My Scooter Is A Pipe Bomb

Yesterday I went to see the County Treasurer about registering my 1987 Honda Spree scooter so I can lawfully ride it around town. (This being a legality unnecessary in the state of Georgia, due to the fact that an ‘87 Honda Spree is a most laughable and fairly powerless automobile, if it can even be called one.) This is the sole reason I got an Iowa driver’s license, by the way – so I cd make this process a little easier by being a “resident” of Iowa. And so:

It turns out that since I didn’t get a title when I bought the scooter from Random Joe in Georgia - for $500 - three years ago (from an older guy who bought it twentysomething years ago so he and his wife cd get out of their retirement Winnebago every now and then and tool around the state park campground, who told me when I asked, “Title? Naw, son. You don’t need one of those. Not in the great state of Georgia at least,” and I was like, “Awesome. The less paperwork, the better.”), I now cannot register it & get a tag UNLESS:

I fill out form 1090828AA-G in triplicate and submit it to the Des Moines office, along with a Bill of Sale (which I also lack), whereupon receipt and review of said materials, the state will get back to me with 6 to twelve weeks with either a request for more materials, or to set up an interview with an inspector, who will of course need to see the vehicle in question and rate it for safety and the minimum state requirements, as explicated on pages 3 thru 4 of form 918907097ZZ-A (attached).

If the inspector gives the Spree the thumbs up, I will then be given the opportunity to procure a bond with the state of Iowa (at the price of approx 1.5 times the blue book value of the Spree, which the State will hold in good faith for up to three interest-free years, at which time the bond will be liquidated and the money returned – which is sort of like a savings plan, except that I already have a savings account and it ran itself dry a long time ago. In other words, unless the blue book values my scooter at about the same price as a bag of Bugles and a snowcone, there’s no extra cash for a state-issued bond in my piggy bank.)

IF I rob a convenience store and buy the bond, though, I can then apply for a tag and register my “vehicle,” which, let me just say this again, amounts to little more than a tiny red wagon with a small gas engine attached on the side. THAT is what’s up in Iowa…and it’s wack.

My dad agrees that this is ridiculous and said, “Yeah, ever since nine-eleven, all the various the states and counties and provinces want to be able to track every little thing that changes hands,” which makes sense. But, then, that’s also why red tape is red tape. When a mazelike, money-guzzling bureaucracy transforms simple tasks into something epically difficult and arduous, you know you’re at the peak of civilization. And that’s exactly why my Honda Spree is now in the basement of this apartment building, collecting dust, sandwiched between a washing machine and two ancient ten–speed bikes, forgotten, not unlike the Ark of the Covenant in that last scene in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Yes, I said it. My scooter is the Ark of the Covenant. But you know what I’m saying: The Taliban would have to be pretty damn hard up for equipment if they were using old Spree parts to make their next bomb.

Of course, I cd always drive the scooter without a tag, but that would make me an easy mark for Johnny Law. So basically I’m effed. To stick with the Raiders metaphor, my scooter is the Ark and I am that Nazi dude who gets his face melted off. Or something like that.

2 Sergios

Here in my own private Iowa City, spaghetti westerns and designer jeans go together like beans and cornbread. Rock on.

Jazz*Fest

I’m down with the quasi-new Steve Earle album…except for his rendition of “Down In The Hole.” (He really shouldn’t have tried to record that. I don’t care how good of friends he was with Townes Van Zandt.)

Anyway, in this photo I give you the Iowa City Jazz*Fest. Yesterday we dug the many groovy sounds of the Jazz*Fest and talked about how sad it was/is that Jerry Garcia died. This after making the acquaintance of a bunch of displaced hipster burnouts sitting in a circle, buzzing along on psilocybin (it would seem) in a sea of Midwestern folks n’ families, working out the archaic issues of Man In Community. “Man, your daughter is awesome!” the Queen Bee chirped, a Marloboro dangling from her lip. These crazee kids were kind enough to hold our spot/watch our stuff while we ducked out, ran errands, got lunch, etc., etc. And the Leader Of The Pack, a funny young shorthaired guy named Ben, kept wanting to shake my hand in some kind of psychotropic ascertainment of Original Okay-ness. I told him, “It’s cool, Ben. Everything’s cool.” He agreed, then offered me a whiskey shot out of a Dasani bottle. “Nah, I’m cool, baby. But thanks.”

Today Lesley watched EB for 3 whole hours while we (me & The Missus) cavorted around on Bicicletas de Amor, hiked in the Midwestern wood, and ate mulberries fresh from the tree while bullfrogs darted from ‘neath me feets. “I hope Ben made it out of that trip alive,” I thought more than once today, then laughed and tossed rocks up to heaven while Eleanor laughed at Beguiling-Crazy-Wicked-Fine Ol’ Mama Earth.

Radiator

Our radiator. (photo by L. Rios)

It's 9 a.m. One of the across-the-hall neighbors is awake and heading downstairs with his indolent Rottweiler. I can hear the sound of the dog tags, the leash, the sleepy primary caregiver in flip-flops, and the big canine body tromping down the stairwell. It sounds to me like a gigantic squid wearing Mardi Gras beads is doing the hully gully outside my door.

My Doc Holliday story’s gone meta. It had to happen, I guess. If you treat a story like a quest for fire, and you run with the postmodernists, sooner or later your story will go meta on you. Oh well. Worse things have happened.

Last night I was able to see half of Modeski, Martin & Wood’s set at the Iowa City Jazz*Fest. Afterwards, there were fireworks. At one point two guys and a gal, jaded late twentysomethings, came and stood behind me. The guys were each hell-bent on impressing the gal with witty quips about the fireworks, which I would think of as sort of impossible (how many quips can a person come up with about fireworks?). But whatever. What was weird was that one of the guys stole all his material word-for-painful-word from David Cross comedy albums. I guess his posse had never heard of David Cross, because they ate it up like piping hot cheese grits.

It was sort of painful, hearing this “I’m an angry liberal” guy re-tread a comedy album that came out seven years ago in some weird courtship ritual on the lawn behind the old capital building, while pyrotechnics exploded like electric spiders spinning lightning-webs across the sky. He fake-riffed on pretty much everything he could tie into the present moment (fireworks, American flags, Lee Greenwood, patriotism, Fallujah, et-effing-cetera). “Man, I hope this cat gets laid tonight. He obviously needs to,” I kept thinking.

I once met a humanistic genius who said that all we really tend to do, as humans in relationship to other humans, is re-tread the same stories over and over. When you’ve known someone long enough, though, you have to start coming up with new material, because they’ve heard all your jokes and stories and lies and fantasies. At that time, he said, you might start to feel a little devastated/terrified and wonder who you are besides a collection of repeated past memories and association. “Don’t worry. You’re a lot more than that. And if you know that, you don’t have to do the painful, shit-shoveling work of maintaining some fake personality.”

I can see the Rottweiler from our living room window now. She’s peeing where Stella peed fourteen and a half minutes ago. She looks lean and evil, like a fiberglass gargoyle on top of a Bavarian-themed Best Western motel at the far-edge of town. She cd probably take your arm right off without the slightest provocation…and now she sniffs clover…and a dandelion explodes on her snout.

Fried Okra

Eleanor versus the scrambled eggs.

Today the wife and I made it to the DMV (Demonstrative Moving Vortex, Designer Milkcow Vicissitude, Deadly Miss Venereal, Dumbed-down Mosaic Vault, Dishwasher Machine Vent, Dastardly MILF Vehicle, Donut Mouth Viagra, Dewdrop Muffin Vamp, etc. etc. etc. in my brain as we stood in line waiting for our number to be called, with Eleanor writhing around like a minion on ice), where a public servant processed our vital records with efficient gusto and I (happily) learned that my driver's license wasn't suspended when I let my car insurance lapse (again). So anyway, the upshot is that now I'm all Iowa, baby. Word.

The public servant who welcomed us to Iowa was a transplant from Mississippi who clearly missed the South. In some ways, at least. "These folks up here be talkin' about it's hot, but they don't know hot, do they?"

"No, ma'am, they sure don't."

"Just like we don't know what's cold. But this Winter, you'll learn!"

She said she made one Hell of a gumbo with okra and that, if I ever tasted her gumbo, I'd discover that I like it. And I said, "Well...maybe. Only way I like to eat okra is fried."

Nine Steps

Fire Escape & Delectable Salad.

Step One: Construct salad, using only the finest obtainable spinach leaves, lettuce leaves, avocadoes, strawberries, hydroponic tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, pine nuts, and Havarti.

Step Two: Let chill.

Step Three: Emerge onto fire escape with one or more of the following:

(a) hand-rolled cigarettes

(b) book of translations

(c) Hagakure (samurai’s guide to life)

(d) empty mind, free of frustrations

(e) feelings of futuristic nostalgia, wherein the present moment is perceived through a metanoiac cognitive/emotional lens of the imagined future self, thus imbuing the present moment with a feeling of fleeting, dreamlike specialness. (These are the good ol’ days. Them fire escape and salad days. Remember way back when?)

Step Four: Watch sunset disappear into smoky blue skies, exploding into liquid fire that disperses itself into erupting cumulus clouds on horizon.

Step Five: Return to apartment, procuring salad.

Step Six: Consume with family and/or friends

Step Seven: Listen to Charles Mingus live at UCLA.

Step Eight: Aimless bike ride!

Step Nine: Fall asleep putting Eleanor to bed.

DMV

Yesterday we attempted to go to the DMV and get Iowa state licenses. Instead we ended up driving along a rural-industrial highway, racing alongside a screaming freight train, only to end up at a state park halfway between Iowa City and the Amana colonies. The park was actually a nature conservation park, so there was a whole lot of prairie going on. Nice stands of pine and hardwoods as well.

At the crest of a hill, we parked and just looked up and out at the endless blue sky, which is bluer here than it is in Georgia. (I don’t know why. Someone tells me it’s because of positive ions, whatever those are.) But it’s a blue comprised of countless of blues that gently shade into one another in these sweeping, soft transitions you can only detect if you cast your gaze slightly downward and peer at the sky peripherally. Then your rods and cones will jangle together in the perfect rhythm that lets you see teals and aquamarines, jades and indigos, dirty blues and pristine blues. And you’ll sigh. And the corn will hear you.

Yesterday it occurred to me how cool it would be to be Amish, to be surrounded by untouched wilderness all day, far from cell phones and – even more sublimely – people on their cell phones. Just you and the windmills, baby. And at night, you could hear the crops sleeping in the moonlight. And you wouldn’t wonder stuff like “I wonder if the crops can dream,” because you’d know they do, deep in your bones. And sleep would overtake you like a beneficent Samurai.