Wasted on the way....

The good news is that my van went to Eliot under the worst conditions, the wheel seizing and squealing and differential fluid pouring into the road and here it is waiting for the bridge to go up again. I fixed it on my own terms and never doubted it for a second. The bad news is that someone got axed at my job and that means we're all on the chopping block.
Tired of all this running around. Everyone agrees the world is fucked up but when I say I want to spend my last $800 on a 30 year old motorcycle they look at me like I'm insane. If I'm insane then what do you call it when 5% of the population of the planet produces 25% of the pollution? What category of insane is that? What do you call a media that is obsessed with trivial celebrity cellulite stories while the polar ice caps are melting? IS that more insane than my sleeping in my van? Or less? Think about it.

I almost got punched in the face tonight because Wakefield gave up a walk off homerun in the 11th inning and I was so pissed I started to clap, like "Way to go, you asshole!" But everyone thought I was a hater because I was wearing my Dodgers cap. That made me laugh. ME? A HATER OF THE RED SOX? I decided (I was drunk and didn't decide anything) to play along and I literally got up and yelled, "Why? What's the problem? They suck. The Red Sox are LOSERS! THEY LOSE IN THE 11th INNING!" and I'll tell you that when you say that in a Red Sox bar the evil I got hit with was as bad as it gets. But you know what? I'm not afraid. Fuck anyone who assumes they know me. Fuck them even if they did punch me in the face. I had drunk a bowl of loudmouth soup and it tasted good. So I ran my mouth. All you fanatics are assholes. Get a life! The world is literally ending for many species and humanity is next in line. Excuse me for buying a motorcycle.

Tired of being punching bag...

No bright and cheery post today, folks. No. My optimistic days are over. My smile is upside down and my gout is acting up in my big toe that now looks like it got run over by a herd of elephants. If you want laughs then go read the Onion. I'm pissed and I'm swinging. You've been warned.

First of all, the pro garage shop "Performance (i.e $80/hr) Auto" over behind Jittos took my frozen bearing off my axle and installed the new one. Glad they could fit my humble van in between their vintage restore projects. There were no vinyl banners there and even though I would've felt better if I'd seen a Playboy calender on the wall the man I gave the axle to had forgotten more about auto mechanics than I'll ever know. His shit could change a tire better than the assholes at NTB. Unfortunately, he didn't know that his shop only took cash so when I rushed over there exactly as they closed I was totally out of luck. Translation: lots of driving with absolutely no results. Yes, the axle is finished and yes it's safe in their garage because they didn't trust me to pay them tomorrow after I planned to spend all day today working on the van. Incremental steps toward completion to make me bite my nails and think the pain in my leg is a blood clot. It's easy to say bring the whole project to a shop but as I've said, this is a 5 hour job that will cost $400-600 plus parts at a shop. I'm trying to do it for just parts but they've got my axle in hock now for $100 all because I didn't know to stop at the bank on the way there. These are the details that get left out of most home mechanic anecdotes. Passed a guy in a motorized wheelchair who collects aluminum cans. I wanted to stop and interview him and plan to do it when I get a chance. He hauls a trailer...and there was so much traffic at the corner of south and route 1 that he had to wait. In fact, traffic on 236 in Eliot is horrible and traffic everywhere is very very bad. We're really fucking shit up, people. Anyone but a corporate slave/media drone could see that this is a completely insane way of life.

Anyway, all this driving around, seething because this simple fucking task now requires three trips to Jittos whose steak bomb is gross and whose pizza sucks and just teases me, and all this driving next to Walmart and Big Lots and one after another disgusting store made me realize something I must now bring to your attention...

Something horrible happened between 1975 and 1985 in Portsmouth. What happened was a centralized, bike friendly town got sold to the tycoons in Newington and is now a sprawling asphalt ridden jungle with million dollar downtown sidewalks that lead nowhere except to a soulless vacuum of expensive coffee and designer jeans. I'll tell you how that happened: every adult who lived in Portsmouth in that critical decade of 1975-1985 completely whored themselves out to Chinese made super crap that could only be marketable in truck-friendly big box malls outside of town. How they look themselves in the mirror now is a mystery. Maybe the wrinkles and dementia and senility make their sleep more restful, but that will not prevent my accusing them of a horrible crime. They sold out the soul of this town to where it resembles some kind of miniature Van Nuys to me and nothing is cheaper outside of town now except bulk buckets of cheese filled pretzels and Chinese made computers. That's what The Little Store got destroyed by. I admired one or two adults back then but I see it was only because I was childish. There were no real men and women who tried to protect the soul of this town. None. We needed a Braveheart and we got Longshanks. The King of England. They laid down and hoped their cowardice would be lost to the sands of time. Mostly, it has been. My generation is so soaked with alcohol and divorce regrets that the blame game never gets to the vicious and unforgivable crime that was committed and that I see now as cataclysmic and irreversible. This is not a town I can live in. It is the New England equivalent to Taiwan. We manufacture junk, sustain ourselves off Taco Bell, drive twenty miles to buy cheap electronics and pat ourselves on our backs because we think we're pretty smart. Well, that's a total load of shit. No, most people don't remember 1983 Richards Ave but I can say that the rusted ghetto doors of the JFK racquetball courts didn't cost the city a penny while the ten million dollar brick sidewalks that will buckle with the ice and crumble when roots push them up are a pure money pit...and who the fuck is walking downtown except the piss drunk college students (1 liquor license per 4 people) and the goofy merchants of expensive clothes and trinkets. Fuck all of you. Go home to your Rye mansion and get off my street!

So, you know who you are, thanks for laying down like a paid-off undercard fighter when push came to shove. Thank you for allowing my home town to become a faceless sprawl of Chinese junk. I thought about buying a mobile home here but I might as well throw a dart at a map and pick anywhere on earth because that's what Portsmouth is. Gentrified and fucked up, soulless and empty like a pauper's wallet.

This all leads me to my renewed faith in my decision to DO WHATEVER I WANT. I have heard the advice of others and I have seen where their wisdom led this town and I can confidently say that no one has any idea what they are talking about. You sell out my town for cheap bags of pretzels? Good. Go eat them. Go fill your vapid veins with brewed poison. But take your advice and bury it under the State Street Saloon because this town is a fucked up mess now, the frogs are boiling in the water and you are telling me I've got to change my ways? Seriously? An iceberg the size of Manhattan is floating south from the North Pole and I don't know what I'm doing by living in a van down by the river? Really? You've either got a lot of nerve or you're as stupid as the cell tower disguised as a pine tree. If I told you I was going to get naked and sprint backwards down Congress street singing the Star Spangled Banner that would not be as insane as if you told me in 1978 that I'd have to DRIVE TO A FUCKING CORPORATE TIRE SHOP IN NEWINGTON TO HAVE MY VAN DESTROYED FOR THE LOW PRICE OF $300 in 2010. I would've told you to have your head examined! And if you told me I'd stop at two hundred lights on the way down route 1 to Heritage Ave I would've asked you why you hated me so much. Why did you hate the town the way it was? What was wrong with having a hardware store downtown? Why do I need a car to buy a book? There were lots of questions you didn't ask in 1978. I guess everyone was too busy at the divorce lawyer to give a fuck what was happening to their culture. Well, just remember this rant when you've got some stale advice for me.

You have to earn a good reputation, you have to earn the right to be listened to, you have to earn respect and from what I've seen of this town you've earned my disgust and resentment. Portsmouth is fucked. I'd like to think that the good guys lost to the bad guys but what really happened was there were no good guys. There were just selfish losers and if living in my van at the Park 'N Ride or by the millpond is my way to save money so I can leave this gentrified copper mill then that's what I'm going to do. I will wallpaper my ceiling with parking tickets and dig a latrine at the Central Little League field. Fuck everyone if they think cleaning the mill pond is cleaning up this town. Your preacher is Steve Jobs and your daughters are Britney Spears. Call them up on their birthday because that's the family you bought with your pickled pride.

Day 2: Bearing project

In addition to my grinding cable harness job (The skills I'm learning there will be valuable when it comes time to fight the machines) I've now got a second job trying to remove a pulverized wheel bearing from an axle shaft. Like a guy at work said, "I can do anything." as long as I have the tools. In this case I've got no tools, no vise, no propane torch, no oven, no slide hammer, no work bench. Removing this bearing and installing the new one is a project for a garage...a real garage where there are no fancy fucking marketing posters and company logos and corporate slogans.
The only challenge is if I can do it myself without destroying the axle shaft. I don't want to know the answer to that question. Every part will take days to arrive so it's another slow grind as each bolt takes one day to deal with. I'm like a cranked up pit crew freak when I've got all the tools and I'm like Dr. Frankenstein when I don't. Today I stacked up a pile of circular weights from a bench press set and used them to lift the shaft off the ground enough to slip another set of weights between the bearing flange and the bearing race and then I pounded on the top of the axle with a slide hammer I borrowed. It was a mess but it's exactly what you do without a bearing vise...and it still didn't work. Oh, I want a motorcycle! So simple.
I don't know if the oil seal ruptured but I'm guessing the gear fluid leak was caused by the bearing falling apart and the axle wiggling.
It's so boring. My life is so mechanically devoted right now I shit spools of copper and piss brake fluid.

I take the blame

Idiot. I promised I would buy 4 new tires if the van made it to New Hampshire. But money is tight and I thought only two for now would be enough until a few more paychecks. What a mistake. Not only was I instantly reminded of how foolish that was by having one of the old tires blow out ten hours after I didn't replace it...but...this is the killer...one of the front tires was a 225 75 R15, a spare I bought in Mexico. And I had them swap the front tires to the rear where there was a 235 75 R15 on the other side.
How bad can that be? What damage can that cause to a rear drive vehicle? I'll get pics eventually but it's almost catastrophic. Mismatched sizes on the front wheels made no difference but the axle shaft is linked in the back and the difference in sizes caused one tire to turn faster than the other and absolutely ground the wheel bearing into tiny shards of metal, destroyed the oil seal, and almost seized up. Only three balls were left in the bearing race.

I take the responsibility for trusting NTB in Newington to do this simple task. If I told those guys to replace one tire with a plastic one off a Big Wheel from Toys R Us they would've done it. The only people dumber than me were the guys doing the work. Absolute retards. Sure, we'll put that tire there without checking the size. And so what if it has steel radial sticking out of the rubber. We're only a tire garage!
I'll be sending them a letter with pictures to see if I can get some damages repaid because this could destroy all chances of my driving the van again. Assholes!
The axle shaft bearing disintegrated, the differential seal evaporated and the fluid dripping out wasn't brake fluid (the brake cylinders are fine) it was differential fluid pouring into the brake hub and causing the pads to fail. If the axle fucked up the differential gearing then that's it. that's the end of the van. I'm not replacing the rear end for $2000 so I can have a 1969 van. All because I didn't want to buy four new tires...and now I definitely have to buy two new tires to replace the odd sized one and the one that blew out. FUCK! IN addition to the hell of this repair.
I'm super bummed out.
I pulled the axle shaft out and am in the process of beating the bearing off the shaft so I can see if it can be replaced. Bearing work is among the most difficult because hydraulic presses were used to put them on. I'm really tested by this project. Metal shards were everywhere and I sliced my fingers multiple times in the dark sauna-like garage. The van is abandoned in a parking lot in Elliot and I drove my moped over the memorial bridge to contemplate jumping off. Oooooh!

All at the exact time I can not afford to lose my van! I would be buying a sweet 1981 Honda Cm 400 right now except I'm digging grease from my finger nails and watching my blood money be poured into the wallets of a corporate retard factory disguised as a tire company. And I have no place to stay and no money and no van and no motorcycle. I'm just a man on a moped rolling through town with my plaid Bell Bottom pants. My freak flag is flying at half mast!

How to get arrested...

At pawtuckaway state park, cutting hemp twine with a jagged knife (I was practicing making necklaces), ragged and sweating in my camper van after changing tires in the dirt. three children walk up thinking it's an ice cream truck . I'm surprised and brandish the knife accidentally. They see the knife, they see the rope. Maybe my balls are dangling from my threadbare shorts. Did I just say "Get in the van, kiddies, or I'll kill all of you."?? They aren't sure but it's better to be safe than sorry and their parents always told them to rat out anyone suspicious. Imaginations go wild and Oggy is surrounded by NH State Troopers. And really, would you believe this guy or three white rich brats out to swim in a pond?

That's how fast you can go to jail in this awful country.