Weird Things in the Queue

For the last 20 years that I've written for Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly Magazine, the ideas have overflowed the magazine's interest by a long ways. I built a website with a queue of articles and stories for my editors to pick-and-choose from and the occasional outlier initially would see original life on this blog. Honestly, while the editors might have said those outliers were "ugly orphans" that didn't contain enough reader interest to see the light of publication, I always thought they were the closest to the "geezer with a grudge" concept: me being as pissed off as I often am in real life. So, in my mind, when I published something substantial here I figured it was too pissed off, too radical, too funny, or too weird for publication elsewhere. In other words, my best stuff.

Now that MMM is unofficially a dead letter (the last paper edition went out with the 2018/2018 Winter Issue), all of those unpublished orphans are getting moved up in the GWAG queue. More often than not, I've used the blog as a place to comment on things happening in motorcycling or Minnesota that didn't really warrant a whole GWAG column. A couple of months after MMM published an article, it would also show up here. As of today, I have shifted my backup schedule on this blog to a schedule that begins to empty that queue every week or two until it runs out (as of today, sometime in early 2020. (Yeah, I know. I should find a more productive hobby.)

I hate to see the end of MMM, but we had a damn good run together. We almost made it 20 years together. MMM published my first article for the magazine in October of 1999; "What Are We Riding For." It is still a question I asked myself every day I taught MSF "safety courses" and every time I see a pirate riding a 900 pound hippobike wearing a protective headband and his underwear (or "panties" as my wife calls it).