#79
MADE IN AMERICA
J/J 18 $13.95 CDN $12.95 US
07
01
74470 91306
MY
FAVO RITE THINGS
M.J. O’Connell
I haven’t moved at all. That’s an important detail here. Sometimes that’s where it’s at:
M.J. O’Connell - Granville, Vermont Instagram: @madrivermoco Photos : Ace
That sort of half-sleeping-still where past adventure vibrates in the present silence. Fourteen minutes of E minor memories in shades of Night Trane — My Favorite Things. No graduate boppers in the arpeggiated calculus of Bird for these Kats. This is for rock’n rollers — the straight dice. Fucking Totems of a Good Time: Books, Music, Writing, Riding, and Revelry. The Things I Take With Me. The Things I Leave Behind. But back to the not moving. Hard to jam a beat when you can’t tap your toes. My books aren’t some pretentious cut-out of the classics. I’m not rotely looking for my place in the stars, cleverly arranging the ideas of others in ways that are easy to understand. Books are movies someone made for my mind. Sometimes it’s nothing more than birds, bullets, and bar backroom blood bathes. Occasionally its a roadmap for a life beyond gods. The hardest part of getting stuck is losing the chance to scream. Hibernation blues may keep an empty key signature but every summer here has a soundtrack. When I ride I sing. To the Road. To the World that surrounds it. I serenade that shit at two times the legal limit for the duration. I love it unabashedly. There are side benefits to the full face no one ever mentions. Maybe its time to sing. If I don’t write it down, it disappears. These books, my little black leather-bound cahier, form a record of what I couldn’t forget - calendars of ideas colliding one after another, page by page, season after season - cross-outs and clues in incomplete ideas about myself. Forty miles into a 140 mile day, gas station coffee by the curb, I can get a ride’s worth of ideas down - the things I’ve thought when there was only me to listen. Strattling a death trap will focus priorities quickly. Motorcycling is one of the few meditative processes that lets you muscle your way there. Between 1993-2000, Excelsior Henderson spent nearly $100 million to build nearly two thousand motorcycles. Motorcycles with a strange cartridge springer fork, and the wrong transmission bushing material. And like the Deloreans and Tuckers before them, they collapsed. But on a Vermont central valley highway, when the RPMs hit Twenty Seven Fifty, there comes this soulful silence to a Super X, and if you stay there, between 2750 and 3850, it feels like it could go on forever.