Even Worse than Cagers

When I taught Minnesota’s MSF classes, I would often caution my students that “cagers aren’t out to get you, they aren’t that competent.” The wannabe bikers who took those classes, from the Beginning Rider Course (BRC) to the Advance Course, would always claim that cagers “are out to get you” and I enjoyed ridiculing that delusion. I did regularly remind my classes that, “It takes them 4-wheels to balance, how competent can they be?” and that always got a laugh. My argument to this day is that if cagers were trying to kill us they’d be way easier to predict than if they are nothing more than random-motion-generators with entirely unpredictable and irrational results.

My last six years stuck to bicycling has not improved my opinion of car drivers. However, living in a Mississippi River town that pretends to be a tourist destination has done nothing positive for my opinion of motorcycles, in particular “bikers.” 

All summer, I’m forced to watch these goobers wallow through stop lights, because they are incapable of stopping without falling over, in a parade of noisy morons is a weekly exhibition of incompetence. Their regular demonstration of white-boy-entitlement (occasionally white bimbos, to be fair) flaunting traffic laws and disturbing the peace with no part of their smog machines meeting EPA/DOT emissions standards proves that we are a lawless failing empire. Never mind the rot at the top demonstrated by half of the country that is willing to elect a felon with a history of rape, fraud, tax evasion, and treason, we get loud and proud demonstrations of the capriciousness of our “law enforcement” every time a biker fires up his blubbering junkmobile. 

Toward the end of my southern California stint, in 1991, I started to see a lot of illegal motorcycles on the road. Like today’s hippomobile riders, the California smog machines were mostly ridden by fat, patched and badged, and tattooed white bozos either being gangbangers or doing their best to look and act like gangbangers. Like every other state in the country, the California cops suddenly started looking the other way when those undisguised criminals blubbered past. The 80s were known as the “greed is good” decade, but they were really about the beginning of lawlessness and top-down criminal behavior.

So, now my opinion has shifted slightly. The only thing I despise more than incompetent cagers are incompetent bikers. The cagers, at least, often have the good sense to try to hide their incompetence with modern driving-assisted vehicles. And, let’s be honest, it doesn’t take much of a computer to be smarter than the dumber-50% of humanity. Bikers are going the other way. Since they feel compelled to compound their noise-making by traveling in herds, they con weak “lawmakers” into passing foolish legislation like Minnesota’s “road guard” idiocy. Three hours of remedial training (pushing the intellectual limits of biker gangbangers) and $30 and a total numskull “authorizes motorcycle road guard certificate holders to stop and control traffic for motorcycle group riders. Drivers of vehicles stopped by a flagger may only proceed if instructed by a flagger or police officer.” Yep, people actually making a useful contribution to society can be held up by a pack of useless numskulls out to violate noise and air pollution laws and get drunk at every tavern on the way.

This year’s lame legislators caved to the gangbanger crowd with about the dumbest “lane-splitting” law yet considered in our rapidly decaying empire. The law slithered into the 2023-2024 Budget Bill, HF 5247, believe it or not. I have no problem with lane-splitting and, in fact used that ability almost non-stop for 10 years living in Southern California. I do have a problem with Minnesota’s penalizing incompetent motorcyclists with, “An operator of a motor vehicle must not intentionally impede or attempt to prevent the operation of a motorcycle when the motorcycle is operated under the conditions specified in section 169.974,”

Now, here is the badshit crazy part of this new rule:

(g) A person may operate a motorcycle and overtake and pass another vehicle in the same direction of travel and within the same traffic lane if the motorcycle is operated:
(1) at not more than 25 miles per hour; and
(2) no more than 15 miles per hour over the speed of traffic in the relevant traffic lanes.
(h) Motor vehicles including motorcycles are entitled to the full use of a traffic lane and no motor vehicle may be driven or operated in a manner so as to deprive a motorcycle of the full use of a traffic lane.

So, motorcycles can occupy another vehicle’s lane at will but other vehicles have to give motorcycles “full use of a traffic lane.” How the fuck can you rationally follow that law if you are in a car? The moment a motorcycle enters your lane, you are in violation of part (h) of the same law. And the law provides a traffic violation for that moment! If the state wanted to find a way for the 99.999,,,% of road users to begin the process of banning motorcycles from public roads, I think they may have hit the jackpot.

Maybe you’re under some delusion that Minnesota motorcycles are particularly competent? [Pardon me while I laugh so hard my guts hurt.] Maybe you think that, even though they dress like Outlaws and Hells’ Angels and flaunt federal and state emissions and noise laws as if they don’t exist, they are really nice people (probably dentists and grade school teachers) who will make every effort to obey that “no more than 15 miles per hour over the speed of traffic” up to “25 miles per hour?” Maybe you believe in the Easter Bunny and Superman, too?

Buy some popcorn and find a safe place to sit back and watch the trainwreck next July. It’s gonna be . . . exciting, as long as you aren’t on the road when it happens.

Roundabouts: A Rolling IQ Test

You know who hates roundabouts/traffic circles? Old people, dumb people, incompetent drivers, and rural goobers (redundant, I know). The rules are simple: “Yield to vehicles already in the roundabout. Merge into the traffic flow when it is safe. Continue through the roundabout until you reach your exit. Do not stop or pass in a roundabout." What do you have to do to obey those rules and to move smoothly through a traffic circle, pay fucking attention to what is happening around you.

I have identified the short list of those who are baffled by those rules. If you are one, you should toss your drivers’ license, sell your car, buy a nice pair of walking shoes and a bus pass, and stay the fuck off of public roads, including crosswalks since you probably don’t know how those work either.

Roundabouts are statistically proven to be safer for everyone, even if they do raise the blood pressure of the above-mentioned group of nitwits. They are safer for cars, bicyclists, pedestrians, and even nearby buildings (since these same morons often find ways to crash into houses and businesses, too). Anyone who walks or rides a bicycle near traffic knows that most cagers barely acknowledge the existence of stop signs and, even, stop lights. The louder the exhaust pipe, the bigger the tires, and the older the driver, the less likely that person is to even slow down a bit before barreling through a sign or light. It’s tough to do that in a traffic circle. Even better, when one of these inbred morons waddles aimlessly into a roundabout, everyone else involved has a fighting chance to avoid them because of the reduced speeds, greater demand for wider traffic observation, and increased idiot-exposure.

No, I don’t love them, but I used to really like yield signs and highway safety experts learned, several years ago, that the whole “right-of-way rules” concept was too complicated for the new breed of morons-behind-the-wheel on public roads. So, roundabouts are what we’re left with in an attempt to keep traffic moving, reduce emissions and increase fuel economy, and improve traffic safety. And, again, if roundabouts are too complicated for you, so is driving.

My “Own Personal Potlatch”

Ms Day has known me for all but 19 of my 76 years and she, clearly, knows my triggers and moods better than me. Even as I wrote them, I knew that it would seem like my last three or four essays were self-pitying whining old man drivel. At least to me, I felt like I was expressing my confusion and disappointment in this phase of life. As I've written a few times, I'm a long ways from somebody who is rich in self knowledge. As a 1950s male, "suck it up and move on" would be pretty close to the motto I've lived by.Yesterday morning, after observing my mood, Ms Day asked me, "So how was your own personal potlatch?" Almost instantly I felt pretty good about the last couple of weeks. Seriously, just that question put the entire “end of motorcycling” in a different light that made me appreciate not just my lucky past but the enjoyment I got from passing my treasures on to people who will also enjoy them.

If you are looking for a guy filled with white pride, you'll need to keep moving . . . a long ways from me. Mostly, I think European males have been a plague on the planet and Mother Earth will be glad to be rid of us if she finds a neutron bomb-way to get the job done with minimal damage to useful lifeforms. The best and most honest thing I've heard about my race (and species) is Ms Day's reminder, "Beware of the Ice Age Hunters." We may not be smart, creative or inventive, pretty, industrious, or reliable, but nobody is more ruthless, brutal, and efficient when it comes to making war. Whatever you can build, we European males can break, destroy, steal, and claim for our own. European immigrants to North America upped that game so dramatically that the Nazi’s studied our Civil War for tactics and Hitler’s version of Jim Crow.

When I was in my early 20s, I got seriously interested in North American Native religions, culture, and government. We were living in Dallas and the downtown Dallas library was the kind of intellectual wonderland that I had never expected to discover. The North American Pacific Northwest Coast tribes (Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Coast Salish, and Kwakiutl) practiced various forms of the potlatch ritual and I have tried to honor that whenever possible in my own life.  Wikipedia says, “During a potlatch, the host may lavishly distribute gifts or even destroy property to demonstrate wealth and generosity. These gifts can include real property like food, blankets, copper shields, canoes, and carved items. . .” There is a lot more to the potlatch custom, but that bit fits my feeling as my equipment and motorcycle was leaving my garage.

While I was piling everything from weird motorcycle parts and paraphernalia to the Aerostich gear that has been my copilot for several hundred thousand miles onto my buyer/guests, I was weirdly happy to see my things go for very affordable prices to people who might appreciate and use them. Some of those things had been nearly gifted to me by friends, vendors (when I was a magazine columnist), and simple good fortune discovering great products early in a company’s start-up stage. I don’t think I’ve ever gone through this ritual to “demonstrate wealth,” but I can be accused of deliberately trying to demonstrate generosity in an attempt to “pay it forward.”

Since leaving my father’s home when I was 15 and when Ms Day and I joined forces when I was 19 and she was 17, I (then we) have moved 31 times. Every time I have moved, lots of stuff was left behind. Sometimes those things were precious but too bulky to be kept. Sometimes things were accidentally left. Often, we knew people who might put our excess to better use. Rarely, we made the effort to sell off our excess. My father used to have a tennis rule, applied ruthlessly in his later years, “When in doubt, out.” I modified that to “When in doubt, throw it out.” For a lot of years one of my personal goals was to own no more stuff than I could fit into a well-packed utility van (I always visualized a 1970’s Econoline E150). Being an electronics engineer in the 1970s and 80s meant chasing our floundering manufacturing economy as it deteriorated from the center out to the coasts. The 80s were particularly hard on my kind of “skilled labor” since Reaganomics moved capital from work (manufacturing) to idle money (investment and speculation). My poor kids probably thought getting to know anyone was a waste of time, since we’d be moving soon and, pre-internet, staying in touch with friends at a distance was a complicated project.

Since retiring and having taken part in dissolving the estates of my father-in-law and my own father’s property, I have tried to constantly re-evaluate my own stuff looking for things I no longer use to sell, give away, or throw out. Ideally, the day Ms Day and I no longer need “stuff,” there won’t be anything to fool with that our daughter’s don’t want to keep for themselves. And I hope to continue enjoying passing on this potlatch tradition to the end.

How do you love a riding suit?

This is one of my favorite pictures of me (Thanks Scott!), from 2018, and one of my all-time favorite motorcycles (my 2004 Suzuki 650 V-Strom). All of this stuff and me spent just short of 100,000 miles together. This past weekend, the last of those things surrounding me went out of my life. Knowing that my old age infirmities had got the best of me, I let my two Aerostich Darien suits go to a new owner.

The Darien suit I’m wearing in this picture is a prototype AD1 HiViz jacket and a pair of AD1 Darien pants. You can’t tell from the picture, but I am armored to the max with every piece of TF3 armor Aerostich sells for that gear: hip and knee pads, elbow, shoulder, and back pads. I also have a pair of Aerostich elkskin gauntlet gloves, a Shoei X1 helmet, and my Gaerne Goretex boots. Along with every other piece of riding gear, special motorcycle tools, and my last motorcycle (a Suzuki TU250X) every thing connecting my 60+ years on a motorcycle found new homes this past week.

I am finding it difficult to choke down how emotionally attached I had become to my riding gear; even more than the motorcycles. In late 2020, I had sold my two all-time favorite motorcycles and clung to the unlikely possibility that I might find my way back on to a motorcycle. I hadn’t let go of any of my gear, which turned out to be more precious to me than the actual motorcycles.

My physical problems were compounded this summer and I could no longer justify pretending that a comeback was possible. I failed my baseline test and, worse, found myself riding with almost no confidence when I lost the feeling in my hands at the end of a piddly 20-mile ride. When our water heater began to leak and I started looking at the opportunity to replace it with a heat pump unit, I had to clear out the storage shelves surrounding the water heater to do that work. That was when I decided it made no sense to put all of that stuff back in the same place. It was time to do some Swedish Death Cleaning. Unlike the characters I met during my Cheap Bike Challenge hunt, I was not going to be clinging to my stuff hoping for some fantasy price. I was emptying the basement shop, my two garages, and my closet of everything I will never use again.

I would be lying if I said that was a fun exercise. It was almost as painful as I imagine giving away a favorite pet would be (something I have not yet had to do). I have pictures, memories, stories chronicled in this blog, and friends to reminisce with, so nothing is really gone as long as I am alive and my tiny brain still works. I lived in and with my Aerostich gear for so many years, miles, and hours that my relationship with that clothing became very personal. I hope the new owners get as much fun, satisfaction, protection, and adventure from my equipment as I have had.

My Pace, My Path, My Objectives

For more than 60 years, the ONLY time I have been in total control of what I’m doing, how fast I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it have been on a motorcycle. I came from a fairly large (5 brats and two semi-adult parents) family and I was the oldest and designated babysitter, cook and bottle-washer, and the official family black sheep. When I abandoned my father’s nuthouse the summer I turned 16, I went from that over-complicated situation to even crazier 1960’s rock-and-roll bands, marriage at 19, and the next 40 years of occupational and parental over-stimulus non-stop; unless I was on a motorcycle.

Other that a few trips with close friends and one decidedly wrong start to the trip of a lifetime with someone Ms. Day had picked to babysit me and one anniversary trip with Ms. Day and a small portion of my 2008 Nova Scotia Canadian tour, I have always traveled alone by motorcycle. Even when I have been on a ride with a friend, my preferred plan is to designate a general time and specific place to meet at the end of the day and for each of us to find our own way to that location at our own pace.

For almost all of my 76 years I have been the poster boy for failing at “to thine own self be true” because I had no idea who I was. In the early 80s, in a “Career Planning” class at OCC, I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. Say what you will about how obsolete that test is, but when I received my dot-matrix printout of my personality results (INTP) it was all I could do to keep from crying during the class. It was the first time in my 35-years that I felt anyone actually “knew” me and that “someone” was an 8-bit, IBM mini-computer.

I am not just “a little” INTP, either. Those measurement bars were pinned to the far end of each characteristic. The intended outcome of that test was for us to plow through a 4” thick book of occupations and find jobs that were suitable for our personality types. INTPs are fairly rare (not in a good way) and, at that time, that giant book of occupations recommended only four occupations. Not helpful, especially for me since “engineer” was not one of the four and I had been making a living as an electronic engineer for a dozen years by 1984.

Worse, everything about being a 1950s kid ruled against the “I” characteristic in my personality type. When I grew up, in the age of How to Win Friends and Influence People, “introversion” is old psych-jargon for homosexual or worse. Giving in to my natural inclinations was the fast route to unemployment and social stigma. So, for the next 40 years I ignored the “I” and concentrated on making the best of “NTP” (my Intuitive, Thinking, and Prospecting traits). And that, occupationally, worked for me right up to when I retired, mostly. It kept me employed, anyway.

For my family and friends, however, ignoring my introversion meant that i spent a lot of my “off-camera” time suffering from an “introvert hangover”: “a metaphorical state of emotional and mental exhaustion. It occurs when an introvert has spent an extended period interacting socially, leaving them drained and depleted.” “Drained and depleted” enough that I would rather risk being bitten by a rattlesnake backpacking alone in the Texas desert or left injured and stranded anywhere from Baja, Mexico to Alaska to the empty backroads of Newfoundland and New Brunswick to Montana or Wyoming’s empty, abandoned wastelands than talk to one more person, no matter how much I loved them. And that is where motorcycles came into my life in a dominant way from around 1969 until a few years ago.

I had been backpacking the wilderness of every place I’d lived, from Kansas when I was a kid to California when my daughters were teenagers, but backpacking usually required a lot of prep time and energy and, often, I didn’t have those resources in any quantity. At the most hectic period of my life, when we lived in California and our daughters were teenagers, I would often have to escape for a weekend or a day or two more and my trip “planning” involved stuffing camping gear into saddlebags along with a couple changes of clothing and flipping a quarter while I sat on my motorcycle to decide if I was traveling north or south out of Huntington Beach: often as far as well into Baja, Mexico or right up to the Canadian border on PCH. Sometimes, I’d make the same trip (with the same planning) in my ‘73 Toyota Hilux with a kayak tied to the rack and a bed full of scuba gear. (“Fuck a lot of ‘dive buddy’ crap, I need to go where nobody else ever goes.”)

If you peruse this blog, you’ll see “reports” of my solo travels that cross about 50 years of my life. I have never had a job that didn’t generate substantial “introvert hangovers” and busting out of my life alone and mostly directionless has been the cure until I retired in 2013. When I retired, two friends gave me copies (one paperback and one eBook) of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, And I thought, “Why the fuck do you guys think I need a book about introverts?” Seriously. After being trapped in a screwed-up VW camper for several months in a New Mexico campground waiting for parts, information, or shop time I started to read the book. By the time I had that crap VW Eurovan back in running condition and we’d relaxed into our original driving and camping

In 2018, myasthenia gravis put an end to that hangover cure, but being retired also diminished the requirement. It got a lot worse before it started to get better and, assuming it wouldn’t get enough better to matter, I sold my beloved 2004 Suzuki V-Strom and my even more precious Yamaha WR250X. Thinking that the worst was past, I gambled on a Suzuki TU250X in late 2019, but it didn’t get better as the eyesight problems were soon replaced with hands that refuse to function usefully or reliably and riding skills that had deteriorated to the point of no return.

Bicycling, my primary transportation for as many Minnesota months as I can stand it, is not the same.

Thinking about Things I Will Never Do Again

This morning, I drug myself out of bed around 6:30AM (I know!), poured a cup of coffee, and waddled out to the garage to change the oil in my wife’s car before a trip to the cities later today. As I assembled the usual culprit tools, drug the floor jack to the front of the car, organized the oil and filter for easy access while I was under the car, I flashed back on 60 years of motorcycle maintenance. A few days ago, I emptied a large milk crate full of assorted motorcycle parts, tools, and accessories into a grocery bag and, now, most of that stuff has been claimed by the various people who bought my more expensive gear over the past week. I am, apparently, one demented Boy Scout. I was still prepared to do an oil change on at least a half-dozen motorcycles that I’ve owned over the past 30 years. But I will NEVER do that again.

A few weeks ago, when I decided to sell my Suzuki TU250X, I did a ceremonial last round of maintenance. I changed the oil and filter, checked the valve clearance, adjusted and lubed the chain, checked the tire pressures, and did a thorough detailing job one last time. As I did that job, I recalled a moment when I thought I might be passing on my motorcycle experiences to my grandson, Wolf. I about to do a pretty serious rework of my Kawasaki KL250 Super Sherpa after coming back from a 2010 North Dakota Ghost Town tour (that I’d planned on doing on the Kawasaki before the idiot shifter oil seal design dumped all of the bike’s oil on my boot during a pre-trip shakedown ride).

My idea was that Wolf might enjoy knowing something about how a motorcycle worked before I ran him through the MSF Basic Rider course and helped him get a motorcycle endorsement (and a driver’s license). He lasted about as long as it took for me to demonstrate chain maintenance and the beginning stages of an oil change before deciding that kind of grubby work was not for him. I wish I could say, “I get it,” but I don’t.

While I was going through the steps of the Honda’s oil change, I had flashbacks of doing that kind of simple-minded basic maintenance on everything from my first car through my last motorcycle. I’m too lazy to count either the number of cages or bikes I’ve worked on, or to even think about that hard, but as long as I have the right tools for the job I kind of love that work. I have a hard time understanding why everyone doesn’t, in fact.

I am a rapidly retreating introvert and as I’ve learned more about that personality characteristic post-retirement I realize that one of many things that I’ve appreciated about vehicle maintenance is that working on, around, and under a vehicle is a really effective people-repellant. If I go into my office to write, play music, or read, Ms. Day feels totally free to pop in, ask me questions, drop another honey-do project into my lap, or just ask “What’ca doin’?” If I am working on any kind of vehicle, she stays as far from that area as possible. The same went for my daughters, neighbors, and, now, grandkids. Nobody has any interest into being roped into handing me tools, holding on to a piece of metal while I weld it, being involved in a greasy, filthy project, or listening to me bitch about whatever stupid thing some factory engineers screwed up. I have never had a more isolated man cave than my garages and that has been true for almost 70 years. When I was a kid, working on my coaster brake Schwinn (or his lawnmower), my father would avoid his own garage until I rode off to test my work.

When we bought our 140-year-old “Ugly House” in Little Canada, I hadn’t seen the inside of the house until after closing, but I’d already made big plans for the 850-square-foot garage. I practically lived in that garage for 18 years and it was worth every penny of the $106,000 I paid for the house. The rest of the house belonged to Ms. Day and, for all I cared, if a tornado ripped the house out of the ground and tossed it to Kansas I’d have celebrated. Anything in the US built before 1947 should probably be scrapped for the raw materials. There was plenty wrong with that garage, too, especially the moronic drainage “plan,” but all the things that were right with it (especially after I installed a big window and skylights) made up for it. Mostly.

But today I’m down to simple maintenance on a twelve-year-old Honda CRV and my ebikes. It is highly likely that I’ll never see the inside of another motorcycle engine, reassemble another gearbox, repair or replace another non-bicycle tire, or do any of the things that gave me peace, quiet, and privacy for 60+ years. Thinking about that also reminded me of the moments in my 76 years when “the last time” passed unnoticed:

• After a practice crash that left me with a dozen broken ribs and PTSD so demented that I repeatedly hallucinated similar crashes every time I caught a few inches of off-road air, I never raced motocross, enduros, or cross-country again (age 28).
• When my youngest daughter and I returned from a wonderful trip up the coast of California in 1989, when she was 16, that would be the last time she and I ever took any kind of trip together. Three years later, my oldest daughter was visiting me in Colorado and we died a 3-day ride on my Yamaha Vision to Durango and around the mountains and that was the last time any of my kids and I would travel together by motorcycle.
• When Ms. Day and I celebrated our 40th anniversary together with a two-up ride to the North Shore, that would be the last time she would ever ride with me on a motorcycle.
• In 2018, I “celebrated” my 18th year as a Minnesota MSF instructor with a forced retirement due to double-vision and myasthenia gravis. Back then, I thought I was through with motorcycling and I sold my beautiful V-Strom and my WR250X. I definitely noticed that one, though.
• After a fantastic 2016 trip through the Colorado mountains where I met a good friend and we explored a bunch of hot springs and our peculiar style of “riding together,” (Breakfast and, then, “I’ll meet you at . . . tonight”) I would never take a motorcycle trip longer than 100 miles again.

Done and Out

Quite a few years ago, when I was still a young 69-years-old, I gave myself a set of criteria, “Creating A Baseline,”  for knowing when my physical capabilities and skills were no longer up to the challenge of riding a motorcycle on the street. (You might notice that I gave myself a slight out there.)  My skills were still pretty sharp when I wrote that article and I was being brutally critical and honest about how lame I think the Minnesota motorcycle license test is.  Today, having watched the collection of losers and fools who parade through Red Wing pretending they are big brave biker gangbangers for 9 years, it's way worse than I thought it was then.  Wobbling to a stop, wandering into a ditch, crashing into telephone poles and houses, and falling over trying to traverse a low speed intersection are unattainable “skills.”

A few weeks ago I took a 40 mile round-trip ride for lunch with a friend.  On the way there, my hands gave me some pain and aggravation.  On the way back, they were practically paralyzed by the time I turned on to my street.  It turns out—one more old fart thing—I am developing severe carpal tunnel in both hands.  It’s been severe enough that some mornings my hands hurt worse than they did when I had broken fingers.  At the end of that last ride I couldn't feel the throttle the brake or the clutch, and I was operating totally on memory.

So, after putting it off until it looked like we might start to get actual motorcycling weather, I rode over to the nearest ex-range (no longer used, due to the decline in motorcycle license applicants), warmed up for about 20 minutes, practicing the exercises I was about to run on myself, and went through the 10 exercises of the Minnesota motorcycle license test.

I failed.

I didn't fail the way you might have, given the same situation, but I failed under my 2017 standards. And that's the deal I made with myself. If I cannot ride that idiotic and easy course perfectly, I'm done. I didn't have anyone there scoring me. And I am a pretty harsh judge of myself, but by my scorecard, I picked up three points: infinitely worse than perfect.

I thought about making another pass at it. Giving myself the exact same second chance I would not give a student. Honestly, my hands hurt so badly. by the end of that practice session and the failed test, that it was just obvious to me that I'm done. I'm 76, this isn't going to get better, if I'm lucky it won't get much worse. 

My good friend, Andy Goldfine, regularly tries to encourage me with stories of his 80-and-over customers who are still knocking out a few thousand miles every year. I've looked into some of those guys and they all ride in a group. So that, if something goes wrong, they have someone to help pick up their bike, to haul their withered butts to hospitals, and even to help them  mount the motorcycle in mildly difficult situations. I'd rather walk than ride in a group.

So, after stewing in disappointment and recriminations, today I started planning up my 2012 Suzuki TU250X for sale.  And the recent past, a half dozen people have expressed interest in my TUX and I'll offer it to them before it goes up on the half dozen sale sites I'm likely to use.  The rest of my motorcycle pile—jackets, riding pants, all-weather gloves, boots, parts, accessories, and tools—will be sold or given away at the same time.

That's going to clear a lot of space in my lower garage.  For that matter, in the upper garage too.  Part of that Swedish Death Cleaning routine, I suppose.

I have been riding motorcycles since my first exposure at 15, in 1963. I am not one of those cool guys who has logged his life’s mileage so that I can brag “real numbers.” I didn’t even own a motorcycle with an odometer until 1983. By then, I’d been on (and off of) motorcycles for 20 years. That same year, 1983, I bought my first Aerostich Roadcrafter when I went through my first southern California monsoon season. I’ve been wearing helmets anytime I’m on a motorcycle since 1971 and assorted protective gear since race tracks started insisting on it in the early 70s. It will be weird not having a motorcycle and gear in my garage and basement, but I still have eBikes and that will have to do.

Putting Putting Last Things First

In it’s usual half-assed, half-cocked way, the Minnesota legislature is considering motorcycle lane-sharing/splitting in an amendment tacked on to Minnesota Statutes 2022, section 169.974, subdivision 5. The new sections are 1) “Only if the operation of the motorcycle does not exceed 40 miles per hour and is operated at no more than 15 miles per hour over the speed of traffic, a person may operate a motorcycle (1) abreast of, overtake, or pass
another vehicle within the same traffic lane, or (2) between two parallel lanes of moving or stationary traffic headed in the same direction . . . and 2) An operator of a motor vehicle that intentionally impedes or attempts to prevent any operator of a motorcycle from operating a motorcycle as permitted under paragraph (e) is guilty of a petty misdemeanor.”

I have no significant objection to the first article as it appears to be a reasonably competent copy of the California lane-splitting/sharing statutes that have been in place since the 80s. The second half is an extension of the entitled, cowardly Minnesota motorcycle attitude that it’s everyone else’s job to watch out for incompetent, reckless and careless motorcyclists. We’ve been here before in my column, many times in fact. Not only do motorcyclists imagine themselves to be free from having to bother with noise and emissions regulations, because of their incredible self-importance, they imagine that “right of way” traffic laws should always assume the motorcycle has the right of way. Lawyers are going to have a field day with this nonsense, but motorcyclists are risking everything putting this horse before the cart.

I love splitting lanes, even though I have rarely done it since I left California in 1991. I feel confident that I would be able to continue that practice, even in less-skilled and passive-aggressive Minnesota traffic. However, I have experienced the aftermath of following one of our many grossly illegal biker gangs in both Cities’ traffic and on rural roads. After those clowns have passed a few motorists (or the motorists have suffered the risk of passing them) most everyone on the road is in a mood to swat a motorcycle. Recently, a friend tried to justify this nonsense by claiming a weird relationship, “loud pipes, which many riders find naturally enjoyable, same as playing a musical instrument loudly, which many musicians naturally enjoy.” I suspect I might find it enjoyable to take potshots at noisy vehicles, but I suspect my enjoyment ends when the bullet hits the target? Who cares what 1% of 1% of the population “enjoys” if that impinges on the peace and quiet of the majority of the people in hearing distance? Not to mention the fact that it is illegal in Minnesota and most states to modify either the exhaust of intake of a modern vehicle. The fact that cops are too lazy and/or cowardly to mess with that crowd does not justify the noise or make that behavior legal. The idiotic “road captain” nonsense is making enemies for motorcyclists every time that privilege is exercised on top of the noise that always comes with that crowd.

But mixing pointless hearing-damaging noises and anti-social behavior with a driving tactic, that is as risky and depending on tolerant behavior as lane splitting, is gambling with lives (on both sides of the obvious crashes that are going to happen soon after this law goes into effect). I admit some of those lives are dirtbags, but too often the dirtbags bring down useful and decent people, which is where the “operator of a motor vehicle that intentionally impedes or attempts to prevent any operator of a motorcycle from operating a motorcycle as permitted under paragraph (e) is guilty of a petty misdemeanor” portion of this law is going to do damage in the best of cases. Since many traffic cops are going to default to assuming the cager caused the crash, even though statistics makes that pretty unlikely, ordinary drivers are going to punished for motorcyclists’ bad and/or incompetent behavior. After that happens a few hundred times, the majority of road users are going to object to being responsible for the irresponsible crowd.

Attracting the attention of the majority of road users and taxpayers is likely to backfire on those to imagine this law is going to be a good thing for Minnesota motorcycling. When taxpayers realize that absolutely nothing about allowing motorcycles on public highways can be economically justified, they will likely start considering the obvious and logical solution: relegating motorcycles to the “recreational vehicle” category and removing the damn things from public roads. And I am here to say “I told you so.” If we made the slightest effort to reduce the public nuisance aspects of motorcycles before introducing lane splitting, I think it might be possible to introduce the practice to Minnesota highway users. If whoever is driving this dumb idea ignores that fact, there will be blood.

Getting A License in 1992

After I left California in late 1991, I spent exactly one month in Indiana working for the dumbest company I’ve experienced in my long life. After I’d given up that experiment as a loss-leader, I flew a bunch of resumes in westwardly directions and landed my first medical devices job in Colorado. The company moved me and all I had to do was get my lazy unemployed ass from Elkhart, IN to Denver in 60 days, when I’d start my new job. I’d shipped my two motorcycles ahead with the moving van, outfitted my 1984 Toyota Van as a marginal camper, and I was starting my westward meander with a dinner in Chicago with an old friend. He and another of his friends spent a good bit of energy arguing out a safe place for two black guys and a goober from Kansas for a late night dinner. We settled on a pizza place in western Chicago and, mostly, that worked out well. I didn’t have to pay for anything and didn’t realize until I stopped in Springfield, MO and realized that someone had lifted my billfold in the restaurant’s hatcheck back in Chicago.

My step-brother lived in Springfield, which is why I’d taken that route, and I stayed with his family for a couple of days while I chased down credit card replacements and did the usual 1990’s routine for a stolen identity. The state of California and my insurance company were gracious enough to send me evidence that I was licensed and insured, but I did drive the rest of the way to Colorado without an actual driver’s license. Since I had no reason to be in a hurry, it took me almost a month to make it the 1,000 miles from Chicago to Denver. A few weeks after I arrived, I was living in a friend’s basement waiting for my new job to start. Not having an official license to drive meant that I had to take the whole Colorado driving test, including the driving part. After I had that, I had to take the motorcycle endorsement written and driving test at the DMV.

I had a 1983 Yamaha 550 Vision and a 1986 Yamaha XT350 to choose from for the test and I’d been spending most of my previous 5 years on the XT350 commuting in L.A. and riding offroad in the southern California and Baja deserts. I was as comfortable on my XT as any motorcycle I’ve ever owned and loved. So, it was a no-brainer; the XT350 it would be.

It was January 1992, but the weather was practically Californian and I wanted to be legal as soon as possible. The written test was easy and I’d lucked into being able to go immediately from paper to the DMV alley where the examiner gave the test. The rest range was pretty weird. Since there wasn’t much room to work with, parts of the “course” was overlaid on other parts; like the cone weave, the swerve, and the quick stop tests. The cop administering the test had to reset the course for each section of the test, moving cones as required. All of the exam was incredibly easy (as all US motorcycle endorsements tests have always been) on the XT and the last test was the quick stop. I’d never had to take any sort of test for my motorcycle endorsement, because when I got my first license in 1964 you didn’t have to do anything but ask for an “M” stamp on your cage license. I was feeling pretty cocky and sure of myself by that last portion of the test.

As I remember, the runup to the quick stop was about 50’; according to the examiner that was barely enough space for a lot of motorcyclists to get up to the required 15mph. He was a little irritated that day because he’d just flunked a couple of cruiser riders and a Denver cop for failing this part of the exam. I was having fun and didn’t take note of his mood (I’m notorious for that kind of obliviousness.) and I was absolutely convinced that getting my endorsement was a given. I squared up at the start line, gave the bike a little more gas than necessary and took off aggressively toward the stop-box. The examiner was obviously startled and as I went past him he seemed excited. A smarter guy might have played it safe, but at that moment in my life I felt more free to express myself and be me than ever before (or since). Worst case, I fail and have to come back in two weeks and do it again on the same test fee. The moment my front tire hit the stop-box line, I nailed the front and rear brakes, lifting the back tire about 2’ in a spiffy stoppie. The examiner had warned me about wheelies, but he did not mention stoppies.

Turned out, he’d never seen a stoppie that resulted in a stop that didn’t also include a crash. Earlier that week, a couple of arrogant Denver cops (not motorcycle cops) had brought their Harleys in for the exam and both had not only sailed past the stop-box but had panicked so completely that they’d put themselves in the dumpster at the end of the alley. That was my examiner’s most recent experience with dumbasses overdoing the quick stop test. Turned out that I just made him laugh. I was so pumped up that I offered to do it again for both of our entertainment, but he’d had all the laughs he wanted for the day and I left with a Colorado motorcycle endorsement.

Since then, I’ve been renewing and transferring that same endorsement from Colorado to Minnesota for the past 30 years. In late 2000, I started on the path to becoming a Minnesota Motorcycle Safety Instructor and I’ve given something resembling that same test to several hundred wannabe motorcyclists. I’ve seen a couple of stoppies, usually accidental, during the course and the endorsement test. I might shake my finger at the student and offer a bullshit warning, but who am I to flunk someone for showing a little style?

Beware of Bowling

Warning: This story is only as accurate as the author's memory.

I have done a lot of moderately risky things in my life, but I will aways put bowling at the top of the list of scary, risky, painful, dangerous things that I will never do again. This is an old story and I’m sort of amazed that I haven’t told it before, but I did a thorough search of this and the Wordpress blog and didn’t find a single word about it. So, in the late stages of my life and whatever is left of my two-wheel “career,” I am going to explain my terror of all things related to bowling.

It all started when I was just a kid. My father was a pretty decent adult athlete, although I guess he wasn’t much as a kid. Into his late 60s, he played competitive tennis at the Kansas state championship level, bowled consistently in the 230-250 pins territory, had a decent golf handicap, and when he was in his 40s he played basketball well enough to be recruited for the Washington Generals when the Harlem Globetrotters were in town. He was also a high school basketball, football, and tennis coach until he was well into his 60s. From about 5-years-old on a good bit of my life revolved around sports. Usually, thanks to asthma and other physical limitations, sports that I didn’t play particularly well. I never managed to play any of my father’s favorite games well enough to impress him and a couple of them—golf and bowling—were sources of irritation for both of us. Still are. Much later in life, I had a spurt of playing beach basketball in California, but that was a world and a game totally outside of his experience.

Moving forward about a decade and I’m a twenty-something working-class husband and a father of two beautiful daughters, I worked a lot of 80-hour weeks, drove a worn-out 1969 Ford E100 panel van 100,000 miles a year across six Midwestern states without A/C or heat. I was employed by a con artist of a boss who generated a lot of angry and disappointed customers. My only escape from pressure, stress, and confusion was the occasional few hours I was able to spend on my dirt bike.

After a couple of years in small town Nebraska, Mrs. Day, on the other hand, was getting desperate for a social life outside of caring for our two little girls and visiting with other mothers of small children. So, she signed us up for a bowling league, partnering with the only young couple she knew who didn’t have kids. I managed to slither out of the first two league games, claiming (honestly) that I had to work at the other end of the state those evenings. The third match was unavoidable. I couldn’t get out of it because my slimeball boss caved in to my wife’s complaints about her missing-in-action husband and “gave” me the weekend off.

Other than rolling a couple of games with my father and brother during the occasional holiday break visiting my family in Kansas, I had managed to stay away from bowling alleys for a long time. By that point in my life, I had learned that “games of patience” do not play to my strengths. Anything that requires me to do the “zen focus” bullshit when I’m losing is only going to be frustrating. I played and loved basketball well into my 50s because catching up (or staying ahead) requires working harder. Same for racing motorcycles, to catch up or stay ahead you work harder and go faster. Golf and bowling require the player to concentrate on form and geometry and I suck at both. So, that evening at the bowling alley started poorly, with me tossing a couple of gutter balls and barely grazing the end pins in my first couple of frames. Mrs. Day wasn’t much better, but she wasn’t expected to be and our new friends were getting cranky only a few minutes into the evening, which promised to be long, boring, and pointless.

I am an alcohol-lightweight. I have been drunk twice in my life and neither of those episodes had yet occurred. I can easily nurse a portion of a beer or a mixed drink for several boring hours at a party and one drink is usually my limit. About two beers into the bowling evening and I was losing interest in the game and I decided to redefine the fundamentals of bowling. Just rolling the ball down the lane was an insufficient challenge and I started trying to see how far I could heave the ball before it struck wood. I wasn’t going for altitude, just distance, but the ball began to make a fair amount of noise when it landed after I’d suffered through the first game of the three we’d committed to playing. About the time I started to think I was getting the hang of this version of bowling, probably at about the 3-4 beer mark, the bowling alley proprietor asked me to leave. Mrs. Day and her friends were embarrassed. Our new social life came to a screeching end and I don’t think I ever saw the other couple again. In fact. I don’t remember being at all upset at being done with my moment in small town social life.

After the bowling debacle, I still had a weekend off. I had planned the next day, Saturday, for some recreational practice time on the limited-access roads I loved about 20 miles north of our home. I’d loaded up the Rickman the previous evening, strapped a couple of five-gallon cans of premix to the trailer, loaded my privative 1975-style gear into the family station wagon, and headed north for some trail therapy. Sunday was race day and I’d signed up for my usual spot at the back end of the Nebraska State Intermediate class races. And I’d be wrenching for a friend who was actually competitive in the Expert class.

As you might suspect, I was slightly hungover that morning. Having never been even a little hungover, I was clueless as to what that might mean.  The place where I chose to make my stand was in the sandhills about five miles east of Palmer, Nebraska and about the same distance south of the Loup River. Back then, this area had well over 100 miles of limited-access roads tied together in a way that allowed me to ride for hours without ever crossing pavement. And that was my plan for the morning. My excuse for running out on my family on a beautiful Saturday summer morning was that I would be “practicing for Sunday” at the races in Genoa. That was sorta true, but mostly I was getting as much alone-time as possible anyway possible. But I was unwittingly impaired.

I unloaded the bike from the trailer, strapped on my gear, gassed up the bike, and took off heading north toward the Loup River. The first section of the route I’d planned was over some mild hills thoroughly coated with deep, fine dust bowl blow-out sand. I don’t know if I have ever ridden a motorcycle more suited to that kind of riding. The Rickman didn’t have much low-end torque, but once you spun it up over about 4,000 rpm it would sail across the sandhills like a prairie racing catamaran.  

I had barely got the bike warmed up, less than a few miles from where I’d parked, when I let the bike slide down the side of a sandhill into a tractor rut. Normally, no big deal. Just haul back on the bars, give it some throttle, and sail back up the side of the hill. Hungover, I considered a brand new option: step off of the bike and bail out. I was doing about 50mph at the time and abandoning ship was a freakin’ stupid option. I discovered that immediately. The thing about the next few seconds that has stuck with me for 40 years was a sound I can only describe as “a pound of hamburger thrown hard against a refrigerator door.” Splat!

Some undetermined, but calculatable, period of time later, I awoke imbedded about a foot into soft, hot sand. While I was unconscious, I’d hallucinated that I’d been tossed out of an airplane without a parachute. When I woke up, the dent in the sand, the pain, and the near-desert surroundings fit nicely with that hallucination.

With some effort, the time I’d been unconscious could be mathematically be determined by the flow rate of fuel from my Rickman’s tank overflow hose. When I righted the bike, I discovered I needed to change the petcock to reserve to get the engine started. My guess was that I’d been unconscious for at least 20 minutes. Getting the bike upright was a challenge, I hurt everywhere, but mostly I couldn’t catch my breath. Getting turned around in that deep sand was another challenge. Getting the bike started and moving in the right direction was tough, but easier than the first two hurdles. By the time I made it back to the parking spot, I was having serious problems breathing. I absolutely failed to lift the Rickman’s actual 250+ pounds (216 pounds claimed weight) on to the trailer. In frustration, I climbed into the station wagon, reclined the seat, and decided to see if I might feel better after some rest. After a few minutes, I was so seized up and hurting that I couldn’t get back out of the reclined seat. And breathing was harder, not easier.

Sometimes the old adage, “No good deed goes unpunished,” gets proved wrong in spades. Over the past year, I’d put a lot of effort into being friendly and useful to the area’s ranchers. I had helped chase cattle back through downed fences, ridden to the nearest ranch to tell the owners about damaged fences or escape cattle, and always stopped to talk (rather than run away like other dirt bikers usually did) when I met someone working the fence lines bordering the limited-access roads.

As I lay in the car imagining what the odds anyone would find me out on this remote road before I suffocated or starved to death, three actual cowboys rode up (on actual horses) and stopped to talk. I was barely able to say “howdy” and real conversation was beyond my capacity. After a bit, they figured out my predicament, pulled me from the vehicle, loaded up the bike and strapped it down, helped me pull off my boots and gear, turned the car around, and even offered to drive me back home if I couldn’t manage it. [That wasn’t the first or last time I’d be rescued by cowboys or horses.]

Because I was, and probably still am, an arrogant, macho/dumb male, I declined the designated driver offer, gritted my teeth, engaged the clutch, shifted into 2nd (to minimize having to repeat that painful movement), and took off for home. I had to pass through two small towns and about half of our hometown on my way home and braking or shifting quickly identified themselves as painful and impossible tasks. For the first and only time in my life, I desperately hoped a cop would stop me and arrest me, even shoot me and put me out of my misery. But I sailed through both towns and the north end of our hometown at 60mph without a glitch. I think I even blew through two stop signs on the way. The station wagon was a 1973 Mazda RX3 and it would easily do 60 in 2nd gear and start with a little clutch slippage, so I didn’t shift all the way home.

I pulled into our driveway, turned off the key and shuttered to a stop, but I couldn’t get myself out of the car. I blasted the horn until Mrs. Day and our little girls came out to see who and what was causing the racket. They helped me out of the vehicle, into the house, and on to the family room couch. After a bit, I thought a hot bath might help, so I went into our bathroom and ran a tub-full of near-boiling water. And I almost drowned when I discovered I couldn’t keep from sliding into the big old clawfoot tub and going down helplessly. I slept on the couch for the next few weeks because our bedroom was on the impossibly-distant second floor.

When I finally made it to the local doc’s office, an x-ray determined that all 12 of my left-side ribs were broken or cracked. The closest thing to sympathy or assistance I got from my doc was, “That’s what you get for riding a motorcycle.” The injuries put me out of work for more than a month and, thanks to the usual 1970’s small business total lack of any sort of disability or healthcare benefits, about destroyed our family’s economy, . However, I had more than enough vacation time, so at least I got paid for a 40-hour week while I was out of work. A few weeks after I was back to work, I ran into the doc limping around our grocery store, on crutches with his leg in a cast. I sympathized with him by saying, “That’s what you get for playing with those damn skis.”

The long-term effect of the crash, the pain, and the extended recovery time was that for years afterwards when I got into any kind of extreme situation on a motorcycle (a little air, going a bit sideways, skittering along a sandy section of road or track) I PTSD’d myself into going through the worst part of that desert crash and usually found myself parked on the edge of the trail or track sweating and panicking over another crash that had only happened in my mind. It was several years before I could really enjoy offroad riding at any sort of respectable speed and look what that got me.

A Two-Wheeled Life

That is a pretty arrogant title coming from someone as uninspiring as me. Mostly, my two-wheeled vehicles have been transportation, first, and recreational, second. For 18 years, there was also a vocational aspect to my motorcycling when I was an MSF instructor. I did have a brief, very low level regional (Texas and Nebraska) racing moment (about 10 years) with motocross, cross-country, enduros, and observed trials. That period of my two wheeled life was only partially recreational because to support that habit I ran a repair shop out of my tiny garage for six of those years and even sold Ossa dirt bikes for three of those years. Since I have been riding motorcycles since at least 1963 and the overwhelming majority of miles I’ve put on motorcycles has been commuting to work and school. My brother and I have mixed memories of when we started and which of us got the first motorcycle in the family. (He thinks I was first and I think he was.) We both remember how much our father hated motorcycles and how quickly shit could go badly when something he discovered one of his sons was doing something he disliked. (My “favorite” example was him tossing a loaned electric bass and bass amplifier down the basement stairs when he discovered I’d made more money playing in a band one summer than he made all year as a high school teacher.) Between bicycles and motorcycles, I have lived a lot of my life on two wheels.

Some people get to keep doing this sort of thing a really long time. Some of us die doing the thing we love. Most of us, get shoved off of two wheels due to old age and infirmity. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but the last few years and, especially, this fall have presented a lot of obstacles that seem ominous. In early 2019, I started to have bouts of double-vision that seemed to be untreatable until after I had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis (MG) in June and medications (I love prednisone!) began to control the symptoms. By then, I’d sold my 2004 V-Strom both due to the vision issues and declining upper body strength that made my wonderful near-400 pound motorcycle impractical and, probably, dangerous. The next spring, at the beginning of the COVID shutdown, I sold my WR250X. At the time, I figured I was finished with motorcycling. I was 72 years old and looking at my father’s history and decline due to MG and fully expected to be in a wheelchair and trying to figure out what was happening on a big screen LCD television from a one-foot viewing-distance.

Did I mention I love Prednisone?

Thanks to terrific medical care from the Mayo Clinic’s Neurology Department and the perseverance of my doctor there, I got most of my function back by late 2020. My grandson had donated a beat-to-snot Rad Rover eBike in 2019 and I’d revived it and started riding it that winter, quickly discovering that me and ice still don’t mix. By the spring of 2020, I was on that bike for practically every local errand or half-assed-excuse to go somewhere by myself. As of this past summer, thanks to the incredibly generosity of an old friend, I have a Specialized electric mountain bike that has a suspension rivaling my WR250X. A collection of physical setbacks made riding a lot this past summer difficult, but I managed to put more than 1,000 miles on the old Rover and just short of 400 miles on the Specialized bike. That’s not impressive by any standard, I know. But it is what I managed this year.

I had some big, hopelessly optimistic goals for this past summer and I managed to achieve exactly none of them, except the bare minimum 1,000 mile goal for the Rad. Back in March of 2023, I weighed somewhere between 234 and 238 pounds. I only barely remember seeing those startling numbers on my bathroom scale and at the doc’s office, but those hefty values stuck with me. I gave myself a target to shoot for and a reward: under 200 pounds by the end of summer and a long motorcycle trip to . . . somewhere. Obviously, I didn’t make it. I’ve been stuck between 198 and 202 pounds since the end of September, which means no tour this year. My poor, setup to travel, barely-and-rarely-used 2012 Suzuki TU250X sits in the garage with far fewer miles than either of my bicycles on the odometer.

Mrs. Day is fond of saying, “It could always be worse.” Which is almost always undeniably true. About the middle of October, I woke up one morning to discover my right knee was almost useless. I couldn’t support myself on that leg at all. I think it would be safe to say this is the worst (and the first) “injury” I’ve ever experienced that wasn’t preceded by . . . something: a fall from a bike, stumbling down a cliff, landing wrong from a jump or a ladder, or some event that I could tie to why the hell my leg isn’t working. A month and a half later, it still isn’t wholly functioning, but it has cost me a good bit of the physical conditioning I’d built up during the summer. This is how old people end up in wheelchairs, they wake up after a good night’s sleep crippled. WTF!

Since I retired in 2013, I’ve had a few “this is it” scares. Sooner or later, one of ‘em will be the one that puts me into a cage for the rest of my life—maybe an ambulance, maybe a hearse, or just our Honda CRV—but a cage nonetheless. I used to tell my motorcycle safety students, “Always worry about people who are so incompetent they need 4-wheels to stay upright.” From where I wobble now, I think that was amazingly good advice.

Noisy Kids Who Go Nowhere

I was sitting in my backyard, mostly enjoying the quiet country environment, but being intermittently blasted by various noise machines: motorcycles, jacked up pickups, sportscar-poser Honda Civics, totally illegal-for-street-use ATVs, and other noisy toys. After the umpteenth laughable Hardly yard implement passed by, I started thinking about the two motorcycles I've owned with aftermarket exhaust systems and the one with a hacked up stock pipe.

Back in 1993, I bought a like new 1992 Yamaha TDM from a doctor. I have no idea what he thought a TDM was, but he had spiffed it up with a custom Corbin seat, a Kerker pipe, and some nice luggage. By the time I got home, less than 20 miles later, I went to work replacing the Kerker with the stock pipe (which had been included in the sale). I found a victim for the Kerker with an ad at my local Yamaha shop and got $250 back from my sale price.

A few years later, I bought a barely used Suzuki SV650 from a kid in a Michigan suburb. A friend in Ohio picked up the bike and I took a train to his place to ride it home. The SV  had a Two Brothers pipe and by the time I had ridden the 800 miles back home I was ready to remove the Two Brothers pipe with a sledgehammer. Again, I found a dumbass in Minneapolis who sold me a stock SV pipe for $25 and another dumbass who paid me $250 for the Two Brothers.

My last loud pipe experience was with my Yamaha WR250X. That bike's original owner was a nitwit who took a hacksaw to the last 4 inches of the stock pipe. Having totally screwed up the fuel injection mapping, the bonehead also removed a chunk of the air box and the air filter in a failed attempt at regaining some kind of performance. Again, I found a dumbass on Craigslist who sold me a stock WR pipe for $25 and someone on Facebook who sold me the entire WR air intake system for another $25.

In all three of these instances—two carbureted motorcycles and one fuel injected—returning to stock not only quieted the motorcycle down it improved the performance. I'm not saying that an aftermarket pipe can't improve performance, but I'm saying most of the idiots who diddle with aftermarket pipes are too lame to do all of the dyno, rejetting, intake redesign, and fuel mapping work necessary to compensate for the reduced back pressure.

In the case of the WR250X, I even had the opportunity to drag race multiple times in multiple situations a substantially lighter Rider on a WR250X with an aftermarket pipe, a power commander, and a hacked up intake system. Mostly, we determined that the two bikes were not measurably different power-wise, but the noise difference convinced the other rider to start looking for stock parts. Even riding side-by-side near his bike made my ear-plugged-ears ring.

Now, back to today where I am listening to multiple mediocre-at-best motorcycles blubbering as loudly as a freight train, ridden (to use that word loosely) by total unskilled idiots disturbing the peace for no reason other than their obvious personal insecurities. This isn't a brand new thought, but it is one that has occurred to me repeatedly through this summer: I think it is a safe bet that damned few of the people with loud exhaust systems ever go anywhere on or in their vehicle.

I'd be willing to put some money on that, in fact.

From a bunch of years of accumulating odometer readings on motorcycles up for sale on Craigslist around the country, it's pretty obvious that the more crap someone piles onto a motorcycle the less likely they are to actually ride it. My late step-brother was an example. He poured more money into his Harley then I have invested in all of the cars and motorcycles I've owned in my life. Seriously. And for him, a trip from one end of Springfield, Missouri to the other was “a long ride.”

In the several hundred thousand miles I have ridden motorcycles in my life, I ran into all kinds of people on the road, riding all sorts of motorcycles, and almost universally the people who ride the most miles ride the quietest motorcycles. Even some of the big mile characters on vintage motorcycles, where a stock pipe is only available from salvage yards, do their damnedest to keep exhaust noise at a minimum.

There is nothing about the output from the exhaust pipe that tells you anything useful about the operation of the motor. In fact the less noise the exhaust makes, the more likely you are to be able to hear upcoming engine problems. More importantly, the pounding your ears take from excessive exhaust noise adds exponentially to the fatigue in a long day's ride. Obliterating what little information your ears can provide about hazards and traffic, doing permanent damage to your hearing, and adding to your distraction and fatigue is not conducive to putting in long (thousand mile) days.

And usually, when I've been forced to talk to these noisy pipe characters I hear that they think a hundred miles is an excessive day. And lots of them are really proud of themselves for riding 20 miles to a bar, spending the afternoon drinking and eating, and wobbling their way back home. So along with knowing that the loud pipe character is an asshole, it's pretty safe to assume he or she is a wimp.

Why I Think They Are Wrong

The constant reminder that the “Normalcy Bias” plagues motorcyclists into making fatal and foolish decisions is one of many reasons I decided my Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF)/Minnesota Motorcycle Safety Center(MMSC) instructor career was not worth continuing. Years ago (2006), I wrote one of my all-time favorite essays, “Panic Reactions,” where I described a phrase I came to use almost as often as “good job” in my motorcycle safety classes, "Every panic reaction you have on a motorcycle will be wrong." As part of my answer to every question a student might have had would be my constant hunt for “escape routes.” The latest version of the MSF’s Basic Rider Course (BRC) de-emphasizes risk to the point that instructors were reprimanded for talking about things like escape routes. There, of course, is a reason for that: 1) The MSF is owned by the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) and their overwhelming incentive is to put butts on seats; 2) The MMSC is funded by motorcycle license endorsements and their overwhelming incentive is to make it easy for anyone in the state to obtain and retain an endorsement. Years ago, I was asked to present a “This I Believe” talk to the Unitarian Universalist society to which my wife and I belonged and what I believe in is that “Incentives Are Everything.” Sadly, I find absolutely no evidence that humans are anything more than a slightly evolved animal and that 99.99…% of human activity can be explained by self-interest and incentives.

I get why the MIC is uninterested in actual motorcycle safety. Like every corporation on the planet today, today’s profits over-ride any future self-interest; you gotta satisfy those “equity investors” first and everything else be damned. The MSF’s mission statement is pretty clear, “MSF is the country's leading safety resource and advocate for motorcyclists. We create world-class education and training systems for riders of every experience level. We raise public awareness of motorcycling to promote a safe riding environment.” “Public awareness” is not motorcycling’s main problem: incompetent motorcyclists is overwhelmingly the biggest problem, illegal noise is second, and a close third is the outright hostility toward the motorcycle gangs that largely represents motorcycling in the public eye. Neither of the two groups I was once associated with have a reason to care about those problems. The state’s civil servants are all old enough that they’ll be long retired before any change happens and the MIC’s executives will be long golden parachuted out when the economics behind US motorcycling finally drops the coffin lid on motorcycles and public roads.

In the past couple of months, I’ve had to listen to at least a dozen motorcyclists and ex-motorcyclists describe their “had to lay ‘er down” stories. Not a one of those fairy tales was even slightly believable. If you can’t competently use your brakes, you sure as hell can’t pull of that stuntman bit, but what you can do is panic, scream, and fall over and, then, make up some bullshit story about how you planned it all and it either worked out or didn’t. At least three of the goobers telling me their sob story were hobbled for life from their motorcycle episode. Even they imagined doing something other than simply and stupidly fucking up and falling down when they crashed and disabled themselves.

Back to the “normalcy bias,” one of my favorite books (and podcasts) is You Are Not So Smart and the chapter on normalcy bias describes people frozen in their seats as a crashed airliner catches fire and burns down around them, while their brains chant “this can’t be happening, everything is normal” until the air is sucked from their lungs and they are fried or blown to pieces. The only way to avoid being trapped by your disbelief is to prepare in advance, to consider the options in a disaster, to look for escape routes, and to think about the steps necessary if escape becomes necessary. Every place you go and everything you do should be accompanied by this process, especially in Crazyville, USA where the NRA has armed every nitwit, fanatic, and pissed-off momma’s-boy incel with enough weapons to empty an auditorium. On the highway, an intelligent motorcyclist knows that bicyclists and pedestrians are the only road users who present a lower threat than a motorcycle and, as such, we’re invisible. The only protection we have are escape routes and a vehicle capable of using them [sorry cruiser and trike guys, you’re likely dead since your invalid bike can barely manage asphalt].

You could argue that riding while constantly worrying about being run over by a distracted, incompetent, and/or angry cager takes all the “fun” out of riding a motorcycle. You could delude yourself into imagining that riding rural highways minimizes those risks. The only real protections you have are your skills, your preparation, and luck. [Never discount luck.] An insurmountable obstacle for me to consider continuing my “safety instructor” career was the organizations’ discounting risk in favor of “more butts on seats.” I love motorcycling and motorcyclists (not bikers, they aren’t the same people) and my life was greatly enhanced by 60 years on a motorcycle, but filling the roster with untrained, unprepared, and unskilled riders is going to kill this form of transportation and I don’t want to be part of that.

The best guess is that motorcycle crashes cost the US economy $16B and the entire US motorcycle industry produces a gross income of about $5.6B in 2022. The damned industry and our idiot licensing systems and godawful training approach produces an income that is not-quite 1/3 of the cost of motorcycling to the nation. In comparison, the automotive industry produces $1.53T in gross income and the cost of automotive/truck crashes is about $340B, or one-fourth the national revenue from cars and trucks. Any half-rational nation would start purging motorcycles from public roads a few minutes after absorbing those numbers. We are closer to half-witted than half-rational, but that just means it will take longer to happen. But it will happen.

VBR 5 and Me

A while back, Andy Goldfine invited me to be a guest storyteller at the 5th Very Boring Rally (Aerostich’s 40th anniversary). I have had a long, enlightening, and valuable friendship, first with Aerostich, and, after I moved to MN in 1996, with Andy. I bought my first ‘Stich gear in 1983, after moving to California from Minnesota. I wore that suit until I replaced it with a Darien in 2008, not long before I rode my V-Strom to Alaska. Mostly from when I moved to Minnesota, my collection of ‘Stich gear has grown steadily and every product I purchased from the company exceeded my expectations along with the company’s legendary customer service.

I was the first speaker in the VBR5 series and I didn’t have high expectations for a turnout. Andy and his marketing team must have over-hyped me substantially; or the draw of a free lunch overcame a fair number of motorcyclists’ better judgement. We had a nice crowd of about 15 rider/spectators and nobody threw tomatoes or other produce at me. Some disagreements, especially on the AGAT propaganda, but I’m used to that.

The industry has changed a lot since my first experience with a Roadcrafter and US motorcycling is either in serious decline or at a moment of serious change. In 2022, Honda sold 17M+ and a peak of 22M unit/motorcycles in 2018 worldwide, but on 32,000 of those in 2022 were US sales (0.19% of total motorcycle sales). When the US motorcycle market crashed in 2007, the worst year of the US recession only amounted to about a 0.05% drop in world motorcycle sales. The average age of a US motorcyclist has increased nearly one year each year for the past couple of decades. When the Hardly/chopper Boomer boom ends, which will be damned soon, something is going to pop. With the insane public costs of motorcycle crashes “the GAO further found that motorcycle crashes’ total direct measurable costs were approximately $16 billion.” The fact that the total USA motorcycle market had an estimated 2022 revenue of $6.24b USD out to be a total wakeup call for the public who foot the bulk of that $10B in totally unjustified taxpayer expense. If you add up the drunk riders, the unlicensed riders, the reckless riders, the unprotected riders, and the uninsured (medical and/or vehicle) riders, you are looking at a responsibility-free recreational vehicle that is ripe for recreational vehicle status and a public road banishment.

There is, finally, the beginnings of a couple of responsible motorcyclist organizations; since the AMA vacated that for the marketing riches of being nothing more than an industry spokesbabbler. Stupid crap like this Rick Gray side-stepping shuffle-dance (https://www.nonoise.org/resource/trans/highway/motorcycles/ama.htm) is typical of the AMA’s uselessness. However, both Andy’s Ride to Work Day campaign and SMARTER (Skilled Motorcyclist Association–Responsible, Trained, and Educated Riders) are trying to bring motorcycling as a reasonable transportation alternative, along with the responsibilities associated with that privilege, up front and personally. It might be too little, too late but it’s also better late than never time.