Show Stoppers

For the last month or so, my 71-year-old vision problems have multiplied into what appears to be a show stopper for what I had hoped might be my last years as a motorcyclist. Last year, about the same time, I had a sudden bout with double-vision that took me out of the driver’s seat until I ended up with a variation in my glasses prescription that involved prisms. (I have no idea how that works, but it did for about a year.) Early March, this year, it happened again, but way worse. Another visit to the optometrist and I learn that my eyes’ offset has flipped and that is an indication of something serious going wrong. So far, none of the various tests I’ve undergone have enlightened either me or the docs. 

I don’t know about you, but I am not inclined to be a one-eyed motorcyclist. I’ve put in a bunch of miles on the bicycle this spring, one-eyed, and it sucks. When I was young and even more foolish than now, I imagined that losing my hearing would be worse than losing my eyesight. I’ve been involved in music for my whole adult (and most of my youth) life and my hearing was once something I took some pride in. Old age, noise exposure, stupidity, and bad luck have taken a toll on my hearing. I’m at the age Sir George Martin was when he decided it was time to hang up his golden ears. I don’t think I ever had golden ears, but they were pretty damn good for a lot of years. Now, they aren’t. Following that realization comes the current problem with my eyes.

Luckily, my close vision hasn’t been much effected. Which is why I can write this without being driven nuts. All this likely means that I might be selling off my only motorcycle, my 2008 Yamana WR250X yet this spring. I sold my V-Strom last spring, after discovering that I no long had the strength or will to wrestle with a 400 pound motorcycle. If I were capable of loving a motorcycle, that amazing 2004 650 was as close as I will ever get. It just never let me down and was always a delight to ride. My WR is a close second, but I will likely never end up spending as much long-distance, day-after-day time on the WR unless I get a couple more years with some cure for this vision problem. If I sell the WR, I will likely be done as a motorcyclist.

I might also be done as a cage driver. My overall sight in my right eye (the good one) is pretty sad. My distance judgement was never great, even with glasses, but one-eyed it is non-existent. My father had similar probably at about my age and ended up having his license taken away after several rear end crashes that were all his fault. I am not going to do that. I have always believed that one crash in the back of another vehicle should disqualify someone from ever driving anything heavier than a bicycle. It means you are stupid or physically disabled enough to be incapable of safe driving. That applies to me, too.

Easy Fix, Never Happen

All Rights Reserved © 2011 Thomas W. Day

The news report read, "Hennepin County attorneys say that on the morning of Oct. 7, 2010, 20-year-old Amanda Elizabeth Manzanares was driving without insurance and under a restricted instructional permit when she drove her car across the centerline of Excelsior Boulevard in Minnetonka and struck a man riding a motorcycle. The man suffered severe injuries that have, to-date, required $500,000 in surgeries and other medical care. . .

"After retrieving Manzanares' cell phone at the scene, Minnetonka police investigators found a series of text message exchanges and calls on Manzanares' phone that were made and received in the minutes surrounding the collision.

"But, according to court documents, Manzanares denied using her phone at the time of the accident, telling Minnetonka police she had “blacked-out,” was tired, that she hadn't taken prescribed medication and that she was still getting comfortable as a driver."

This is what passes for "news" in modern America. Tainted, slanted "information" intended to inflame the unwashed, illiterate masses without providing any solutions, context, or depth. Back when he was funny, Dennis Miller defined television news as a series of unimportant but bad things we could all be glad didn't happen to us.

Don't get me wrong, Manzanares ought to prosecuted for nearly killing an innocent bystander with her miserable, incompetent (for whatever reason) driving. But by shining a bright light on this pitiful excuse for a human being, the law and the media are doing their damndest to distract the blame from the real criminals in this all-too-common sort of incident; cell phone providers. On one hand, television reminds us at every cop-show opportunity that any cell phone can be tracked if it is on. If it can be tracked, its trajectory and velocity can be determined. If all that is true, any communications attempted while the phone is in motion can be terminated. End of problem.

Driving while yapping on a cell phone use is clearly an example of driving while incapacitated. Every study that has examined the relationship between driving drunk and driving while asking "whut r u doin?" has found that cell phones are linked to driving mental retardation. One study (published in Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society) found in simulated driving conditions that drunks (at least those with a 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level) are better drivers than cell phone yappers. None of the drunks crashed in that study, while three cell phone morons did.

Why it took a study to identify this character of cell phone abuse says more about academia, society, and capitalism than it tells us about the actual problem. Any half-conscious motorcyclist knows that you stay as far from a cell phone user as the road permits. They are erratic, marginally conscious, and as dangerous as gangbangers. I'm no less worried about riding near a cell phone user than I am about trying to get by someone who is tossing out the occasional empty beer can or has an Easy Rider rifle rack loaded with automatic weapons.

If you're brand new to this planet and these United States, you might ask, "Why is this tolerated if the solution is so simple?" The reason, dear alien life-form, is money. The slim splinter that remains of our democracy is dedicated to the idea that the profits of a few override the security, health, safety, and quality of life of the nation and its not-rich citizens. Those trust-funded, grossly overpaid and under-skilled corporate executives who are the only real beneficiaries of the death and destruction their products cause (not the cigarette executives, this time) are more important than the lives of every other person on public roads. Why that argument doesn't hold true for alcohol-pushing corporate executives is a little inconsistent, but I'd bet it's because the cell phone execs are richer.

Of course, my electronic trigger isn't the solution I'd recommend in an ideal world; too passive and forgiving. Personally, I'd rather see cell phone manufacturers forced to install a spring-loaded 4" spike in every cell phone that would be triggered by cell phone use at any velocity exceeding 10mph. At worst, the cell phone user would have some part of his/her anatomy skewered for violating rational cell phone laws. At best, one more idiot would be spiked from the gene pool.

Honestly, I don't expect either idea to take hold in my lifetime or before the next comet blasts an idiot wind across the planet and restarts the evolutionary cycle. The rapid degeneration of our species depends on the right of the dumbest and most corrupt evil spawn's access to every damn toy their idiot heart desires. So, my favorite solution is dead in its tracks. Second, the attention deficit disordered have grown to depend on knowing what their friends and family are doing at this very second and they are perfectly happy to kill anyone in their path to have that knowledge. What's the worst thing that can happen, being prosecuted for "felony texting and driving?" That sounds slightly more serious than unpaid parking tickets.

A Partial Gearhead

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

Most of my friends think of me as a gearhead. It's true that I like almost all kinds of gear; motorcycles, guitars and other musical instruments, recording studio equipment, computers, manufacturing and machining tools, almost everything mechanical or electrical. It's not true that :I like all things mechanical, though. I particularly dislike gear that has passed into obsolescence and continues to waste human resources and energy; like cars. I don't like driving them, riding in them, thinking about them, and, especially, I hate owning them.

My wife ruined her knees walking on concrete, while working for one of the big box hardware stores. So, riding a motorcycle is no longer a pleasant pastime for her. For our anniversary this year we took a cage trip south along the Mississippi into Iowa. She gets carsick, so traveling by cage, plane, boat, or bus isn't all that pleasant for either of us. She usually drives and that's fine with me. Other than the knee issues and the motion sickness, she's a fine traveling companion.

I hate driving cages. There are two too many wheels and the damn things give me an unpleasant feeling of instability and cumbersome awkwardness that is mind-numbing and a little scary. For three to four months every winter, I'm stuck in my Ford Escort wagon wishing bus service was even close to practical where I live. No, having a "better car" wouldn't help. I've driven Beemers, Porsches, stockcars, dune-buggies (my favorite cage), and a collection of staid Eurotrash luxury sedans and unpronounceable Italian "sports" cages and they all leave me bored. Convertibles are almost tolerable. If I could poke out the windshield, they'd be better. If I could legally drive a dune-buggy wearing a heated suit and helmet, I'd be about as happy in a cage as I'm likely to get. However, if I have to be in a cage I'd rather be a passenger than a driver. Being a passenger in a cage is at least productive, since I can write stuff like this as I ride along isolated from the wind, weather, and all sensations of speed and motion. If I'm going to be caged, I prefer the biggest cage I can get into: buses, trains, and such.

Floating past my favorite letter roads along WI35 was particularly frustrating. My GPS is littered with routes I would be taking along the river, if I were on a vehicle that well-tolerated dirt roads and twisty two-lanes. That kind of path is a perfect formula for agitating my wife's nausea. And her getting sick doesn't do my traveling Jones much good. I can hang upside down in a moving box while reading a technical journal without a lick of stomach instability, but if someone else gets sick near me I'm following their path like a cow heading to the barn. Barfing is something else that never happens to me on a motorcycle.

I keep hearing about "man's love affair with the automobile," while talking heads try to explain why we're pouring money into the black hole of cage manufacturing. I don't get it. What's to love about a cage? To me, that's like loving a chair or a wheelbarrow. At best, a cage is another utilitarian device that has outlived its usefulness; like horse-drawn plows or buggy whips or cell phones. We only cling to the damn things in the US because we haven't been bright enough to maintain our mass transit infrastructure. We're going to pay for that within a few years.

In San Francisco or New York, I could rent or borrow a cage on the rare occasion I need one. Where I live, the bus stops running anywhere near my home at 6PM. A decade ago my route ran till midnight, but that schedule ended after the current administration took office. I don't expect to live long enough to see real mass transit in the Cities. We're way too conservative and oblivious to reality to put rail or any other alternative on the burner until the last pump drips its final drop of gas. Then, in true conservative fashion, we'll shriek "the sky is falling" and it will.

We made the Wisconsin-and-back trip safely. She didn't get sick. I didn't throw a boredom-inspired tantrum. That's as good as cage traveling gets for us.

The next day I mounted up and headed back to Wisconsin. Almost immediately, I got stuck behind a gaggle of doddering cheese-burners on WI35, but at the first county road (which happened to be gravel), I split off and got back on my pace. Within a couple of hours, I had almost forgotten the torture of being trapped and strapped behind a windshield, listening to poorly selected radio music or talking head babble. On a real vehicle of transportation (physical and mental), I was swinging through the countryside with my own music in my head, pacing my own rhythms, thinking my own thoughts, enjoying the ride and the place. I hate cages and love motorcycling.

Highway IQ

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

I stare into every car, truck, van, or SUV that shares the roadway with me. Women probably think I'm checking them out. Sometimes there might be an element of that. I'm human. I stare at guys just as often, though. No matter what they think, I'm not checking them out. I am stereotyping them, though. I know that's politically incorrect, but there it is. Like the marketing gurus say, "impressions are everything." Or "image," something like that. I don't have time to get to know these people. I'm not even interested in doing so. I just want to know, as quickly as possible, what kind of hazard they present to me. Cops call this "profiling." Lawyers get really upset at this practice. So sue me.

The average person has an IQ of 100 points. I grant that and start from there. My built-in point system adds or subtracts from that number almost as quickly as I can make out the interior of the vehicle. From there, I either disregard the driver, more or less, as a threat or apply evasive tactics to get as much distance between me and the hazard. The dumber the driver, by my IQ accounting system, the quicker I want to escape their sphere of disaster influence. You probably do the same thing, either more or less aggressively than me.

• Driver is in a 4(or more)-wheel vehicle: -5 points (How smart do you have to be to drive a cage?)

• Driver is a cop. This class of government official has an inflated sense of driving skill, not reflected in performance. They are prone to make sudden, irrational moves when their radio distracts them. They regularly ignore stop signs and stop lights. They scare the crap out of other drivers, making everyone in their vicinity a little less skilled and attentive: -10 points.

• Coffee, hairbrush, and/or cigarette in hand: -15 points for each item

• Driver is tipped at 45 degrees, so that his (always a guy) head is right under the rear view mirror: -20 points (This appears to be a Minnesota thing, because I've never seen it anywhere else, but it always means the driver is drunk, stupid, physically incapable of holding himself upright, or all three. I treat this driving posture as a flashing "beware of idiot!" sign.)

• Backwards baseball cap, blue hair, cowboy hat, or ski mask on driver's head: -25 points

• Coffee in face or driver is most often looking in any direction other than the vehicle's path of travel: -30 points

• Driver looking at self in rearview mirror with hairbrush, coffee, or cigarette in hand: -40 points

• Cell phone in use or beer in hand: -50 points

• "Start Seeing Motorcycles" or other pro-biking sticker on the vehicle: +2 points

• I catch the driver's eyes in the rear view mirror: +10 points

• After seeing me once, the driver looks again every few moments to see if I'm still there: +10 more points

• Both hands on wheel, head and eyes in motion: +25 points

• The driver is towing a trailer full of dirt bikes: +50 points

After I've made the above calculations and classifications, I use a modified version of the David Roth (ex-Van Halen frontman, current-EMT-has-been) crowd intelligence rule. I roughly count the number of vehicles in a 100' distance, front to back and both sides, of the vehicle and divide the driver's IQ by that number. In heavy traffic, everyone is a menace to my safety, almost by logical default. I'm the least likely vehicle on the road to harm the passengers of another vehicle, so I'm in the logical space for an escape route for other vehicles.

Just to calibrate your appreciation of my scoring system, an article in Scientific American Magazine once stated, ""Adults in the bottom 5% of the IQ distribution (below 75) are very difficult to train and are not competitive for any occupation on the basis of ability. . . " and "Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 100) are not competitive for most professional and executive-level work but are easily trained for the bulk of jobs in the American economy. . . " That's pretty cold, isn't it? Nature and the highway are cold as the floor of an icehouse. As far as my own survivability is concerned, a web article on IQ gave me the following information about the brainpower behind the numbers and I've added my own "Estimated Driving Skills" column to assess my own risk based on the driver's IQ:

IQ Range	Estimated Driving Skills (Alert Level Color Code)
Below 30	Flashing Red: This driver is clearly an unpredictable moron, an outrageous hazard at any speed, expect any damn idiot move from this rolling example of chaos theory. Ultimate alert.
30 to 50	Red: Mostly unpredictable, slow-witted, prone to panic and irrational lane changes. High alert.
50 to 60	Orange: Unless a slight change in traffic, road condition, or the moon's position relative to the sun occurs, you can probably count on this driver to remain stable. Check for distracted behavior every second or two.
60 to 74	Yellow: Loud noises, bright colors, anything sparkly or in motion will distract this driver, but he/she will probably do something mildly predictable when panic occurs. Moderate alert.
74 to 89	Blue: Mostly, this driver is stable. Pay special attention to this driver at intersections, on curves, and near fast food entrances. Fairly low alert.
89 to 100	Green: Probably not a risk, if anyone else in the above categories is sharing the road, this driver warrants minimal attention. I'd still avoid spending any time in an adjacent lane with this driver.
Above 100	Invisible: The chances are slim that this driver provides much risk. Based on past experience, one of these guys will probably be who kills me.

I realize these generalization are culturally "unfair," "biased," and even irrational. They are based on my nearly half-million miles of motorcycling and they are habitual. I constantly and automatically balance my belief that most people are decent and well-intentioned and that most drivers are nuts and "out to get me." My riding state boarders on paranoia, I'll admit. My confidence in my ability to deal with these contradictions varies with the road conditions and my concentration. You'd think that this would take the fun out of riding a motorcycle and it does put a damper on outright highway euphoria, but I'm disinclined to that mental state as you might have noticed. Riding a motorcycle is risky and that's part of the attraction. However, there is a definite line between assuming risk and committing suicide and evaluating the folks I share the road with is part of my risk assessment.

Highway Blues

All Rights Reserved © 2010 Thomas W. Day

A while back I spent a flu-infested weekend watching European motorcycle travel videos. For several minutes a critical aspect of the first film, the smooth on-bike camera work, made absolutely no sense to me. Eventually I decided that European roads must actually be paved competently. Any attempt I've made at Minnesota on-bike camera footage has been marred by massive vibration. One incident cost me a few hundred dollars in camera repair bills when the trip vibrated the guts loose in a supposedly "indestructible mini-cam." Over the years, I've had a few videos submitted for my Motorcycling Minnesota show that were interesting, but too regularly interrupted by camera glitches and sync dropouts to be used without hours of frame-by-frame editing. I did that once and decided to never be tempted again, no matter how interesting the footage. I've been trying to do a helmet noise test for the last year, but my solid-state sound gear keeps shaking to pieces while I try to gather road data. Highway construction is simply not a skill belonging to the citizens of this state.

For example, MNDOT built an extravaganza of weird highway engineering in my backyard. Some government genius decided that the five minute traffic jam that occurs every weekday rush hour was justification to build an LA-style multi-lane freeway mousetrap that will filter two lanes of 35E into two lanes of I694. Esher would be proud of MNDOT's assortment of swooping overpasses, but I think they created one of the nation's last monuments to mindless urban sprawl. After two years, the construction is still on-going and I figure MNDOT will finish this shrine a few minutes before gas hits $10/gallon and everything north of White Bear Lake and south of the Humphrey Airport becomes a collection of tele-commuter ghost towns.[1] When the asphalt mousetrap is finished, I give it about three weeks before it all decays into the rubble Minnesota calls "pavement." The crap that passes for asphalt here wouldn't be used for patching rural driveways in other parts of the world. Minnesota and other eastern states build the world's only water-soluble highways.

For the most part, the United States (and, especially, in the east) are incapable of building highways worth traveling. Moments after we pave a section of road, it begins to crumble into disconnected chunks of asphalt, strip-mine-sized potholes, and mini-canyons. It's probably a nasty combination of corrupt bureaucrats and incompetent contractors, but the result is that roads last a few seconds before they begin disintegrate. There is a section of I35 just a bit north of Albert Lee that is so freakin' awful that I once stopped to see if I had a flat front tire or a disintegrating wheel. Heading west on I90, the right lane of the freeway was so trashed that my back was practically pounded into dust. These two pitiful excuses for roads typical of Minnesota's attempts at the art of road building. At the local level, most of St. Paul's residential streets would make a respectable motocross course and Minneapolis is no improvement. Many of our two lane roads are simply a waste of tar and paint.

Before I condemn all of American highways, I have to admit that Colorado actually manages to put a surface on a roadway that approaches a decent paved standard, although they often take a decade to build a mile or two. New Mexico is astoundingly un-American in its ability to manage asphalt and cement. However, Rust Belt highway engineering is a national embarrassment. Chicago's freeways and toll roads are unattended bomb craters. It's hard to tell Cleveland and Detroit pavement from volcano rubble. My limited experience with east coast freeways and highways always makes me appreciate the fact that I'm only partially responsible for the condition of rental cars. Face it, from the western edge of Nebraska heading east, "highway engineering" is an oxymoron.

So here's my suggestion: Give It Up. As a nation, we can't manage construction, so we should admit failure and quit trying. The rural dirt and gravel roads we have are actually pretty drivable, in comparison to the paved disasters. Even if our dirt roads weren't better road surfaces than our freeways, I'm happier knowing that traction and road surface will be consistently poor; rather than inconsistently mediocre.

One should always go with the talents one has, rather than waste effort on unobtainable skills. Since we can't manage pavement, I advise that we give up the whole idea. We're simply not smart enough to deal with it. I recommend that we plow up the highways, freeways, and streets and give back most of the land to the homeowners to whom that property originally belonged. We can leave just enough asphalt for paved bicycle trails, because if MNDOT can't manage pavement, it appears that the folks who design the DNR's bicycle trails are almost competent. A little of the roadway could also be left "undeveloped," for off-road vehicles. I don't mean four-wheel blimps because that's just a waste of space. I mean vehicles like . . . dirtbikes. Good old fashioned, real motorcycles; not girly-man whimp-bikes that require impossible-to-build smooth-as-a-baby's-butt roadways, but real motorcycles that can negotiate any terrain nature coughs up. This brilliant solution would inspire mass transit design, getting the idiots out of their SUVs, and reduce hydrocarbon emissions.

And it would be a lot more fun to ride to work.

[1] A depressing, but complete site for all sorts of links to information about the coming energy crisis is http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/.

A Bad Place for a High Side

Finally, a group-riding video that actually looks like fun. Where are all the 1%-ers on Harley's here? I guess there are 1%'ers and there are .00001%'ers.

Somewhere between these trails and a decent farm road is what I'd call perfect highway maintenance. Anything more than that is extravagant and a waste of good terrain.

Minnesota Eyesight

I don't like to jump on the "Minnesota sucks" bandwagon, because I think driving skills are declining all over the country, but Minnesota is far too accommodating to particularly heinous driving handicaps. Eyesight, for example.

In 40 years of driving, a half-dozen states, and a dozen licensing tests, Minnesota is the only place in the bunch that thinks I see well enough to drive without corrective lenses. Thirty years ago, Texas suggested that I have my left eye removed, if I wanted to drive without glasses, since that eye is practically useless at any distance. Just add an extra mirror to the car, poke out the eye, and they'd have taken off the restriction. I chickened out and went for the glasses. Minnesota is far more accommodating. I've passed this state's vision test twice in the last six years. I failed that same test in Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, California, Colorado, and Indiana. Inspires confidence in our system, doesn't it?