#Whatever

We rode back from the big Six-Pack Superbike Shootout covered in glory, triumphant heroes who had conquered all the logistics and Russian nested-doll email chains that culminated in the whole MO crew getting to flog the latest greatest high-tech hardware around the crazy twists and turns of Laguna Seca raceway. A couple of us even had the good fortune to ride a couple of the bikes home afterward. (One of us even got to ride up!) Followed by another couple of days roosting all over hell and back for the street portion of the test. It’s a lot like a military operation, it really is, minus the shooting. In fact there’s shooting, too, but photos and video instead of projectiles. Anyway, when it’s all over and everybody returns home to their loved ones (with only one flesh wound), you seriously do feel like you’ve accomplished something. Or helped accomplish something in my case, since E-i-C Duke and Troy S. did most of the heavy logisticing.

You really do have to be careful what you wish for. Before I came to Motorcycle.com 1.5 years ago, my tastefully graying hair had me relegated to “testing” the occasional cruiser or scooter at the Big Magazine when nobody more competent could be found. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was shuffling around the office rooting through musty old files in my slippers, Bartleby the Scrivener style, to put together some sort of retrospective. Or maybe rounding up six old superbikes from my era and getting them running so the popular kids could go out and ride them. It was very, ahhh, peaceful. It felt like the long slide toward the abyss had begun…

I hate to bring it up and taunt the gods, but I have to for the sake of literature (sarcasm). I have administered some pretty gnar soft-tissue damage to myself, mostly thanks to my abortive attempts to race my old SRX-6 at Willow Springs years ago. But the only bone I ever broke was a collar one courtesy of a hopped-up Zephyr 550 that unexpectedly expectorated me onto Pacific Coast Highway decades ago at the end of a horrendous tankslapper as I was riding home one night. It hurt for a long time. Now I can’t even remember which collarbone it was? Thank you Jesus.

In honor of National Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the automobile drivers who don’t try to kill us every day. “Clueless cagers” is a common theme wherever motorcycle people congregate and with good reason, but I think the vast majority of car drivers (of which I am one) mean us no harm and actually wish us well. If they do plow into us, most of the time it’s just an accident with mitigating circumstances. It really is human nature to become less than hyper-vigilant when you’re safe, warm, comfortable and entertained inside a nicely upholstered soundproof box the government mandates must be able to bang into things at speed without injuring the occupants. I wonder how much the government spends crashing perfectly good new vehicles every year? Maybe if cars were less up-armored, people would pay more attention?

The good news is I finally found new digs in beautiful Orange County, California. The bad news is I had to team up with the ex-wife to make it happen financially. Don’t cry for me, Argentina, so far it’s working out better than I could’ve hoped: Ex is the perfect housemate in that she tends to not be around for three or four days at a stretch, and when she does appear, she’s got the Master Boudoir, whose bathroom opens onto the backyard/patio. In exchange, I get the Big Office, which opens onto (now that I punched a hole in the wall) the big old 2-car garage out front. Which is all I really need in a house. We’ve achieved separation of church and state, so to speak, both of us get to live in a much sweller place than either of us could afford alone, and no motorcycle (or resident) should have to sleep under the stars anymore unless it wants to.

By the time I made it to Buttonwillow Raceway, it was 8:20 am, and private trackday honoree Jerome the jeans mogul had already landed on the front straight in Steve Rapp’s Cirrus SR22, with Steve Rapp at the controls. This is how you do a trackday when you’re worth a reported $350 million. Not only do you get Daytona 200 winner/multi-time champ Rapp to give you private instruction all day, you also get him to fly you back and forth.

Lead Image by Alfonse Palaima MOTOINSIDER:

I should know better than to say yes when Brad says let’s go on an off-road adventure, but that weekend it was either Death Valley or start deconstructing 18 years worth of worldly possessions for an impending housing relocation. I still had the KTM 1190 Adventure in my garage, and how many times would those two things align? Also, Brad’s rides are less death-defying now that he’s paraplegic. How he rides his DR350, I know not. Nor how he walks, but he does both amazingly well, looking only a little like Mr. Natural sometimes if he’s had a cocktail.

People occasionally drop me a note or friend me up on Facebook and say, “Hey! I used to love your ‘Bitter Little Man’ column when you were at Motorcyclist.” I always love fan mail, everybody loves a little pat on the back. But hey, that was a long time ago … and I’ve been cranking out new pearls of wisdom every three weeks here on MO for a year now. Hey, Lama, how about a little something, you know, for the effort?

As I chased my little compadre Tom Roderick once again into the breech, up California’s astounding S-22, at a speed probably quite a bit above the limit, him on a brand-spanking BMW and me on a 126-horsepower KTM Adventure, I had the thought again that often pops into my head when we’re out riding, especially on this road which I have decided is my favorite: Why doesn’t somebody take this thing away from me? (It’s what James Thurber’s mom said, waggling a revolver, in his short story The Night the Bed Fell.) Everything else that feels half as crazy and exhilarating as riding a fast motorcycle up and down this cliffhanger of a mountain road is not just illegal, it’s impossible. For the average stiff, anyway. The only other things that could approach the adrenaline level this place induces might be if you were one of those guys who owns a Mig or your own racetrack or distillery or high-end women’s shoe store.

When I backed into the motojournalism biz all those years ago, I pretty much just wanted to tear around on motorcycles without giving much thought to the hows and whys. Now that I’ve matured, and have had the amazingly good fortune to spend time with the brilliant people who design and build the things (and read a lot of Kevin Cameron columns), the really fascinating part is how organizations of people come together to produce (or not) such complex assemblages. It really does take a village.

Since my babies left me, I need a new place to dwell. I’ve been renting the same little bungalow in a beach-close part of Orange County where I could never afford to buy since, ahhh, 1996, but it may be time for a relocation. Most people who visit “LA” think of it as one big mess containing Orange County, and in fact, “the Southland,” as the newscasters call it, really is one big sprawl, though the names of what were once separate towns remain as reference points. How we keep from going crazy in all the traffic, which is what everybody from out of town wants to know, is that most of us settle into one little corner of the sprawl as close to work as possible – and avoid, fear and diss the rest of it. That or ride a motorcycle. Without lane-splitting, I never would’ve made it this long. Okay, without lane-splitting and the Pacific Ocean a 15-minute bicycle ride away plus so many great places to ride motorcycles once you break free of the megalopolis.

Well, some people are always going to be opposed to it aren’t they? Progress that is. No matter what motorcycle you’re writing about, you can count on there being at least one guy who’ll pop up with: How is this thing any better than my ’84 Sabre (Nighthawk, Vulcan, Magna, Midnight Maxim, et al), which cost half as much (in 1984 dollars) and is twice as fast and has never let me down in 86 years of ad nauseum …

I was excited as the next guy to hear about Wayne Rainey’s new organization, KRAVE, galloping to the rescue of American Roadracing (say, didn’t that used to be a magazine?), but it did get me reminiscing over what great times we had spectating over the years – even being able to participate a few times – and hoping Wayne and crew won’t be closing the barn door after the horses have all retired to Las Vegas or been incarcerated.

I have a lovely Shoei Neotec I got about six months ago, which I have worn extensively and adore a little more every time I wear it. There aren’t many helmets I can wear for 12 hours at a stretch. It’s a beautiful cranberry sparkly color, but it didn’t take long for it to fall off my motorcycle seat onto the pavement, where the paint got gouged on the rear – a little ding. Dammit. I know there are people out there who would follow the rules and mail the thing to Shoei for inspection, like you’re supposed to do. I am not one of them.