Motorcycles, Post If You Got Em

But watch how not a single car veers away from him as he streaks up the center of the busy ave.

Yeah the camera lense gives a goofy perspective. Sometimes they are like a fish-eye & distort the view. There is that possibility that it's some good editing work, but with that bike it's totally believable.

Never liked lane splitting out in CA. Dangerous. Some people get pissed that they're stuck in traffic & swerve at you. Had that happen more than once ...

SMITTY wrote:Yeah the camera lense gives a goofy perspective. Sometimes they are like a fish-eye & distort the view. There is that possibility that it's some good editing work, but with that bike it's totally believable.

Never liked lane splitting out in CA. Dangerous. Some people get *censored* that they're stuck in traffic & swerve at you. Had that happen more than once ...

Yea but this guy is lane splitting at 100mph. Not the same. He's insane.

Yeah - that's suicide. Especially in MA or CA ..

"Season of the Bike"
Cold!

There is cold, and then there is cold on a motorcycle.

Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of sharp bone fallen from the skies of Hell to shred my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letter "M" is stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and weight as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a summer is worth any price.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes' and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sun that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.

Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed.

At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree- smells and flower- smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony.

Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous.

The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.

Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy.

I still think of myself as just another rider, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over a couple dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've ever done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep."
Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

by
Dave Karlotski.

HEAR! HEAR!

Cap,I don't know what you were drinking,probably some of SMITTY'S hooch,but outstanding post--you're quite the writeoligist

Great writing on that story. The last time I rode was over ten years ago, I almost killed my 15 yr. old neice when we went off the road and wrecked on her mom's Honda dual sport. We weren't wearing helmets, twilight, just came out of the woods onto a paved road, I made a fast leaning turn and she leaned off the wrong way, it pulled the bike off the road, she went over the handlebars and 50' down the pavement. The bike went back across the road and slid 100' down the street. I landed in a little open space in the woods, missed a telephone pole, rocks, trees. It was a miracle. Like slow motion, angels must have set us down, can't explain it to this day.

I restored about a dozen bikes prior to that. Tough call for me, don't know if I should ride again after my life was spared. This is the last bike I had, a 81 Suzuki GS 1000e. That bike was so much fun.

freetown fred wrote:Cap,I don't know what you were drinking,probably some of SMITTY'S hooch,but outstanding post--you're quite the writeoligist

I didn't write it, can't take credit. Written by, Dave Karlotski.

This is mine but I can't find any better pictures of it on my computer. I love to ride and my wife does too. Even if it's just a day trip to Atlantic City or Baltimore. We've been to New York several times for an annual motorcycle event held in June and also to Washington DC for Rolling Thunder. It's also brought my father and I closer together. We've always been close and did things together but as an adult I can go for a ride with him and we both have a blast.

Stoked, Cool! Now I am stoked too

stoked, I did the first Rolling Thunder run through D.C, in 1987--good you're still doing it my brother

Thanks guys!

Rolling Thunder is definitely something everyone should do -- at least once. It is an amazing experience. I don't know if I will get to go this year, I hope so. The hotel we stayed at last year is already booked full.

Here are a couple pics of some of my bikes.

Check this out, out riding today near Kempton, PA. The location is a drained PA Fish Commission Lake which is under construction with a new damn. His wife showed up with a Jeep Wrangler and we yanked him out. He drove into a marshy area which wasn't real obvious when there onsite.