Mending

Some of you don't know this, but now that I have sold my motorcycle, I will tell you a dirty little secret.  Once upon a time, Bigskeptic was a dumb, dumb rider and crashed that poor little sucker.  My bike was a 2009 Moto Guzzi V7C...and it was at the same time one of the loves of my life, and also a very bad decision. I bought the damned thing based on an emotional attachment with the look, feel, sound...instead of analytically and logically.  It was the romance of the bike, the Italian-ness, how unique it was, the fact that it was mainly hand-built. I loved that damn thing. It was gorgeous. It handled like an Italian bike should...crisp and forgiving but agile.


It also handles curbs and sliding across concrete rather well, too.

The Guzzi was healed entirely in about the same amout of time as it took me.

I'm reminded of my Guzzi romance because on Tuesday I was rear ended in my CT, which pissed off my previous whiplash injury from the Guzzi crash.  I spent Valentine's Day with cops and EMTs and nurses and doctors and xray techs...and honestly, my crash/police assistance/ambulance ride/hospital ranks right up there with some of my previous VDay experiences. 

I'm a little stoved up, and my neck is still pretty sore, but I'm alright. You'd think that after so many injuries from sports and bikes and being clumsy...wrists, ankles, knees, hips, neck, etc, that I would be more likely to sit back and take inventory and decide in Animal Farm terms: Two Wheels Bad Four Wheels Good.  While my first motorized love will always be the four wheeled type, I can't stop thinking of life on only two.

Ya see, motorcycles scare me.  They do---honestly, I have a deep reverence for them, a slight fear of what they are capable of doing both to your body and to your adrenaline. Just like everyone else, I know people that were killed on bikes. Some of them were doing impossibly stupid shit, and some of them were just cruising along.  I tend to be of the cruiser variety on a bike, and have zero daredevil temptation. I don't want to be owned by fear, but I'm also not going to tempt fate.

My desire for a bike started after reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." The author, Pirsig, says: “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.”  We say the same thing time and again---that it's not the destination but the journey. I see so many people on a terribly boring journey day to day, traveling within these safe little boundaries they've defined for themselves. I've hurt myself along the way, and I hate to scare those that worry about me, but I do believe I will continue on the side of the mountain without as much regard to the top.  I will always think more with my heart than my head politically, in purchases, in love, and of course---with my cars and bikes.

Skeptically Yours.