#column

“It’s clear to me that more of us are dying because there are too many people who really shouldn’t ride motorcycles and the industry and advocacy groups do nothing to discourage them.” – Me, “So Why Are we Dying?,” CityBike Magazine, August 2012.

Did ya check out our 2014 Holiday Gift Guide? It’s chock full of functional gift suggestions for adult motorcyclists. You know what it doesn’t have? A single motorcycle toy! What the hell is wrong us? Editors Scrooge and Grinch must be responsible for excluding the youth demographic.

The endless stream of clouds marched in from the Pacific like an invading army of sullen, gray giants. Pushed by the relentless northwesterly wind, they stacked up against the slopes of the Cascades where, squeezed between the earth and sky, their life’s blood was wrung from them in the form of a steady, soaking rain. Eventually, the clouds would lose enough of their moisture that they would overtop the great mountain range and continue on towards the east, but the process would take time, and until then, the rain would continue in dribs and drabs, possibly for days.

A long time ago, in a small town far, far away, the motorcycle dealership at which I worked hired a new service writer. His name was Bart. Days before Bart was to begin he was involved in an accident. Nothing critical, but his start date was pushed back giving him time to recuperate and deal with insurance, law enforcement and transportation matters.

WARNING: This column is completely SATIRICAL (I don’t really mean it). I actually love Peter Egan, but grew terribly jealous after a few years opening his fan mail at Cycle World. And PE loves me, too, a little anyway. At lunch during my last week at CW not long ago, he told me I was the guy to take over his column. Ha! Well, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, but in the words of John Paul Jones, I have not yet begun to write …

Spotting a young geisha in training, a “maiko” in Japanese, on the streets of Kyoto is always a bit unnerving. Despite her opulent silk kimono and the brightly painted bamboo and paper parasol she carries to shield herself from the heat of the summer sun, the first thing you notice is her lips. They are mesmerizing and you cannot look away. It’s an intentional effect that she has spent months learning to perfect and, against the traditional stark white facial makeup, offset by her dark eyes and framed by her carefully coifed hair, they form a shocking, unnaturally red bow that commands your complete attention.

I had the good fortune to be standing in a driveway in Northern Virginia last year staring at what appeared to be a box-stock, showroom condition, 1978 Yamaha SR500. Yamaha introduced the big thumper in ’78 but it was meant to evoke images of the earlier BSA Gold Star, G-50 Matchless, and Norton Manx, big sporting singles that had preceded it from a bygone, kick-start only, era. A time when men wore porridge pot helmets and had square cut jaws and steely faced grimaces that prevailed in places like the Isle of Man, or at Normandy and El Alamein as the case may be, if their racing season was interrupted by unpleasantness on the continent. This particular pristine big single had been purchased by its original owner 35 years ago from CycleSport in Northern Virginia, and here, several thousand miles and three and a half decades later, I had just bought it, along with an impressive collection of spares.

I knew Rodney Dickinson (name changed to protect the guilty), we had gone to church together for years and to be honest I had always thought he was a bit of a tool. Now he was at my door, hat in hand, asking about an old AMC Javelin I had in the driveway. No, he didn’t have any money but he had an old motorcycle. Would I be interested in a trade?

Did not start (DNS) is a term you may see from time to time on race result sheets. It denotes a competitor who for whatever reason was not able to make the start grid of a race. Racing is filled with unique terms and phrases.

Cash in hand, I watched as the delivery driver rolled my mighty GSX-R1100 into the back of his truck and then supervised while he fussed and fidgeted with the tie downs that would hold the bike steady on its final trip out of my life and into someone else’s. When the driver was done, I walked around the truck, gave each strap a pull to make sure that everything was right and then watched as he climbed into the cab. As he paused momentarily to check his map, I looked at the wad of bills in my hand and once more at the bike in the back of the truck. I could still stop this, I thought, but deep in my heart I knew it was better this way.

The Daytona 200 is the most important roadracing event in North America. Months of work, countless laps of tire testing, years of accumulated knowledge, they are all brought to bear on one piece of asphalt for one race event. If you win at Daytona, the ads will run on Monday, and your stock will have gone up considerably. If you are a motorcyclist it is the place to be in late February or early March.