Ain't Nothing Like a Little Recognition

I think, I'm not sure, but I think, that today was the first day anyone on the World Wide Web has linked to this specific blog. It is an honor, and a wake up call. It's been months, but I've found myself recently back to the place where this was all derived, and now...

I find myself looking forward, to the future. I had a great lunch with a friend of mine, E.R. Sprague, on Monday. We're both trying to get set a snowball in motion of our dreams, our passions. We're both trying to get the damn things out of our heads, and either onto paper, or built and into useful hands. We find it very difficult, very frustrating, and very un-motivating. But every once in a while...things just seem to come together.

To me, building this dream was very much like rebuilding the top end for my 1982 CB650. It was scary, simply because I'd never done it before. I knew there was a lot of pieces, and I could spend hours, days even, taking them apart, cleaning them, analyzing them never to put them back together again. And that was my fear! That I would never put it back together. 21 hrs straight of dismantling my first top end last year. I bagged and tagged every washer, nut, bolt, and even a piece of old crusty chain grease that had solidified so much I thought it was part of the starter assembly. I wasn't quite as scared when I finished the tear down that night. Knowing I could come back tomorrow, open up the container I had organized and either associate a part number, a serial number, or a made up number I had come up with, with a picture or section in the manual somewhere.

You see, through the whole process I really had no idea how I was going to get to where I knew I needed to be. I didn't know what all was going to be entailed in taking that top end off. But I knew that if I "tagged and bagged" everything along the way, if I ever messed up, it would be like leaving a bread crumb trail back to home.

So as I sit here knowing the point at which I want to be some day soon, I still have a very unclear picture of the path it's going to take to get there. But I'm tagging and bagging all the nuts and bolts along the way. Oh, and that CB...she made it back together. A couple of bad timing jobs and broken bolts, she's fast enough to startle me when I twist the throttle fully.