https://ash-asphalt-3xfzp2rt.manus.space/#about, https://ashandasphalt.substack.com/?r=2bwc6&utm_campaign=pub-share-chec

AshandAsphalt, Calumet, OK (2026)

08/12/2026

The Italian Fade.

There are two chairs in my life that do the same thing. One is the barber’s. The other has two wheels and a bill from the dealership I’m still not entirely at peace with.
Picked up the Goose this morning. Mandatory maintenance and break-in service. The bill was what it was. Italian motorcycles cost Italian money. You know this going in. You accept it in the abstract. Then the abstract becomes a number on a page and you sit with
that for a moment before deciding to ride it off. Which is exactly what I did.
Pointed the Stelvio toward town. That particular Guzzi sound — unhurried, deliberate. By the time I got to the barber I had mostly forgiven the invoice.
I still go to a barber. Not a salon. A barber. Straight razor. Hot lather. A fade that took years to develop. My man tried something different today — called it the Italian fade. Closer near the cheekbone, longer at the chin. He explained it with the confidence of someone who’s been doing this awhile…and I didnt argue. Not entirely convinced I can pull it off at my age. Still thinking about it though.
The La Aurora 107 was waiting when I got home. Dominican Republic’s oldest factory — founded in 1903, the 107 released to mark their anniversary. I sat with it on the back porch and let it work its magic. The first inch is pepper and cedar. Then something opens — a
sweetness that doesn’t announce itself, just shows up somewhere in the middle and stays. By the time you’re into the last third you’ve stopped analyzing it.
The Guzzi bill is what it is. The Italian fade may or may not be for me.
I’m still thinking about the cigar.
—

08/03/2026

Nobody talks about the boredom. They talk about the freedom. The open road. The wind.

The romance of two wheels and no particular obligation. That’s the version that gets posted.

Nobody talks about Mississippi.
I left Panama City before dawn. San Antonio by nightfall. 846 miles. I-10 west the whole way — Florida panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and then across Texas,
which is its own separate problem. One day. Gas stops only. An event on the calendar that didn’t care about my comfort.
The first two hours are fine. Body fresh. Mind engaged. Watching the road, feeling the bike, settling into the rhythm.
By hour three the road stops being interesting and starts being a fact. Just a grey line that doesn’t change. Mississippi goes flat. Louisiana goes flat. Texas doesn’t even pretend. The
interstate becomes a treadmill — moving but not arriving, always the same distance from the horizon.
That’s when the mind starts looking for an exit.
Music cranked loud enough to feel through the helmet — works for about forty minutes before the road noise bleeds back through and you’re alone with it again. Audiobooks — good until you realize you’ve read the same passage three times because somewhere in rural Louisiana your brain checked out without telling you. Phone calls — effective but they end, and the silence after is worse than the silence before. Podcasts. Same problem.
Around hour five the hands start going numb. Not painful. Just absent. Gripping the bars but can’t entirely feel them. Feet follow. Then the lower back. Then the neck. The body sending a message — we did not agree to this.
Texas is where it gets serious. You cross from Louisiana thinking you’re almost there. You are not almost there. Houston is a hundred miles from the border. San Antonio is another two hundred past Houston. Straight. Flat. No mercy. Speed limit seventy-five and even at seventy-five it takes forever.
Every justifiable phone call already made. Somewhere west of Houston in that particular altered state — eight hours on a motorcycle, not quite all there, not quite gone, running on
instinct and stubbornness. The decision, made and remade every thirty minutes, to keep going instead of stopping.
The negotiation between the part of you that wants to pull off and the part that made a commitment.
The commitment wins. Not because you’re tough. Because you’re already out here. San Antonio came up slowly. Lights on the horizon first. Then overpasses. Then the noise of a city after hundreds of miles of nothing.
I pulled off. Sat in a gas station parking lot. Didn’t get off the bike immediately.
846 miles. One day.
The hands came back. The feet came back. The back would take until morning.
Mississippi does it. Louisiana does it. The stretch of I-10 west of Houston does it.
—

08/02/2026

The fog was still in the valley when we left Santiago.

Tamboril sits northwest of the city, in the Cibao Valley between the Cordillera
Septentrional and the Cordillera Central — two mountain ranges holding the valley between them the way cupped hands hold water. The Yaque del Norte runs through it. The soil is deep and black and has been growing to***co since before anyone thought to write it
down. In the early morning the whole thing sits under a layer of grey that the sun burns off slowly, and the first light catches the ridgelines before it reaches the valley floor.
My plant manager drove. We were there to look at to***co — sourcing leaf for a cigar concept I was developing, the kind of project that sounds straightforward until you’re actually in the fields trying to understand what makes one farm’s leaf worth the difference in price.
Somewhere on the road between the first farm and the second, he mentioned his relative. A master blender at La Flor Dominicana. Had been there for years. Two years prior they had released something new — a step up from their Coronado line. More intensity.
Different wrapper. The man had worked on it through the iterations the way a jeweler works a setting — because Litto Gomez, who built La Flor Dominicana, had himself been a jeweler in Miami before to***co found him. The gold tubes on the Oro line still carry that.
The conversation came back to us across the whole day. Between stops. Between introductions to farmers who walked us through rows of sun-grown leaf — harvest season, workers moving through the rows priming the lower leaves by hand as they ripened — and
explained, in the patient way of people who have done something for a long time, what separated a good harvest from a lost one. Not all of them were prospering. The ones who were had figured out something the others hadn’t — about the soil, the seed, the particular
attention a to***co plant requires at each stage of its life.
That evening I smoked the Oro.

La Flor Dominicana Oro. Nicaraguan Habano wrapper, Dominican binder and filler from the La Canela farm — the same family farm we’d been driving past all day. Earth and pepper at the opening. Leather and cedar in the middle. The whole thing building steadily, the strength arriving in layers rather than all at once.
I’d been working on a cigar blend for nearly two years at that point. Enough iterations to understand the distance between a concept and a finished product. Enough failure to stop
underestimating what it required.

Sitting with that Oro, the day’s conversations still in my head — the master blender’s years of work, the farmers’ particular knowledge, the farms that were thriving and the ones that
weren’t — I understood something I hadn’t fully understood before.
I was good. I knew I was good. But I was in the minor leagues. The blender working his twentieth iteration of a blend is still learning something the nineteenth didn’t teach him. The farmer who had a good harvest last year is watching this
year’s crop with the same attention as the first one.

Two years of work and I was still learning what that cigar already was.

—

07/22/2026

I’d been to the Blue Swallow the year before. That’s the thing about a place that gets it right — it pulls you back.

That’s the thing about a place that gets it right — it pulls you back. The Blue Swallow sits on Route 66 in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Neon sign. Sixteen rooms. The owners had come from up north somewhere, Chicago possibly. Technology industry. The particular exhaustion of a life that moves fast and produces little you can actually hold. They’d left it. Bought a piece of Route 66 history and decided to mean something different with their days.

I’d spent time with them the first visit. Long enough to understand they hadn’t made a mistake.

So I went back.

The Chieftain and I were somewhere on US-54 northeast of Santa Rosa when the sky changed. Not dramatically. The horizon shifting from blue to amber in a way that means the air is no longer just air. No warning before that. There rarely is.

Then the sand hit.

First a grit on the visor. Then pressure. Then the world narrowing to thirty feet of visible road and a sound against the fairing like something had a grievance.

The first instinct is to fight it. Lean harder. Correct more. Hold the line. That instinct is wrong.

A sandstorm doesn’t negotiate. It comes from everywhere at once and has no interest in your schedule or your confidence.

Somewhere inside it — amber dark, sand in every gap, collar, ears, the space between helmet and jacket — something let go. I stopped arguing with the road and started riding what was actually there.

The Chieftain settled. Lower. Steadier. Moving with the pressure instead of against it. The storm burned out about an hour before Tucumcari. Sky went back to being sky. Road reappeared in full. Tucumcari Mountain came up on the horizon as the amber cleared — the mesa sitting low and flat against the sky the way it has since before anyone named it.

The Chieftain and I came down off whatever that was into clean air and long flat highway. The silence after the sand is its own thing — not absence of sound, just everything the storm had been crowding out coming back at once.

The Blue Swallow’s neon was already on when I pulled in.

I parked. Walked into the lobby. Pulled a Pepsi from the cooler. Stood there a minute. Cold bottle. Quiet room. Sand still in my collar.

The owners remembered me.

That was enough.

—

07/06/2026

The Future Keeps Arriving.
We were outside. The granddaughters were playing. My son and his wife were there, and the afternoon was the kind that doesn’t announce itself as significant while it’s happening.
I watched my son for a while without him knowing I was watching.
He’s at the stage now — the work, the marriage, the young kids, the particular weight of a man who has taken on more than he’s finished figuring out how to carry. I know that stage.
I lived inside it for years without always knowing what I was doing or whether I was doing it right.
He’s doing it better than I did.
You don’t say it out loud in the moment. You just see it — the way he moves through the afternoon — and you file it away. Not to forget.
Time doesn’t move the way you think it will when you’re young. When you’re young the future is opaque, and somewhere “out there”…ahead — you aim at it, make plans for it, even
picture yourself standing in it. What actually happens though is the future keeps arriving while you’re looking at something else. And then one morning it’s behind you, not ahead, and
what you thought was tomorrow, has quietly become last year.
What surprised me more was what stayed. The old bikes are gone. The shops I built and closed. The versions of myself I wore for a while and then set down. Most things move on. The granddaughters running across the yard
while their father watched them the way I once watched him — that stayed.
The difference is between the things worth holding and the things you’re holding onto because letting go is scarier and harder than keeping — you learn that eventually.
He already knows it. That’s what I saw in him.
—

06/30/2026

Every Road I Took

Before sunrise in Washington state the road was quiet and dark and mine.
No smoke yet. No fires. Just the Colonel running north through country that hadn’t wokenup, the engine sounding different in the dark because there was nothing competing with it. The road was good. The sky was starting to show its edges. I wasn’t in a hurry to get
anywhere because the riding itself was the point.
That changed in Canada.
The wildfire smoke moved in the way weather moves in the north — not gradually, but decisively. What had been clear highway became something else. The air took on a haze that compressed the distance, turned the treeline grey, made the horizon disappear. The Alaska Highway through northern British Columbia was closing in sections west of Fort Nelson. No detour available. Check conditions and find another way. I found other ways.
Routes I hadn’t planned. Roads I wouldn’t have taken if the smoke hadn’t forced the question. Some of them I couldn’t name now if I tried — just the direction, the trees, the Colonel underneath me working through terrain that wasn’t on the original map. I think about the roads I’ve taken. Not with regret. More the way you’d look at a map after the trip is over — curious about the route, interested in what you chose without always knowing why.
Some choices were right. Some were wrong in ways that taught me more than the right ones did. Some weren’t choices at all — just smoke on the highway forcing a turn that led somewhere I needed to arrive at, which I wouldn’t have recognized as a destination until I was already standing in it.
Every road I took brought me here.
Here is the Colonel running north in the dark before the world woke up. Here is an engine that pulses rather than hums, that has opinions about what’s underneath it. A man with enough miles behind him to stop arguing with the road and start listening to it.
Here is enough.
—
The Mounts May Change.
POSTING NOTES
Pillar: Motorcycles (Primary) · Life/Philosophy
Platforms: Substack, Instagram, Facebook, X
Hook: Every road I took brought me here. And here is enough.

06/26/2026

Half Empty or Unfull

Half empty or unfull. I’ve been thinking about that question for a bit and I still don’t have a clean answer.

The half empty version is pessimism dressed up as realism. The half full version is optimism working too hard to convince itself. Neither one is honest about what’s actually in the glass.

Unfull is honest.

Unfull means there’s still room. Room for more road. More miles. More mornings when the fog is low and the engine is warm and the only question is which direction. More conversations that start somewhere unexpected and end somewhere you didn’t plan for. More of the particular kind of quiet that only arrives after enough miles.

The ride isn’t the good parts minus the hard parts. The beauty and the difficulty run alongside each other in the same hour and neither one cancels the other out. You ride through both because the road doesn’t separate them for you.

Every life is a mixed bag. No exceptions.

That’s not a consolation. It’s an accounting. The bad parts are real. So is everything worth protecting. The goal was never to find a life without the hard parts — it was to see clearly enough not to let them erase everything good.

I’m still riding. The glass is unfull.

Pour something worth drinking.

—

06/25/2026

You Can’t Smell a Website

Buying ci**rs online is the fastest way to know a lot about ci**rs and nothing about smoking them.
Belicoso Ci**rs & Cafe had life in two different locations, a walk-in humidor, staff who knew the regulars well enough to have a cigar waiting before they asked. That knowledge wasn’t in any database. It lived in the conversation.
The man behind the counter at a real shop carries three things simultaneously: what’s in the humidor, what you’ve smoked before, and what you walked in carrying today. Those three inputs produce a recommendation that takes ninety seconds and lands almost every time.
Online you get ratings. Review aggregates. Customers also bought. The cigar that scored 94 points smoked by a reviewer whose palate has nothing to do with yours.
I walked into Ole Time Ci**rs in 2015. The man asked what I’d been smoking. I told him. He walked me into the humidor. We talked through the mood, the occasion, the time I had and we landed on a Fuente 858. Exactly the right one for the situation.
He didn’t consult a rating. He read the situation. That’s tactile knowledge. Years of smoking alongside customers, learning manufacturer lines from the inside out, watching what lands across hundreds of different palates on
different days. It doesn’t transfer to a screen. It lives in the room.
This applies beyond ci**rs. Wine. Coffee. Gear. Books. Any category where in-person expertise holds something the algorithm can’t access — the human read. The ability to factor in what you didn’t say alongside what you did. You can’t smell a website.

What’s a category where you still go in person? Why?

— CJ ·

06/22/2026

You Get On The Bike.
There are mornings you get on the bike and you couldn’t explain why to anyone who wasn’t already a rider. This was one of those mornings.
Anchorage behind me. The Colonel running south on the Seward Highway. Turnagain Arm on the right — grey water going flat to the horizon. The Chugach Mountains rising on the left, close enough that the road felt carved between them and the water rather than built. I looked down at my hands on the bars. They were not the hands of my youth. Not old — just older. Weathered. The knuckles more prominent than I remember. The skin across the back of them looser than it used to be. Stronger than they look. These hands have held a lot of bars on a lot of roads and they
show it. I don’t know when that happened. I was busy.
The tunnel entrance appeared — the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, 2.5 miles bored through Maynard Mountain during World War II, now shared by motorcycles and freight trains on a schedule that doesn’t deviate. One lane. One direction at a time. You wait,
then you go in, and the mountain closes around you. In there it’s just the Colonel’s headlight and the sound of the engine coming back off concrete walls and 2.5 miles of dark. No scenery. No distractions. Nothing to look at but
the road directly ahead and staying planted between the RR tracks.
On the other side — Passage Canal. Whittier. Prince William Sound opening up past the town.

I came out into the light with the same hands I went in with.
Still riding.
—

AshandAsphalt

08/12/2026

08/03/2026

08/02/2026

07/22/2026

07/06/2026

06/30/2026

06/26/2026

06/25/2026

06/22/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request