Rants and Musings – Motorcycles, Health and Acting

There are so many things rambling around in my head. It’s hard to concentrate, and I only slept a few hours last night. I tried but woke up at 3:30 am. So, it’s time for my therapeutic writing, my stream of consciousness.

Yesterday I was preparing my motorcycle for a long ride today. It is a three-hour roundtrip to Mountainair. The 1923 hotel is unique, and the food is good. There is great scenery along the way. At one time in the early 1920s, before Hitler rose to power in Germany, a swastika was almost a universal symbol of life, the swirling arms indicative of the cyclical nature of life, and well-documented as having been used in Native American and Asian cultures. Native Americans in the U.S. Southwest say that it was not a major symbol. One Albuquerque high school used the symbol for their yearbook. The Kimo Theater in Albuquerque was built in the 1920s using swastikas as decoration, and they still adorn the inside walls. The nearby old Federal building has a similar motif. Of note, the Shaffer Hotel in Mountainair still incorporates the swastika. It was used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality. The last time I was there, this is the view of the front of the building:

People stare but it stares back

Hitler, who believed in numerology and astrology among other things, chose the symbol to give his new Reich some gravitas grounded in ancient history. It was not a good luck charm for him.

Here are some more photos of the inside of the Shaffer Hotel:

I have been to the area more recently than the photos I took then since the area also has the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, where you can visit the ruins of Spanish colonial rule: the Abó mission, Gran Quivira Pueblo, and the Quarai mission. I’ve taken too many photos of those over several trips to post them all now. The way the Natives were treated then, and later by the United States, is eerily prescient to the way Hitler’s “Third Reich” treated Jews, gypsies, and non-conformists, and in a way, the immoral, villainous treatment of American Indians makes the twisted use of their own symbol not seem oddly placed here.

So, back to the narrative flow. The reason I didn’t go on the ride is that I fucked up my Honda Shadow Phantom motorcycle. As of now, it is unrideable. I did not crash it. I bought it in 2020 after my 1997 Honda Magna was stolen, after 19 years of riding that wonderfully fast, smooth machine. I was only able to recoup $2,500 from the insurance company, for the bike and accessories. I put it down on the Phantom.

The 2014 Phantom.

I was seriously pissed off. I did it through stupidity. All I was doing was checking fluids, making sure it was good to go for the three-hour trip to Mountainair and back. Somehow, the little old ladies around here all made it point to bring their little dogs by as they walked them around this compound I live in. I had just topped off the oil when one of them interrupted me. I had been planning to turn the bike on for a bit to warm and circulate the oil so I could double-check the level. After speaking to them and keeping an eye on the anxious little dog trying to get at me, I forgot that I hadn’t tightened the oil dipstick. I had left it just sitting in the hole. As soon as the old biddy, and her little dog too, were gone, I fired the bike up. Holy mindfucking crap! The racket was incredible. The engine had vibrated the dipstick, which tipped to one side, and before I could reach the off switch, it bent the dipstick at a 90° angle and spit it out.

I still can’t believe I was so stupid. I looked at the dipstick and realized a small piece was missing. I used an extension magnet to fish around in the oil reservoir but only found a small piece. A thin length perhaps 3/8 inch to 1/2 inch was somewhere inside. Reasoning that perhaps it was chewed up into smaller pieces I stopped trying to find it. I tried straightening the dipstick rod and replacing it. I got it very straight, so I could barely feel where it had been bent. I had to see if the bike would run OK. It didn’t. The noise was still there. I cut the rod off just below the screwcap, replaced it, and tried again. Same thing – a god-awful racket. Things are bent and ruined in there. It is going to be damned expensive to have it taken apart to replace the damaged parts. I’m a moron. I just can’t believe I did that after riding for the last forty years or so. I took care of my bikes, worked on them myself when I could, and got expert help when I couldn’t. Perhaps my riding days are over. I only had that bike for a year and a half. It’s a 2014, but I bought it in September of 2020, with only 2,662 miles on it. I’d only gotten the odometer up to 5,550 miles since I last rode it. I am devastated again. The loss of the old bike was bad enough, especially after some pricey work I’d just had done, and the fact that it rode so smoothly and quietly, I was just getting used to this one. Crap. Fuck. Piss and moan.

To top it all off, my blood pressure recently shot up to a dangerous level, and my cholesterol, despite regular use of a statin drug, healthy eating, and regular exercise, is also higher than it was before I had a heart attack in 2013. I saw my doctor after a long wait and scheduled a stress echocardiogram to see what things look like in there, but on March 1st, they discovered that my blood pressure was dangerously high, and canceled the test, even while I was standing on the treadmill, ready to go. The next available test date was to be March 28, and I will still go, but the cardiologist’s office called me this morning to tell me she won’t be available (for the originally scheduled March 29 follow-up visit) until May 9. I had asked for this test because plaque in a major heart artery had caused the artery to close off before, and I wanted to know how bad it was now. But I won’t know my status and what to do about it until May 9? In the meantime, I’m on a blood-pressure-lowering drug, and I have to take my blood pressure twice a day.

I’m no longer sure I’ll live to May. If the test itself was too dangerous for me, what about hiking in the mountains? Working out? How much can I do? I guess I’d better update my will, although the motorcycle repair or replacement may take what’s left of my savings. I sound like a “Debbie Downer”, but this is all depressing.

Well, one good thing, I should have an acting agent soon. An agent looked over my resume, learning, and experience, and is ready to have me audition for her. My acting coach recommended me, and she trusts him, representing several of his students already. I was really pumped about that, but a little less now. Well, all I can do is keep trying, keep auditioning, keep learning. It would be nice to have a good, dramatic role in a feature film before I die. I’ve been working on that for eight years. I feel I’m close. I have good acting chops, my memorization is good, and I will have an agent helping me find auditions for a feature film before the productions arrive. There are a lot of movies being shot here all the time, all over the state, but they usually already have their principal actors before they get here. I want to be one of those, even in a small role. It’s pretty much all I live for.

As a thank-you for reading this far, here are a few pictures from the Pueblo Missions National Monument: