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Spring continues to, er, spring in Chester County, in all its chilly, wet, muddy splendor. The Wyeths love to paint this area — the starker, muddier, and more ramshackle, the better. In another couple of weeks, though, the grass will be up, the trees will be bursting with fragrant verdure, and the number of West Chester University students running down High street in cutoff Abercrombie and Fitch shirts, sweating off their winter beer guts, will have more than trebled.

Kate and I raked up all the leaves that had blown onto the lawn over the winter and mulched the front beds. Mulch is a wonderful thing, a panacea for all ills. After twenty minutes of spreading it carefully around the bushes and the daffodils, you can stand back and admire a patch of ground that suddenly looks professional: you know, like a dentist’s office or something. I’m being completely serious: I love the way mulched beds look. I’d better watch out, or before you know it I’m going to own a two-stroke string trimmer and be edging the beds with a pair of sharp scissors. Funny how all those god-awful activities — weeding, edging, placing little garden gnomes — become suddenly fresh and alluring when it’s your patch of ground.

For a break, we took a walk on the Chester Valley Trail, a rails-to-trails project that will eventually connect Downingtown’s Struble Trail (about 5 miles west of us) all the way to Philly (about 20 miles east of us.) It’s pictured, somewhat Wyeth-ily, at right. Only about one and a half miles have been paved, but we got an early-adopter thrill in searching out the likely spot for the trailhead on a Russian satellite photo, plotting the coordinates into the GPS, then bushwhacking until we found it. The fact that there were several other couples on mountain bikes, plus two park rangers in a green SUV, only damped my thrill of discovery somewhat. Hell, I can get lost in my back yard, so I suppose it’s easy for me to get my Stanley Livingstone jollies.

I hear from Kate that, in Seattle, many folks use the rails-to-trails parks to commute. After reading the RTT press release for the Chester Valley trail, I understand that’s one of the purposes of this trail system. Philly is about 20 miles, as the crow flies, and the trail runs fairly straight — first along 202, then along the Schuykill river — so I don’t think it will add too much to the mileage. If and when I get a job in Philly (note to co-workers: sometime in the medium-to-distant future) , I wonder if it would be feasible to commute on a bike. Will I have to become super-hard-core, or only mild-core?

“Join the Boxer rebellion with the non-profit Airheads Beemer Club”

If you’ve ever checked out my essay on Snuffy Smith’s Thanksgiving motorcycle rally, you know that picking your motorcycle clique is a serious business — like choosing which area of the cafeteria you’re going to sit in throughout college. As the Salvation Army worker sang to the drunk, lying next to a pig in the gutter, “You’re measured in life by the company you keep,”^* and so it’s important to choose your alliances carefully.

Actually, I discovered this morning, it’s much easier than that: the motorcycle clique picks you. For one thing, you have to pick a motorcycle that looks like you. My friend and colleague Kieran Downes will look fine crouched on top of a wasp-shaped Ducati. For my part, I don’t aspire to the ZZ Top vibe that you need to ride a bright red Indian. I’ve always thought that the boxy, black BMWs of the 1970s were the sharpest bikes ever — from the Tonka-toy rubber boots on the forks to the Messerschmidt biscuit logo on the back of the seat. What’s more, airhead BMWs are great long-distance touring bikes, and they’re reliable as dirt.

The only problem with owning a BMW is that people are always asking you where the cappucino maker plugs in. If the stereotype of the Harley rider is a beer-bellied bruiser who works down at the stamping factory (or a proctologist with a shiny Sportster trailer queen in the garage), the stereotype of the Beemer rider is of the guy who goes camping with a satellite phone and an Ortlieb dry bag full of self-heating meals.

Since I am that guy, I accept the stereotype. Also, I found a really cool BMW club on the internet, at www.airheads.org. Things in favor of it:

• It’s got a hip URL in the .org domain.
  
• It’s written in PHP. Ergo, there are geeks on the staff.
  
• It uses text breadcrumb navigation (“Home > Join“) Ergo, there are enlightened geeks on the staff.
  
• It’s packed with FAQ information for the newbie.
  
• The logo has a kind of skull-and-crossbones thing going on, which I’m a a huge sucker for.
  

The club’s Canons include the tenet “Airheads believe that the simplest engineering solutions are best”, which is going to be a challenge for me, but it’s something to aspire to. Also, I don’t fulfill one of the most important prerequisites for membership, as I don’t yet actually own an airhead Boxer. But I soon will, and you can follow my progress in the thermometer to the right. Until I reach my goal, I’ve asked them if I can join on spec, so that I can commute to work on my starter bike wearing an Airheads sticker on my helmet. I’ll let you know what they say.

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^* From (once again) a song my mom used to sing me as a kid. The last line goes “…and the pig got up and slow-ly walked away!”

I am ashamed of my president, and I am ashamed of my country.

History speaks clearly: violence leads to violence, and war leads to more war. I’m disgusted with America’s foreign policy over the past eighteen months, and I’m disgusted with the way the crimes of September 11th were hijacked by the Bush administration and used as an excuse for promoting an aggressive, imperialistic agenda both at home and abroad. I’m saddened at the US’s decision to violate another country’s sovereignty, especially without UN support — damaging the slow and difficult progress towards a real world polity. I’m disgusted at the childish and jingoistic responses to our allies’ dissent — if I hear one more reference to “Freedom Fries”, I’m going to put on a beret, carry the French flag, and march up and down Park Avenue singing Le Marsellaise at the top of my lungs, as one scrappy Frenchman was doing on St. Patrick’s day outside the Lexington Avenue Armory.

I believe deeply in the freedoms that this country represents, and (though you can’t know until you are faced with the choice), I would be willing to sacrifice my life in the defense of those freedoms. But war isn’t about dying for your country: as Patton said, war is about “making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country”, and that is never justified, at any time, in any place, for any reason.

Whether there is ever such a thing as a “just war” is debatable, but it is at least certain to me that this is not a “just war.” We will achieve nothing in this war that could not have been achieved through a longer, messier, more frustrating, and more uncertain process of diplomacy.

I will support our troops in any way I can: by wishing them a safe and speedy return, and by letting them know that I, as a citizen, care deeply about their well-being. I will not, however, support my government in this lazy, misdirected, and destructive choice.

Spring is springing
The warm weather is an intense relief. Kate and I spent Saturday moving furniture and fetching power tools out of storage, then spent Sunday installing a new kitchen cabinet. Wonderful to drive to and from Lowe’s with the windows down, wonderful to cut 1/4″ plywood out on the porch instead of in the kitchen, wonderful to pull the battery out of the motorcycle and get ready to make the switch to two-wheeled transportation to and from the train station.

The daffodils by the front steps are seven inches tall, and show signs of blooming in the next week or two, and every four-dollar flower Kate has bought at Home Depot has erupted from its pot with supercharged vigor. (Viz. her picture of some colossaly pulchritudinous tulips above, a week after coming home from the barbecue-furniture aisle)

More Crafts:
John Rooney is a Boston-area artist who builds miniature model cars, modified and damaged in such a way that you can set them up next to bonsai trees in order to recreate miniature fender benders.

www.crashbonsai.com

I just subscribed to ReadyMade, the Martha Stewart magazine for boys and everyone who wears Ben Sherman shirts, and I was thinking about how much I like it compared to some other magazines I’ve been reading lately. So here’s an impressionistic list of those magazines.

The New Yorker: 1) Obsessively tangential reviews of experimental theater. 2) Angst-ridden stories about growing up in the projects, set between twin rows of advertisements for distressed canvas travel hats and upmarket liposuction techniques. Take magic marker and write “LIMOUSINE LIBERAL” on your forehead when reading these stories. 3) Ex-editor Tina Brown’s obsession with titties (“Annie Liebowitz photographs Las Vegas showgirls!”) 4) Essential delivery vehicle for Roz Chast cartoons into your home each week.

Reader’s Digest: 1) Stories like “I fucked a bear for the FBI and found God!“* 2) Getting that Duane Hansen smell out of your clothes.

2600: 1) How to hack traffic signs so they don’t say “EXIT 43 EXPECT DELAYS 10AM – 3PM”, but instead say things like “0wN3d by 7334 h4x0r d00d” and “FREE KEVIN.”

Utne Reader: 1) Live in a tree! 2) Hug a tree! 3) Be a Buddhist! 4) Next month: Be a tree-living, tree-hugging Buddhist!

ReadyMade: My faaaaaaaavorite magazine right now. This month: 1) Build a lite-brite table. 2) Pinhole cameras. 3) Make a sofa out of dirt and sod.

* That’s the punchline of a joke my mom told me, about a guy who submits a story to Reader’s Digest entitled “I fucked a bear”, but gets rejected, so he re-submits “I fucked a bear for the FBI”, and get’s a lukewarm interest letter, so he submits once again as “I fucked a bear for the FBI and found God”, and it runs on the cover.

Like the Thunderbirds, but they want to beat you up

Kate patrols the rich vein of knitting blogs on the Web (a representative example) My mom used to describe my grandfather’s fly-fishing hobby as “relaxation for brain-surgeons”, and she was right: the exacting, small-scale demands of tying, selecting, and deploying a royal coachman number 14 were therapeautic for those whose jobs were equally exacting. Knitters are the same way, I think: it’s a highly technical skill, involving not a little math, and requires a non-trivial investment of time and money in order to progress. Young freelance illustrators and art directors (another example) with digital cameras and (often) free time between jobs are the perfect demographic for knit blogs, and there’s a lot of really cool stuff out there. I even made a sock dog after seeing Anna’s of Absolutely-vile.com‘s pattern.

Kate sent me the link to Anna’s site, originally, and some clicks around in the community led me to ReadyMade Magazine, from which I got the idea for the Guerilla Drive-In. Work is progressing nicely on the Commando LCD Projector, by the way: I wired up a Sylvania halogen high-beam headlight to run off of DC power, with a Radio Shack adapter, and I bought five feet of six-inch aluminum ducting to use for the projector body. More on that later.)

In ReadyMade, I found an ad for Kid Robot, which has lots of 12″ action figures for Hong Kong platter spinners and other clunky-shoed Asian hip-hoppers. Take a look, if you have half an hour to kill. The most interesting figures there, I thought, were the “Brothersworker” series, which are a set of blue-collar industrial action figures, all with their own union-trade specialties: “Bomb is an expert in the construction site on the bombing techniques.” They’ve all got big, hulking, Guy Ritchie cockney foreheads, and come with working tools: Smart (pictured above) comes with a TIG welder, as far as I can tell. The figures are hugely detailed, and hugely expensive. here’s the official site.

It’s beatiful in West Chester today, and all the motorcycles came out of their garages, like oily, dusty daffodils. A bright red Honda CBR followed me for two blocks this morning, the left-turn signal blinking on and off, on and off. You can’t hear a turn-signal clicker inside a full face helmet, and the indicator light is way down outside your field of view, so forgetting to cancel your turn signal is the first sign of rustiness. Little signs like that (along with putting both feet down at a stop light), are normally what separate weekend hobbyists from real riders. This weekend, though, everybody’s rusty, and there’s a spirit of bonhomie and forgiveness in the air. I even saw a skinny young Suzuki rider in neon green Joe Rocket leathers talking to a grizzled Harley rider, which normally never happens. Both of them were leaning up against their bikes in the Burger King parking lot, basking in the thin spring sunshine.

I recently read through Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy: “The Golden Compass”, “The Subtle Knife”, and “The Amber Spyglass”. People seem to call them the “not-the-Harry-Potter” books, which is almost fair. Instead of a Tom Brown’s School Days with magic, the Dark Materials books are from another well-defined genre, in which the hero seeks to right a fundamental flaw at the axis of parallel worlds. The theme is taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost (as Stephen King’s Dark Tower theme is taken from Robert Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.) Unlike Stephen King’s parallel-worlds books, though, Pullman’s books are very religious, much more like C.S. Lewis and Madeline L’Engle.

So, once I was finished hoovering “The Amber Spyglass”, I decided to pick up the Chronicles of Narnia books again — basically, reading my way through the whole right side of the “Young Adults” section at the bookstore around the corner*. I found The Voyage of the Dawn Treader on the shelf, and I discovered two things. First, the Narnia books are incredibly speedy reads: I polished the Dawn Treader off in four hours. Second, like Roald Dahl, — and unlike Pullman — C.S. Lewis really is a children’s writer. His prose is direct, simple, straight, and funny as hell. Viz. the first paragraph of the book:

Chapter 1: The Picture in the Bedroom

There was a boy called Clarence Eustace Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn’t call his Father and Mother “Father” and “Mother”, but Harold and Alberta. The were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on bets and the windows were always open.

Eustace, of course, is a terrible grind in the beginning of the book, but ends up redeemed, and goes on to be the hero in The Silver Chair. It’s this quality of redemption, I think, that really makes C.S. Lewis’s books feel like a breath of fresh air: J.K. Rowling’s books are at least as compelling (though maybe written to an audiencce a year or two older, or fifty years later in history), but you never get the feeling that Crabb and Goyle will ever have a change of heart.

C.S. Lewis’ characters also seem to be their age, in the book — everyone suffers from temptation, and everyone has a childish hissy fit at some time or other during the book. Even Prince Caspian storms off to his cabin and slams the door when he can’t visit the Uttermost East, and emerges an hour later tearful and penitent. This kind of characterization rings true, and I remember seeing myself in the characters when I read the books for the first time. Usually, when Eustace made up his mind not to be a horrible pain in the ass, I’d go downstairs ond offer to wash the dishes, or something.

It’s also striking how little happens in the Narnia books, compared to Harry Potter or the Dark Materials books. There’s a striking absence of twelve-foot cave trolls, and nowhere in the book do any smelly, treacherous cliff ghasts get gorily beheaded by an ancient, occult nanotech knife. The creepiest part of the Dawn Treader consists of Lucy walking down the silent second-story hall of a magician’s house in the middle of the day. I can remember, however, every hair on my head standing up when Lucy looked into the little mirror and saw a bearded reflection of herself looking out. I don’t think I could use a hair dryer for a month after reading the Dawn Treader: I’d have to turn it off and listen for whatever it was that I didn’t just hear.

* The left side of the Young Adults section is entirely crammed with Mary Kate and Ashley books.