The beans are starting to train up the twine. The tomatoes are confused, with the smallest bearing three tiny tomatoes and the bigger plants starting to flower. The peppers have gone on strike with this mild spring. Even the zucchini is content to leaf out – not a single flower even though the garden plot catty-corner from mine has majestic zucchini resplendent with glorious yellow blossoms.

But my weeds! It’s early, sure, but I’ve got a bumper crop going of frustratingly creeping vines, broad-leafed deep-rooted parasites, and if you pull one up three grow back in its place…

Weeding is, without question, the worst part of gardening.

A couple of weeks ago my plot was utterly overrun with unwanted foliage. I had to split the work up over a couple of afternoons to give my back and knees a chance. And you know what I had at the end of each day to show for my labor? Dirt.

Of course, when I came back to water a couple days later it really did seem like all the plants (the legitimate ones I planted) seemed to stand a little taller, glow a little more vibrantly green.

Not gonna lie: I cursed them all a little bit.

I mean, I know, you’ve got to do the things you don’t want to do but are “good for you.” But if you’re looking for the sermon detailing how we’re all better off for the hard work of “weeding” in our own life, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Sure, the plants were standing tall, but my back was still sore. And I joked that I’d finish weeding a row only to turn around to find the weeds had all grown back.  It’s funny… because you know it’s true.

Truth is, I was planning on weeding on Sunday – marathon session under the midday sun and just get the whole plot done. That sounded great in my head! Of course it didn’t come to pass. You know what I did instead? Not a damn thing. Sunday could be seen – through a certain lens – as one colossal waste of time. Nothing whatsoever was accomplished.

But it was a blissfully necessary lethargy. And, I recognized, the eye of the storm.

The last few weekends have been jam packed with obligations. Last week in particular I fixed a can organizer project, built that drawer I wrote about, tended to the garden, even picked up the kitchen. And things are getting crazier from here on out, too, with trying to cram bartending gigs while preparing for an upcoming epic motorcycle trip that’s only about three weeks away.

I needed Sunday to do nothing just so I could remember what doing nothing felt like.

The weekend wasn’t a total waste, though. Saturday morning I got in a great hike from Shell beach up to Red Hill and then put the front wheel back on the motorcycle and gave it a quick test ride. Having officially accomplished a couple things, however, I settled in to a nice session of doing nothing.

I frequently find myself caught between two worlds. I know (and envy) people who just can’t sit still. They have to be fixing something, building something, creating something. Constantly in motion. These are the people who were happily weeding on Sunday after they cleaned their house top to bottom and afterwards prepared all the meals for the week.

I’m tired just thinking about these people.

I do have some of those tendencies.

However, I’m also a card carrying member of Procrastinators United (our motto: we’ll get you a motto tomorrow). Case in point: weeding. The weeds didn’t grow that much between Sunday and today.

An example of this dual states of mind is that Akilah gives me crap because I notoriously never finish a TV series. Part of it is I just don’t want things to end (I still haven’t finished the last half of the final season of The Good Place because I don’t want it to be over) so I’m pushing off watching the ending. But another part of not finishing TV series is that something’s got to be really good for me to sit through it.

I filled the 5-gallon bucket with weeds tonight before the failing light forced me to postpone finishing weeding for another evening. The tomatoes are weed-free, as are the beans and zucchini. I’ll probably be back at it on Wednesday, clearing the weeds from the finicky peppers and trying to figure out where the beets stop and the weeds begin. So far, my back doesn’t seem the worse for wear. Part of that is genuinely the rest I gave it yesterday – I was a little over exuberant on the downhill portions of Saturday’s hike.

Sunday was a wonderful day of doing nothing… except, of course, for letting my body rest so I can get going on everything that’s to come. Time’s going to go into fast-forward in just a second here. I’m glad I had a day to let everything slow down and quiet my mind and body.

The weeds, obligingly, waited for me.

According to my self-imposed publishing schedule for Selfies, this was due last night. So I’m late. But I’m still getting it in, and that’s important – “Better Late Than Never” is a truism that should be tattooed on my forehead along with “Perfect is the enemy of progress.”

I’ve been resuscitating a bathroom vanity and time got away from me. It started a few weeks ago with shoring up a drawer whose face pulled off and then this weekend I built a new big bottom drawer to replace the one that was disintegrating. While the drawer build went really well in and of itself, it uncovered other faults, which necessitated other fixes… Last night as the clock ticked past ten, Akilah finally said, “You need to throw in the towel for the night.”

“But…. But… but… it’s not finished yet!”

But I was done. I twisted my back wrong a few hours before, and contorting myself on the ground trying to install new drawer sliders into an installed vanity wasn’t doing my posture any favors… Yeah, good advice, Akilah… But I was late finishing a project that was supposed to be done on Saturday. It’s about 85% there. And it saves replacing the vanity for a few more years.

I’ve come to woodworking late. Regrettably, I didn’t take a wood shop class in school, but I always wanted to. My family isn’t exactly do-it-yourself oriented. Don’t get me wrong, some of my brothers and sisters (and their significant others) have taken up the mantle and have made impressive accomplishments. But my tool inheritance from my dad was a corded drill that looked like he inherited it and a pair of rusty vice grips. I remember him aghast that my brother Jay was going to change his own oil on his own car. The nerve!

But I always wanted to get into wood working – mostly out of a sense that, sure, that product is nice, but… I’d prefer it to be just a little different. My coffee table I bought from a big box store years ago – I love it. It’s got a top that lifts up and works great as either a laptop workspace or a makeshift dinner table… but what if it had wheels? So, I had to re-engineer the legs but in the process, I not only gave it wheels but allowed for more storage.

Understand, I’m not a great woodworker. I count myself as competent. I don’t say that to demean myself, just recognizing my limitations – I’m terrible at finishing projects (as in applying a finish), I’ve never made something out of “good” wood (too expensive!), and I’ve gotten bitten when I’ve only measured once instead of twice before cutting. But it’s a process. I’m getting better.

And I find I look at the world around me differently. “What kind of joinery is this?” “How did they accomplish that cut?” “How would I do this differently?” I think that’s a benefit of coming to something later in life – you approach things with a little more patience, a little more consideration, a little more carefully.

I try to go out of my way to learn new things as often as possible, and wood working falls into that category. Sometimes it’s a new piece of software – recently I’ve been trying to pick up Adobe Premiere. And sometimes I’ll learn something… and then promptly forget it – like how to use my ham radio. I’m the type of person who needs to use something regularly to really get it. In the little river valley that Guerneville sits in, the reach of my handheld ham radio is pretty limited. Without regular practice, my skills go dormant. But, on the plus side, I’m fairly confident I could re-learn pretty quickly.

There’s only so many skills my brain can hold onto at a given time. Thinking about that vanity, was it worth it to spend so much time on it? I mean, the drawer I built is overkill for the vanity… but I don’t get to practice my drawer building techniques too often (if you’re wondering, I used the ¼ ¼ ¼ method, though scaled up to 3/8, 3/8, 3/8; that’s me setting up the dado stack on my table saw in preperation). And once I discovered other issues that had to be corrected, my brain went into creative problem-solving mode – given that the vanity is installed in a bathroom and can’t be removed, how do you shore up the carcass and replace the rotten parts without undoing any plumbing? There were pocket holes. There was routing. I had to get pretty creative to get everything to fit and be stronger than when I got to it.

So, it’s anyone’s guess about whether the cost of materials and my time was quantifiably worth it in the end to shore up an aged vanity. But that’s really besides the point. I built a drawer I’m proud of, conquered my fear of installing drawer slides (well, maybe just subjugated it for some time), and improvised a solution that’s leaving the vanity much stronger than I came to it.

Or, well, it will be. I still have to put the face on that drawer, and clean things up. It’s not done yet. But it will be tomorrow! Better late than never!

With apologies to Robert Pirsig, I don’t know that I ever found anything approaching Zen when performing motorcycle maintenance. I do, however, routinely discover new and creative swear words and create impressive scars.

Or at least I did.

In my Story of Jasmine, my old Honda CB360, I mentioned some egregious wrenching faux pas and that I grew into a decent mechanic. What I didn’t mention – who I didn’t mention – was my friend Kirk. I don’t know this, but I suspect Kirk saw from the beginning that Shawn’s truck never did run quite right. He likely knew Perot (my CB200) was absolutely never going to run again. Because Kirk could fix anything he touched.

I don’t remember who got theirs first, but he also had an ancient CB360 and where I was able to keep Jasmine running reasonably reliably, Kirk kept the same model bike with all its questionable engineering choices running with the efficiency of a Swiss watch. Which was good, because I’ve never seen anyone push an antique right to the edge of its performance envelope. But if something broke – and, despite his meticulous maintenance, it would – there wasn’t a question of whether it would be fixed. The only question was how much better the repair would be than when the bike came out of the factory.

I tried to glean everything I could from Kirk in terms of wrenching, but he had the touch. Maybe for him it was Zen – I’ll have to ask him. I saw skinned knuckles, fascinating conjunctions of four-letter words, and dollar signs. But I did learn…

There’s a gap of about fourteen years between those old riding days of Perot, Jasmine, and, later, Pumba (1985 Honda V-65 Sabre). If you know me, then you already know what brought about that gap – a little argument between Pumba and the hood of a gray Volvo that turned left in front of me. Spoiler: Pumba and I lost. Between not being able to walk on my own for eight months and finances, I wasn’t able to get a bike again.

But, man, did I want one. I still read all the magazines (most of which have gone out of business), then blogs. I could tell you merits of various cylinder configurations, the bells and whistles offered by one manufacturer versus the other. For a while I thought my next bike would be a Honda Valkyrie… and then that went out of production. Maybe one of the shiny Moto Guzzis with their V-twin cylinders peeking out the sides…

In the back of my mind, though, my dream motorcycle never really faltered. Since I first saw one at a show in the 90’s I was deeply in love with BMW’s big opposed twin “boxer” GS bikes. When the stars aligned (or so I thought) and I was able to buy my dream bike – a 2014 BMW R1200GS Adventure (Amelia) – I deliberately bought it new because I knew it had so many electronics and I didn’t have a garage to work on it – not that I’d know how to do anything anyway, right?! I’ll let the warranty (and extended warranty) deal with that!

A few months ago, I was at a Costco gas station at 9 at night when I went to start the bike, I realized my mistake. The starter clicked rapidly, the tell-take sign my battery was dead, and a cold dread washed over me. Sure, I was stuck – I had to do the crabwalk of shame to get the bike out the way of the next car in line. That didn’t bother me – everyone’s had that situation whether on a bike or a car. No, as I was waiting for Akilah to come with a jump starter, the panic I felt was due to the fact that I didn’t know how to get to the battery.

Yeah, I’d managed to ride Amelia – Amey for short – to Death Valley twice, over the highest pass in the Sierras, up to the uppermost islands of Washington state and I didn’t know where the goddamn battery was.

Akilah showed up (of course), and I got Amey home, all the while admonishing myself for having to use YouTube on my phone in a Costco parking lot to figure out how to jump start her. I wondered where that guy was that was able to perform the fairly herculean task of adjusting the valves on that ridiculously awkwardly canted V-4 in Pumba…

Okay, I wasn’t that hard on myself. This is one of the ways in which I’ve grown in the last few years – beating myself up over mistakes (real or imagined) doesn’t get me anywhere. That sounds obvious, and I’m sure some of you are rolling your eyes and audibly saying “duh,” but I cannot express how hard fought that lesson has been for me. I suffer from crippling self-doubt. It’s taken me a long time to push past through that terrifying fear of failure and just try. I fight it every day, every hour, right now – “Does anyone really want to read this…?” (answer: “Who cares? Worst case you’ve got it down, and that’s creating something”).

I went back to YouTube in the light of day. I changed the battery myself. That picture up there? That’s me changing my rear brake pads myself. I’ve got some other things to do in the coming weeks leading up to an exciting trip I’m taking in June (that’s another story), but I’m feeling really confident I can do them. In fact, as I was reading the manual, I said out loud, “Oh, I’ve done that before!” See, despite her German lineage, despite electrically adjustable suspension, Traction control, ABS, despite a goddamn CANBUS… it’s still a motorcycle. I can work on motorcycles (thank you, Kirk).

Maybe I shouldn’t apologize to Mr. Pirsig too much, after all. My high school drama teacher gave me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance after the first time I rode Jasmine to play practice (yes, I know how cliche that sounds, but it really did happen!). I appreciate the book, and it’s one I like to revisit every once in a while and I still wrestle with the philosophy. In the end, though I think I wanted more motorcycle than existential exercise – more of William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways on two wheels. Or even Kerouac, On the Road… My problem, I know, is I’m too much Pirsig’s romantic and not enough the rationalist.

Can a leopard change its spots? Can a romantic even out his rationalist? Can I push through my staggering fears? I’ll tell you this, it starts with changing my own battery…