Photo of Andy Arthur

Andy Arthur

Fifty years later I'm pondering the final words of the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance. 🏍 In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things. 🪷 Maybe I'm just sunburnt and it was just a dream as I reached the end of the audiobook I was listening to watching the Red Winged Black birds teary eyed. 🐦 👀

Back to the Monday routine on this cloudy morning ☁️

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Back to work today, hopefully with all the repairs and parts put into my bike it should be good for a while now. Probably not but usually mechanical problems all happen at once.

Good morning! Monday’s come back around again. Cloudy and 52 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁️ Calm wind. Not as cold today but also not a beautiful day. Probably tomorrow will be the best day of the week but that’s not saying much.

Johnny cakes with onion, spinach, brocoli and corn this morning. 🥞 Used some cumin as a spice this morning which gave it a real earthy flavor. Topped with some cottage cheese and drank way too much coffee ☕ as is common these days.

Bike should be ready to be back on the road today, 🚲 with a new tire and tube on the front and 8 oz of tire sealant between the two wheels. I bought two tires but installed only one as I found the front new tire to be a bitch to install without the bead fully formed into position due to being a new tire. I figured the rear tire – – which I rotated to the back two weeks ago has a fair amount of tread life on it, on and the rear wears faster at any rate but in many ways is less important for control while riding trail then the front one. 🚵 And the thing of it is realistically I don’t do that many miles riding trail, it’s mostly commuting and gravel like truck trails and dirt roads.

I actually ordered a speedometer / odometer 📦 – – just a real basic model to better track my milage on the bike. I was using a phone app but it’s a pain to have to reset it all the time and sometimes the GPS track is lost when I open the photo app. 💾 It would be good to have better milage tracking for maintence needs, like changing out the chain before it gets to be complete slop and wear out the gears or to rotate the tires. Plus I have a rough idea of how many miles I’m riding – – it’s 8 3/4 mile the most direct way to work but that ignores detours and other side trips, and I’m curious to get an exact milage count. Also would be interesting on road trips and the alike.

Today will have isolated showers between 9am and 1pm. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 72 degrees at 7am. Four degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical day around May 17th. Southeast wind 3 to 6 mph. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies in the morning, remaining cloudy in the afternoon. The high last year was 63 degrees. The record high of 89 was set in 1930. There was a dusting of snow in 1994.❄

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:53 pm with sun having an altitude of 64.1° from the due south horizon (-6.7° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 2.9 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 7:22 pm with the sun in the west-northwest (287°). 📸 The sunset is in the west-northwest (294°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 8:02 pm after setting for 3 minutes and 10 seconds with dusk around 8:32 pm, which is one minute and 6 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 The best time to look at the stars is after 9:12 pm. At sunset, look for clear skies 🌄 and temperatures around degrees. There will be a calm wind. Today will have 14 hours and 22 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 21 seconds over yesterday.

Last night was Sunday dinner with the family. 👪 It was kind of tough, we got into a big fight, Mom started to play the whole guilt trap on me over my addiction. I really should quit getting high all of the time, but it feels so good and it’s mostly harmless if people just let me do my thing up in the woods. 🔥 I get that living high isn’t the way to live, but it’s hard to quit and I don’t know if I really want to. I tried getting help, and maybe I was close a few years back, but the truth is I don’t really want to change. I just want to be left alone, not bullied by others, especially not my family. At the same time, I don’t not want to visit, as I know there is only going to be a few more visits before it’s forever over. Time goes by so quickly.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy 🌥, with a low of 47 degrees at 7am. Two degrees above normal, which is similar to a typical night around May 11th. Calm wind. In 2023, we had cloudy skies in the evening, which became partly cloudy by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 45 degrees. The record low of 29 occurred back in 1874.

Right now, a split verdict on the weekend. 😕 Saturday, partly sunny, with a high near 60. Sunday, a chance of showers. Partly sunny, with a high near 65. Chance of precipitation is 50%. Maximum dew point of at 7am. Typical average high for the weekend is 70 degrees.

Looking ahead, there are 7 weeks until Latest Sunset 🌆 when the sun will be setting at 8:38 pm with dusk at 9:12 pm. On that day in 2023, we had partly cloudy and temperatures between 86 and 61 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 82 degrees. We hit a record high of 96 back in 1943.

State Street

St Lawerence County Primative Campsites And Lean Tos

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St Lawerence County Primative Campsites And Lean Tos

This map shows the locations of campsites on the St. Lawerence Flat Lands and surrounding areas in the north-western Adirondacks. I believe this is a fairly complete map for state land up that way, please see individual state forests for details.

Can You Live Outside Society?

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Notes on the Re-Run for Friday, September 2nd.

I wrote this essay over seven years ago, when I was a sophomore in college, spending many an evening walking around and exploring Partridge Run and Thatcher Park. It was a different time, before the cowboy hat and pickup truck, but crystallizes both my beliefs and thoughts of the time, and many of the core beliefs I still have today on liberalism. Enjoy!

— Andy

While I doubt that it is possible to truly live outside of society in America today, I think it is an interesting subject to explore. To explore living outside of society is to gain a greater understanding of the self and to try to see what the rural life must truly be like. I do not think this essay fully answers that question, but I think it is a place to start with some thought. This essay is based in part of my thoughts gained by meeting a small-scale farmer in Schoharie County.

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about living outside of society is the neccessity of land and money to purchase that land. To own your own land, would give you a little piece of the world where you can excerise at least some soverignity over. And if it’s rural and large enough, and you cultivate that land the right way you can turn it into a life beyond society. It is possible through family connections or some kind of donation to gain land without money, but for most of us, we must work for land.

Cooking Dinner

That brings up interesting moral questions: how to make that money, before you quit society? Do you go an immoral, but legal route to gaining money quickly or do you give up a high-profit lifestyle for working a less profitable job, but doing the right thing before gaining that farm? I can not claim to answer that question for you, but it would seem if you are trying to escape an intolerable society it would seem that any means possible might be okay. Then again, you are simply making things worst if you take that attitude.

Second, what land do you purchase? Something that’s very far away from a city, or something near enough that even though you live outside society, you can still participate as you want. Do you get land that’s easily farmable, or do you find land that is more affordable or farther away from the evils of civilzation that you are trying to escape? I would think if your trying to an individual who wants to live outside of society, you would need to have good land that you can grow and produce most if not all of what you need, once you finally quit society. Still, so much of modern society is centered around modern technology, that it is nearly impossible to live completely outside of society as we know it today.

There are many conviences that we rely on in modern society. Corporate agriculture produces food for us cheaply and tastefully, our buildings contain many industrial materials like sheetrock and aluminum roofing, our lifestyle is surrounded by automobiles and power equipment. Few who repudiate society and choose a rural life are willing to give up their truck, their tractor, or their chainsaw. Are you willing to give them up to be more free and more outside of society as we know it today? Yet to live with such items means your dependent on outside sources and influences, such as the need to go beyond yourself to purchase fuel and parts for such machinary.

Colors

At one level, things might be changing to make the individual more indepedent of the oil economy, yet be able to participate in it’s benifits. In the far away future, the farm and it’s equipment will be able to be powered by solar and wind energy, burning hydrogen in their engines. Already, you can see farms that use solar powered electric fences, where a solar cell on a fence post collects electricity that is relased from a capicter when an animal touches the fence. Certainly, this technology requires an outside purchase, as you can’t grow silcon nor steel to make this fence, but instead are reliant on it’s existance.

Maybe the future is promising for a free rural life, but not without still many connections to society as we know it. Thoreau never really escaped the society of his era, and it seems even more impossible today. We rely on technology to such a high degree, that we have to accept it in running our household, our homestead, or farm—you actually end up living in society. At best we can choose to live a partially isolated life in rural America, but we are tied to all that makes urban society so evil. People in rural Montana still have to live under government, obey laws, act a certain way. The moral of the story is you live inside society so you have to embrace it in one way or another. Be it living on a farm or in an apartment, your just as much part of a community, though the prior does afford a greater freedom of action.