New years resolution

As soon as I opened my eyes, I knew it would be difficult to keep my New Year's Resolution...It's not the first time I have resolved to finish that damnable bike. It just sits there on the jack beckoning me, mocking me, "Kevin, come and finish me." As if it had a brain, as if it's living and begging to feel the road under its tires once again. 

It was only a few years ago that I took the torch and grinder and cut it to pieces. Before Nancy got so sick and my age started catching up with me. I always knew the day may come when I didn't feel the  drive, the ambition, the love of the pursuit of making another motorcycle into that thing which I have in my imagination.

There's a long line of bikes and cars that I molded into custom creations, a foolish pride I took in what I considered my art. I did it all myself, welding, fabricating, modifying, painting and polishing, spending hour after hour in my little shop, stereo blasting, sparks flying, wrenches turning. Its who I was, it's what I was all about, but now, well, my heart isn't in it, the passion has gone.

I try to trick myself, thinking I'm just too busy taking care of my poor Nancy, cooking, cleaning, laundry, caring for three cats and spending a lot of time alone while she slept in the other room waiting for an ending that was uncertain at best. I feel pretty sorry for myself I guess, bearing this cross and fighting a losing battle with depression and pains of my own that wear on my stamina to carry on.

In spite of it all, I still let this unfinished project eat at me. I go out to the shop that used to be my refuge from the reality that I banged my head on each day, to what was now just another source of pain, loss and a reminder that I'm that much closer to the grave. I would love to have the spark, the glitter in my eye that would push me on to just this one more creation but, alas, the best I can conjure is apathy and sorrow without a reason to exist.

I've tried the potions and snake oils, concoctions that were supposed to FIX me, but they're temporary at best, at worst they bring me nightmares of suicides I'll never indulge and sleeplessness that wraps me in my blankets like a sort of trap  to escape from in the cold lonely dark. 

Yet there is still a part of me that believes that I can pull myself up by my alleged boot straps and get it done. I've purchased most all the parts I need to put it back together.  The engine on one metal table, that I've managed to rebuild. The aluminum covers for the engine, I spent hours on the polishing wheel, brought to a high luster.  It has a turbocharger set up to make two hundred plus horsepower all painted semi-gloss black.

Custom made suspension with an extended swing arm  leading back to a fat tire, dropped seat and a one-off fuel tank. The devil of course is in the details and that's where all the time needs to be spent. I lay awake at night with blueprints running through my mind on how it needs to be done.  

Then Nancy calls in all her misery and the guilt overpowers my will to attempt doing something with a semblance of who I once was. I cannot manage to make a stupid motorcycle measure up to the importance of my poor wife's needs or the suffering she has lived with the past eight years.

I do the best I can to make her comfortable, to coax her to eat though she hasn't enough teeth left in her jaw to manage to chew anything but the softest of substances. Trying to keep her in her Norco and Percocet, cigarettes and Coca Cola and enough clean blankets to keep her warm as she shivers from the perpetual sweat that overcomes her.

We thought the last surgery she had when she lost her breasts was going to help her regain her strength, but that has proven to have done the opposite. She has not recovered from that surgery and has grown weaker and in more pain than before. Hope is hard to grasp when each day seems worse and more difficult than the last.

To make matters worse, my poor dear love feels her own guilt and shame because she knows her illness has much to do with my mental capacities. She still finds a way to laugh at the silliest things on YouTube and old TV shows from the sixties and seventies. Sometimes I wake in the night and hear her talking to the screen of some old gameshow or black and white program. I admire her ability to see the bright side when she only rises from her recliner to stumble to the bathroom or to retrieve something from the refrigerator.

Weed has been a great help with her pain, as it takes her mind off her battered body and instead allows her to focus on her TV shows and her You Tube kitties, babies, puppies and people doing stupid shit in cars.  I wish I could escape so easily but weed does the opposite to me, causing me to go to dark places in my minds eye.

Yes, I will try to rise above my trivialities and reassemble my turbo Kawasaki. I will need help to put the engine into the chassis and there is still much welding to be done.  I wanted to do a bunch of fancy shit that costs a bunch of dough I ain't got, which just adds up to another excuse for me to let it sit, as it has these last several years. Nope, no more excuses, this is the year I'm going to put this piece of shit together in a manner I can be proud to leave behind for my son, whom I see far to little of, but that's another tale for another time...