"….been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time"

HOT DAMN!

Beast is finally back in action, and she's in fine form. Every last vestige of injector bronchitis is gone, she’s wearing deep rubber front and rear (...just scuffed enough to be broken in) has two working mirrors all the way to six o’clock, and she’s freshly tuned to boot. She’s got a few scars here and there, but overall, she hasn’t felt like this in years. I’d pretty much forgotten what crisp throttle response was like, and had been riding hesitantly because of the sketchiness of the tires.

This morning, once I reloaded the drivers and remembered how to ride again, I was actually able to relax and focus on the ride instead of fretting over the machine. As a result, without even thinking about it, I opted for the more circuitous, rolling, winding “motorcycle friendly” route instead of the expeditious—but dull—superslab I’ve been favoring on four wheels for so long. Outstanding.

On the way home, I noticed something else interesting. My homeward commute on four wheels is a long string of counting down the miles, endlessly flipping through the radio stations, tedium piled upon tedium up to the last mile coming down the lane. But today, time and distance was irrelevant. I was, as the young'uns say, 'in the moment,' and the otherwise incessantly granular trip home was transformed into a delightful, fluid moment.
______________________________

This is my 300th post on RLYMI, which will be five years old in a week or so. That works out to a post every six days or so. I’m no Great Orange Satan or anything, but I’m pretty pleased with that posting schedule, given all that has transpired during those years. Personally, I think most of what I’ve posted stands up pretty well.

But of course, I’m biased.

Mission creep

Okay, so I started writing about riding, and more and more things have less and less to do with riding. That's too bad. I'll write about riding again when I think I have anything interesting to say about it. Or not interesting for that matter--it's my damn blog.

--The Management

Writer's block

Uh, yeah, there's this one thing I've been trying to get written and posted, for like three years in one form or another apparently, and it seems like it's more of a kidney stone than a post, because I CAN'T SEEM TO GET IT OUT OF ME and I keep not getting it written because the ESSENCE of it keeps eluding me, or transmogrifying, or I keep stepping back and looking at it differently, and then I think it's the MOST FASCINATING THING EVAR and then it occurs to me that really it's dumb as dirt, and then I notice certain aspects of my writing that suddenly I'm all self-conscious about, and oh yeah THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK. Hey! Look over there ! A bright shiny thing!

That is all.

Personal commentary on 'Coda'

Ha! Just kidding.

Also, the Led Zeppelin album that nobody remembers.

Coda

I've been meaning to tend to this unfinished business for a long time, but always turned away at the last minute. It seems like an eternity ago when I started writing about riding, and at that time riding meant something completely different to me. It was an alternate universe to the daily grind, one that I was delighted to explore at length and that satisfied some intellectual curiosity.
What I enjoyed most, and the blog clearly reflects that, was to discover thoughtful pieces that others had written about riding that belied the common perception of motorcycling and motorcyclists. I felt there was an imaginary reader I was writing for, a singular audience who I was conducting a private conversation with. Moving out of an old life to a new one changed riding from an escape (that I no longer had so much need for) to a--dare I say it?--chore that had little to recommend it. I tried commuting on Beast 120 miles a day for a brief period, and abandoned that to a mind-numbing routine of getting up hellishly early and going to bed hellishly early.
Riding is not the thing that makes sense of my life anymore. But I hope it will eventually find its rightful place as relaxation, as recreation, and as a portal to an internal intellectual world that I still cherish. Just remember:

"We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird...But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. If you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles."

HST

PS: If any member of that mystery audience is still out there, drop me a line.

Analogy

If you look up in the top right corner, you'll see a little button which says "Next Blog." I've been using this nifty little feature a lot recently in my downtime, and I have come to a conclusion:

"Blogging" : "writing" as "Karaoke" : "Singing"

I certainly don't put my own humble efforts on any pedestal, and there are a group of bloggers (some I know personally, some I've admired from afar) whose work I hold in high esteem for both content and execution.

But golly whillikers, folks...people do actually read these things sometimes.