Sorry about the brief absence (not that surprising, since I am the absent.canadian).
A good bit of this past weekend was spent engaging in retail therapy. Nothing exciting, though - mostly just needed things like groceries, cleaning supplies and toilet paper.
And for my friends living in northern latitudes, it’s currently 22 degrees Celsius in Raleigh. Yes, that’s bona fide T-shirt weather. I drove the motorcycle into work this morning, and I didn’t even need gloves.
Please - don’t hate me.
We’re such a funny lot of people. We’ll tell you all sorts of things to make you believe that motorcycles are the next closest thing to sex with seventy-one beautiful virgins. (editor’s note: I’m not exactly sure who came up with the idea that one virgin, much less seventy-one virgins would be some sort of good thing … but the mixed metaphor works, so we’ll go with it)
Anyways, I rode the bike in to work this morning. It was three degrees Celsius when I left (that’s about 38 Fahrenheit for the ‘mericans), and I considered my decision as I sat at a stoplight, watching the little white clouds of my breath puff out from under my helmet.
I have a perfectly good car sitting in my driveway that will convey me to work in all the climate-controlled luxury and safety that the Germans can muster. Instead, I chose a rickety little contraption with the same amount of bodywork as a Sports Illustrated model has bikini. The engine makes a lot of noise, it shakes, and it’s bolted directly to the frame - a great way to transmit all of those vibrations directly into my body. Sure it’s fast, but it comes at the expense of being exposed to all of Mother Nature’s glory, including rain, bugs, fog, bird shit, dust, and even the occasional rodent that strays in my path. What’s normally a dull thud in my car is a live wide-screen demonstration of seven hundred pounds of metal and flesh versus a few ounces of four-legged fur when it happens on the motorcycle.
The odd part is that we’re proud of this. My head is held high through the rain and cold, and I wear it like some sort of badge of honor that I don’t need one of those big windshields to ward off the nasties.
The rationale for all of this came just before I pulled into work. A woman in a minivan passed me going the opposite direction, and I had a split-second to observe the going-ons inside. Phone clutched in one hand and kiddie-toy in the other, she had a mixed expression of bewilderment and irritation. I counted two kids in the back - mouths wide open in mid-scream, no doubt. The minivan had all the usual telltale marks of a mommy-taxi: a thousand door-dings from the WalMart parking lot, little stickers on the inside window, and the ghost of a thousand kool-aid stains haunting it.
Considering this rather extreme alternative, there’s something comforting about a few bugs and some chilly knees, and the fact that God himself couldn’t make a cellphone loud enough to be heard over the drone of my bike’s engine. What the motorcycle afford a person isn’t noise and bugs; it’s the peace and quiet from everyday life.
