This is a stolen picture . I found it on a blog called ATR .

I don't know them but they took this picture of this nice motorcycle built by this feller named Grant .

The reason I'm posting it here , is because Grant was nice enough to buy one of my fancy iron cross points covers and put it on his bike . Hence I have it here for your viewing pleasure . Thanks Grant for building a pretty neat chopper & ATR for being awesome and not even knowing it .

Boom-shaka-laka .

If you now me personally , this little story will be no big surprise but will maybe shed a little light onto the kind of person I am and why .

When my parents moved to Bonita from skyline in the late 60's , it was a case of " white flight " from a once beautiful young neighborhood in Spring Valley that was suffering the fancy new fangled plague called " urban gang activity and turf war " We had lived in Skyline for about 4 years and had just adopted my sister before it started to eat shit and become a life sized shooting gallery . My mom & dad decided it wasn't a going to be such a great place to raise their newly aquired young family .

We moved to a bigger house in a new neighborhood called Bonita . It wasn't too far from Spring Valley , but it was light years away from all the trouble and violence going on there . It was near a park and was new and clean and not engrossed in drug and gang troubles so it seemed like a good new start to a brand new life as a family man .

He was the first one to buy a lot and as soon as the word got out all of his newly retired Navy buddies all jumped the line and bought new houses on the same street . It was awesome . We had a family in every house on the block and new everyone in every direction . It was pretty much urban utopia .

One of the great parts about this new living situation was the constant roaming house parties . Being a bunch of retired salty dogs , these men liked to tear back on the cocktails and have a good time every once in a while . All the wives would lounge around on the patios with Mai Tais or Blue Hawaiians , smoking like smoke stacks while the dads would be huddled around a little a.m. radio listening to the ball game next to the pool drinking beers and getting sun burns and whooping it up like a bunch of drunk sailors .

To this end my dad decided to take it to the next level . We had a 4 bedroom house , and my dad knocked out one of the windows and made it into a sliding glass door , that led to a swimming pool . On the other side of that door he built the ultimate man cave ( at least that's what they call it now-a-days ) , complete with a sunken bar ( where the closet would have been ) a working sink ( plumbed into the bathroom sink on the other side of the back wall ) , hidden Hi-Fi speaker system and a keg cooler . All this sweat and work , to have a classy drink with his pals . . . who's that sound like .

I've tried to tell my friends who've never been to that house what the room looked like and how it hasn't changed in the better part of 35 years . I swear it has bottles of booze that have been there for that long .

Anyhow , here it is for the first time ever , photographic proof of the crazy story I always tell about my dad's bar-room . This is a large part of why I am the man I am today , because I spent a large portion of my youth hanging out in this room with the dudes , talking dude shit and making drinks for the old guys .

And this is the ceiling . . . black spray on popcorn texture , with sliver flake in it . Yes , my dad has a metalflake ceiling , in his bar , that he built by himself , in his house . I was fucked from the holeshot .

The venerable Banana Caliper

I know more about this little feller than I ever thought I would need to know . Big thanks to Davey for motivating me , once we hit the garage and started scoping it out , he realized that the dust seal on the new caliper would work on the old caliper so we took them apart and put them back together with each others parts and we started looking good .

Oscar busted the piston a little when he put it back together for me the first time so the original seal ripped when we got it assembled and back on the bike . I had to take it all apart again do a little filing & dremeling & massaging to get it to be compliant , but it sealed up nice and solid . Big thanks for him finding me that damn caliper in the first place . I couldn't use it in the end because it needed a " Y " bracket instead of the " boomerang " bracket . Who would have thunk it . It did however have the elusive dust seal that we needed so it turned out great .

Well all's well that ends well , except that once it was all back together and looking like I was out of the woods , I find this under the bike . . .

yippy . . . . brake fluid , leaking from the master cylinder ! The chase for junky old ass motorcycle parts continues ( or at least a rebuild kit ! )

**EDIT** it turns out that my #1 bro buddy Davey who filled up the master cylinder , tells me after the fact " Oh yeah bro , I was a little messy when I topped it off , that's probably just left over dripping off there . " Well as it turns out , it seems that's the case . No mess under the bike for the last few days and the reservoir is full . . . all is well in old Harley town for now !

***NEW EDIT*** , no it's leaking . never mind .

So sad......

I guess punk rock can be imported as a DNA thing

Like at a genetic level , deep in your molecular structure .

That or being a spaz is just what 4 year olds do when they hear anything fast and silly . I like the first one better even though I know the last one is more likely to be true .

Finding things . . .

Some of the most fun you can have for no money is just keeping your eyes open and seeing some cool shit that has been abandoned for whatever reason . I've been wanting a metal detector my whole life , but that's not what this is about , this time .

About 15 years ago I was at a party in the park down by my house . My neighborhood was pretty sketchy back then , you could hear drive-bys and screeching tires and buy almost any kind of weekend party substance right on the corner from some friendly entrepreneur . Seems like that was a long time ago . . . so I'm chilling & grilling at the park . We're all having a great time and I notice something pointing up out of the mud . It turns out that this crusty old knife is stuck in a mud puddle that had dried out and left the broken tip showing about an inch above the crust .

Being the scavenger that I am , I pick it out and clean it off and take it home . It was pretty messy , the tip was broken and bent and the leather handle was falling apart , so I just stuck it up on a shelf next to my stereo in the garage . Hidden back up perhaps for home invasion that never happened . Forgotten for the most part .

Anyhow , fast forward to a few weeks ago and I am thinking , " man I'd like a nice fixed blade knife for my collection , but they can be so expensive . . . " just like that . Eventually as I reach up to turn up the stereo I see my trusty crusty old shank and decide to save a few bucks & restore it into a usable tool .

After a few hours of wire wheeling , heating and rebending the tip and regrinding the point it's starting to look pretty good , but the handle is fucked . The leather rings that made up the grip are disintegrating and falling apart the more I mess with it . It only took about 10 minutes of Googling ® to find replacement parts for this type of knife and I'm off to the races . My buddy Fredo is an aspiring leather crafting master and he offers to help me rebuild the handle and with about an hour on a drum sander and a little burnishing and stain it turned out really nice . I blacked out the metal with gun blueing acid and put a nice new edge on there and it's turned out to be a pretty nice blade .

Turns out also that after I got all the muck & years of neglect off of it , it's a Camillus blade made in NY . They went out of business in the 80's but made blades for the military as well as cooking and plain old civilian type knifing . This one in particular is a Viet Nam era pilots survival knife . The original kit had a neat leather sheath with a sharpening stone in a pouch . That was no where to be found sadly . Fredo is however going to craft me a custom sheath that you can see in the picture . I made a cardstock cut out of what I want it to look like , and he said he could whip it out in no time . Back on the road with a whole new lease on life !

I wonder what kind of life this blade lived through it's long existence and in it's original owner's hands , and how it ultimately ended up in a mud puddle with a broken & bent tip , in the gutter 4 blocks from my house .