Workplace Violence


– Stuart Jonathan Thad Schippereit 74, of Savannah, Georgia passed away April 24, 2023 at his home with family by his side. He was born March 22, 1949 in Columbus Ohio.

Editor’s Note: We are aware of the discontinuities of perspective in this daily shout at the heavens. You will note that this brief excerpt comes from Marlow, and it is only a couple years old. He has now been in his grave for a few months, and there will be no further issue from his pen. The plan had been, as it is with all Socotra contributors, to issue a ‘capstone work’ for publication should the untoward intervene in publication. We have two books he did as part of his literary voyaging, and it is past time to get them issued. We thought it might be fun to journey with Marlow to how his legacy was created and how it will endure as our pleasant planet continues to spin energetically. This one was issued after an insurrection a couple years ago. We have now had a few such events

– Vic
#############

The Mullet Moron Invasion of the US Capitol got Marlow thinking about workplace violence some months ago.

Just for grins, he made a short list of his brushes with it:

Union shop steward threatened me with unspecified pain due to my college-boy, Commie thoughts about negotiating employee stock ownership rights for us retail clerk union members. Damn, we’d all be jillionares by now. It would have been Kroger stock.

Neighborhood dudes threatened me and other employees with zipguns at an A&P store in the 60s.

Can’t count military war zones, since they paid us extra for our presence.

Debriefed-for-cause employee threats and come-backs to have it out.

During 25 years of delivering hot meals and bags of groceries to the hungry in poor areas he had some interesting early chats with certain gun-carrying gang block leaders. he had to convince them he was not a rat, narc, snitch or whatever the word du jour was for police informant.

A casual remark at a second job regarding the thievery at his main gig led to a secret midnight conversation with the mob “security managers” of a midwestern grocery store chain I was working at. Dudes were from central coasting — olive skinned, pinstriped suit wearing, and sporting chest holster bulges and such — so, initially it was unpleasant in the extreme. After some truth telling, they said they owed me, and I could go. Out the door I went.

Stories from my Grandpop: He was a very successful trucking company owner in 1920’s Brooklyn. The 1929 crash bank closures cost him all his money. Then, one of the mafia families came knocking on his door not for some assistance or protection money but for his trucking company. He rolled and sold as others who resisted similar requests in the borough were experiencing extremely bad outcomes.

He had two small kids and a wife.

Then after a year-or-two of government cheese, the schmucks then made nice with him (mentioning something about respect, keeping quiet, yada yada yada) by finagling him a crap dockworker job on Brooklyn’s waterfront which was totally controlled by friends of these wise guys. Later, due to his Navy service in WW I off the coast of France, Pops caught on with the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard. He went to his grave using derogatory terms for Italians and “f*cking banks.”

Meanwhile, the sons and grandsons of the original wise guys would show up at his small Brooklyn apartment and then at his Long Island village house’s back door every now and then, even into Pop’s 90s with a trunk-full of something off the back of a truck that might be of interest. Cash only after a cup of fresh coffee, some gossip, and a slice of Entenmann’s. On this last one, I kid you not — in the early 90s I talked with them, saw, selected, cooked and ate their goods. I think back when this all started the word “respect” was richer in meaning and meant a lot more than it does now.

Our house was broken into, vandalized, and ransacked when we were in the islands during my Navy days. Somehow, these morons thought it’d be a good idea to spray paint anti US Navy stuff on the house walls. Pissed me off. Complaint was filed. Island cops were pissed at what they saw. Perps caught and tried. Some threats were communicated during their trial. Cops were told. Shit really broke loose in their hood. All were convicted, jailed and later deported. Join the Navy. See the world. Deport some morons.

While on a 1970s Med deployment onboard USS Forrestal, Marlow was finally hoping to enjoy an Italian port visit after a long at sea period. We have shared the experience in space and time on that ship, once known as “First in Defense” after the namesake Cabinet Secretary. Unfortunately, Italian Communist Unions were holding their summer confab in this port city and had prepared a welcome of sorts for us with “Baby Killer” posters draping buildings and streets and Unwelcome Wagon reception committees in the bars and restaurants. This last wasn’t well received by our white hats and young hot-head JOs.

After two nights of applied correctives by their USN visitors, the local carabinieri (likely after some USG pressure) arrived and pushed the Commies outside of the sailors’ preferred areas for liberty.

Lastly, the Mark 1, Mod 0, standard issue, 1970s anti-war telephone or scrap paper delivered bomb threats.

I couldn’t figure out what they meant by “Save your money!” Then I went on my first 8 plus long deployment. It was also on that deployment when I figured out the irony of “See the world,” when I calculated one day in between cyclic ops briefs that the world was almost 71% water.

Copyright © 2021 From My Isle Seat

www.vicsocotra.com

Marlow’s Meatballs: From Little Italy

Morning, Gentle Readers! This is a note from a deferred tradition. It goes back a ways through several contributors, though with a stringent eligibility criterion. They can no longer be strictly of this world. The project began with the Cook-Book we started with Jinny Martin.

There has been a curious periodic eruption of old Spook trade-craft over the years. The current endless political campaign for the American Presidency has brought the issues to a certain luminous quality. Jinny had been married to an old Spook named Barnie. Before his passing, he finished a career in espionage as the Chief of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. A man whose trade-craft was superb, and enabled effective collection all along the way.

With service on warships painted stern gray, he had also served in pseudo-diplomatic posts around the world. Like the one in Istanbul, Turkey.

That historic city, once called “Constantinople,” guards the Bosphorus, a 700-meter wide, 19-mile long strait that joins the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the network of world commerce.

There is news from there this week. The “Special Military Operation” continues in Ukraine. There was a treaty protecting merchant ships filled with grain peacefully leaving Odessa and traveling south to Egypt and Eastern Africa. The Russians announced no such protection exists this morning.

For Jinny’s husband, that often mean taking the Embassy boat and crew out to the navigational channel and seeing what ships are deeply laden, and which might have cargoes to make the Geiger-counters count. It is not just wheat on those ships.

But what interested us was what it was like for ladies like Jinny who had to run households in those islands of diplomacy. Like a prominent NATO ally’s capital. What to talk about in the living rooms that could steer cocktail-talk to the appropriate counter-intelligence topics?

What cocktails appealed to what crowd of guests? What snacks worked best to loosen tongue and support the report that would have to be written over coffee the next morning?

You can see this rapidly becomes complicated, and that is why Janet, who Marlow nick-named “W” to avoid marital strife, passed along the meat-ball recipe as a back up main-course that never failed.

Here at Big Pink, we are blessed with the presence of Grace, the best Angel-hair pasta chefs in all of Northern Virginia. When a plate of those delicate pale noodles emerges from the strainer, they still need some help in terms of rich, vibrant sauce festooned with grated Romano cheese.

Marlow had the answer for that. Not just in terms of delightful browned meats and vegetables. Imagine for a moment those amazing noodles smothered with tomato goodness shared with a happy crowd all mentally preparing their own reports for the morning meetings that will come on the inevitable Monday morning meeting tomorrow…

From Marlow’s perch across the Styx comes this recipe for the centerpiece of a cozy comfy Italian plate of healthy calories. It will add a little spice to the beginning of a week that could feature the end of commercial shipping on the Black Sea. That is the point of this cook-book, anyway. And a note from the next world to this one while we simmer and pour a refreshing glass of red to help guide us forward to a meal that will support robust counter-intelligence collection operations at the dinner table, wherever that might be!

Marlow’s Meatballs

1 pound hamburger

½ pound ground pork

½ pound ground veal

2 eggs

1 cup pecorino/romano cheese (grated)

1 ½ tbsp chopped fresh parsley

2 cloves garlic minced

Salt and pepper to taste
2 cups fresh breadcrumbs (leftover baguette from La Grignote

French restaurant in Key West, 1211 Duval St, Key West, FL 33040-3129)

2 cups warm water (He uses water leftover from soaking dried mushrooms from previous meal- and uses both cups!)
1 cup olive oil for frying

Directions:

-Combine meats, eggs, cheese, parsley, garlic, salt & pepper.

-Mix in bread-crumbs.

-Mix in water ½ cup at a time until moist.

-Fry in oil until brown.

-Serve with tomato sauce.

-Freeze extra separately on sheet pan after frying. When frozen, place in bag.

Chef’s Tip: Use one cooking session to prepare servings based on entertainment/collection opportunities. Romanians coming? Make a few extra meatballs and tuck them away in the freezer!

Copyright 2023 Marlow & Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Editor’s Note: Marlow chimes in this morning with some thoughts about the road ahead we all share. We held off on running this piece during Holy Week to stay in tune with the turning of our world from winter gray to the promise of bright blossoms amid fresh new green. Our contribution? Stay alert. And love the life we live!

– Vic

My Turn Now

What’s it all about to be at death’s door and ready to walk through it?

I’m a bit thinner now than I was back during the Christmas holidays but not much so given the bountiful, tasty treats W tempts me daily with. I’ve lost muscle tone and the curve slope of my function loss has increased but not scarily so. Yet. But it’s coming. Our in-house living arrangements have evolved a bit with me living exclusively on the first floor, acquiring assistive accoutrements of chairs, bathing helpers and such for the activities of daily living.

I no longer want or need to tell folks that I am dying, I just wait for signs of their inner stillness to gently tell than what’s happening and that I’m OK with it — sorta like Butch Cassidy and Sundance jumping off the cliff into the river canyon’s raging torrents. Someone’s gotta push off first, no? It’s just my turn.

With the doctors this talk’s been tough, since their primary task is managing the hope file cabinet of Hail Mary pass play diagrams, we might choose to call and run on the patient’s behalf. It’s a strange sensation to sense the arbitrary switching of roles between the sick and provider.

There are no accepted signals that it’s safe to talk about dying, so I as the patient surfaces it using the D word. Maybe we say to our providers we don’t want any more of these off-label use of drug ZSWira or that our affairs are in order or that we’ll go out to dinner with them next week. I have started this death talk or its prelims long before some of them appeared ready.

Deathbed miracles strictly forbidden: a good death, newfound wisdom, last minute reconciliations, regrets dealt with, our lives’ tasty spiciness simmered into a bland tomato sauce, and neatness of the death process – it ain’t. It’s also NOT the dying’s showtime for the living.

Even if I tell them I’m ready, nothing can lessen the blunt force of their grief of loss – the hard reboot control-alt-del of the human condition.

Just put this into your backpack — I’m still okay now, since I look down at the dirt and not up. It’s just my turn now.

Copyright 2023 My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com

Life & Island Times: Arty Factys


Author’s Note: Dusting off and playing old vinyl and CDs and uncovered the pictured arty fact and the lyrics to Steppenwolf’s Monster. Copyright on composition is theirs with our thanks. Our reaction to it? That is ours this morning!
Spy Navy.jpg

– Marlow

Monster

Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope

Like good Christians, some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches
But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light
And once the ties with the crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And ’til the railroad linked ocean to ocean

Many the lives which had come to an end
While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man
But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
The blue and grey they stomped it

They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war over
They stuffed it just like a hog
And though the past has it’s share of injustice

Kind was the spirit in many a way
But it’s protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it’s a monster and will not obey
(Suicide)

The spirit was freedom and justice
And it’s keepers seem generous and kind
It’s leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won’t pay it no mind

‘Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
And now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it’s all just an echo of what they’ve been told

Yeah, there’s a monster on the loose
It’s got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watchin’
Our cities have turned into jungles

And corruption is stranglin’ the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can’t understand
We don’t know how to mind our own business

‘Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who’s the winner
We can’t pay the cost

‘Cause there’s a monster on the loose
It’s got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching
(America)

America where are you now?
Don’t you care about your sons and daughters?
Don’t you know we need you now
We can’t fight alone against the monster

Copyright 2023 My Aisle seat
www.vicsocotra.com

The Minor Aggravations…


the minor aggravations of death

Another one in our aging family is always coming, so a family reunion is perforce rising on the distant event horizon

Yes, another parade of the haunted casualties of irreparable damage in the crucible of life whether at birth or some other large or small fork in one’s life road

Tales of soul-killing abuse decanted upon them from flawed beakers of memory

A parade of crosses up the hill toward Calvary

Roomfuls of spirit killers

Neurotics . . . . endless and fascinating

Family reunion Venus flytraps holding sweet poison

Distempers and aggravations

Solitary misfits

Shitpot stirrers

Uncontrollable tongues

The family crazy . . . easy to find hard impossible to lose forget

Passionate and primitive in one easy bake Roman Catholic box of lunatics, nutcases, borderlines, and psychos

A legitimate no-shit cliche of larger than life

I’m bringing the popcorn and got dibs on some good seats

Copyright 2023 My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com

Life & Island Times: Roads and Their Riders

Four Corners Meditation

Editor’s Note: This is a missive from the American Road as it was in a day of remarkable freedom. We just completed publication of “Marlow’s Detour 1.0,”an account of a pair of riders hurtling across the vast panorama of the American Road. What follows is an evocation of the time when all roads were open. Marlow is now working on a recreation of the Four Corners ride, the one that started in the Florida keys and hit the other three contiguous corners of the nation on America’s road.
– Vic

Author’s note: This was written after a day of stacking up piles of east coast miles enroute a vacation rendezvous in Vermont with former neighbors from northern Virginia. So, it’s more a meditation about back country roads and their motorcycle riders than a recounting of a day’s ride.

Roads and Their Riders

There is a difference between America’s western and eastern country roads. The latter are seacows compared to the tireless workhorse country roads of the west. When a rider hooks himself to a wonderful eastern road, challenge and thrill are certain but not the struggle and battle of those out west.

Why the difference? Perhaps it is the size of the western spaces, the height of the mountains, the depths of the sea, the total lack of civilization for long periods of space and time, the wide range of wild weather conditions. Regardless, the roads are different, if not in species, then in disposition.

Sometimes before changing conditions arrived on western roads, a faint smell or slight temperature change would hint at something new around the bend or over the hill. Rarely did the sounds of impending change announce with suitable warning time a serious challenge. When you heard this announcement loud and clear, you were already in the soup.

Once you were hooked in, you and the road were on a run, sounding and rising, jumping and jerking about in a test of the machine and the man atop it. Few riders could resist a slight turn of the throttle to see how far and fast they could take this test.

Roads often fought back, making the riders work a man’s job. Riders must work mostly straight up with slight leans. Roads fought on their sides, unexpectedly moving side to side, up and down, bobbing and weaving, with hidden substances on their surfaces to trick and fail their would-be conquerors with their heads down and intent on never stopping or slowing.

If a rider rested on the road while in battle, the road might rest too, but only to set the rider up. The road’s method might be a long, slow and gentle lift, then lower still to encourage the rider to crack the throttle further to wind the road in faster. When the road is reeled in like this, it might refuse to come in any faster or further beyond a certain point, creating a deadlock which could be fatal to a rider who tried to break it. Thus, western roads tried by guile and surprise to take the delusion and the fight out of its riders.

The best road for riders is the one when they are alone without other four-or-more-wheeled vehicles, all alone on a narrow pavement on a wide, wide rolling prairie.

The long, heaving hills, the windy lanes, the sideways flight of the rainwater and the uplifting wind microbursts from leviathan storms, the greyblack wall of night on the horizon, the leap of the spirit as a road was finally subdued, the sweet, soft scent that breathed from off the fields full of herbs and vegetables that would be in the market the next day, the beauty and mystery and color and movement of the road – these belong to riders alone, and they were as rich as if they had found the gravel of the road to be diamonds, its rainwater nectar, and its frost heaved, chipseal surface pure gold.

Happily, neither politics nor reality TV can intrude upon, let alone ruin, the wonders of the back country road. The sun and the fog, cold and heat, the rain and dust, the great, calm waters, the warm ocean currents, the pleasant and cyclonic winds — these elements all have their tasks, and they perform them faithfully, to the happiness of those who run these roads.

These untamed roads are free, careless, wholesome, restful, and serene. They are democratic and indifferent and aloof. These roads can be restless, like black threads in the new web that is America and responding to the jerks and tremors of all the other threads in the country.

The country road does not suffer its rider’s idleness. They expect, encourage and demand their rider’s onward rush.

Back country byways do not pour their riders upon its places willy-nilly. Their rider people are not impatient, like the big city world on wheels in its hurry to be somewhere else to be served, worked, bought or sold. Riders are the opposite of urban little animals in a cage, turning wire wheels, unable to stop.

Wonderful were the country road little breezes coming down the valleys, zephyrs filled with fruit trees scattered moisture from their leaves and rejoiced in the returning sunlight. Riders delighted in these roads’ wet and glimmering greenness. Sometimes these tarred roads steamed like the French dessert treats at a four-star restaurant.

These out-of-the-way roads gave their riders feelings of great adventure, when their tarmac happened to be quiet. Riders propelled themselves as far and fast as they could towards the distant horizon. The adventure was unlimited and exploration extensive, like that of a smiling and laughing toddler ambling over an endless green pasture.

Back country roads could be primitive creatures who deserved not just respect but propitiation and dread. Their beauty might give a rider sustenance, just as it might give him terror and death.

On the other hand, urban roads were different since they were often crowded with impersonal and relentless fragments of humanity. Their commuter hour crushes were like the tight links of the iron track of a caterpillar tractor or the steel scales of some tank tread. Their tremors and vibrations were just plain dangerous.

All riders have stories of commuter rushes when an unseeable squeal and scream seemed headed directly for them. A nameless terror would fall upon them. They were about to be crushed. Then came the silence that meant they had been pardoned once again.

Battles with urban roads were more like American revolutionary war skirmishes. Urban musketeer riders were rarely shot; but, when it occurred, it was likely deadly. There was no skill in this, just pure chance of the place and moment.

As these urban roads were under constant improvement, vehicles would come crawling to a halt and would then mambo along slowly ahead. The whole affair around America’s city centers was thus like a siege, with mine and counter-mine, trench and scarp.

These urban worlds were too built-up and too official for two wheeled riders to enjoy. There was no use grousing. To sell out and buy a nice McMansion shack in one of the nice new suburbs of the big city was not an answer. The ever-present construction bumps on road surfaces weren’t considered obstacles those days. So much so, warning signs of bump presence were rare in urban settings.

Riders knew the secret of their vague discontent. They had rediscovered the immense possibilities outside of the selfie-ness of the city in what country folks vaguely call the spirit. They felt something under their scooter’s wheels on the road for which they had searched all their lives.

The vast accumulated experience of the urban world had, oddly enough, been admitted only to the surface of their minds, and had left little impression on their hearts.

Like a child who, with wonder and fascination, discovers that water is wet, and that fire will burn, they began their investigations of the world where life’s vitality and the big things humans live by but cannot be analyzed in laboratories or learned in books.

The answer was easy for the riders, a simple formula to relax the mind, body and soul. It would rock in the cradle of their confidence. It would require more than a shred of attention to the details. They would sneak out onto the roads they knew and seek out the back country roads that they didn’t.

The urban driving public needed straight lines; riders would not.

Vermont curves

Copyright © 2008 & 2023 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com

Life & Island Times: Alternate Detour Opening

Author’s Note: Ten years ago, I briefly considered resurrecting my 12-year-old, scrapbooked, Detour Version 1.0 journal notes in a series of email postings. I dashed the attached off the narrative below and then let it sit unshared until my recent 2001 scrapbook’s unearthing in Jan/Feb 2023.

I then started recasting it as a possible opening approach to crafting my road diaries going as far back to a 1968 Angers-Paris r/t in France, the Appalachians in 1971, Thailand in 1978 and all my US European wanderings during the ’00s into a single book form.

That was an impossibly bad idea.

Marlow

06 MARCH 2023

Life and Island Times

Forecasts Magnified & Distorted

When you take upon yourself the schooling of others using your own life
adventures as sign-posts, and to acquaint them with what monsters lie in
deep caverns, cruise beneath the sea and lurk in our souls, do not, through
ignorance, omit telling them of these beasts’ power to heal the inward bruise.

It is impossible to meet a motorcyclist on the road without being struck
by his appearance. While small and slight compared to the drivers and their
four wheeled motor vehicles, the rider is eagerly scanning the wide expanse
around him, with a totally different air from those engaged in regular motoring.

It is not until well after the motorcyclist returns from his
pursuit of distant byways, that non-riders can see in his
appearance the beast within and the savage road he has just traveled.

It is not generally well known that few motorcyclists
ever return from a trip unchanged by the road.

Forecasts Magnified & Distorted

Some call me Marlow. Many years ago – I am unable recall how many with precision – having stuffed more than enough money in the pockets of brokers and bankers on my behalf, I achieved a certain professional mastery during adventures upon the seven seas, and nothing particular to interest me at home. I thought I would ride my motorcycle to see the drier parts of the world. It is the sole means I had available to quell my ennui and regulate my dyspepsia.

Whenever I find myself down in the mouth, growing disconsolate about the newspaper headlines trumpeting the crisis of the day; whenever it is a sticky, humid August in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before whiskey bars, and considering posting some rant on every internet listserv that I follow; and especially whenever my maternal Irish curse of melancholic rage begins to rise in my chest, that it requires a strong drink or utter exhaustion to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically insulting and brawling with strangers – then, it is high time to mount my motorcycle as soon as I am able.

That is my sole substitute for automatic weapons, booze and aimless self-destruction. As the samurai wields his blade during his daily dawn-light practice and search of zen, I quietly ride my two wheeled machine. There is nothing surprising in this. If others of my acquaintance knew it, most men, sometime or other, cherish these very feelings towards motorcycling life’s back roads with me.

As I approached fifty, I lived in a pre-American Revolution town, now belted round by interstates, lobbyists, commuter rail, and tourists as the Florida Keys are by coral reefs and predator fish. This tidal water town was just below the eastern continental fall line and had long been a place where people traded. Its raw materials and hard goods commerce had long ago been replaced by the froth of service barter. Right and left, brick and cobblestone streets take you waterward to ferries, boardwalks and tourist attractions. Its oldest wharves, which had launched America’s sons, daughters and war machines to defeat the country’s enemies during two hundred and twenty five years, are now bedecked with million dollar condos, chichi restaurants and watering holes. Along the few remaining undeveloped parts of the river bank, crowds look northward towards the proud monuments of an empire in unknowing decline.

No longer do men stare out from these quays beyond the tidal flats fixed in ocean adventure reverie. Most lean against the Riverwalk’s rails with Big Gulps in hand, while some slurp Ben and Jerry ice cream cones while endlessly twiddling their texting thumbs. No one appears to want a better view of adventure that awaits in distant lands or seas. Neither sailors or landsmen, these passive virtual trekkers seem tied to smartphones, nailed to benches, and affixed to a world unseen and unseeable. Why and how is this? Are dreams of distant blue highways, green fields, azure seas, and verdant islands gone? What can they do here?

At night there come more crowds – younger, energetic – racing past the Cohongarooton’s water, and bound for the local dives. It is strange that nothing nautical in this maritime portal contents them. They loiter under the shady lights of faux alehouses with pro sporting contest coverage blasting forth from large screen video displays, alternately consuming energy drinks and high-powered cocktails. Why these Inlanders all come from their lanes and cul de sacs, streets and avenues to unite here by the sea only to get as far away from the water as they possibly can without digging themselves a grave and jumping in remains a mystery.

Life carries us all to watery pools in streams, then to rivers and the sea. We are compelled to follow and seek water and its magic. Philosophers mediate next to it, artists paint it, romantics dream by it, travelers seek its charm, and all require its nourishing power. I feel its mystical power most when upon it. It becomes a holy place when land is no longer in sight. Gods and monsters are there. They vibrate it and all those who sail it.

The ocean is where I became what I became, where I first saw the reflection of what I am. It made the phantoms of life graspable. Upon it I know that it is all right and am content.

Life is about balance, and incomplete is one who seeks extending life’s line without knowing the original point. So I seek, not as passenger, but as simple able-bodied seamen before the mast that is the source of the water.

Motorcycling to my cradle waters provides the same benefits that sailors at sea receive – mental and physical exercise and fresh air. Just as at sea, two wheeled mariners encounter prevalent head winds. Bikers sense the weather like their waterborne brethren do in forecastle and aloft in the yardarms.

My motorcycling voyage may have been part of some divine plan drawn up a long time ago. Were it a picture show at a local movie theater, it would have been a short in between two top-grossing, long-playing features. The playbill would have listed it:

“WALL STREET CRASHES, MANY SUICIDES”
“MOTORCYCE DIARY BY MARLOW”
“BLOODY WAR IN AFGHANISTAN CONTINUES”

Why make this journey? What motivates one to depart comfort, chuck success, and eschew chance for war glory on foreign shores? Ennui, certainly not. Adventure, yes. Monsters and gods, perhaps. I had encountered them in forbidden seas, but never really ashore. The journey would take me to places and people remote and potentially barbaric. I like that.

Copyright © 2013 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com

Life & Island Times: Motor Cyclists


Author’s Note: Detour Version 1.0 Series tale tail end #2 of 2
Here’s a brighter note on this series on . . . if you will . . . our dare-to-be-different sentiment-sprinkled memories — no weeping, wealth, or glory — will keep us alive in the hearts and souls of those who we love and leave behind.

If you still see my face when you’re dreaming, and you wake up screaming, I’ll know that I did my job.

😀

-Marlow

We’re a hundred 20 in fast left lane
Dust from a passing bullet train
We’re the pop in French champagne
No one’s gonna hook onto our chain

You can’t buy what we got
You won’t see it in a Harley shop
Riding’s the boom in our mic drops
Goin too fast for the world to watch

We’re motor cyclists
Yeah, we’re different
On a whole ‘nother level way off the ground
No you can’t hold on we’re above the clouds

We’re motor cyclists
Oh yeah we’re different
You don’t wanna miss this
We’re motor cyclists, watch us

We’re high flyers
Watch ‘for us pass by ya
Yeah we’re lit like lighters
Our own ride or die-ers

You can’t buy what we got
You won’t see it in a Harley shop, no no
We’re the boom in our mic drops
Don’t care if the whole world don’t watch
We’re motor cyclists
We’re different

You wanna witness?
Might miss us when we’re gone
But we’re gonna have all the fun
Life only has a few tastes
Can’t let greatness go to waste
So try flying state to state
Not patiently await something to believe
And that something might be motor cycling

Copyright © 2023 From My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com

Life & Island Times: Detour: Random Postcripts

Socotra House Note: The formal re-telling of Marlow’s Detour 1.0 was complete yesterday with a ride back home in Fairfax, VA on the Couty Parkway. The rigors of nearly 10,000 miles on two wheels, coast-to-coast is a prelude to an epic “Four Corners” ride around the corners of the continuous States. It was written in the sense of adventure as it occurred, which only now has an immediacy of a way of life at an apex. Fossil fuel-powered, it was an amalgamation of individual freedom. It was empowered by the American Road across a vast continent optimized for motion at individual discretion. Marlow wrote this morning to say that the following thoughts might be raw and impassioned by the immersion of the “then road” and the current perspective of our times. “Detour 2.0” may integrate them in different manner, but this current-time collection of thoughts focused by the headlights of the American Road are now protected by an “UNSANITIZED” label for which only independent contract personnel can be held accountable.

– Vic

Detour Version 1.0
Random Postscripts
(brain bug-smashings)
04 March 2023

Based on the hunches of utter strangers, they surmised that we Men in Black were voyaging well into our country’s hidden unknown side spaces seeing these places’ phantoms and looming darknesses but not really too afraid of them. So, they approached us.

We became erstwhile pilgrimage route signposts for those who felt too
much of their dreary mortality clinging to them, having wanted desperately to live and still did. At times there was impossible anguish and regret for all the things they had not done, of all the drudge they had to do. Our presence and brief sharings made them feel a window might have been opened for them on life they had not considered before. To this day we hope to God they got a chance at these journeyings to become not so much deeper and wiser but simpler and peaceful when seeing all our country’s strangeness and the glory and the power of its life, places, and people.

——

There is an extravagance which expresses itself on the road. So long as our roads were asphalt black and curvy, not endlessly guard railed, and empty and dry, we were rich.

Our tires never wanted air, our engines, save for the periods of my balky battery, had the good habit of starting each morning at the first turn of the ignition switch: a good habit to force these engines over the nine plus atmospheres of their compression.

Skittish looking due to the inability of their two wheels to support their standing upright on their own, motorcycles come with a touch of blood in them — they are better than all the four-legged riding animals on earth, because of their required logical extensions of our senses and faculties, and the hint, no — the provocation, to excess conferred by their unrelenting smooth power.

——

Early on as we started out in April and late as this trip’s final days in May in America’s pivotal year 2001 approached, now and then like tiny arrows, insects hit our cheeks. At times a heavier body — a grasshopper or a locust perhaps — would crash into our cheeks, chin, or lips like a spent bullet, snapping our heads back. A glance at the speedometer: eighty-two. Our bikes were warmed up. We threw off the effects of the bug smash to briefly twist our throttles wide open, on the top of the rise in the road, swooping as if flying across the coming dip: our weighty machines launching themselves like projectiles sometimes landing with a small lurch.

Okay, Mother Nature, we got you. Right back atcha.

——-

X-country road trip to somewhere . . .

We’re on a one-way motorway
We’re just riding and riding away
Then follow a route back home
We’re road lamps shining
Not a wild lights blinding bright
Mostly flickering off and on
Yaaaaah . . . .
Times like these we started to live
Times like these that give and give
Times like these we started to live
We craved times like these over and over

Maybe soon we’ll become a new day rising
A brand new sky
To hang the stars upon the night
No longer are we chopped and divided
About staying or running away
And leave all these times behind?
Naaaaah . . . .
Times like these we started to live again
Times like these that give and give again
Times like these we started to live again
We craved times like these time and time again

——-

Is our trip done? As long as we have breath, dreaming and planning are underway for the next one.

———

As Detour 1.0 came to its concluding segments, our faces showed no sadness. There was great age in them. We felt suddenly the distance we had travelled and the amount we had lived and experienced. We had a moment of cohesion, a moment of affection and union, which drew us together like small flame flickers against all the senseless nihilism of our approaching DC hometown.

Hometown of a nation?

DC is such a cruel city, but it is a lovely one; a savage city, yet it has such southern tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent Armageddon safe catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with unhealthy fluorescent blue light, and roaring, combat centers managing the fighting of constant ceaseless wars of men and of machinery. To the uninitiated innocent, it appears so sweetly and so delicately full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it is full of political intrigue and hateful grasping at rock bottom.

We comfort ourselves by believing when bad things happen in DC that they are due to madness. It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, insane. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychopaths in high places, and we’ve got the problem solved. Oopsies.

We who toiled there or lived on its outskirts have seen it naked, with its guards down. We know, not just sense, how the current hollow pyramid of its false social structure was erected and sustained upon a base of its citizen’s sacrificial blood and sweat and agony. Its privilege and their truth could never lie down together. We know how its brokers get through their days — holding up solid gold coins close enough to their eyes so as to blot out the truth-revealing sun itself. This coinage also blocks the effects of stronger, deeper tides and currents running throughout America. Their glamorous beltway lives course the dark depths we the sun loving people would mistakenly like to sound.

DC, hometown of a nation? The nation’s antithesis, for sure. You can’t go back to your real home, and DC is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. When we think it and its work are sick, they tell us “it’s all in your minds.”

It is without cynicism, that we road riders after a day or two of our voyages’ ends stand upon some metaphorical hill above DC, not saying “The town is near” but turn our eyes towards distant rolling hills that might lead us anew to a homeward bound path.

Yes, it’s an angelic desire of dark romanticism – an unlimited
drunkenness drawing us into the polar and blue sapphire world of an oceanic earth’s ancient mariners.

—————

And in response to my 1950s inner child in the car’s back seat, “No, if we’re lucky, we are never there yet.”

Perhaps this is America’s strange paradox — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to us riders who were never fully assured of purpose when we were headed somewhere on two wheels. We never had the sense of home so much as when we felt that we were going there. It was only when we got there that a restless homelessness might begin once again.

————–

Ending thought:

Road Revelation #3 (#2 was in Day 4): The unchanging weather of man’s life is not love but loneliness. Love is its rare and precious flower. Sometimes it is a riotously colored flower bed that gives us limitless life and joy, that breaches the dark walls of all our loneliness and restores us to life and companionship. But sometimes our only love is just some cut flowers atop our caskets.

Copyright © 2023 From My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com

Life & Island Times: Detour, Day 23

Waffle House for breakfast — carb loading for the long day ahead. We retraced our steps from Day 1. Opening 30 minutes riding was in rain close to the intensity of that which we experienced in Kansas two days ago. Thankfully it abated. Even light rain made West Virginia toll booth stops a dangerous slip and slide ride. No food stops today after breakfast meant lots of high protein snack bags — the 3rd and final trail mix sack consumed at a midday gas stop.

An act of trust: a tortoise family (mother and two tinies in trail) more than halfway across a West Virginia highway. Folks stopped to let ‘em pass in response.

Saw our first speed traps on US 211 less than 2 hours from home. Steve and I parted company on the Fairfax County Parkway. Arrived home ~ 730 PM. 8040 miles. Avoided until 40 miles remained the pain of numb butt complex. 10 minutes before I pulled into the South Lee Street parking pad, a neighbor returned home from 3+ weeks working in Nigeria. An impromptu stoop cocktail party ensued — displaying for all our new Yankee neighbors that here in the South we do not hide our crazy, we parade it on the front porch and give it a cocktail. Met our next-door neighbor’s Vietnam era USAF transport squadron mate & pilot, Ralphie. An endearing laugh, consisting of three long Heh’s separated by raspy exhalations with the last Heh being extra-long and under toned with the back notes from 35 years of Marlboros puffing.

Observation #15: see Idle Moment Roadtrip Thoughts. Various octane level cocktails at stoop party were followed by red and white wines and a home cooked meal of Italian sausage and pasta. The Maccallan 12 year capped the evening.

Why Roadtrip? On a Motorsickle?
-questions posed 3+ weeks ago in this journal
(see partial answer below)

And so it ended. Cue the music. Roll the credits.

. . . so glad we made it, so glad we made it
You gotta gimme some lovin’ (gimme-gimme some lovin’)
Gimme some lovin’ (gimme-gimme some lovin’)
Gimme some lovin’ every day

Well, I feel so good, ev’rything is getting high,
Better take it easy, ’cause the place is on fire
Been a hard day, not everything tuned out good
Now I’m gonna relax, ev’rbody should

So glad we made it, so glad we made it
You gotta give me some lovin;
Gimme some lovin’, gimme-gimme some lovin’
Gimme some lovin’ every day.

Daily Windshield Bug Smash Bingo Game winners: yellow

Query count as of the end of Day 23: (no change)

Where’re you going? – 23
What’s that? (Steve’s Valkyrie) – 9
Damsels in distress? – 9

A human being should be able to
palm an ace, pop a zit, annoy a bureaucrat,
raise a flag, bait a hook,
name all members of Frank Zappa’s last five bands,
slay the Jabberwocky, boot to DOS,
kite a check, repel most common household stains,
ignore a ringing telephone, change the channel,
burn rubber in all four+ gears, make a salad,
Do da Funky Chicken, re-primer the right front fender,
press khakis, open a beer bottle on 15 different parts of a car,
copy a videotape, start a recolution,
fake an orgasm, grow giant mushrooms in the basement,
understand general and special relativity,
quote the Bible, draft a Constitution,
use duct tape 117 different ways,
ride the tiger, hock loogies, buy low & sell high,
choke the chicken, smelt some bronze, change a diaper,
recite Fireside Theater and Saturday Night Live bits,
plan an invasion and bombing campaign, build a wall,
program a computer, BBQ a chicken, saddle a goat, set a bone,
lay some asphalt, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders.
cooperate, act alone, solve equations for “x,”
whack a mole, true a spoked bicycle wheel, pitch manure,
analyze a new problem, chip some rock, spit shine a boot,
play an accordion, butcher a hog, write a sonnet, and `
balance accounts and motorcycle flywheels.

If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.

A good pair of serviceable shoes can always be had at your local bowling alley for $1.85.

—————————————————–

Rear View Mirrors
March 2023

No matter how many road trips you take or journals you write, you want to ride and write more. To ride that rare air. Like on a spaceship. Breathing it changes you. Each new road is a new appraisal by the world of whether you the rider can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you got. But be careful, some roads are monsters with teeth. On the other hand, life’s pain is the entry ticket price into the palaces of sublime pleasure and knowledge.

Copyright © 2001 and 2023 From My Aisle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com