The Outlaw Car I Desire

It was an evil looking car.  

I rent fun cars for fun on the regular, because I am old, of a generation that still thought cars were cool.  Convertibles. Sports cars.  Luxury cars.  All of the vehicles that I find delightful, but that I lack the resources or desire to own.  I'll request contributions to my rental car fund for birthdays and Christmakkah, and on a beautiful weekend, I'll get one for my pleasure.  

This last weekend, it was a 2017 Dodge Challenger T/A 392, rented through a service from an utterly friendly dude who lives nearby.

Menacing.  A little too obviously criminal, the sort of vehicle driven by a villain in a slightly dumb but entertaining movie intended for the undiscerning masses.

Dark as night, the wheels similarly blackened, what is now typically called "murdered-out" in the car community.  The engine, an immense eight cylinder, each bank of the vee larger than the straight-six under the hood of the perfectly quick BMW I last rented.  The exhaust note ranged from a growling rumble to a snarling, vicious roar, and unlike the blatty falseness of so many "performance" exhausts, the bite was as deep as the bark.  Four hundred and eighty five horsepower gets you going real fast real quick.  Or it lights up the rear tires.  Get too hard on the throttle in a turn, and it sends you sideways.  Zero to sixty comes in the low fours, with a top speed of over a hundred and eighty.  

This was the sort of car that would have gotten me into some real trouble when I was seventeen. 

It radiated "outlaw," and I found myself very much noticing every single law enforcement officer I drove by.  The engine growled and spat as each patrol car passed, though I drove as gently as I could.  Because people...and cops...do make assumptions about such a car.  Why drive one if you're not planning on doing something extralegal?  

Rumbling about in the beast for a few days got me thinking again about a car that is actually an outlaw.  To possess this car and drive it on American roads is actually against the law, a criminal act, one with all sorts of penalties, including confiscation.  

I desire it.  In fact, I desire it so much I'd own one.  

Here it is:

Radiates menace, doesn't it?   It's a Honda N Box, which one pronounces En-uh Bock-su if you're a total weeb.  

It's a kei car, meaning a teeny tiny vehicle designed for Japanese cities and roads.  It comfortably seats four six footers, has all wheel drive, and all the modern safety features.  It's easy to get in and out of.  It is astoundingly practical, perfect for in town errands.  It gets over fifty to the gallon.  Though it's tiny, it has been designed to accommodate a wheelchair.  It's capable of puttering along all day on the highway at between 60 and 65.  It gets to 60...gradually.  Top speed?  Maybe eighty five, assuming you're going downhill with a following wind.  It costs, brand new, under twenty grand.

It is exactly what I need.  Not just want, because it's cute as a button, but need.  I don't need more car than this.  Most of us don't.

It is also illegal in America.

Some outlaws are bad.  And some outlaws are outlaws because the law is bad.  You'd think we'd know the difference.

Centerstands

Yesterday, as my family chilled our way through a Monday off, I found that it was time for a bit of routine motorcycle maintenance.   The shiny yellow 'Strom was slightly less shiny following a few sustained jaunts through driving forty-degree rain, and while spatter and road grit add character to a bike, they really don't do much for your drive chain.

So out onto the driveway I went, and for about 45 minutes, I performed the necessary ablutions and applications of solvents and lubricant.  For the first time in almost twenty years, I found myself hiking a bike up onto a centerstand.  Not since my first ride, a '72 Honda CB750 purchased way back in my late teen years, have I had a centerstand.

I've missed it.  My last two rides were a bitty little cruiserlet and a sportbike, and both cruisers and sportbikes don't have centerstands.   The reason varies, depending on the type of bike.  A centerstand is a great big dangly thing, a mass of steel that snugs up under the chassis.  It ain't purty.

And cruisers are purty bikes.  Purty is their raison d'etre.   They're all rumble and chrome and glossy shine, with elemental lines that catch the eye as you style on by in your do-rag and chaps.  Centerstands work for that aesthetic about as well as a life vest on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.  

Sportbikes are bellisima bikes too, but they're also shrouded in many thousands of dollars worth of plastic for the purposes of aerodynamics and attitude, and that leaves no room for a stand.  A centerstand cuts deep into lean angles on a low bike, so that's strike two.  Sportbike designers are also as obsessed with weight as a high-school wrestler, which is strike three, and means that big hunk of steel has to go.

But on the 'Strom, tall and lean and rangey as a Masai warrior, it works perfectly.  It means that I don't have to stash a paddock stand somewhere in my cluttered home.  It means I can maintain my chain and work on the bike anywhere I can find a bit of flat ground.   It's just so deliciously practical.

Almost no bikes in the United States have them any more, of course.  Bikes aren't meant to be practical things here.  America has become a binary land of sportbikes and cruisers, and gas is still cheap, and our bikes aren't transportation.  They're lifestyle statements that spend most of their lives pampered and polished and gleaming.

Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But for four season, rain or shine, day in day out riding, you just can't beat a bike with a centerstand.

I'm glad to have it back.

The Practical Mystic

Mysticism is typically construed as being the faith of the esoteric, a faith full of odd chants and visions, of obscure dreams and convoluted ritual. Mystics are the folks who sit upon mountaintops wearing loincloths, muttering mantras in an ancient language as they delve into the stern and secret truths of the universe.

As I read through the writings of George MacDonald, I'm reminded again of how totally inaccurate that perception of mysticism is. Mystics are earthy folk. Thomas Merton certainly was, as was the delightful Jallaladin Rumi. For all of his passion and all of the depth of his engagement with Spirit, Christ, and Creator, MacDonald's deep sense of the reality of his faith does not pull him from connection with being.

Instead, it grounds and centers him, in both creation and in the practical needs of day to day existence. Take, for instance, the way he counsels those who are feeling distant from God:

"Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God love thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last...for the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go to do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work."

As someone who has experienced many times that dark night of the soul, MacDonald has the way out quite exactly right. Don't anguish. Don't navel-gaze. Don't force it. Just do what must be done. It's an approach to faith that speaks to the here and now, to action in the meatspace reality of our being.

His delight in things as they are extended to his view of miracles. He doesn't reject them, mind you. He just sees such glory in the created order as to view all being as miraculous:

In all His miracles Jesus did only in minature what His Father does ever in the great. Poor, indeed, was the making of the wine in the...pots of stone, compared with its making in the lovely growth of the vine with its clusters of swelling grapes--the live roots gathering from the earth the water that had to be borne in pitchers and poured into the great vases..."

That fundamental wonder at all being is something that mystics of all religious persuasions seem to share. It is, once again, a pleasure to find a brother who shares my joy in experiencing the First Book.