It’s helpful when your old bike breaks down at a buddy’s garage. Especially when your buddy happens to be an old bike fetishist, too. One who just happened to have an extra voltage regulator lying around for a 40-year-old motorcycle that was only offered for sale in the United States for one year (1983).
It is good to have friends like that.
It’s even better to have experiences like that – because it gets you to thinking that maybe there is something unseen going on. Either that or we are characters in a “sim” – as some seriously believe and who knows? Maybe they are right. All I know for sure is that my 1983 Honda made it exactly as far as my friend’s shop, some 25 miles distant, which we’d ridden to just to see him and hang out for awhile, where it obligingly stopped working. 
Well, stopped starting.
We discovered the problem as we were saddling up to head back home. Ignition on, push the button (no kicker on the ’83 Silverwing) and . . . nothing. Further investigation revealed we’d made it there on “fumes,” so to speak. Plenty of gas. Not much charge. The battery had given its last. I should have known – or suspected – before it did. The neutral light had been flickering and the bike’s performance seemed a little off. It was a good thing we’d decided not to ride out to Meadows of Dan, which is down the Blue Ridge Parkway from us – and very far from any parts for 40-year-old motorcycles. Had we done so, we’d still be in Meadows of Dan.
And I would not be typing this.
My buddy got his jump box and that got the engine running, but not right. The problem was more than just a croaked battery. Out came the multimeter and – lo! – something awry with the charging system, too. That something-wrong having croaked the battery. My buddy – who has several similar 40-year-old motorcycles – suspected the regulator, as the ones in his have failed, too. And – lo! – so had mine. 
Which we determined was the case by hooking up the spare regulator he happened to have on hand to my bike’s electrical system. That plus a new battery for my 40-year-old bike, which he also happened to have lying around and – Lo! – and behold! – the bike started and ran normally, the charging system registering a normal 12-14 volts being produced.
As we were piddling, I noticed some debris under the seat that looked soft and fluffy. Stuff like that is not supposed to be under the seat. Further probing revealed what had been living under the seat – and in the air cleaner housing. Which was full of its lunch. A mouse – not in the house. Inside my bike. No wonder the bike hadn’t been running exactly right! I shook out the pieces of chewed-up acorns and so on. My buddy used his air compressor to get the rest out of the air cleaner. He didn’t happen to have a new one of those lying around the shop.
But – by the grace of the Motor Gods – he did have exactly the right regulator we needed for my 40-year-old bike – if we were going to get home on my 40-year-old bike, rather than on foot. 
It would be interesting to calculate odds of that. Of all of that. Not just his happening to have the oddball part an oddball bike that was made during Ronald Reagan’s first term of office had to have in order to be operational. Also our just happening to decide to ride to his shop and not somewhere else.
The Swiss psychologist Jung wrote a lot about this kind of thing. That there is a collective unconscious we plug into somehow, without really knowing that we are. It inclines us to do this – or not do that – via some kind of intuition. Maybe my subconscious plugged into a general intuition that something wasn’t right with the bike and that it would be right to ride it to see my friend – and not anywhere else. And maybe, somehow, the bike intuited that it had just enough gumption left to make it there – and no farther.
I find it marvelous, regardless.
We made it exactly there. And there just happened to be exactly the place we needed to be. Can such things really happen by chance? Certainly, it is possible. Almost anything is possible. Including the surreal actuality that a fat tranny – someone who is morbidly obese and so physically unhealthy – as well as mentally unhealthy, being a tranny – is “serving” as a federal health czar.
But is it likely?
I mean, about the bike croaking out where it did.
I like to think it’s not just random chance, because it makes me think that – just maybe – there is something unseen afoot and – just maybe – it isn’t unfavorably disposed toward us.
Well, it’s either that or we are characters in a “sim”!
. . .
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Hey Eric,
Glad it all came together. I was in Meadows of Dan this past weekend! We stopped in at Jane’s Country Cafe and the Poor Farmer’s Market! Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to see about giving you a visit! It was non-stop go-go-go for us the entire time. If I can talk the wife into a longer visit out that way, I’d really like to bring over my friend that moved out there to meet you. I think you guys would be great network people. He and his wife are purebloods and trying to get more into livestock and growing food. Not sure when another visit is in the cards, probably be next Spring but you never know.
The Lord works in mysterious ways. He looks out for us even when we look for other explanations.
I kicked 30 years of a-theism in an instant, September 2, 2008 11:14AM
more government control and evil….
Why Politics is One Large Conspiracy to Screw Over the Little Guy
An intereseting take on the current situation in the G7 with the wef, build back better, great reset/2030 agenda
Big government….the bigger the government…. the more evil the politicians become
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-10-21/why-politics-one-large-conspiracy-screw-over-little-guy
A George Gammon quote….
Qualities required to be a good politician…
you have to be evil, have no ethics, morally bankrupt, a good liar, a better liar then your opponents, as government gets bigger, it attracts those with an insatiable lust for power.
Eric, did you see this one? Lucky Charms are better than chicken:
“Fake “president” Joe Biden has a new “Public Health Nutrition Advisor” named Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian that says sugary, food coloring-saturated breakfast cereal is healthier for children than chicken meat.
A “Food Compass” document released by Mozaffarian claims that watermelon and kale are the two single-most important foods a person can eat, followed by Frosted Mini Wheat, unsweetened almond “milk,” nonfat frozen yogurt, and chocolate-covered almonds.
The worst things a person can eat, according to Mozaffarian, include ground beef, cheddar cheese, and whole eggs fried in butter. (Related: Remember when the Obama regime tried to reclassify pizza as a “vegetable?”)”
https://www.aspartame.news/2022-09-20-white-house-lucky-charms-healthier-than-chicken.html
I didn’t realize I was being covertly photographed, you got me on that one, lol! You should have taken some pics while you were out on the GL1100.
The only time a Honda failed to get me home was when I clipped a telephone pole dodging an idiot that was sitting still in on a local highway with no brake lights or signal going. Every other occasion I have succeeded in limping home. Broken levers, chains (always carry a spare master link), clutch cables, rectifiers, batteries, flat tires, and blown pistons (always ride a twin+ cylinder), fuel starvation, oil leak, but always got home under its own power!
Was great having the company of the 2 of you, even if it was extended a bit unexpectedly.
Not as simple or handy as scouring eBay but a voltage regualtor is a very simple and common circuit. Easy to DIY on perfboard:
https://www.circuitstoday.com/voltage-regulator-circuit-list
As time rolls on and parts become more scarce bodge jobs will be more necessary. Cuban Packards powered by Soviet diesel engines comes to mind.
A few years ago the field mice who are usually harmless took a liking to the sound-deadening insulation under the hood of our Ford Focus. Chewed off one whole corner of it, so now we keep a couple of traps under that car. They’ve never bothered the other car.
So… where you find mice you often find predators of mice. Opened the hood one day and a blacksnake was lounging on top of the engine. When I tried to shoo it out of there it crawled back inside the body somewhere. Not sure how long it stayed there.
Mice are attracted to the “environmentally friendly” soy-based insulation used on much of today’s automotive wiring. The”bunny-huggers” strike again…
Cars from 1999 forward have soy based wire insulation, it is way cheaper so manufacturers use it…..cheap wiring….lol…..there has been lawsuits…it is also an insurance claim….buy older cars…..
[Note: My 1st try vanished. This is my 2nd and final try today.]
I just LUV the spooky-good forces that save people from inconveniences but won’t lift a magic pinky to save thousands of innocent children from fatal accidents every year, nor nip in the bud “our” government’s ongoing parade of murderous crimes, nor save my good parents from being killed by a tornado, nor nip in the bud the last contrived war, current contrived war, and next contrived war.
You would prefer we all never get hurt, injured, or die? You’d prefer divine intervention in national elections? It wouldn’t be much of an existence I think walking around like invincible blobs in some fairy land. When I ponder our world, I wonder where did all this stuff come from? Like originally. The stuff that makes the stars and planets. It was just always here? And Jesus Christ there’s tons of it. Supercllusters of galaxies with hundreds of thousands of them There’s infinitely more we don’t know than we know. Except for Greta Thunberg. She knows everything.
There is no such thing as a coincidence, everything happens for a reason. There is no such thing as karma or luck. I am a Christian and fully believe/know that nothing happens without God’s consent/directions/orders, etc.
There is way more evidence for believing in God than not.
Good to believe/know that God will consent/direct/order my next coin flip.
And God will consent/direct/order the next rape of a child in the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner-Rothschild network of human trafficking.
And … .
Eric, I know this is not a religious blog and don’t want to get into that. Some/most people have very little knowledge of theology—me included and speak about things they don’t understand. Thought this article was very timely. Again, it’s very short.
https://thecripplegate.com/miracle-or-providence/#more-226829
Thank you for that link/article, Elaine. I just finished reading it and – while I am not a professing Christian – I like the idea of providence (as distinct from miracles). I also think it likely there is far more to what is than we perceive to be. I feel humbled and awestruck by the fact that we are here at all. Thanks again for the article!
Miracles are important in the believing world, because they can be viewed as affirmation that god cares or that the claim of heaven in the next life, the “afterlife” is true. God knows we sure could use a miracle right now to stop this mad drive to nuclear war, or to stop trannies from being normalized, or even cannibalism, now a big trend in California, the Gov. Gruesome state.
Connecting the dots, it makes sense California just legalized human composting, and legal to sell it too, just in time for the new school year. Gee, I wonder who is behind such legislation? And just think they just mandated Covid shots for all school kids. Where else but hell is this kind of shit normal?
https://www.exposingsatanism.org/spirit-cooker-marina-abramovic-i-am-not-a-satanist/
My parents are died in the wool Catholics, and they have a wonderful Mother Mary shrine down in the woods, and every time I visit I really appreciate the beauty of it, like any shrine, it brings up emotions of peace, love, hope, and makes this a better world.
In my view, earth is a kind of hell, which is why humans are so desperate to believe in something – to bear life in hell. Like I always say, hope is the cope dope while treading water in hell. My wife thinks I am very cynical, she has a positive outlook, no matter how bad the news.
This planet isn’t run by Him….
people have free will, you can be an instrument of your stupidities or an instrument of Him….you can choose something or nothing…
this planet is being run by uncontolled idiots exercising their free to the max, they are instruments of their stupidities
Satan was a fallen angel, he made it into heaven but was booted out.
This means you can end up being the instrument of your stupidities = satan.
the control group at the top and their helpers are satanists…liars….
the double-speak they use is intensely characteristic of the reversal of reality practiced by satanists…..black is white….. up is down….bad is good….
do whatever you want, go to hell, it is actually fun there….(then when you get there you find out you get thrown in the fire….tricked)
do as we say not as we do……inversion typical of leftists…the rules don’t apply to them….
leftists lie 24/7
Demons invert/reverse all that they touch. The psychopath uses the same trick.
leftist/communists = satanist.
Today the church/government/medical system is one huge satanist/communist religious cult.
Elaine, I’ve heard atheism is the belief if you place a bunch of chemicals in a puddle and wait long enough an elephant pops out. I guess it’s possible life beganh when some proteins happened to bind together and somehow became self replicating but boy that’s a stretch. Good luck doing that in a lab. What seems ieven more far fetched is how seperate genders started. Wouldnt that have to happen simultaneously in some multicelled creature? What are the odds of that? To say we know all that is dishonest but to even question gets you labeled a denier or something. Humility is a real part of growth and much of our world has lost it.
Do you mean “cohencidence”??
Funny how a mouse in the house turns into a hunt to be rid of the dreaded mouse that is in the house. A mouse will afflict your comfort zone, you rest after the mouse in detected, captured and probably killed.
The sticky traps work good, just use some peanut butter, pea size, right in the center. Mice love peanut butter. The mechanical traps that sweep mice into a enclosed bin of the trap work too, just put some peanut butter inside the trap.
Three blind mice made the farmer’s wife want to chop off their tails.
Mice can make you jump.
I’ll take a motorcycle that can be fixed and running again to 4,100 Teslas that have been flooded and can ignite spontaneously. A motorcycle to any Tesla.
A bicycle needs maintenance, don’t need an engine, just two wheels. 12 mph, you’ll be there in two hours. Have water and a lunch.
You can always walk 25 miles, go the extra mile and make it a marathon, close enough.
Have the motorcycle, some fuel, you’ll be 25 miles in about a half an hour. There is a fix if it doesn’t go.
There are no problems, only solutions.
Hi Drump!
I am moving one of my bikes into the house – to escape the mouse (probably mice) that are in my work shed. That was where I had been parking the ’83 Honda…
I had mice completely, and tightly fill the filter box on my 97 Tacoma once with fiberglass insulation from the top of my heated/cooled room inside the shop. Barely started, and ran very poorly. Until I discovered the problem. Since the Tacoma won’t quite fit through the doors of my house, I set out a couple of boxes of D-Con. That was several years ago. No mice.
Eric,
NONE of your five cats nailed this mouse? Or are they indoor cats?
BTW, make sure you have a good dust cover for your baby! You have a rare classic, so you need to keep it nice; a good dust cover will help you do that. I keep my bike in the house too, so as to free up the garage for my car-something I appreciate with winter coming. I keep my bike in the utility room next to the garage. Unfortunately, the litter boxes are down there too (other side of the room), so there is some dust. Plus, I need to powerwash and treat the concrete floor of my garage; that gives off dust too. Every time I open the door to the garage, dust comes in from there too. Anyway, I finally got a dust cover for my baby… 🙂
RE: mouse in the house,.. or, shed, as the case may be.
I came across a video of a 5 gal. bucket mouse trap top with a spring loaded flap a person can purchase for about 15 Bucks (can’t readily find the link) I imagine it’s a take from an old timers/farmers method, seemed worthwhile, for some, here’s a video of a d.i.y. method:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D47P1TgZ7ZE
Anyway, this article was interesting, more and more I’ve reached the conclusion there ain’t no such thing as, coincidence.
‘just maybe – there is something unseen afoot’ –eric
Five weeks ago, I impulsively entered the name of a friend from teenage years whom I hadn’t seen in several decades, and had no particular reason to be thinking about. Search result: his obituary had just been posted, saying that he had died two days before.
How improbable is that? It seemed that he gave me a tap on the shoulder from the ether. I felt that he wanted me to let his old girlfriend know. Despite being out of touch for decades, and her having moved to a distant state and remarried with a different surname, it took all of five minutes to find her phone number, let her know of his demise, and catch up.
Even in connection with loss, such synchronicities add rich texture to life.
Makes you wonder whether we intentionally can shift consciousness, to tune in to the unseen more of the time, instead of motoring along obliviously, focused on the mundane.
Hi Jim,
Sorry about your friend. What an interesting thing to have happen, though. Such things fill me with wonder. They have happened to me a number of times, too. Here’s one from fairly recently: About a year or so ago, I went with my girlfriend to meet some good friends of hers, a couple that lives about an hour away from us. When we arrived there, after they welcomed us in, we all went to the kitchen area to talk, get-to-know-you, etc. On the table was a plate of cookies. Hazelnut star cookies. These are a Swiss-German kind of cookie my mom used to make when I was little. I had not had or even seen one in decades. And there they were. I told Dawn – my girlfriend – about this. We both agreed it was such an improbable thing that the idea of it just being a coincidence seemed ridiculous.
Hi Eric,
A local couple both grew up in a small town in Wisconsin … population 670 when they graduated high school decades ago. The wife told me that last week, when they were sitting outside at the brewery in our small Southwestern town (pop. 2,000), a tourist couple at an adjacent table had a dog which wandered over and prompted a conversation.
Turned out, not only was the tourist wife from the same small town, but also the two wives’ dads had worked in the same plant and knew each other.
Are these cosmic coincidences just random, or do they have a deeper meaning? Was the dog somehow in on it too? In any case, they are weird and wonderful.
Jim, a couple of years ago I was thinking about my stint driving trucks over-the-road back when I was 21. My first driving partner bragged constantly about how he had been fired from the Houston Police Department for “whooping a n***** with my handcuffs.”
I did an internet search for his name (which is quite unique) and found a story about how he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for stabbing his girlfriend to death. Yikes!
I find this type of thing fascinating.
The coincidence nuts would say “things just happen.” I’ve seen far too many non-coincidence occurrences to write off everything as a coincidence just as everything isn’t a synchronicity or divine providence.
Since this is a car blog I’ll go with the time my 68 sedan Deville lost a wheel bearing in Grand Island Nebraska February 1998.
It turns out the wheel bearing had friction welded itself to the spindle I was young, broke, and had limited tools while making my move from Nevada back to the mid-west. I was basically stuck and making my plans to live in Nebraska. While standing in the parking lot of the motel we had the car towed to my wife suggested we pray.
I wasn’t particularly religious, agnostic most of my life. I thought… Well this is kind of pointless and retarded, but what do I actually lose if it doesn’t work?
No joke approximately 2 seconds after the simple prayer was done a guy pulls up in a beater truck with dual exhaust that sounds cammed ( or a bit of a miss in it, not sure to this day) and asks if he can help.
Short-ish version: He helps us source the part locally, brings back a small mobile garage with him and proceeds to grind off the old bearing polish up the spindle and get the new one on while telling me if I stay out of his way he’ll get done a lot faster.
He doesn’t ask for a dime, just a drive around the block to make sure it seemed right and a handshake.
We head out and make it to our final destination with the gas guage on E and a literal pocket full of change as our “cushion.”
That one event convinces me there is far more to this world and universe than simply the material
That’s a great story, Sicilian!
Such stories renew our faith in other people and in things, generally. There are more good people – and things that are good about life in general – than they bad people want us to realize.
Sicilian,
While not often being the recipient, I have lent similar help to people broken down on the road. When they offered pay, I told them their bill was “do this for another”.
Of course that was back in the day when a car COULD be fixed at the roadside.
Got my order of Kroil today!
Dr. Wayne Dyer’s story on how he located his father’s grave and the life changing event it became is too close to more than coincidence.
His daughter tell’s the full story. It is fascinating.
Dr. Wayne Dyer located his father’s grave on August 30th 1976.
Dr. Wayne Dyer died on August 30, 2015. His father abandoned his wife and family, caused great strife. Wayne Dyer’s birthday is on August 31st.
The story includes a business card that led Wayne to an inn in Mississippi, a rental car, drove it to his father’s grave site in Mississippi, full of rage and anger stomped on his father’s grave, then returned to forgive him.
More to the story, the rest of the story here.
Oops, didn’t work to paste the link. So sotty.
Some good science in the link provided, study it.
https://lukestorey.com/transcripts/the-knowing-lessons-learned-when-wayne-dyers-your-dad-w/serena-dyer-pison-366
Hope it works.
Our reservoir of knowledge is a puddle compared to our reservoir of ignorance. Contrary to the “experts” and “authorities”, we know little about what is actually going on in the universe. A lot of “I believe”, and not much “I know”. I’ve long thought there might be a divine creature, perhaps a number of them, metaphysical or otherwise, that play a hand in our endeavors. Not all necessarily nice creatures, but some, if not most, likely are. Apparently you tapped a nice one Eric.
Conflating “I believe” with “I know”, is the very foundation of the tragedy that is the Psychopaths In Charge. To meddle in things they know little about. For their own gain. “Let it be” is outside their frame of reference.
John Kable:
All of the most intelligent people I know have a clear understanding of how much they don’t know. While the least intelligent have no problem blathering on about how their opinions and misconceptions have equal standing with immutable facts, the laws of physics, and are experts on every subject that comes up
Sicilian,
I’ll paraphrase Bertrand Russel, since I’m to lazy to look up the exact quote, nor is it necessary:
“The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so sure of themselves, while the wiser among us are always in doubt.”
Hi John
someone said that extent of mankind’s knowledge is we think we think….lol