Motorcycling truth.
A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between
driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference
between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our
time sealed in boxes, and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle
us from home-box to work-box to
store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air,
temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.
On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems
strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push
through it, and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel
the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of
sun that fall through them.
I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and
around, wider than Pana-Vision and IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling
or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom
telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the
pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic
ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole
songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the
air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells
become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells
and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant
symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's
as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only
the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a
summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume
and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an
electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It
tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed,
apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles
flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a
decompressing plane.
Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy
machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized
prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold
lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for
bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a
motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over
a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade
one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride
one of the best things I've done.
Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The
air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep,
sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and
exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's
no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.
Author unknown.
American Biker Party
Our Mission is what every true American wants!!
"We, the members of the American Biker Party are in favor of returning government to the original intent of our founding fathers."
