Death in The Early Evening

This is the bull I named Champion

In Mexico, the Bulls die to applause. I ate a vegan hamburger before going to the bullfight if it makes any of you hippies feel better.

Ego Invalidates Warranty

About half the pieces remained

If someone can show me a wheel bearing that they drove through Guatemala and Mexico on that is in worse shape then I'll be impressed. What is left of this wheel bearing carried me through some hellish climbs and dips and so many speed bumps and dirt pot holes and goat bones and ego trips that I don't know why the van is not in some river valley with my bones decomposing to drift down toward my Nirvana. The drive into Mexico was beyond difficult, bordering on madness with high stress that has me reevaluating my sanity and scratching my balding gray head when I see I now weigh 140 pounds, which is less than I weighed in 1979...awful terrors, Mayan dreams and self-denial, textiles and nightmares, actually screaming at demons in my sleep as they clawed at the mosquito screen, paralyzed and in terror but fighting the evil that is hovering nearby. Or maybe that's simply stress of emergency fuel repairs, possibly self-immolation, fear and loathing in Guatemala. Too many fatal accidents on the road, like a war zone. I can't really touch on many of the details yet but one day they will find release in these crooked fingers. My bad decisions all haunted me, my longing for romance stabs me in the back with rusty knives, all my good intentions are foolish child dreams and I deserve the chaos that enveloped me I used the radiator overflow reservoir as an emergency fuel tank and a hand siphon to prime the fuel line after bad gas or maybe a fuel pump failure left me stranded high in the Mayan kingdom. But I'm going to a bullfighting fair on Sunday to feast on chicharron tacos with green salsa. The demons have been defeated in this battle but they never surrender. They will wait for another opportunity to claw my throat and I will fight them with shiny blades and my fingers and the broken neck of my guitar.

Highs and Lows

I did it so you don't have to.

How many wheel bearings am I going to have to replace this trip? I should ask how many FUCKING WHEEL BEARINGS AM I GOING TO REPLACE? The number is up to 5. Really exhausting. At one point I was reading the number KML 88128 serial number off the outer side of the disintegrating bearing and the sun was about 20 seconds from descending below a volcano and I thought that if there were some prophecy that if a gypsy reads the wheel bearing serial number at the exact moment the sun is setting on a certain day then some mystery is revealed. I was alone on a grassy hill, tools spread out, injured from hitting my arm on the wood stove, desperate, broken, lost, and trying to find out what part I would need to hitchhike to Mexico to find and then return with it and I could read the numbers mere seconds before the sun set. No mystery was revealed. The sun set, it got dark, I lost parts in the grass and then dogs came out to haunt the shadows. Swearing was futile. Gypsies don't die, they simply lose everything and become ghosts to the waking world. It's bullshit. One day from my destination and fate refuses to cooperate. I was content to keep going but there was a major fuel problem from crappy gasoline and clogged fuel lines and sputtering and dying on steep mountain roads and in the process of trying to fix that I notice there is more differential fluid coming down the tire that I had just replaced the seal...and I see that my repair failed or the shaft is too scored...and later see that the whole bearing has now failed, which explains the sound I was hearing for the past 2 weeks. Two quick punches to the gut that threw my whole day upside down. Not to mention that I have a whole planned essay entitled "Semana Santa in Central America or Why Jesus Forced Me To Sell My Van." It's all true, Jesus forced me to sign the title over to someone in order to import it to Guatemala.

Why didn't fate just let me keep driving and surprise me with a frozen wheel bearing on some steep mountain pass? I leave you with that question.

Never Ending Fun

Even Spanish Conquistadors need love

This was a project to replace 4 front roller bearings that I had ignored for 8 years. I avoided it because I felt nothing was really wrong with the front bearings, but then I bought a new set and waited for a good time to replace them since I had no idea how long they had been on there, only that I had not packed the inner bearings with grease in 8 years. Finally, I changed all of them and repacked the grease after hearing a low growling* on the way out of Costa Rica. Dirt parking lots are my habitat.

*the growling was not the front bearings.

Colgante

Long drive for vanity shots.