As If I Needed Yet Another Reason Not To Fly

Full disclosure:  My last flight just over a year ago on American Airlines went smoothly.  All four legs of the 9000 round trip flight departed and arrived nearly on time.

I hate flying.  A decision to fly anywhere means handing over an unlimited amount of time to a soulless corporation.  I know the statistics, driving is more dangerous.  I understand the clock - planes fly fast.  But the pain is just not worth it.
My previous flight in 2008 was more typical for my flying experience.  Arriving on a morning with questionable weather, I checked in to a plane that was initially listed as on-time before its status was updated several times, leading to lots of confusion.  Eventually on the plane, departure was greatly delayed as the Captain informed us there was a minor mechanical problem with the plane.  Eventually we took off, exceedingly late and arrived in a special kind of hell - Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport.  Missing the second flight of the day, I sat in the airport for several hours.  The airline decided the first flight's delay was due to weather, not the mechanical problem the Captain knew about.  Eventually, I asked to be put on the next flight home.  This was not possible since one connecting leg of my return flight was not on the same airline, meaning I had no choice but to sit several more hours in Atlanta.  Eventually, I was put on a plane in an opposite direction from my final destination of Las Vegas, NV.  I was again blessed with several hours sitting in another airport.  While Fort Lauderdale seems like a nice place to spend some time, airports are like public restrooms - they are pretty much all the same and the goal is generally to get out as fast as possible.  Eventually I was put on a plane bound for Las Vegas.  By the time I was outside of McCarran Airport, I could have driven from my home to Nevada in less time than what the airlines were able to do.

And that gets to my biggest problem with airline travel.  Arriving a day late, stinking and feeling shitty, after being routed all over the country counts as a win for the airline, "You got there, it was only a day late."  But the Las Vegas Trip in question was only a few days.  There is nothing I value more than my vacation time and the airline stole a considerable percentage of it.  Once I bought that ticket, I was under the whim for whatever the airline wanted to do.

My 2008 flight was glorious compared to a recent situation.  Filed under current events, a doctor was recently physically dragged of a United Airlines flight from Chicago O'Hare bound for Louisville, KY.  He wasn't drunk.  He wasn't unruly.  He was a paying passenger, sitting quietly in his seat, just trying to get home.  The flight was overbooked and United found it more important to get a few employees to Louisville rather than any passenger; United Airlines found its business more important than the reason for the business.
I understand why airlines overbook, but when it doesn't work out in their favor, they need to bite the bullet.  Better options include:
Moving employee schedules since they screwed up and paying lots of overtime or whatever it took.
Putting the employees in a nice rental car to drive the five hours (yes, only five hours) to Louisville.
Chartering a plane since United screwed up.
Continuing to raise the amount paid to overbooked passengers until someone volunteered (give me lots of cash and a rental car and I'll drive myself to Las Vegas!).
Paying to move people to other airlines.
Anything ... other than dragging a bloodied elderly man off of a flight after he was allowed to sit down.

Making the situation even worse, the CEO issued a statement applauding the employees, while one of the officers involved in dragging the man off of the plane was put on leave.  A CEO should not make up words like re-accommodate to try to sugar-coat the situation.  What a wretched euphemism.  Maybe the CEO should be re-schooled in the reason for an airline.
One of the rules we all learned in kindergarten was when we screw up, admit and say sorry.  Doing otherwise makes a bad situation worse.  Perhaps Oscar Munoz didn't learn this early in life; there is also a relatively high possibility that he may be a psychopath.

In the sad state of airline travel, there is no way to win.  Paying more for a business class flight doesn't change the likelihood of getting anywhere on time (private jets probably do, but...).  The people in the front of the plane are just as unlikely to arrive on time as the proletariat.  The only way to slightly hedge the odds in the favor of the average traveler is to minimize connecting flights - a cheap 3-leg flight has at least 3x the chance of mayhem over a more expensive direct flight.

I never lived through this, but I sometimes wonder what flying was like before it was brought down to the lowest common denominator?  Before people were crammed in a seat only big enough for a prepubescent anorexic girl.  Before a short flight becomes an all-day affair.  Despite my poor personal record with airline travel, I'm always friendly with the people at the gate and on the plane; at times, they have a painfully tough job becoming the face of bad corporate policy.

I'm hoping to head south for a day of ocean fishing in a few weeks.  My travel time will be more than the time spent at the coast, but I'm looking forward to that as much as the fishing.  I'll get to see familiar sites, and look for opportunities on taking a new route.  I'll stay in cheap hotels and eat at small restaurants.  I'll probably get to talk to interesting people and see things impossible to comprehend from 30,000 feet.

Thankfully, I love driving.  I've turned "travel" from the worst part of my vacation to the best part.  I've ridden my motorcycle through 50 states (*Hawaii was a rental).  I love the areas that look like home in the Midwest; familiar, yet different.  I love crossing the Mississippi and seeing the rolling hills transition to the great American plains - so much better than the lousy United planes.  I love the big empty.  I love the mountains and how arriving at them having crossed the whole country brings with a better frame of mind compared to being dumped out of an aluminum tube.  I love the heat, the cold, the smells, the rain.  I look forward to the challenges of roadway travel, because I know I have a little more control in how to resolve them.  And I'm reasonably certain that nobody will drag me out of my vehicle because the road is overbooked.

Starting Over

A few coworkers were discussing the relatively recent trend of "Tiny Houses" and the perceived benefits versus the negatives.  This discussion evolved into one about the more generic wish to simplify.  The interpretations of this ranged from winning the lottery and buying remote land to just moving to a smaller house.  It seems like Tiny Houses keeps most of life the same but just deletes some comfort from that same reality.
My comment, "I want to sell everything and travel on the cheap for the rest of my life."

I'm assuming this exists in many cultures, but the idea of throwing off the shackles of work, of possessions, of interconnected responsibilities runs deep in America.  America was built on the idea of carving out a new life as the country slowly migrated west.  The image of the cowboy riding off into the sunset is part of many fantasies.
Elizabeth Greenwood wrote Playing Dead - about people who fake their death in order to start over.  While not addressed directly in the book, the idea of walking away from everything by faking one's death is just an attempt at simplification.  Albeit this rather drastic way to simplify is more often used to ameliorate one (or a few) specific problems.  I enjoyed the book even as it was written from a very Millennial perspective.  Her personal narrative shows the consequences of making some choices early without thinking about the long term implications.  I suspect this is something everyone does to some extent.  Faking death ultimately just appears to create lots of new complications in the end.

Cheryl Strayed tried to write about her experiences hiking the Pacific Trail.  I admire her quest and success in taking on the challenge, but her writing reeks of self-help, and the self-help genre approaches a status somewhere between a cult and a drug.  While self-help books may give short term relief, they too quickly need to be reinforced by another.  And another.  Sadly, Strayed is more Brand than honest inspiration now.

Bill Bryson hiked (most of) the Appalachian trail and wrote about it as only he could.  Mr. Bryson is a bit of an enigma, he comes across as very condescending in The Lost Continent.  Small-town America deserves better; the heartland is only as terrible as he makes it out to be if a traveler demands that it is.  I suspect his interaction with the British is far different than mine has been.  The people in small-town England could be small-town Americans if it weren't for the accent.  Having spent a few days in Dusseldorf, Germany several years ago, I found it as charming as Gary, Indiana.  A Walk in the Woods was more genuine, less snarky, more personal.  Bill Bryson didn't use the Appalachian Trail to start over, but he paints it in places as a form of contemplation.

Geraldine Largay was determined to hike the Appalachian Trail at the age of 66.  Originally with a partner, she ended the adventure on her own, and it ended tragically.  From the Donner Party on, American history is littered with the dead.  As the saying goes, "Every corpse on Everest was once a very motivated person."

It is probably impossible to talk about this without remembering Chris McCandless.  After bouncing around the country immediately after college and (literally) burning his money, he ended up in Alaska.  He hiked out on the Stampede Trail near Healy, before living in a bus bear Denali National Park for a few months.  Surging rivers prevented his return, and that bus ended up being where his life ended.  Whether thought of as idealistic or a degenerate, his story is part of the American lexicon, with Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, PBS' excellent documentary, or Sean Penn's subpar movie all telling his story.

Christopher Knight really did throw off the shackles for a long time.  A new book (I haven't read it yet) out by Michael Finkel tells the story of how he lived in the Maine woods for 27 years - living off of what he was able to steal from nearby homes and cabins.  Mr. Finkel wrote a riveting article about this in 2013 and I can't help but wonder what new information will be included in the book given that the end of that article seems to indicate the end of that relationship, "...we are not friends ... I’m not going to miss you at all."  Michael Finkel's book True Story - another book about people tragically starting over - was good, so I'll probably have to read The Stranger in the Woods.  Hopefully it gives a little insight on how Mr. Knight is fairing now.

And among these more notable cases, there are countless tales never told of people doing something, anything, to start over.

I try to be very honest with myself and the chances of selling everything and traveling on the cheap for the next few decades is very, very unlikely.  Not impossible, but the odds are terribly long.  The events recounted here suggest no shortage of situations where these things end very tragically.  But I can't help but wonder what else exists from vagabond and vagrant through beige suburbanite, and where on that continuum I am ... or could be.

Why All the Rage?

I sometimes wonder if we all become L Ron Bumquist as we get older.  Or maybe I'm just wondering if I'm becoming Dr. Bumquist.
A news teaser blurbed that a Kendall Jenner commercial for Pepsi was generating controversy.  Apparently, handing a cold refreshing beverage to a police officer in an advertisement is an act which necessitates social outrage with enough people for it to make the news.  Social media is the liquor store next door; it is the enabler of a rampant addiction to rage.  And when did nearly everything become worthy of anger?  Contempt maybe, ambivalence clearly, but anger?  Pepsi is just trying to sell more empty calories - junk food as my mom used to say.  Thank a Capitalist as without them we'd have nothing to fret about today.  Can anything happen that doesn't require someone to bitch, moan and create banal memes about.
Luckily this rage is very short lived.  Cecil the lion is still quite dead, but nobody really cares any more about Minnesota dentists or hunting big cats in Africa anymore.

I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed about this, but after hearing the news story on TV while getting ready for work, I really wan't sure who Kendall Jenner was.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and saw she is Bruce Jenner's daughter and something about the Kardashians - at which point I quickly lost interest.  Although I seem to vaguely recall that one of the Kardashians was married to Kanye West.  So Caitlyn Jenner and Kanye West could end up at the same family reunion.  Do people like that have family reunions?  I think not.
And if Kendall Jenner is Bruce Jenner's biological daughter, does that make him still her dad?  Or is she now her mom.  Maybe Family guy can sort this all out.
Again, I lose interest...

I have no interest in Pepsi as a surrogate for someone's social anxiety, the Kardashians, or pretending I'm interested in things that people who are half my age should probably not even be interested in.  How is it so easy to spot the old person uncomfortably attempting to act young?  The wedding a few years ago where they played The Macarena and the dance floor was filled with only young girls and middle-aged men.  It was terrifying.  Maybe that was another phenomenon altogether.  A former coworker recently resigned;  he's been convicted of some crimes and it apparently wasn't dancing The Macarena.  Even the limited information I heard on that one is too much.  Every time I think about it, it is quite disturbing.  Yet some kind of voyeuristic stupidity compelled me to look it up on the county court web site.

Maybe Dr. Bumquist can help afterall.

A Change in a Jiffy

I found it oddly troubling that the packaging for Jiffy Corn Muffin mix changed.  Not because it changed per se, but that the change was so arbitrary.
I've eaten Cornbread Pecan Waffles most weekend mornings for years.  I store the Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix boxes in the pantry - always facing forwards.  This puts the picture of the "Jiffy-Man" on the right.

When I purchased a new box of mix recently and put it away after grocery shopping, the Jiffy-Man was no longer on the right.  Carefully looking over the box, there weren't any other changes.  The only change was swapping the left and right panels on the box.

I work for a large company that can at times be bureaucratic;  at times can be very bureaucratic.  I wondered if this change to the box was part of some orchestrated project at Chelsea Milling Company.  Did people sit in a conference room, discussing the merits of moving the Jiffy-Man to the left of the box.  Were there packaging experts and baking experts and management all discussing how this might raise sales?  Was this part of some larger-scope project to standardize packaging across the Jiffy line-up and save manufacturing costs?
I guess I could understand if this was a total redesign of the box, but there were no other changes other than the left and right panels had been swapped.  Maybe the Chelsea Milling Company engineers even diagrammed out the change.

Could the Chelsea Milling Company brand managers and bean counters have projected why spending time, money and energy to change the box was worth it?

They didn't change the box to update the nutrition label.  They didn't add a new recipe - not even one for cornbread pecan waffles.  They didn't redesign the iconic front to make it more appealing to Millennials.  They just swapped left a right labels.  I guess it could be a mistake; the box printing company just got confused.  Possibly this box is a unicorn of premixes, akin to the Inverted Jenny of stamp collecting.  Or maybe there are two box makers, and one of them works from a different set of standards.  Maybe, the corn being used to make the Jiffy mix with the Jiffy-Man on the left is genetically engineered to have its DNA helixed to the left.  The Horror.  The Horror.

I contacted the Chelsea Milling Company, but they said they wouldn't respond in writing.  The conspiracy deepens...

Donald Trump Should Buy Me a New Shirt

In preparation for the change of the very confused seasons, I bought a few new short sleeved shirts to wear at work and retired a few veterans.  One of the things I really like about buying from Walmart online is the ability to return stuff easily at the store.  Purchasing from some of their "partner" sellers removes this ability - always read the fine print.  The fine print gets worse; if I return something, I will be refunded my purchase price, less the original free shipping cost (and possibly an additional small fee).
One of the shirts I bought is slightly smaller than I prefer.  Perhaps it will motivate me to lose the winter blubber more quickly.
One of the shirts is quite a bit uglier than it appeared in the picture online and is prohibitively small.

A partial dump of Donald Trump's 2005 income taxes was shared on the internet.  I won't defend President Trump (for anything), but the requisite for any presidential candidates to release taxes has always struck me as somewhat odd.  I'd be quite resistant to interview with a company if I had to share my finances first.  And while a public official may justifiably be treated differently, it isn't clear where this line would be drawn.  The president must release taxes?  How about all senators?  And members of Congress?  Unelected bureaucrat?  Chief of police?  Police deputy?  Civil servant mailman?
Looking at President Trump's taxes, what I'm struck by most is how ordinary they look.  I expected a totally different, crazy form or all those lines I always leave blank to have confusing numbers in them.  Not only are they ordinary, they'd be boring if the scale of the numbers wasn't so bloated.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't pay any more taxes than I can squeak by with.  I'm hoping to avoid last year's tax fiasco, but this year I had to figure out some new-to-me deductions - thanks to the ill-timed maturing of a few Unit Investment Trusts.  My first attempt at investments outside of my 401(k) did not go well...  I'm not the president so I won't release my numbers, but in contrast, Donald Trump grossed $152.7 million in 2005, with business losses of $103.2 million.  There is an astounding amount of criticism over this deduction bringing his Adjusted Gross Income to $48.6 million.
Donald Trump is doing the same thing as 122,000,000 other adults in the US are doing - paying as little income tax as can be done legally.  If I could have legally written off $103.2 million, I would have.  To be clear, in my life I'll never earn $103.2 million, nor even $48.6 million, nor even the $38.4 million Mr. Trump paid in 2005 income taxes.
Warren Buffett is often the darling rich to those on the left as he complains that he doesn't pay enough taxes.
But even ignoring President Trump's deducted losses, he paid 25.1% of his $152.7 gross income in taxes, contrasted with Mr. Buffett's 17.4% - which is stated as payroll taxes inclusive so actual income tax is presumably less.  Yet no criticism for Warren Buffett just because he complains about his low tax rate?  It could be pointed out that the Treasury will take any money sent to it, so Mr. Buffett is free to send as much money as he wants to the federal government.  His criticism of federal taxes is really not suggesting he should pay more tax, but other people like him should.
Accounting for Donald Trump's assumed justified $103.2 million loss, he paid a shocking 79% of his Adjusted Gross Income in taxes.

There is a lot of tax misinformation in the United States.  We have neither a progressive nor regressive tax system - a confusing tax system that can only come from years of compromise.  Too often, we compromise ourselves into complexity.  An astounding 45% of adults do not pay federal income tax.  None.  The big Zipola.  Somewhere between most and all of these people are at the bottom of the income scale, not the top.  And while the rich (President Trump and Warren Buffett inclusive) as a percentage of their actual income might pay less than the average worker, they pay a phenomenal amount in real terms.
The median income in the united states is often reported to be around $50 thousand.  That results in a federal income tax of around $5000.
So it will take 7680 average workers to equal Donald Trump's $38.4 million in taxes, or a mere 1400 average workers to equal Warren Buffett's $6.9 million tax bill.

As the platitude speaks, "A fine is a tax for doing poorly.  A tax is a fine for doing well."

There will be much more gnashing of teeth over Donald Trump's 2005 taxes.  It should really be looked at through the same lens we all see through when filling out form 1040.
I'd love to know what Mr. Trump's $17.9 million in itemized deductions are.  I don't want to make this a whole left/right Obama/Trump thing, but President Obama's 2015 $36,587 in mortgage interest deduction is actually more than my first house even cost.  Nope, not criticizing, I just find it humorously incomprehensible.  Whether Donald Trump or Barack Obama or Warren Buffett, the scale of the numbers can be sometimes hard to put into perspective.

I don't think either President Trump or Warren Buffett are buying their shirts discounted from walmart.com.  Actually, maybe Warren Buffett might, since he is reported as so notoriously cheap.  I think cheap to a guy who pays $6.9 million in tax means something different than it does to me though.
And me?  I'm stuck with two shirts that I have some regrets over.  Returning them is not worth it given the pain of return policies and cost of shipping - I'll not buy again from the Walmart partners.  One shirt I'll probably wear and grouse about it every time I put it on.  The other I will donate to Good Will; at least I'll be able to deduct that from my taxes next year.

Dan Cooper

Dateline Muskegon, MI:
The identity of Dan Cooper or DB Cooper has finally been revealed!  His name really was Dan Cooper and he has been hiding in plain sight for decades.  "I've never really kept my life a secret," he said during a recent interview.  "I just assumed that the FBI wanted to keep the case unsolved for some reason.  Maybe the FBI has a stake in keeping urban legends alive, or maybe they just didn't want to admit that they forgot to look into easily available records for 45 years."

In 1971, a flight from Portland to Seattle was hijacked by a passenger who bought a one-way ticket under the name Dan Cooper.  His name was later represented by the press as DB Cooper.  After securing a $200,000 ransom and some parachutes, Dan Cooper jumped from the back of the 727 over Washington State and parachuted down to terra firma.  While mostly silent on the specifics of the hijacking, he has allowed a few details, "I actually landed in the parking lot for Glen's Market in Onalaska, Washington.  The first thing that I used the money for was a package of Little Debbies.  That money recovered by the Columbia River ... I guess the FBI must have done that.  I think that is where the real mystery has been all these years."

Mr. Cooper's life before and after the hijacking has had some interesting twists.  He is actually the cousin of shock rocker Alice Cooper.  Dan Cooper and Alice Cooper kept in touch for many years, but now they are more limited to Christmas cards and the occasional birthday greetings.  Alice Cooper refused comment at this time, but it is believed that Dan Cooper helped Alice Cooper find a relevant attorney after the on-stage chicken death in Toronto.  It may have been that 1969 Toronto incident which led Dan Cooper to realize the need for a nest egg to prepare for the unexpected.

Little is known about Mr. Cooper immediately after the hijacking, but a close look at records show that he eventually moved to Alpena, Michigan and began living in a condominium with a J. Hoffa in 1975.  Police records from the time show that the condo, on the shores of Lake Huron, was the site of many noise complaints.  Jack Allerton, who still lives in Alpena remembers living next to Mr. Cooper and Mr. Hoffa, "We all knew Jimmy Hoffa just wanted out of organized labor, but didn't know Danny was a hijacker.  Ya' know, it was the 70's though.  Everybody was runnin’ from something."  Mr. Allerton is quiet for a few moments with a telling smirk on his face, "Those were some wild times."  The current whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa are now being investigated with renewed vigor.

With much of his hijacking cash spent by the late 1970's, Mr. Cooper had to tame his partying ways and find other employment.  In 1978 he began working for a new TV news magazine which eventually became known as 20/20.  However, he apparently had a hard time sitting still and remained somewhat nervous about being caught.  After the producers began looking into doing a story on the 1971 hijacking, Mr. Cooper must have known it was time to get out.
In 1993, Mr. Cooper joined MTV and was largely responsible for moving the music entertainment channel from mostly a music video format to the growing genre of reality TV.  MTV's Kurt Loder says that MTV still receives hate mail addressed to Dan Cooper over the destruction of how great MTV was in the 1980's music video era.
After MTV, Mr. Cooper moved on to Fox News in the mid 1990's.  He was instrumental in creating the Fox News Brand, although his initial plan was considered bloated and unlikely to succeed by both investors and executives.  As Mr. Cooper had realized the importance of weather in planning his hijacking in 1971, he invented the concept of the weather gadget in the corner of the TV screen.  To this day he still gets small royalty checks every time it is used.

Bored with broadcasting, Mr. Cooper opened a Dippin' Dots franchise in Olathe, Kansas.  This was done in partnership with William S Burroughs (author of Naked Lunch), who maintained a separate franchise in Lawrence, Kansas.  Dippin' Dots was apparently very lucrative for both Cooper and Burroughs, Mr. Cooper even created a way of making far more uniform dots through the use of something called an acoustic nozzle.  These far superior dots would likely have taken Dippin' Dots to a new level if it had not been for the worldwide frozen confectioner's scandal of 1999.  While not directly implicated in the scandal, Dippin' Dots was unable to take advantage of the acoustic nozzle process and Mr. Cooper moved on.

After 2000, Dan Cooper returned to Michigan and opened an automotive repair shop in Muskegon.  Mr. Cooper is happy to talk about his current life, "Muskegon is great.  I have everything I need here.  Cooper Dan Automotive is going gangbusters and I have my boat ready at a moment's notice on Lake Michigan."
Pushed for more information on the hijacking, Mr. Cooper just presses his lips together and shakes his head.  Questions remain about the statute of limitations and there is still an indictment out of Portland, Oregon.  When Alan Redford, Mr. Cooper's lawyer, was contacted, he only wanted to confirm he is still studying the case but there are more questions than answers, "Since Dan Cooper boarded the plane under his own name and hasn't been hiding, I think the in absentia indictment from 1976 is invalid."

A legal battle will likely play out over the coming weeks and months.  The FBI has been largely silent since the information has come to light and one senior investigator, who would only talk off the record, suggested that department embarrassment over the whole issue has become a major morale problem.  This same senior investigator also suggested that they have begun recently using Google to search for anyone relevant to unsolved cases, and it appears that Mr. Cooper's situation is not unique.

Standing on the rocky pier at Muskegon State Park for a few final words, Mr. Cooper is largely reticent, "Ya know, fake news has been in the news so much recently.  And so maybe I made some news in the early 1970's and worked in the news in the 1990s.  But maybe not.  Maybe it is all fake news, ya know?   Sad..."

The Perfect Motorcycle

Some uncharacteristically warm February weather last week, coupled with a few good travel articles in Rider and Wing World Magazines have me craving to head out on a road trip.  The last full week in February saw several days with temperatures in the upper 60's to nearly 80.  These warm days are not too unusual as Spring starts to peak around the corner, but having them for several days in a row was unexpectedly pleasant.  The warm weather allowed some seat time on the motorcycle, bringing me to the right frame of mind to read a few good motorcycle travel articles as the local weather returned to something closer to normal.
Any real motorcycle adventure is still at least several weeks away.  But mentally travel can start at any time.

I had a major service done on my Triumph late in 2016.  It was expensive and was also a major pain since the dealership took longer than anticipated and is sort of far away.  There is another dealership in Cincinnati, but every single interaction with that dealership has been negative so I just can't bring myself to go there for anything.  That recent service has got me questioning my Triumph ownership long term - even if a new bike is largely an academic exercise since I really do like the Trophy and a new truck late in 2016 makes another vehicle purchase improbable.

Does the perfect motorcycle exist?  No...  But it is fun to think about.  My Goldwing is an exceptionally capable bike for long distance 2-up touring.  However, it is a very heavy bike and riding it daily is a little like driving a small motorhome for commuting and grocery shopping.  I have no plans to get rid of the Goldwing, but what about for my daily rider and for solo trips?
1.  The perfect bike needs to have a comprehensive dealer network, preferably with a good dealership close enough to home to get there easily on a work day.  The Motus looks like an absolutely amazing motorcycle, but the nearest dealership is well over 100 miles away and if an issue would come up while I'm traveling through Rapid City, SD it would be an eight hour drive to get dealership help.  The BMW Dealership network is adequate, but the nearest dealership to where I live is also well over 100 miles; I'm convinced a franchise opportunity exists here.
2.  The perfect bike needs to be shaft drive.  Chain drive has been used forever and is well-proven.  Belt drive is in a similar state.  I'm a chronic worrier though, and when I did have a bike with chain drive, I found myself constantly checking/lubing/adjusting/etc.  As much as I know this concern is partially misplaced, I also know that my personality isn't going to change on this one.  I suppose I could argue that I'm going to worry about something, so worrying about a chain and sprockets is probably as good as anything.  I will gladly pay a little more and live with a few horsepower lost to a shaft drive.
3.  The perfect bike needs to have cruise control.  My motorcycle adventures sometimes take on a life of their own and on a few occasions, I've found myself a day and a half from home with less than a day to actually get home.  This usually means a slog on the superslab, and cruise control becomes a near imperative.  If my ST1300 had cruise control, I can't imagine I would have gotten rid of it.  As bikes move from throttle cables to drive-by-wire, cruise control becomes more an issue of software vs. hardware so manufacturers not including it starts to get harder to understand.
4.  The perfect bikes need to have simple maintenance.  I don't really care about fuel economy in a motorcycle.  All the bikes I've owned have gotten at least 40mpg over the long haul, so fuel costs are not an issue.  Maintenance cost (and pain) is a much bigger deal.  Most of my recent bikes have been fully faired bikes which adds to the time and/or cost.  Removing tupperware isn't hard, but the plastic can be fragile and removal and reinstallation takes a lot of time on top of routine maintenance.
5.  The perfect bike needs to have simple valve adjustment.  As a subgroup to maintenance, valve adjusting shim under bucket valves has a lot of collateral costs.  Harley Davidson is a near lone holdout in the hydraulic lifter world and there are some bikes which still use rocker arms, but too many manufacturers default to shim under bucket designs.  This makes sense in a hyper-performance bike, but on daily riders it is unnecessary.  I miss bikes like the Honda Pacific Coast 800 which were designed with maintenance in mind.  I was appalled recently when I saw that the Honda NC700 requires valve inspection checks every oil change - unless that was a misprint?
6.  The perfect bike needs to be comfortable.  I loved my VFR800.  The symphony of those screaming gear-driven cams will live with me forever.  It was not a comfortable bike, even after I added Helibars.  I was good for a couple hours at a shot, and an all-day ride, even with a few stops, made me question my sanity.  My wrists ached if I overindulged in miles on the VFR.  I should be able to burn an entire tank of fuel before lunch and two or three more in the afternoon without complaining.
7.  The perfect bike needs to have heated grips as an option.  I used to think heated grips were a gimmick.  Then I bought electrically heated gloves and got a little more curious.  Then I got heated grips on my Triumph.  I ride a lot in cool  to cold weather - having heated grips as a factory option is not an imperative, but it is approaching one.
8.  The perfect bike needs to have adequate, but not excessive weight.  My last four bikes have all been what can probably be considered heavyweights.  Despite what the scooter crowd might say, weight has benefits for touring as well as in bucking wind, etc.  Still, I'm missing the simplicity, handling, and tire life that inherently comes from lighter weight bikes.

So the unicorn I am after seems be a light-weight, low-maintenance, comfortable bike with yesterday's simplicity.  I'll throw in that I want tomorrow's performance.  Can it be inexpensive too?
This doesn't exist and it probably won't.
Life is a series of trade offs, so maybe my next bike will be a lightweight bike like the previously mentioned Honda NC700 - at least the valves are rocker actuated and inspection/adjustment looks quite simple.
Or maybe it will be another sport tourer.  It seems like at some point I'll need to own a Yamaha FJR1300.
Possibly I could trade off on dealer network and finally buy a BMW?  Probably not, I'm just not ready to stand proudly and commit to being a BMW-guy.
Or maybe I'll go with something super simple like a Zero electric bike, and further my Goldwing riding for anything beyond the range of batteries.

What is odd is that my current Triumph Trophy checks most of the right boxes.  There are quite a few Triumph dealers, even if I've had some negative interactions with the closest.  It has shaft drive.  It has cruise control and is very comfortable with well-integrated heated grips.  Maintenance is all pretty easy, and valve inspection interval is a tolerable 20,000 miles.  While heavy, it is on par with other sport tourers and loses weight very quickly once in motion.
So why am I thinking about other bikes?  Oh yeah, warm weather ... and travel.