Dopecentury XVII --- Halibut
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
“Did I ever tell you about the time we were out riding our bikes, and ol’ Sparky realized his frame was cracking underneath him?”
“No Pop. When was that?”
“Back in the 70s. Late in the year, like maybe October or November. Pretty cold for riding, so we were doing doughnut hopping — riding half an hour or so from one doughnut shop to the next where we’d warm up.”
“I get so fuckin’ cold on my bike. Sometimes even when it’s 60 degrees out.”
“Damn right. And it was colder back in the 70s! So we’re flying along some curvy back road. Up through the western mountains. We’re moving pretty fast, whipping around cars and trucks that have to slow down a lot for the curves. And Sparky starts falling away behind, and then he’s gone — stopped back behind us somewhere. A few of us notice, and manage to signal up toward the front and the whole gang of us whip around and head back to find Sparky. We find him a few miles back, kneeling next to his bike which is on its sidestand. But the bike looks strange, it’s slung low like a hammock across the wheels, the engins almost touching the ground.”
“Didn’t all those old 70s choppers look like that?”
“Not like this. I mean, the engine is an inch off the ground. We all got off and stand around Sparky, and he explains: ‘Damn frame tube split right out at the bottom. I was riding along and suddenly the whole bike is bouncing up and down, scraping on the road and throwing sparks out beind.’”
“The frame just split like that?”
“Damndest thing I ever saw.”
“You guys were always doing crazy home-garage modifcations to those old bikes. I asssume the frame failed where he had previously tried to weld it or something?”
“Maybe, maybe. I don’t remember really. What I remember was us standing around trying to figure out what we’re going to do with Sparky’s bike. We didn’t want to leave him behind. But it was also early in the afternoon, we were looking forward to a lot more riding and doughnuts. And then Halibut, he’s like: ‘We’re only 20 minutes from my shop. I’ll just ride over there with Sparky and we’ll weld that fucker back together right now.’ ‘Alright,’ we say, ‘and then if you want we’ll meet you at the next doughnut shop Halibut.’ So we tell Halibut we’ll stay at the next doughnut shop for a couple-two hours, and if he can find us again, that’s great.”
“I’m always amazed that anyone was able to ever meet up with anyone before cell phones.”
“Well, mostly it worked just like this situation: we’ll see you at the next place, and if we miss you, we miss you. Life goes the fuck on. So we all get back on and start riding, and Halibut and Sparky fall behind pretty quick because Sparky is takin’ it really fuckin’ easy, as you might expect. Pretty soon they turn off and that’s the last we see of them.”
“But Halibut finds you at the doughtnut shop, I assume.”
“Sure fuckin’ enough. We’re at the doughnut shop, and you know it’s the 1970s so bunch of guys on chopped bikes show up, and everyone else leaves.”
“…Which you thought was fun.”
“Sure we did. Though you know it was all appearances. Most of those guys were sweethearts all around. ‘Cept a few total badass mutherfuckin’ assholes. You know, every hockey team has and enforcer, so with us too. Still, we showed up, we owned that doughnut shop while we were there. Other folk steadily made their way out. But we certainly bought up our fair share of coffee and doughnuts. Those shops had nothin’ to complain about. Anyway, just about two hours later, when we’re talking about which direction we’re gonna ride next, Halibut rips into the parking lot, and tearing along just behind at full speed on a fully repaired bike is Sparky.”
“So Halibut fixed a huge problem with the bike that quickly?”
“Well we all troop out to the parking lot, and stand around Sparky’s bike again, and Halibut gives us the tour: shows us where he welded the frame back together. And when someone reaches out, he says ‘don’t touch the welds, they’re still hot’.”
“And Sparky is riding the bike around with the weld’s still hot?”
“Ha! Fuckin’ A he was. Air coolin’ them welds. Sparky tells us how Halibut through the bike down on a pile of tires, clamped the frame back together, and just welded the shit out of the frame right there.”
“That’s hilarious.”
“You mean cool as fuck. See, this is the problem with your generation. You just buy shit, and if it breaks, you replace it. No one of you goes around fixin shit that breaks.”
“Pop, there’s still a lot of folks who make their living as welders. Lotsa hobbyist welders too.”
“Yeah, but when was the last one you saw welded a broken thing back together on the fly, just to get it workin’ again? Look at your bike, would you ever weld the frame back together if it broke?”
“Not me, but I might be able to find someone…”
“No you wouldn’t. You’d sell what was left of your bike and buy a new one.”
“People in the 1970s mighta done that pretty regular too.”
“Mighta. But mostly a bike was far too valuable to just scrap. We didn’t have the extra money for that kind of thing. We had to fix what we had. Nowadays, you want to fix a vehicle, you gotta ask the fuckin’ computer what’s wrong with it first.”
“Sure, but I just did that for my car. Checked the computer terminal I needed outta the library, in fact. Hooked it up, and figured out I needed a new fuel injector. Maybe that’s not how you fixed shit back in the day, but it’s still fixin’ shit by hand.”
“But you don’t understand how the machine works.”
“Sure I do. I’m a decent mechanic.”
“I’m not measuring by how you can get your car back on the road. I’m measuring by your ability to, you know, fuckin’ intuit what’s wrong with a machine, and then figure out how to fix it. Not unlike your fuel injector, there was a time my bike was starting rough. I ended up taking the carb apart, and figuring out that one damn o-ring had gotten eaten up and disappeared. Too much air getting into the mixture as a result. Similar problem to your fuel injector, but I figured it out myself, just from feel and understandin’ about how my machine works.”
“Can’t really see the difference myself, Pop. And vehicles are much more reliable these days. Remember back in the 70s when cars would be over-heating all the time, and a car with seventy-thousand miles on it was a high-mileage car? It’s not like all the old machines we so great.”
“Not that they were great, but that a normal person could understand how they work. That’s my point there.”
“Did they though? Normal people, I mean. Sure, there were the mechanically inclined, like you and your bike buddies, but seems to me like most people had no clue how their machines worked back then. They just took their cars to the mechanic then like they do now. And their cars were wildly less reliable then.”
“OK, Maybe not normal people. But the mechanics were different then. No computers to fight with. The machines weren’t controlled by microchips and made with microscopic parts. You could hold the bits of a machine in your greasy hand. Take them apart, and see what’s wrong with ‘em with your own eyes. Now you don’t fix anything, you just replace it.”
“Is it really any different replacing a computer-controlled fuel injector or a mechanical carb?”
“Sure there’ fuckin is. You don’t know how the fuel injector works…”
“Sure I do.”
“No, I mean, you can’t get into the computer and really break down that fuel injector. You’re left at a point far above where the machine works. To get into where the fuel injector actually does its job is a realm that is now left to only fuckin’ engineers. The mechanical carb on my bike, on the other hand, I could take apart down to the tiniest o-ring, like I told ya. I could actually see how it worked. And seeing was understanding. Less magical fuckin’ complexity that us peons are allowed to get involved in anymore. Just leave that shit for the engineers, is what they are fuckin’ implyin’ to us these days.”
“You’re right that I’m not going to go in there and replace a microchip or reprogram the code running the fuel injector. At the same time, I’d say the fuel injector is actually much less complex than your old mechanical carb. There’s many fewer moving parts, less to go wrong. I think that’s fundamental to why cars are more reliable these days.”
“I’ll give you that the engines are more reliable… but the rest of the car falls apart around you with all the stupid electronic features. And I think even the reliability has nothing to do with electronfication, and more to with engineers just getting a lot better at predicting wear patterns on engines, and designing around them.”
“…Which is only something they can do because of computers.”
“Maybe so. And I’m not arguing there’s not a practical place for computers, for advanced engineering complexity in the stuff of our lives. I just want the engineers to keep it in their offices.”
“It’s not like the old machines of the 70s weren’t designed by engineers too.”
“That’s fuckin’ right. I’m just asking the engineers to keep the complexity in their office, in their modeling computers. I want the machines in my life to be reliable, but also to be simple. I want to be able to fix them when they break. And fix ‘em with my own tools. I don’t want to have to get some customized computer terminal from the fuckin’ library any time I need to figure out what’s going the fuck wrong with my car.”