You figure it out. Quite frankly, I have given up. Let me set the scene for

you. It’s late at night, and you are in the garage, working on your hike. You have been there way too long, and getting sluggish, but you have to finish the bike so you can go riding in the morning.

How can you tell you have been in that garage too long? Well, chances are you have been sitting on that stupid milk crate so long that you have a waffle pattern on your rear that won’t go away for three days.

Anyway, here you are, spinning nuts off and on bolts, tightening things up with screwdrivers and replacing worn-out things with new things. Your bike has a whole bunch of 12mm bolts and nuts on it, so you have a couple of varieties of 12mm tools: a combination wrench and a ratchet with a deep-wall socket.

You dribble a little blue Loctite on a bolt, slip on a nut, then snug it down with the 12mm open-end wrench. You then set the wrench down on the floor at your right side, get another bolt, repeat the Loctite process, twist down the nut and reach for the 12mm wrench.

It’s not there.

So you look down to see if you kicked it off to one side. Nothing. Nowhere.

At this point, you get up and walk around the bike. Maybe, just maybe, you kicked it real far. Off into a corner. Or under a box. Now you waste another 20 solid minutes looking for the wrench. To no avail.

Friend, you have entered The Zone. That wrench is gone forever. You will not find it again. Unless, that is, you don’t need it anymore. Let me give you an example: I used to ride Maicos a lot, and they had zillions of 13mm fasteners on them. So I stocked up on 13mm tools. One by one, I lost them, just like in the incident related earlier.

Then I started racing Suzuki RM250s, which use a lot of 8mm, 10mm, 12mm and 14mm fasteners. At that point, I started finding 13mm wrenches and sockets almost everywhere. They just appeared mysteriously. I would reach in the screwdriver drawer of my tool chest and there would be two 13mm open ends and a deep-wall 13mm socket I had lost two years ago.

Bizarre! The Zone struck once again.

The odd experience repeated itself a few years later when I started racing KTMs. Like most Euro bikes, the KTMs used 13mms all over the place. Well, almost all of my 12mm Suzuki tools were gone and my toolbox had strangely restocked itself with scads of 13mm tools.

Wouldn’t ya know it? One month into wrenching on the KTM, slowly, but surely, the 13s vaporized and the 12s started reappearing!

The Zone also displays subtle variations on that theme. Let’s say you need a straight-slot screwdriver. Okay, you reach in the screwdriver drawer and almost everything in there is a Phillips-head. A half-hour later, you need a Phillips screwdriver, and it’s straight-slot city!

The power of The Zone does not end at your tool box. Nope. It extends into your gear bag. You will find six left gloves and only one right—and the right will be too tight, worn out, or both. You will find missing socks that smell so bad that bugs won’t hide in them—but you will not find the socks that you absolutely know you put in the bag the night before.

What strange powers are at work to create situations like these? Who knows? We can assume that it makes the Bermuda Triangle look pale by comparison.

Some other facets of the Zone: Your memory will fail you during the strangest times. Example: You are at the gas station getting ready to add four gallons of gas to your can. A gallon is sloshing around in the bottom. You already added a bottle of two-stroke oil to the can right before you left the house. Or did you?

You remembered picking up a plastic container of oil and . . . wait a minute! There’s a bottle of oil in the back of the truck. Or has it been there for a while? Should you play it safe and add too much oil? After all, too little oil could seize the motor. Confusion is the norm in The Zone.

Even worse. You get to the riding area and as you hoist that full five-gallon can of gas to pour it into your tank, you stop in your tracks. Did you put oil in the gas back at that station? Your mind will simply lock and you might spend most of your riding day sitting on a rock, confused.

This is the nature of The Zone. Losing things. Lapses of memory. Unexplained gaps in the thinking process. However, there is an answer, and to play it safe, I wrote it down and taped it to the top of my helmet—and the helmet is right over there by the … the … hmmmm.

Never mind.