TWNW #12

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Well I just wrote a whole big thing but then my awesome computer logged me out and now the whole thing is gone. Gonna start again, from ^%*&# scratch.

Still in L.A., still having a blast even though here at the keyboard it seems like we haven't really done an awful lot.

So far Jake and I have:

-gone out to lunch a lot; noodles and sandwiches and pizza and a hamburger
-hung out in the yard and gotten in lengthy arguments with Jake's cat, Edward James Olmos
-taken a short moto-ride to Gordon's house
-hung out down the hill by the workshop, with short breaks to mess with my bike.

Yeah there's some content! My bike! After being here in the very Mecca of the ratbike for a few days I've decided to take all the paint off the tank wholesale and let it rust, which we did with a frightening goop that curdles the paint so you can scrape it right off.

Chemical burns are a fantastic teacher in a class about why to wear gloves, btw.

But I mean not rust all the way through, just a nice scuzzy patina in however long that takes and then BLAMMO hit it with some clearcoat. Jake found a logo on the internet which was made for a Polish dairy company in the 50's, and his neighbor Tony just finished cutting the stencil with his laser cutter, and tonight we'll buff the shiny bare metal and spray on the logo. The logo, see, is like a kind of mod-ish silhouette of a bear? And the bear is holding a giant milk bottle? Operation Ratbike just became Operation Milkbear, I guess. We tried different iterations, with the bear holding an AK-47 or a rubber ducky or a cartoon bomb, but the milk bottle seemed best at the end of the day.

Jake's neighbor Tony has a laser cutter. Think about that for a minute.

Say, let's get all the Echo Park gossip out of the way:

-The neighbors on the other side are still finishing their horrible faux-Victorian layer-cake monstrosity, and this will be their sixth year of working on that pile of crap. They've got dreams of owning the whole hilltop someday, and apparently they've been going about it in a manner most skeevy.
-Jake is building a house nearby, for a client, and anybody who's ever done anything like that will agree that clients are to be avoided.
*le change order*
*le change order*
*le impossible request*
*le change order*
'hey winz mah howse gunna b finishd i wanna moov in2it naow! n whyzit so espensiv???'

(The preceding was excerpted verbatim and with permission from Jake's email account.)

(There was other stuff in Jake's email account too but you should trust me when I say you're better off not seeing that stuff.)

(I mean I guess half-naked Samoan truck drivers are a thing but I don't see why they need a weekly newsletter?)

Moving on, there's a mission at hand to be undertaken this evening... there's a neighbor girl, named Klara, who is stunning and who the grapevine says is looking for a guy to be eventually disappointed by. I'm not the guy, for three reasons: (1)she's pretty far out of my league, (2)she wants something "serious" whatever that means and (3)she's not nearly rough-looking enough for me even though she's got me reconsidering my attraction to rough-looking women and maybe reinitiating myself into the world of fancy broads.

Right now I'm listening to an NPR story in which the NPR reporter is complaining about her neighborhood becoming gentrified. I'll just leave that here without comment.

So anyway back on goes my matchmaker hat and let's all hope for better results this time. The plan is, I'm gonna snare her as she walks by with my grotesque, cartoonish version of "charm" and hope that she's unable to look away for long enough that I can tell her exactly how awesome Jake is, and that those sores of his have almost totally gone away and that he only reads "Half-Naked Samoan Trucker Weekly" for its excellent articles.

Seriously Norman Mailer wrote some of his best pieces for that title. People don't remember that.

Wish us all luck. She's lovely, she's looking for a male human, and Jake needs a green card.

I'm hoping to get out to the shore tomorrow. This whole entire trip of mine, the one I've peen planning and saving for and that I've been talking up a big noise about how I'm gonna riiiide out to the coast and take the 1 aaalllllllll the way down from Washington blah blah blah... you want to know how many miles of ocean I've ridden along so far in perhaps 1000 miles of north-south coastal-state travel? 70 miles. 70 miles of salt-water adjacent riding, and 60 of those were a canal and 10 were a strait. I took a bridge over a sound once.

So I'm a punk if I don't get in at least a little Highway 1 awesomeness before I head out for San Antonio in a few days. The problem is, Jake's kind of new at the moto thing and his bike is old-ish and maybe not awfully reliable and he swears he doesn't have the right wrench to take off the training wheels.

(He does).

The plan, then, is to take surface streets out to the beach and then go up the road to Malibu or something so I can get some pics; just a short trip so I can say I rode along the damn ocean. I'll post said pics as soon as I get them, and also the ones of the shiny completed Milkbear.

Okay, that's all I've got right now. Thank you for reading!

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Photos

Goop
Yuck.

This is actually
Vancouver.

Stairs in L.A.
are cooler than your stairs.

Tony's laser cutter;
Tony