Two Things

Just two things. That’s all. 

I need to combine necessity, creativity and opportunity today. Here are the two I have selected as ‘most deserving’ of my time and energy:

1) Finish the video. A unannounced upgrade that took almost half a day to load caused some down-stream issues with my editing program, Final Cut Pro. Mixed with a simultaneous power outage I lost a full days work. I began the reconstruction yesterday afternoon and set about the frustrating chore of doing the grunt work of uploading files and reconnecting them to the timeline. I like editing on the fly, finding artistic flow and moving the project in waves of focused, joyous effort. Doing the same thing twice is torture and it is very easy to assign blame elsewhere - and lose the purity of creative flow in the process. One cannot be completely honest with such a potentially cathartic medium as video when one is bubbling with contempt just slightly below the surface. I can always, as a superbly talented jewelry maker once mentioned of her stunning work, see the neurosis in my work - a sloppy edit here, a missed opportunity there, emotion rushed, transitions lacking power, light and color underexposed and unwanted, unprofessional camera movements ignored. It is more work than art when inspiration goes missing. 

Granted that my main concern is not to win a film festival award or attract a million eyes to my YouTube channel, but I do take the same approach with the creation of my little training videos, now in season 5, that I do with my training: Continual improvement. This means, to me, that faster is better. After all I constantly flirt with the number one rule of independent film-making: Thou shalt not create big budget films for small audiences. Thank God for dwarfs and midgets. Can a block-buster be for an audience of one? 

2) Clean the carburetor on the Honda. Leaving regular un-leaded gasoline in a 2002 Honda Shadow VT600 over a long, cold Northwest winter, protected from the elements by nothing more than a cheap 8x10 tarp, will gum up the pipes almost as destructively as pouring in Gorilla glue. As a public service, the same is true of small engines in lawn mowers, generators, chain saws, mopeds and mini-bikes. They tell me it is the ethanol mix. Drain your tank if you value your tools. 

And with gas currently over $3.25 per gallon, my little motor scooter is a tool. 

I am attempting a tricky maneuver in the attempt to spray clean the carb without its or the tank’s removal. That failing, it will be full-on rebuild and maybe a week on the bench. In order to make that determination I must execute part one of the diagnostic testing, today.

That’s it. Two things. Of course we have a noon run scheduled and a spin tonight in the PB, and the design for the new 2019 Epic ride fund-raiser T-shirt and jerseys, but all of that is secondary to the two. 

I should get started.