Written by awneitsch on July 3, 2023

I Just Can’t Shake It

Motorcycle Vapors . Mutterings And Murmurs . Social Studies

The uneasy feeling persists. Every time I hit the road, and travel 6000 kms or more without incident, no matter how detailed my preparations, physical and mental, nagging questions work to niggling effect.

“Where to now?”

“Am I being sensible?”

“By whose standards?”

“Do I have my wallet?”

“Keys?”

“Where the hell are my keys?!”

Recent trips through Canada and the U.S. confirmed to me that the world, the round earth and parts of it that are curved or flat, is without a doubt, a beautiful, magnificent and wonderous place. It can be an inspiring and healing place, a healing balm for the senses. It is still a source of sustainable life and prosperity for all who live on it and has been for as long as humans and animals have been on it. The great tragedy is that there is, has always been, a minority of powerful, wealthy and entitled monsters that have plundered the earth and abused and oppressed the majority of the earths population to advance their interests. They are rendering the earth unlivable for the majority, saving pockets of the best of what the earth has to offer, that they will preserve and protect for their exclusive use as the rest of us die off in the dystopia they have created. A Great Reset is at hand. Do your research. Only you can stop it. Only you can prevent Canadian wildfires and government bills and edicts that make make life unlivable and shorter.

Remove certain people and the harmful effects of the They/Them Elite Mob on the natural bounty and beauty from California and the state could still be a beacon for good people wanting a favorable climate, peace and plenty. Passing through California on $5.29 a gallon gas, I stayed in an undermaintained, overvalued, run down $110 a night Motel 6 rooms that featured chemically enhanced, benzine fluoride water and wobbly toilets. It was surrounded by streets filled with shuffling, hunched over people. Eureka, California is a gloomy, dystopian, run down industrial experience by the sea. Seagulls go there to die. It had all the markers of a Northern Los Angeles, a Portland, a Seattle or a San Francisco in training…a Western, Kurt Vonnegut style, Midland City, Ohio by the sea. California is the blueprint, a work in progress, of what The United States of America is to become. A once prosperous and paradisal state now become a lawless magnet for the worst of humanity, to indulge in a very legal and accepted form of cultural and moral suicide. Every time I think of California, and especially now that I have seen more of it in ground level 360 degree, five sense splendor, I think of a great American novel by Carolyn See titled ‘Golden Days’. Her book offers fresh insights into the way we were, the way we are, and the way we could end up. The novel portrays fictional but entirely plausible events of societal collapse and redemption after the world is nearly obliterated by powerful, misguided politicians and elite, globalist masters…very much the situation we find ourselves in now.

I roll…mile after mile, gallon after gallon.

Past the lurching, screeching, dishevelled or prone shopping bag carriers and shopping cart pushers, past the derelict homes and burnt out cars and motorhomes.

Past the army and air force bases and abandoned amusement parks, boarded up shopfronts and name brand outlet malls and world famous fast food ‘restaurants’ and the graffiti splashed drug zombie tent city apocalypsos, through the grocery stores being picked over by masked and wheezing, morbidly inked and obese and frail and elderly Americans making choices between overpriced labelled ‘organic’ produce or an $8 bag of Sweet Chili Heat Doritos, heat and eat taquitos, ice cream novelties made with 3% real milk substance and cheaper corporate brand soda.

Yum.

Past the cell tower deployments disguised as pine trees or church steeples.

Past the foggy misty surf beaches.

Past the vast fields of GMO corn, soybeans, nut trees, orchards feed lots and legally organic dairy farms.

Past the billboards calling for more dams and water, or the heads of Gavin Newsome and Nancy Pelosi and the ones that boldly declare that the Body Mass Index is racist and the ones that advertise motorcycle injury lawyers. Non-colored people are no longer billboard worthy.

And then…

Past the migrant farm worker slums of hopeful but enslaved Americans.

Neath the wide silvery grey skies oer the desert plains and shores, streaked with condensation paths not trails and not bands of aluminum and barium particulate.

And then the splendor of some real cumulonimbus clouds and bright ocean blue skies.

Imagine that.

Perhaps you are old enough to remember how blue the skies were when you were young, how they were darkened at night and then during natural, severe weather and then when vast flocks of migrating geese, swans, swallows, cranes and other migratory birds did what came naturally to preserve their species. Some mated for life.

Imagine that.

My eyes water and crust.

From tears and chemicals.

We won’t mention Portland, Seattle, L.A., or San Francisco…ever again.

They were once ideal but now dying cities, smothered under ever growing and morphing WOKE PRIDE flags, symbols and banners of debauched conquest over the innocence of children and oppressive climate emergency agendas. The ideology of intersectionality is practiced there. It makes these places doubly dangerous.

They have ‘Poop Map Apps’.

Canada has Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto.

These are dying cities.

Documentaries say so.

Some states display resistance. The good people in them know that they are in trouble but they feel sorry for Canada. They drive trucks and side-bys. They have guns and still hunt for food and fish for fish. They don’t entirely know what to do about their troubles and neither do we but they have the second amendment.

We don’t.

We have government platitudes, fancy socks and peacock feathers that may provide public safety and protection from foreign and domestic terror.

They have sporting bread and circuses and celebrity worship and infotainment lubricated with lite beer promoted by creatures that cannot procreate. We have Tim Horton’s drive thrus staffed by slave migrants that came to Canada looking for a better life made impossible by a government that wants to make life miserable for all.

That equity and inclusion thing.

Un-Democratic, unRINO Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and other portions of states are God’s country, naturally lush green and safe and prosperous, not red or blue. They still seem to place value in their constitution and individual rights and freedoms. They are protective of their faith and families. They are meat eaters.

Not so much in California…or Canada…or what it once was.

Charter?

What Charter?

Yes, it is historically windy up and down the blustery corridor between Coutts, Lethbridge and Fort Mcleod or the Waterton or Lundbreck area of Alberta or the stretch of highway 84, along the Columbia River between Biggs Junction, Oregon and Camas. No amount of prayer or preparation can prevent the turbulence or guide you through it when it happens. Quite often, stopping is not an option. Trying to lean in to the gusts that can come from four directions at once at variable speeds of up to 65 kph or those of a hurricane or tornado requires Herculean effort and luck. Add the bonus of the turbulence of passing transport trucks and I am tossed, pushed and pulled like a red balloon tied to a bucking rodeo bull that hates red balloons…and people. Side cases, windscreens and top mount dry bags act as sails, parachutes and kites that enhance rider experience.

My wrists ache.

The worst, best was the steep and narrow, bar grippy 1300 meter climb of tight switchbacks and curves to the peak of Mt. Hamilton and the Lick Observatory. The curves were so tight they had to be navigated at lower speeds which risk stalling. Completing the turn required a quick but careful throttle twist that slingshots up to the next turn and possibly over the edge. There were very few guardrails and fewer turnouts that weren’t graveled. Several washouts reduced the road to single lane. The ride down the other side was marginally less exciting, less tense and thrilling but required the same level of concentration. It showed the devastation of the 2020 wildfire that nearly destroyed ‘The Lick’. It was eerily quiet when I pulled over and stopped….when it was safe to do so. There was a smell of rotting flesh and skunk. To ultimately find the rhythm of the winding byways through the Redwood Forests, plains and canyons eased the numbing pain and distraction of long hours behind the bars. The rhythm eased the sensory overload, the stress of of hypervigilant situational awareness. The coming down the other side was cooling as the sun set.

The transport trucks are always so angry with me. They scream. They howl. They push and pull, their engines whining and grinding past. They eject soda bottles filled with trucker piss. Their tires bark, slap and wheeze, sounding like gunfire and mortar rounds every time they hit the rumble strips and expansion joints in the pavement. Some tire violence sounds like depth charges or imploding submarines. This is war.

Incoming!!!

The tractors want to push me aside, into the ditch or other traffic as they pass. At times I can feel the front wheel of my bike hop. My heart stops. The trailers want to suck me under and crush me to a bloody pulp. To linger behind a tractor trailer truck for any length of time out of fear of passing means suffering the galloping, high velocity 360 degree turbulence or losing time from hanging back for peace.

Time.

Ultimately it was the dithering that got to me. The little mistakes. The missed shifts and wrong turns. Where to next? What is the weather going to be like? This is so epic and awesome but how much more bliss can I take?

At some point my body and brain got together without me and convinced my gut to gently suggest that I might consider cutting the trip short. A brutal cramping right leg and piercing pain between my shoulder blades chimed in. In Rohnert Park, California, I stayed at a ‘budget’ Motel 6 for $136.73 U.S. in a marginally clean but run down room with a cracked bathroom mirror, a sticky stain by the door and only two cigarette burns on the coverlet. Before getting into bed I caught a glimpse of my body. It had changed from the most recent post radiation and chemo emaciation and death camp reduction, had gained muscle and sinew and color. While I was so busy doing other things, millions of cells had divided and died. Toxins had been eliminated. Bad skin had sloughed off and been replaced by what could very well be a normal, aging bark. My beard and the hair on my right arm and leg had filled in. I was looking at a fitter, fuller self in spite of the nagging aches and pains that come from long hours and days as man and machine against nature and other unnatural human forces on the road.

I did not recognize myself.

Who was I?

Who am I now?

Am I okay?

It was time to go home before I could finish what I set out to do. I will not say that I tried. The word ‘tried’ is weak, part of a language of failure and defeat. I have done “it”, whatever it was, just not as completely as I had wanted. I am here. I was there. I am going somewhere else.

I refuse to quote Yoda on this.

I went.

All the way somewhere, home, through the turbulence and the rain and the smoke, I wondered if the end, my end, would come quickly or slowly…under a truck or over an edge. I wondered at the end of things, when it comes, whether I would have the capacity to shake that feeling, to question if I had found my purpose, made my peace and amends, had come to the realization that everything will happen, has happened as it should, has happened as it was supposed to. Had I made a difference for the better to anyone?

Why did I subject myself to “Oh shit, I fucked up, I shoulda tanked up in Jensen” needless distracted fuel anxiety on this trip?

Does my body hurt good?

Have I developed an odd manner?

Will my daughters be okay?

Will anything good grow from my ashes?

I am deeply sorry about that bird I hit.

Get over it.

Shake it.

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