#time

I rode in the desert for the first time in the spring of 1969. I was fourteen, and I owned a 100cc Bridgestone. Although I had spent some time on a friend’s Hodaka and had done some trail riding on a 50cc Suzuki, I wasn’t prepared for the experience. On the wrong bike, with the wrong tires, wearing the wrong gear, I fell and then fell some more, and hurt myself in places where I didn’t even know I had places.

Have a father? Plan on celebrating Father’s Day? Well, it’s time to get to gift giving. You’ve been searching for that perfect gift for the guy who’s spent your entire life being your dad, but you can’t decide what to get. Is your dad a motorcyclist? If so, things just got easier. Not only because buying any biker motorcycle-related stuff will be an instant win, but also because MO put together a super rad Father’s Day Buyer’s Guide with gifts guaranteed to win you the coveted favorite child award. Rest assured, when your pops tears the wrapping off of one of these bad boys, he’ll forget all about that other child and his lame robin’s egg blue tie.

Well, what shall I write about this month? I am kind of a left-wing liberal, so naturally I want the free and/or easy stuff, the low-hanging fruit… you know what was freer and easier when I got to California in 1988? Time. There was lots more of it then. It was kind of a settled matter that the magazine I worked for would come out monthly, so you knew what you had to do and you did it and the pages got filled. Looking back upon it from today’s 24/7 (ok, it’s more 24/5 or /6 here at MO), it was a remarkably stress-free and pleasantly paced existence most of the time, though we of course complained constantly how overworked and underpaid we were. Come to think of it, there were more than a few late nights when we were on deadline – a thing that really doesn’t happen anymore now that every day is a deadline – but not really a hard deadline since there are no longer any actual presses to stop.