the problem is that if he had pulled the bell, there were 600 people on this 747 ready to take off, and whatever flight attendant comes running back to deal with him is not going to be impressed that he wants off this plane, and they are going to give him a lollipop and in order for him to actually get off this plane would require him creating an incident that meant that he went to jail and was in the newspaper, so he needed to get his shit together, while other anxiety attacks he has had there were not those conditions and there was not a thing that made him get his shit together. The chain of events if you are sitting in your house in the middle of the night having an anxiety attack is just that it gets worse and worse.

Setting out on the trip

John was sitting in Ben King’s apartment and he was ready to call this off. It was not quite like being in the back of a Lufthansa, but they were all in the front revving their engine, and John was wondering if a 53-year old should be on a motorcycle trip. It was not the time for this. Ben is a laconic cowboy and he is no stranger to anxiety, but he says: ”Once you are on a motorcycle it will feel differently, and if you still don’t want to do it, then you can stop!”

John got on the motorcycle, he was terrified, they got on the wet roads of Portland, and John loves Portland, it is a wonderful town, but everybody in that town is a fucking idiot and that is one of the things that makes it such a great town. If you put 300.000 idiots in a town it can’t help but be interesting and fun. They are really bad driver,… they make good beer and the food is pretty good. It was a lot of lumberjacks who paid for a house for their mother to live, there were Punk Rockers and Hippies and they got along pretty well, but now who knows what is there! For the same $50 people are making dreamcatchers and fucking home-made sausage, but they can’t drive and John was in the road.

Trying to get his prescription faxed to Madras

They went over Mount Hood, it was snowing of course, John had forgotten his medication and had to stop at a pharmacy in Madras and get some Millennial pharmacist who thinks that she makes a phone call one time and nobody answers and her job is done for the day, so John sat there right in front of this gal and called until the person at the other end answers. He could text on his phone right now and if he had the right text information it could change the direction of a satellite orbiting the Earth, but a pharmacist has to fax a prescription from one pharmacy to the next, and that can take between an hour and 15 days, and it has to happen via fax because faxes are much more official than anything else.

John got a different pharmacist on the phone and they say that they were very busy there, which John understood because of COVID and other stuff, but John is at a pharmacy in Madras and this pharmacist didn’t have enough to do and all she needs is for them to fax his prescription. They said that they had a bunch of old ladies there, trying to get their Metamucil prescription updated, but John understood, times are tuff all over, Donald Trump was president for 4 years and we survived him, just take 3 minutes, and he said he would see what he could do and he would try to get it done by the end of the day. CLICK.

John’s motorcycle buddies were out in the parking lot and said they needed to get to the campsite and John told them to go ahead while he should probably go back and go home because this was God saying that this was the day he would day even if he doesn’t feel it. At one point he called his mom and asked her if she could walk down to the pharmacy, get in line behind all the other old ladies, and when it is her turn say to get them to go over to the fax machine and fax her son over in Madras Oregon his fucking prescription. She agreed and eventually the fax arrived, and there was no blood on the floor, everybody got what they needed, John was just a little late getting to the camp ground.

By the time he got there he was in the rhythm. The motorcycle felt natural again, he was riding it on dirt roads, even in the night, things that in past motorcycle trips had been terrifying and now they were only mildly terrifying, and over the course of the next 8 days they got more and more into radical environments, they were sleeping out, lighting fires, they were in little forest cabins, staying in hotels on the side of the road that were built in 1860 with the plumbing last maintained in 1974, like the hotel that Merlin stayed in in Portland where not only is there no TV, but you couldn’t get a TV into this space because the door is too small. It was one thing after another.

Getting into the rhythm over the course of the week, realizing the reason for his uncomfort was the small motorcycles

The first day three of the motorcycles broke, but somehow Ben King fixed them all and it was a problem that was only obvious to him. These guys never take credit for how smart they are! All of a sudden it was not the turboencabulator, but it was the petcock under the seat that was off. There is a little bit of a high-five, but it is understood that it is all in the service of the larger project. John was there with his Napoleon hat on and his epaulettes, wondering what he is contributing. Every 20 minutes he says something mildly humorous and everybody chuckles, that is his job in this 7-man crew.

Over the course of the week he got better and better at motorcycling and he realized an important thing: All these motorcycles are set up for someone who is 5’7.5” (171 cm) and weighs 170 pounds (77 kg), while John is 6’3” (190 cm) and weighs 245 pounds (111 kg). Everyone else on the trip is the former and it is just like every guitar is built for Angus Young, but then you get a Zakk Wylde and they are playing the same guitar. Jimi Hendrix has very big hands and a Stratocaster in his hands is a very different instrument than in John’s or in a small-handed man’s hands.

These motorcycles are all wonderful, they are just not set up for John and none of the other dudes would really notice it. It is like putting a praying mantis on a bicycle designed for an ant circus. John has been on these logging roads and everybody was zipping around them and on one side you fall down to eternity into the John Day River that takes you out to the Columbia River and then they will find you in the Pacific somewhere, floating around with a bunch of Nike tennis shoes, or you stay on the road somehow, and John has managed to stay on the road on these motorcycles where he is not even on the properly.

John was coasting while everybody else was on their own motorcycle. Ben King was letting him ride his father’s motorcycle that was set up for his father who is a Leprechaun. He literally has a pot of gold and lives at the end of a rainbow. John is so grateful to be invited and to be given this motorcycle to ride, but it is invisible to Ben that the small things that you can do, the shims that you can put in to make things bigger, are not enough. John needs a custom motorcycle, and like Shaquille O’Neal he needs the guy (Jesse James) who was married to America’s Sweatheart (Sandra Bullock) with tattoos on his knuckles to make him a motorcycle that is 10% bigger (see RL252).

By the end of the trip he had gone across a line where he had done enough adventure motorcycling that instead of saying: ”I have done it now, I need out, I can mark this off as a thing I did and I can go back to aging gracefully and knitting and going to PTA meetings!”, but what he wants now is a motorcycle that fits him and he wants to do this again and he wants to do it now. He actually knows how to do this and the thing that makes it scary is that the tool doesn’t belong to him, it is not his tool, and he needs his own tool now.

On a motorcycle you are just one drunk truck driver away from eternity, there is going to be stuff happening that you cannot anticipate, and it happens even to the best, there is going to be an old man with a dozer that made a shitty road one day and you are going to go straight off. They are not all geniuses! John came back from the trip and it felt like something clicked. The bike threw him off at one point and it bruised him hard, but that happens. He was limping around and he thought he should learn to play basketball, but then somebody told him that he would need learn to play yoga and stop pretending he doesn’t.

They were trying how to lace his boots up logger style, but the problem is that you need to bend over and hold a bend, which is another one of the ”here is how you do a back flip” things where they are on a 100cc motorcycle and they are climbing a tree, but they put John on a Honda Goldwing from 1978 and say: ”Follow me!” John can’t even get his boots laced without singing a song of mourn, like a mournful whale, that sounds like coyotes on the carcass of a dead horse and he realized that he needed to do yoga.

John being on a high feeling right now

On another channel a friend of John and Merlin is helping John make sense of the notes of his book, he interviewed his mom for the first episode of a podcast where she talks about being a woman computer programmer in the 1960s, he has all this stuff going on, and there is just a clear-headedness. On a motorcycle you cannot get distracted by thinking what you should have said to the guy who came into the newsstand in 1994. You have to focus! Just taking in all the Trump flags in Eastern Oregon takes up 40% of your brain, all the billboards that say the election was stolen.

Merlin went up to wine country last weekend for his wife’s birthday and he realized he lives in such a God-damn bubble. Really, you have an actual flag of Donald Trump? There was a great flag flying in front of a house in a little Oregon town where they will tell you they might secede from the union if you give them half a reason, this little 100-person town in fucking Steens Mountain Oregon. John will personally rent a Cessna 150 and drop a barrel of gasoline. He will come and help them move! There was a big flag flying, saying: ”TRUMP LOST LOL” and they stopped and took a picture.

John has a momentary feeling of energy where he doesn’t believe that adventure motorcycling is his calling, but he had a victory in a place where it was very easy for him to look at these trips and do the thing he usually do, which is to say: ”Anybody else would call this a victory, it was an amazing 8-day trip into the wilderness on a giant off-road bike and I survived it and I had these great experiences around the campfire with all these guys and this wonderful cultural experience!”, but he could still pull defeat from the jaws of victory by saying: ”Meh, I was never comfortable on the bike, I was always sketchy and anxious!”, but something happened on this trip where it really felt like a victory and it has positioned him to come back and look at everything with a different perspective, not: ”I almost died and life is precious!”

Trying a different smaller motorcycle that John understood much better

There was a nadir when he was waiting for his mommy to get him his drugs and the millennial pharmacist wouldn’t look up from her game of Solitaire. No! Deep into the trip when they were deep into a canyon, going down a rocky, sketchy road that was carved out of the side of a cliff and John could not find his center of balance on the motorcycle, which meant that every time the front tire went into a hole the bike pitched him forward and his hand on the throttle turned the throttle off, which meant that the bike pitched nose-forward even more.

Then it bounced back because it has an off-road suspension, it throws him back and his hand pulls the throttle on and the bike lurches forward, but he doesn’t want the throttle on because he is on a freaking sketchy cliff and he turns the throttle off, pitching him forward again, repeating the process, all while he is trying so hard to keep his balance back and to keep that steady symbiotic place, but he is not able to get it and he is on this cliff and all that has to happen is that he revs that motor one time while pointed in the wrong direction, and he is upset and furious at it because it knows at this point that it is because he and the motorcycle don’t fit together.

The other guys are: ”Come on! Let’s charge up this hill!” because they are a) great at motorcycling and b) the motorcycles fit them and they can do amazing and incredible things while John feels like the gimp, the one that is slowing them down, holding them back, and is also having a bad time and is scared. He got to the bottom of this hill exhausted and angry, but there is no-one to be angry at, he is on a fucking free motorcycle trip and everything is been taken care of and when he cries Ben King somehow wipes his tears away and he didn’t even know he was there, with a rag he invented that somehow crawls over and wipes his tears away and doesn’t ask for credit. Who is he supposed to be mad at? He is not mad at anybody, he is just mad.

At one point the engineer from the apple orchard suggested John to ride Scott’s bike, which is a dirt-bike, not an adventure bike, and John wasn’t sure about it because he is not good at this and he said he would just fly right off the edge, but he convinced John to at least try it and John got on this little dirt bike that is something you would give a 25-year old who had ridden a motorcycle since they were 10. This was insane! Off they went and the guys were right: John was a lot bigger on this bike and it felt like his Vespa that he rode for decades in all conditions. It is small and he knows how to control it.

It was still not sized for him, it was too small like everything else, but the ratio of John’s size to the power of the machine… When you go horse-back-riding and the lady says: ”You weigh 245 pounds? Well, there is not a horse here for you except for Old Paint. He used to pull the beer wagon and now he is out to pasture, but he might be able to hold you!” In that case you need the big one and Old Paint is going too slow and he is going to be honory, but in the case of a motorcycle John got on this 500cc and kicked up a rooster tail and he was gone, we went over the mountain and down the other side, going around corners with the back tires kicking up dirt and he knew exactly what he was doing and he just gave it more power.

Meeting a white dog over in the fields

Amazingly over in the fields John saw the head of a white dog poking over the harvested wheat. He disappeared and showed up again 20 feet closer to John, it was a cross between a Golden Retriever and a Husky, a friendly dog, a good boy, and then he disappeared again and showed up over to the left, even closer to John. He started to call the dog, but the dog was very timid. His collar was ragged and the dog was ragged and John kept trying to get it to come over. He understood everything now, he understood motorcycles, he understood what he was doing out here and he understood that it matters what size your bike is, and he wants to live like this, he wants to be on a motorcycle where he is the competent one and the good one, the guy on the stupid little motorcycle that is making a bunch of noise.

The white dog agreed! He came halfway across the street, John got down, he got his hand out, the dog was smelling him, his nose about 2 feet from John’s hand, and in the distance you could hear Gergor approaching who had finally caught up to John after having been ahead for 20 minutes, and John and this dog were about to touch, but the noise of Gregor’s motorcycle made the dog turn around and go back into the bushes. Gregor turned off his bike and went: ”What happened to you? I was hauling ass trying to catch you and you were just gone!” - ”Well, this motorcycle is a real different thing, but look at the white dog!” and the white dog popped his head up, John and Gregor got down, calling for the dog again, and the dog comes all the way across the street, is about to touch them, and Scott came around the corner on his motorcycle and eventually the whole gang got there and the dog is freaked out by the noise and runs off, watches them from the bushes.

Whatever that was, whatever touching the white dog was, John didn’t get to do, he didn’t get the blessing of the white dog, but boy he got close!

Outro

Merlin thought he had a good title, but now he has to change it. MacBook Weekly seemed a bit self-involved.

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