Revenance: The Rip Van Winkle Effect. Like returning from the dead or a long, long sleep. The body’s youth has deteriorated and the world is a bewildering place.
“What’s your favorite book?
“It’s between ‘The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain’ and ‘Acid Dreams The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond’”
"This is the first Harley I built. I got the bike in ‘83. The picture was taken in ‘88. Over a 10 year span, I studied every idiosyncrasy of how a Shovelhead works, making it ergonomically and mechanically sound. She was stolen in 1993. It was a devastating hit. Taking the bike was like tearing up my resume. Everyone called her beautiful, never ‘pretty’. People would see her and say ‘I want something like that’ and it got me all kinds of work. Not only that, but I had a lot of experiences with her, a lot of close calls… and that’s when I began to believe in her being a Talisman and having a soul. She was a protective bike. Like being watched over like a guardian angel. It took decades to recover from a broken heart and the psychological impact and to get to a place where I could build motorcycles again. The bike on the lift is a project of recreating her. Recreating her is therapy… rebuilding the past is a tough therapy too. To condense 10 years of work into this puts it into perspective."
"So this bike… there’s not a nut, bolt, washer, or part on it that I haven’t touched… three or four times actually… that’s the case with most of these bikes. As we talk about this something comes to mind… I firmly believe that doing this puts an energy into the machine and it eventually develops a soul and becomes a protective talisman which kind of goes against everything in today’s capitalist society. It’s like everything is throw-away these days, even people."
"Tear in the Wind: I never understood why people get tattoos in prison. A tattoo would be a constant reminder of the dark place. My one and only tattoo I got before prison. There’s two meanings, one is what it is, and the second is what it represents. Mostly, I didn’t care to explain to people what it meant and some people knew exactly what it is. For those who didn’t and those that I didn’t care to explain it to, I would simply call it a Rorschach. Something fortuitous came from this. When they told me their interpretation it gave me an insight into the characteristics of their own personality. And having discovered that I felt no obligation to explain further."
"Vegvísir: I'm thinking about getting a second tattoo. It’s a Norse symbol called The Vegvísir. It’s my ancestral traveler’s Compass that invokes powers to help them find their way safely back home. If this sign is carried, the hero will never lose his way through storms, even when the way is not known. It’s a magical device, like Wizardry… like another Talisman. The artistry has to be perfect and done with integrity. If it’s messed up it disrespects the meaning of the symbol and brings about the opposite energy of what it’s meant to. That's the importance of getting it tattooed, as the meaning of each rune in the compass is then imprinted on your body and your mind. Too many people have internalized philosophies that they haven’t fully researched the history of. It’s an insult to your own being to just take something at face value. The herd mentality of accepting something without even looking into it is lazy minded and is as if they had no moral compass before having internalized someone else’s dogmatic ideas."
"I do yoga for two reasons: to be able to swing my leg over the dirt bike and to keep the rigor mortis from setting in."
"Of everything we’ve talked about, the quotes we picked out… I’ve enjoyed the serendipity of discovering and documenting beliefs that came from my heart”
People with felonies are just that… people.