“Sounds like art,” the instructor says.

“Well, it is art,” I say. “This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.”

They’re not sure whether I’m kidding or not.

“You mean,” DeWeese asks, “that when I was putting this rotisserie together I was actually sculpting it?”

“Sure.”

He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. “I wish I’d known that,” he says. Laughter follows.

- zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance