Geezer with a Grudge: blind lizards motorcycle club

Showing posts with label blind lizards motorcycle club. Show all posts

Jun 25, 2011

Riding to Work

Another Ride to Work Day passed, on the 18th. Did you ride?

Hell, I didn't even work, but I did take the bike out for a trip into school for a meeting, a collection of errands and a little dirt road cruising. In the summer, most of my work days come on the weekends. Monday is "reserved" for hellish meetings (of which I was forced to partake) and boxes-stacked-on-the-bike expeditions to Fed-X for my occasional eBay sale shipping trip.

As usual, you could count the number of motorcycles in the St. Paul and I35E traffic on the fingers of one hand. That whole "start seeing motorcycles" BS campaign needs an associated "start riding your damn motorcycles" poster for cagers. How the hell does the ABATE crowd expect to be seen if they don't have the balls to ride?

Yeah, I'm pissed off. I spent at least 45 minutes editing helmet-cam footage in hopes of finding a motorcycle or two to post on the Geezer YouTube site and here only to find three other riders in 2 hours of freeway, business traffic, and highway footage. I think it's time to start forcing motorcyclists to retake the driving test every year to prove they can still ride. Screw the statistics. There may be 180,000 licensed riders in Minnesota, but they don't deserve to be licensed.

As for the Teabaggers and wingnut hate mongers who did their damned best to inspire the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (regardless of the shooter's eventual motivation), I hope there is a hell because that's where you'll be spending eternity. You don't put a bull's eye on public officials, shriek "Don't retreat, reload," and agitate crazy boneheads to violence without consequences, unless you're a wingnut. Giffords is one of the good guys. There aren't many of those left in public office.

Jun 14, 2011

A Two Wheeled Party

My kind of club ("the Blind Lizards Motorcycle Club meets exactly one day a year") and I can't help but admire the art. The event is the Blind Lizard Picnic and it's held at Nicollet Island, Father's Day, Sunday, June 19. Only bicycles and motorcycles are invited, no cages. It's advertised as a family event.

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"Nobody else does this emperor's clothes kind of thing!" Kevin Cameron August 2009
"Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing." Aristotle
"You are a motorcycle bigot." Known and Unknown
"This is not a video game. This is your life. Ride to stay alive." Mrs. Elvy Day
“If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” Hunter Thompson
"Truth is more of a stranger than fiction . . . It is not worth while to strain one's self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn't." Mark Twain

Warning: If you're looking for a pleasant conversation about motorcycling from a frozen-north Minnesota Nice perspective, good luck with your search. As Bobby Dylan once said, "it ain't me, babe."

This blog was a companion to my MMM magazine column. MMM died and went to website oblivion in early 2020, but I have continued to find things to squawk about even after myasthenia gravis doubled my vision and may have ended my life on a motorcycle.

Google has continued to defeature and abandon Blogger, including making it very difficult to include pictures, video, and audio. I have copied all of my old stuff to my Wordpress blog, GeezerwithAGrudge.com, and there are now essays on that site that I won't be duplicating on this site. AND you can subscribe to Wordpress blogs.

The Geezer Story

I stumbled upon this column name (Geezer with a Grudge) almost 20 years ago, in 1999. The first Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly editor I worked with, in late 1999, complained that the magazine was getting no mail and the editors wanted to know if any readers were still out there. I fired off a sarcastic note, as a joke, intended to provide a little humor and some feedback. He published it as an article and later called me to say he'd received more mail on that letter than he'd received in the past year! I followed that with an offer to write a monthly column attempting to piss off a particular section of the magazine's readership to see if that tactic would generate some mail.

It did, probably more regularly than the magazine wanted at times, and I wrote a monthly column for MMM until the magazine died in 2018.

I plan to post an occasional old Geezer article into the blog, followed by short comments about the current status of my perspective on our activity/sport/vehicle of choice.