I Was Wrong, Loud Pipes Can Save Lives – Yours and Mine

 For 50 years I have argued that there is absolutely no useful purpose for a loud exhaust system. I used to wear a t-shirt to my motorcycle safety classes that said “If loud pipes save lives, imagine what learning to ride that thing could do." Today riding across this little town on my bicycle, I saw how wrong I have been.  

I was on a bicycle trail coming down a hill away from our local clinic. As I approached a neighborhood intersection with a four-way stop, I heard a blubbering piece of crap, some kind of junk Japanese pretend-sports car, blasting down the road behind me. I moved as far away from the road as I could get.  I kept my eye on my rearview mirror as this moron barreled through the stop sign without even slowing down.  A block later, he barely slowed down for the next stop sign. After that second stop sign, he attempted to make a relatively quick right hand turn to merge onto Highway 61 (cue slide whistle). He missed the curve, turning too sharply, and his right side wheels jumped the curb and he ground off a good chunk of his exhaust system off on the curb, as he wobbled his way through the corner trying to get back onto the road.  Maybe that’s where his loud exhaust system was born?

This wasn't my first example of loud pipes saving lives, but it was pretty dramatic and it was certainly the most recent. The noisy assholes’ argument has always been backwards, though. Loud pipes don't do anything for the car or motorcycle making all of that noise, but they do warn the rest of us that there is an idiot on the road and look out for whatever stupid thing that moron is going to be doing.  There are several personality characteristics of people who imagine they are special enough to deserve to be the loudest vehicle on the road: arrogance, incompetence, entitlement, stupidity, distracted, probably stoned, uneducated, childish and selfish, irresponsible, violent and unpredictable, and so on.  If people had “personality bubbles” floating above them, like cartoon thought bubbles, that labeled them with all of those characteristics, wouldn’t you want an advance warning?  That’s exactly what a loud exhaust system is doing for the rest of us. 

 

When I was a regular motorcyclist, that was pretty close to the opposite opinion I had of the loud pipes morons.  Every mile they rode on public highways endangered my own safety.  Their noisy existence pissed off every driver and all the passengers of every vehicle they came near.  The “rest of us” on two wheels, sometimes including bicyclists, bore the brunt of that anger, since we are obviously less dangerous.  So, from my perspective, loud pipes risked my life as a motorcyclist.  My motorcycling life ended, after about 60 years of that live-changing, wonderful experience and I’ve been on ebikes and in our Honda CRV cage since.  I have always hated excess noise, I wore hearing protection even when I was playing in 60s and 70s rock bands and, certainly, when I was working in heavy equipment.  Rejecting the noisy exhaust system was, naturally, automatic for me.  I’ve bought at least a half-dozen used motorcycles that came with some piece of crap aftermarket exhaust, discounted my buying offer because of the pipe, and sold the pipe for enough month to buy a stock exhaust and a few useful accessories. 

As of this week, I am re-evaluating my opinion.  I’ve been participating in an anti-fascist protest on Highway 61 since February 2025 and I have observed that every single exhaust noise fan who passes us is a Trump culter.  That, of course, totally verifies my opinion of their personality traits (see above).  Along with the traffic and driving experiences, I think the worst people on the planet have self-identified themselves with their noise makers.  That has to be useful information. 

Do You Want to Go for A Drive?

Ms. Day wants to travel, somewhere, almost every day for recreation and to pacify or overwhelm her claustrophobia.  Me, not so much.  I spent our first 50 years of marriage either constantly on the road for a decade in my early electronics career (averaging more than 100,000 miles/year) to being often gone for training courses, field service or product testing trips, field clinical in-service training (as a trainer) or substituting for medical devices clinical engineers, or all-day local travel for my three one-man businesses.  As has often been true in our decades together, our moods and motivations are not matching up, but this daily drive mania is a big mismatch.

By the time I was in my late 20s, I’d driven well over a million-and-a-half miles for work and avocation (R&R bands), many of those miles under intense pressure because my bosses were cowards who wouldn’t give a customer a realistic time for my arrival and made insane promises to avoid unpleasantness on their end of the transactions.  That meant all of the unpleasantness would be saved up for me, the tech who arrived hours or days after he was expected.  Even after that part of my work life ended, I hated being behind the wheel of any 4-wheel (or more) vehicle.  We moved to California in 1983, I left first, from Nebraska, by motorcycle and my family followed a few months later by train.  That was on my first street bike and my first motorcycle road trip and I was hooked. 

I was 35 years old and, already, close to burned out when I left Nebraska, but the long ride from Omaha to Costa Mesa, California and the ten days I’d allowed for the trip and finding a place to stay and getting acquainted with my new home state was rejuvenating.  It didn’t hurt that my new job was a giant improvement over any previous work environment I’d experienced.  The three months between leaving Nebraska and the day my family arrived in California were enough to free me from the dreaded confines of a four-wheel “cage” indefinitely.  Before they arrived, I bought a cage, a 1976 Volvo station wagon, for my wife’s transportation, but I only touched the damn thing to do maintenance (not an infrequent inconvenience).  Over the next ten years, I sat behind the wheel so seldom that I practically forgot how to drive a car. 

The early 80s were the beginning of the end for the best days of US motorcycling.  Dealerships were consolidating and manufacturers were trimming down what they’d import into the US to suit our shrinking market.  Last year’s models were this year’s huge discount.  I went through a string of motorcycles in California, starting with the Honda CX500 that got me there, moving incredibly briefly to a Kawasaki KLR600, to a pair (in sequence) of Yamaha XTZ550 Visions, and a Yamaha XT350 that, along with the ’83 Vision, moved with me to Indiana and, 30 days later, to Colorado.  In a slight nod to practicality, I bought a 1986 Toyota van in Indiana and used/abused it as a camper when I moved from there to Colorado after a failed attempt to upgrade my career in Indiana.  As soon as I got to Colorado, I prepped my bikes for life at a mile-high and rarely used the van again.  It became my wife’s vehicle a year or two later.  Colorado wasn’t California, but it was close enough that I could plan on being on two wheels for at least 10 months of the year and most of the other 2.  The US motorcycle business was still in freefall in 1992 and, in early 1993, I picked up a barely used Yamaha 850 TDM, from a discouraged physician who had spent an extra $3,000 “customizing” the bike.  I bought the TDM for less than a song, maybe a chorus or part of a verse? 

I moved to Minnesota in 1996 when I was 48-years-old.  Not so old that I couldn’t ride my motorcycle most of the year, but old enough to need a cage or a bus pass when there was ice on the roads.  (No longer made of “magic and rubber.”) I was also often acting as a liaison with medical device company clients and I was required to use my own vehicle to shuttle customers around Denver and, then, the Cities.  I had bought a 1990 Nissan Pathfinder in Colorado for the outstanding 4-wheel-drive, passenger comfort, and all-weather transportation.  The liaison aspect of my job quickly vanished in Minnesota and, once again, Ms. Day took possession of the Pathfinder.  Our Roseville rental house was close enough to work for me to return to bicycling for, at least, half of the year and my Yamaha 850 TDM provided me with transportation, recreation, and utility for the rest of the year.  In early 1997, we bought a house a bit further from work but closer to the Cities and we lived there for the next 18 years.  That house had an 850 square foot garage and the garage became my “office” at home.  Over the years we were there, I cycled through a half-dozen motorcycles, an electric scooter, and wore out three bicycles. 

Not long after I retired and we moved to our current house in small southeastern Minnesota town, old age and medical crap made motorcycling less practical and fun.  I sold my last motorcycle, a year ago, in early spring.  It was definitely my last one because I sold a lifetime of tools, riding gear, and camping equipment, too.  It turned out that utility was a big part of why I owned motorcycles.  Riding to work every day kept up both my skills and my interest and retirement ended both.  Just getting on a bike for a pointless cruise through the countryside never appealed to me and when sleeping on the ground became difficult even a long adventure tour lost its attraction. 

After all that, I still do not like driving a car.  One of my medical issues has provided me with occasional double-vision as a symptom.  When that is happening, I don’t drive.  That usually means after noon I’m not getting behind a wheel.  Ms. Day has most of 59 years of expecting me to be the primary driver when we go somewhere together, but those days are likely gone forever.  She isn’t used to that, yet. 

Solving the ICE PR Problem

40-years ago, I worked for a company that was struggling to be noticed in a very competitive market.  Our CEO was, typically, worthless when it came to . . . anything.  But he imagined himself to be an astute marketing person, mostly because marketing is an area of business that rarely receives any sort of scrutiny when it comes to performance or return-on-investment.  One of his favorite, mostly meaningless, sayings was “perception is everything.”  Of course, in most situations, reality is what creates perception, but that’s a different topic than my point of the day. 

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department has created an international perception of being little more than a unidentifiable, random-uniformed, masked, over-armed, brutal, lawless, gang of Trump’s thugs who enjoy beating up, arresting, or murdering anyone who gets in their way.  Their role in “law enforcement” is about as clear as their 1941 SS and Brown-Shirt German counterparts demonstrated at the beginning of the German fascist catastrophe.  The only “friends” these goons have are the other worst-of-the-worst uneducated, unintelligent, unemployable white people who will happily and proudly guzzle whatever Kool-Aid Trump pours for them and Russia’s Republican useful idiots, squatting in Congress, doing whatever treasonous, criminal acts Putin and Netanyahu tell them to do.  That’s not a sustainable marketing plan. 

There are targets that Trump’s goon squad could be aimed at that would thoroughly distract the public’s attention from the awful, un-Constitutional things they are doing.  For example, the old FBI (back when they were, marginally, involved in law enforcement) estimated that there are about 44,000 gang members spread across 300-3,000 Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMGs) littered across the United States. The nation’s impotent and timid “law enforcement agencies” have quietly labeled the largest of these groups “organized crime syndicates.”  All of these characters are easily identified by the pointless, peace-disturbing noise they make and the “rolling bowling pin” crowds of unskilled “Biker Santas” plodding down highways, jamming up traffic, and crashing randomly.  What if ICE pretended to be actual “law enforcement,” just some of the time, and targeted these useless sacks of fat-marbled meat for PR purposes? 

 

Shooting VA hospital nurses and harmless moms in their cars creates a bad image for ICE, but blasting the shit out of a couple dozen biker assholes could turn that around instantly.  Assuming the ICE goons clean up their mess, afterwards, of course.  Imagine Trump’s weird banty rooster, Bovino, posing over a pile of dead bikers with a bulldozer shoveling the bikes into a ditch behind him.  The ICE goons could wear cowboy hats, military helmets, or even full-on clown suits and they’d still get near universal approval for their performance.  Bovino would be up for a Presidential medal of something-or-other instead of hanging out with a bunch of washed up fascists at a cartoonish "remigration" summit in Figueira   Foz, Portugal.  Tim Waltz might even say something nice about him if ICE had wiped out a Minnesota nest of Outlaws or Hell’s Angels. 

It’s probably true that an occasional dentist or lawyer dresses up like Sonny Barger and blubbers through his neighborhood posing as a tough guy biker.  After a couple of rounds with ICE hitting the news cycle, shown mowing down a bar full of half-witted biker Santas, the dentists and lawyers will crawl back to their country clubs and go back to posing as rich, single guys in Miatas, BMW M2s, and vintage Corvettes.  Their overpriced, underpowered, noise-maker Harley’s will continue doing what they do best, drooling oil on the garage floor. 

 

If ICE mismanagement really wants to change the department’s public perception from a pack of untrained, cowardly, goons with no useful purpose to actual law enforcement, this is the shortest path to that goal.  Start gunning down bikers and anyone else with illegal exhaust systems[1] and the department will, overnight, go from being universally hated to being cheered where ever they go.  And, let’s face it, nobody will notice if every asshole biker on the planet disappeared tomorrow.  It’s not like they have ever contributed anything but fear, noise, stupidity, drugs and violence to the nation’s problems. 

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[1] Every state in the Union has similar laws to Minnesota’s 325E.0951 MOTOR VEHICLE AIR POLLUTION CONTROL SYSTEMS rule, which states:

“(a) A person may not knowingly tamper with, adjust, alter, change, or disconnect any air pollution control system on a motor vehicle or on a motor vehicle engine.

“(b) A person may not manufacture, advertise, offer for sale, sell, use, or install a device that causes any air pollution control system not to be functional as designed.

“(c) A person may not sell or transfer a motor vehicle with knowledge that any air pollution control system is either not in place or is not functional.”

On the Path to the Pine Box

We have a fairly constant annoyance, with occasional bursts of much worse emotions, with a new “neighbor from hell.” The existence of this pack of goobers has convinced us it's probably time to move on. Mostly, our motivation to move is based in the fact that, at almost 80, we're probably not up to taking care of this third-acre yard on a hillside anymore.

But, also, the reason we're in this bad-neighbor issue is because the city of Red Wing is mismanaged by a part-time City Council and a full-time and grotesquely overpaid bureaucracy who don't do their jobs. The neighbor from hell property was abandoned for more than 15 years and, since it was abandoned with the whole back side of the house roof unfinished and a large shop roof that collapsed, it should have been condemned and destroyed by the city. It wasn't: because our city inspector is about as energetic as a block of wood and, as long as the absentee owner paid his property taxes, the county was bribed to do nothing.  As always, incentives are everything when it comes to humans.

We did some house hunting this past weekend. Two of my target cities are Rochester and Northfield, Minnesota. Yesterday, we spent several hours going from one listing to another, checking out the neighborhoods. We are looking for what is, apparently, an odd property: a small footprint, two bedroom and two baths, reasonably energy efficient house near a quiet downtown area. And pretty much everyone who has a house that fits that criteria ain't going anywhere.

Up to this point, you would be rational in assuming this is going to be a Rat's Eye View rant. But you'd be wrong.

There was one house on my list that ticked every single box and I was really looking forward to seeing it. As we approached the neighborhood, the bicycle trail that ran parallel to the street was almost packed with walkers, joggers, and bicyclists. Bear Creek runs next to the bicycle trail and it looked absolutely kayakable and easily accessible. Despite that “traffic,” the neighborhood is reasonably quiet.  My hopes were rising. The house is a four bedroom, three bath, brick home with a small, very manageable yard, and a really nice back deck with a fully fenced backyard. But I barely looked at the house before telling Ms. Day "this ain't it." 

The house next door was a large, white box building with a highly customized Harley piece of two-wheeled garbage parked right next to the front door. There are a few things on earth that are a bigger red flag than a customized Harley. I instantly knew why the house we were looking at had been on the market for more than 80 days and the price had dropped three times. I knew why the people who were selling that house desperately wanted to leave. I wish them good luck, but the only people they are likely to find interested in that house would be another biker gangbanger. And, usually, that demographic doesn't have enough money to pay rent let alone fund a house down payment.

And we're in a similar boat with our home. The people who bought the next-door hell-house instantly cut down a backyard full of trees and, because there is no equipment access to their backyard, decided they were going to use a wood chipper to grind up a small forest. This guy is on full Railroad Pension Disability, supposedly due to long-COVID.  In the meantime, the garage right next to our property has a collapsed roof and has been condemned by the city. And in Red Wing, condemning a property means absolutely nothing. They are still storing vehicles in the garage and it is obviously a fire trap. Neither the city or the county cares and won’t until it burns down and causes a major neighborhood disaster or someone wanders into that garage and gets injured.  At one time, around 2006-2008, the deceased owner’s nephews cooked meth in the house until . . . something, I don’t know what, shut that business down.  Supposedly, the meth chemicals still provide an essence to the house.  And, did I mention, there is a POS cruiser parked in the collapsing garage.  Of course, there is. 

California Is Coming for Your E-bike!

E-bikers around the country are freaking out over California’s attempt to regulate e-bike use.  Senator Catherine Blakespear (D-SD) introduced Senate Bill 1167, legislation that is aimed at “tightening California’s oversight of electric mopeds and other higher-speed electrically powered two-wheelers that fall into gray areas of existing law.”  “Gray areas” is putting it lightly.  Electric motor bikes (not necessarily bicycles) almost immediately became the insane wild west of US transportation.  The crowd who are promoting these electric scooters and motorcycles are about as technically adept and unskilled as the average US motorist, but they imagine themselves to be “special.”  Senate Bill 1167 bill hopes to “create a clearer regulatory framework for vehicles marketed as e-bikes but capable of speeds and performance more akin to mopeds or lightweight motorcycles.”

Since this is the United States, where we can’t even manage to keep high-capacity, military-grade automatic weapons out of the hands of kids, morons, and lunatics, I can only wish California “good luck.”  The law’s intention is not just rational, but worthwhile, “Faster and more powerful electric motorcycles are being marketed as e-bikes, which is dangerous to children and adults,” Blakespear said. “SB 1167 makes clear to consumers whether they are buying an e-bike, which has defined limits for power and speed, or something else.”  The problem is that the same people who happily elected a convicted felon to the Presidency are the ones buying electric motorcycles and whining “but it has pedals” when the fact is that they are incompetent riders, aggressive traffic hazards, and low-level criminals. 

Yeah, “low level-criminals.”

Like exhaust noise and pollution, most every state has laws defining bicycles, mopeds, and motorcycles.  The definitions are based on horsepower and max speed under power and they are defined at the national level by DOT.  E-bikes, for example:

“Electric-assisted bicycle” means a bicycle with two or three wheels that:

• has a saddle and fully operable pedals for human propulsion
• meets the requirements of a class 1, class 2, or class 3 electric-assisted bicycle.

In Minnesota, a moped (motorized bicycle) is defined as having:

• Pedals or a seat,
• 50cc, engine max 30 mph.
• Requirements: Must be registered ($6 annually). Operators need a driver's license or a Moped Permit.
• Operation: Cannot operate on sidewalks or interstates.

   And motorcycles:

• Seat/saddle,
• 2 or 3 wheels, >50cc. Includes motor scooters (e.g., Vespa).
• Requirements: Valid driver’s license with a 2-wheeled endorsement. Must be registered, titled, and insured.
• Operation: Must use lanes, not sidewalks. Passengers allowed only if designed for them.

See how easy that would be to regulate?  Probably not.  If vehicle noise is beyond the capabilities of “law enforcement,” everything else is Crazyville.  Minnesota’s 325E.0951 Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Systems rule provides police with clear guidance, even defining “motor vehicles,” “people,” and the parts of a vehicle’s “air pollution control systems” for the totally clueless characters in uniform:

• Motor vehicle. "Motor vehicle" means any self-propelled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine and designed for use on the public highways, such as automobiles, trucks, and buses.
• Person. "Person" means an individual, firm, partnership, incorporated and unincorporated association, or any other legal or commercial entity.
• Air pollution control system. "Air pollution control system" means any device or element of design installed on or in a motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine in order to comply with pollutant emission restrictions established for the motor vehicle or motor vehicle engine by federal statute or regulation.

Minnesota’s law is clear about “prohibited acts” and the penalties, too:

• A person may not knowingly tamper with, adjust, alter, change, or disconnect any air pollution control system on a motor vehicle or on a motor vehicle engine.
• A person may not manufacture, advertise, offer for sale, sell, use, or install a device that causes any air pollution control system not to be functional as designed.
• A person may not sell or transfer a motor vehicle with knowledge that any air pollution control system is either not in place or is not functional.
• Subd. 4.Penalty: A person who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Spend a few moments on any major traffic route in the state and you won’t have a moment of trouble identifying misdemeanor criminals, but local and state cops are totally incapable of this simple task.  If there were ever a job that could be immediately performed better than humans, it would be “traffic cop.”  Put a decibel meter, a CO-sniffer, and a photon-cannon on a robot and advertise the “new rules” on YouTube (where all of the idiots get their “information”): “If your vehicle is stopped for noise or emissions violations, you will be given five minutes to remove your possessions from the vehicle before it is vaporized.” 

Likewise, if a Robocop sees a “bicyclist” cruising along at 21+mph on level ground without pedaling, the bike is obviously a moped (under 30mph) or a motorcycle and becomes the property of the city or state to sell at auction, or to crush for the recycling value.  Or provides roadside entertainment with the photon-cannon. 

Obviously, in every respect, e-bikes are the least of our problems today.  Our Constitution is so poorly conceived and written that it doesn’t prevent convicted felons from becoming President, although that same person probably couldn’t get a job at McDonalds flipping burgers.  That wad of slavery-protecting tissue paper doesn’t prevent Supreme Court judges from taking bribes or even require the Chief Justice to recuse  himself for having direct financial interest in a case. Thanks to the deadly blow to democracy from the Citizens United stupidity, every Russian oligarch, tech bro billionaire, and foreign interest can buy any political office needed to rape and pillage the nation’s credit and national security. 

The inability to competently regulate something as simple as electric bicycles vs. motorcycles is just a symptom of a nation that has spiraled into lawlessness and chaos.  At least from where I sit, it’s hard to see a path to anything resembling an organized, rational, law-abiding society.  Canada is looking better every day: and I hate winter.

How Idea “Compounded Interest” Works

 Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground

In the late 90s, I created three Google Blogger blogs: The Rat’s Eye View, Wirebender Audio Rants, and Geezer with a Grudge.  The Rat’s Eye view was, originally, going to be a repository for a collection of articles I had written in my position as a freelance manufacturing/management consultant with Productivity, Inc. (A long dead manufacturing consulting company out of Temecula, CA.)  That gig didn’t last long, mostly because I was disgusted by the executives I worked with as a consultant and moved on to other money-making ventures.  But I kept writing in The Rat’s Eye, even though it didn’t seem like anyone was paying attention.  About the same time, I had become a regular contributor to a regional motorcycle magazine, The Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, and my column was called “Geezer with A Grudge.”  I almost always wrote more articles than the magazine could use and I started storing my “extras” in the Geezer blog.  A few years later, I started working, part time, at a music college, first as a technical support consultant and, later, as an instructor.  I also had three music-related one-man businesses that I called “Wirebender Audio Services.”  So, to promote those businesses, I started Wirebender Audio Rants.

I haven’t written much about motorcycles since I had to quit riding, last year, for reasons of old age.  So, I haven’t paid much attention to that blog’s statistics.  Today, I discovered that sometime ago the Geezer blog past 2 million views (2,028,204, as of today, in fact) and is averaging about 6500 views per month!  So, I checked the other blogs and found that The Rat’s Eye View, my least likely candidate for readers had 393,543 views and for the past year has been averaging 3500 views per month and Wirebender Audio Rants and averaged 9100 views per month and a total of 332,501 views for the blog’s lifetime. 

For a while, Google’s Ad Sense actually paid money for advertising links in the blog and the Geezer blog made me an average of $100/month for the advertising hits.  A few years ago, Google decided to keep all but a few pennies of the advertising revenue to themselves and I deleted Ad Sense from all of my blogs.  That was several (about 10) years ago and, since then I just write for the excuse H.L. Menken gave, “for the same reason cows give milk.” 

The point I lamely tried to make with this essay’s title was that many things that we do, creatively and without much hope of notice, can pay some fun dividends if you last long enough.  Way back in late 2020, I was still writing fairly regular Geezer columns and paying attention to the numbers.  I was pretty impressed with myself when that blog made it to 1,000,000 hits.  I know that’s pretty lame in a world where a Tik Tok or drunks-in-a-bar YouTube “influencer” can, apparently, easily gather 1,000,000 followers.  My most “popular” blog, the Geezer, has a grand total of 90 followers and The Rat’s Eye has 2 and Wirebender has 14.  I’d be embarrassed by those lame numbers, except that . . . I’m not. 

My comparatively new Substack page, “T.W. Day Stories and Rants on Random Subjects,” has 24 “subscribers” (all free) and that page has had about 6,400 hits since it started in December of 2023.  It has ben a slow, somewhat exponential, reader growth and I’ve made-little-to-no effort at promoting my page.  My “biggest” month had a little over 900 hits.  Every source I know of claims that reading isn’t something that many people bother with today.  My wife, more typically, gets practically all of her knowledge from YouTube, which is a sure way to drive me from any room or gathering.  I really don’t want to think about how many people use Tik Tok for that purpose.  I never expected to be read as much as I’ve been on any of my Blogger blogs and I’m delighted with the slow progress of my Substack page.  I’m incredibly grateful to everyone, even the critics, who has take the time, exercised the patience, and kept a rare skill alive by reading my essays. 

Gratefully,

T.W. Day

A Year Later

 Thoughts from an ex-motorcyclist a year after selling “everything” and calling it quits. 

I started riding motorcycles when I was 14, with a bottle of booze, a gray lie about my age and motorcycling experience, and my first low speed, minimal damage “crash.” That was in 1962 and, other than brief interruptions due to our many cross-country moves and a couple of moments when I thought I’d stumbled to the end of my motorcycle enthusiasm, I have owned motorcycles since. But due to a collection of age-related medical issues that hammered me almost into giving up a lot more than motorcycling, I sold what was likely my last motorcycle a year ago. Not long after that, I emptied my basement and two garages of all the motor gear, tools, and odds and ends (and there was some pretty odd stuff, too.) I am infamous, in my family, for ripping off bandages before the wound has healed and when I sold two of my all-time favorite Aerostich riding suits it was traumatic. When I was a motorcycle instructor for the state of Minnesota, I’d often advise new riders “Buy the best gear you can afford and, if you have any money left, buy a motorcycle with the remainder.” My Aerostich suits represented an almost $4,000 investment and I am highly unlikely to put that kind of money into riding gear again. I’m not likely to pay that much money for a damn car, let alone motorcycle gear.

I’m a bit past a year since my last motorcycle ride, which was traumatic at best. As that “Done and Out” Geezer post described, my last ride was relentlessly depressing. I haven’t sucked that badly since my first, foolish “test ride” on a borrowed BMW (“or Guzi”) when I was 14. My turn off of MN19 to the road that leads to my home was so tentative, so cowardly (thanks to severe carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands) that it was obvious to me that I did not belong on a motorcycle. It wasn’t just motorcycling that seemed to be coming to an end either. I had some of the same limitations on a bicycle, driving a car for any length of time, writing with a pen or pencil, typing, and playing guitar. That short list just about wraps up my whole life’s interests and work. Couple the previous years’ problems with vision and myasthenia gravis and it felt very much like I was driving out-of-control toward my father’s last, awful 20 years of life. The days between selling the Suzuki and my gear and November of last year were downbeat, at best.

Thanks to my brilliant and dedicated primary physician, Dr. Thomas Meyer, and the Mayo Clinic team that he referred me to during those months, in late October I had carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand. Less than two weeks later, I was able to securely hold a guitar pick and play for the first time in at least 10 years. In early December, I had the same surgery on my right hand and two months later I was able to play guitar, painlessly, for well over an hour without once having to shake my hand until the feeling returned. Before the surgery, Neil Olmscheid, D.O. (the surgeon), estimated that I should be able to play guitar, type, and ride a bicycle within a few weeks of the surgery. I, seriously, thought he was either joking or that I’d misunderstood his time estimates or he’d mistaken my activities for something way less strenuous. He was right, I was wrong, and I’m glad.

It’s possible that I could ride a motorcycle again, now. Since I self-identified as “a motorcyclist” (not “a biker”) for about 62 years, it was hard to let go of that, but it seems almost as difficult to think about starting over, too. I no longer commute anywhere and commuting was the core of my motorcycling transportation purpose. Most every year between 1972 (the year I bought my first street-legal bike, a 1971 Kawasaki 350 Bighorn and put a license plate on the damn thing), I rode to work almost every day that I wasn’t required to haul equipment. There were few months, even in the Minnesota winters, when I didn’t motorcycle commute more than half of the work week. I lived on two wheels for a decade in California so completely that I practically had to take a driver’s ed course when I needed to drive the family cage.

I bicycle almost that much today in my small Minnesota retirement village. But not in the winter. Early in my ebike “education” I did a face-plant on a slushy trail, undercoated with a layer of ice, and that convinced me that I’m “too old” for riding on snow and ice. I don’t like it that much, anyway. (Sorry to disappoint you, Wolf.) Thanks to the “effects” of being nearly 80, a bunch of things are in my life’s rearview mirror:

• · sleeping on the ground,
• · sleeping through the night without having to take a piss at least twice,
• · decent reflex response time,
• · running or jumping without injury,
• · remembering any sort of math formula or learning a new programming language,
• · doing a brake job on my wife’s car without being crippled for a couple of days afterwards,
• · playing guitar with anything other than light gauge strings,
• · working with 4’x8’ plywood or sheetrock thicker than 3/8” (especially if stairs are involved),
• · and a whole lot of other stuff I don’t want to think about.

When I taught motorcycle safety classes, I often tried to subtly discourage the over-50 crowd from chasing their motorcycling bucket list dreams because it’s not an activity for the disabled. Most Americans are disabled (grossly overweight and weak) by the end of their 30s. There were a few wonderful exceptions to that advice, but most of those pitiful youth-chasers were going to buy (or already had) some kind of cruiser/girl’s bike to join up with an existing gang of incompetent wannabe-biker-posers. The odds are, overwhelmingly, likely that they’d soon be dead or disabled from a crash and I didn’t want to be part of the “nobody warned me” crowd. So, I warned them, but almost nobody listened, even when they failed the disgustingly easy MSF motorcycle endorsement test at the end of the class. The latest version of the MSF’s Basic Rider Course is so simplified and passive that I couldn’t choke it down. My bout with MG in 2019 was enough to convince me that year would be my last as an instructor.

There are lots of things I miss about no longer being a motorcyclist and a few things that I don’t miss. I don’t miss changing tires, wallowing in grease and automotive chemicals, or trying to find a tool I had in my hand a few moments ago. I certainly miss being young enough to think I can improve with practice. I miss the near-total independence (except for fuel) of being in a moderately remote area by myself on a motorcycle with a full tank of gas, riding with camping gear and a couple days of dehydrated food in my side cases, and no particular destination in mind. Some of that has been replaced with the comfort and security of retirement from a lifetime of frugal living that has left us with decent savings and no debt. Living in a rural area with dozens of miles of traffic-free bicycle trails is some compensation, too. We all know “everything ends,” but we don’t all know that means us, too.

You Are No Cowboy

I grew up in western Kansas and spent a lot of my K-12 years working on an uncle’s eastern Kansas ranch. My cousins were actual cowboys, even winning state roping and riding championships. I liked the work, but it turned out that I don’t like horses all that much.

In the late-60s, my wife and I rented an apartment from a dude in Dallas who desperately wanted to be a rich guy and had bought a “ranch” that he planned on turning into a horse breeding business. Since my wife loves horses and I had spent some of my youth working on a ranch, our landlord thought we’d be cheap ranch help.  For two years, I trained, fed, castrated, exercised, and got tossed on my ass by a motley collection of thoroughbreds and some wonderful, world-class quarter horses. Most of which were almost as smart as a two-stroke motorcycle; especially the thoroughbreds.  I have documented my horsie experience before, in Geezer with A Grudge: “#48 An Attempt at Understanding.” The end result is that I have enough trouble keeping track of one scatterbrain and I generally don’t ride horses or want to ride horses.

At the beginning of my electronics career, I was a tech, then an engineer, in commercial ag equipment; electronic scales, to be precise. Most of my customers were feedlot owners from Louisiana to North Dakota and all states between and west to the Rockies. Many of their employees were cowboys at the tailend of both a career/life and a way of life. I met a lot of working cowboys in that job and saw a lot of rodeos. I am not one, but I know a cowboy when I see or hear one and I know a great rider when I see one.

There are two things that are guaranteed to piss me off are Nashville country singers wearing cowboy hats and Harley assholes pretending that their idiotic motorcycles are throwbacks to “western riding style.” (Obviously, there are more than two things that get that reaction.) Nashville and the southeast are no more likely to produce a “cowboy” than Wisconsin or Minnesota. If you own a horse and you live in those places, the horse is a pet and your “ranch” is a hobby farm and your “western style” is a costume. Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you Charlie Daniels, Garth Brooks, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Clint Black, and the rest of the limp-wristed spaghetti-western country star pose-alikes.

 

My wife’s grandfather and great-uncle Kye (pictured at left) were eastern Colorado real-life cowboys. This picture has hung in our homes since the early 1970s. Kye McKeever worked as a ranch hand until he died. My wife’s grandfather, Ira McKeever, was the Monford Ranch range manager until he quit to start his own successful cattle ranch in the 1940’s. His ride of choice was a 1950’s Ford pickup, but he had a horse or two mostly to entertain his grandkids. Several of Ira’s Colorado neighbors still used horses for daily work and transportation well into the late-60s (1960s). Those men would be as likely to submit themselves to a gynaecological pelvix exam riding position as they would to wearing a ballerina outfit to a cattle auction. You’ll notice a cowboy has his feet under his ass, so he can stand in the stirrups when necessary and guide the horse with his heels and toes.

 

This kind of idiot crap is for handicapped fools who could no more negotiate a parking lot turn than ride a motorcycle functionally. This isn’t “western style,” but it might be Hollywood or New York-style. (Donny looks about as “comfortable” sitting on a propped-up Hardly as he did catching a soft-underhanded toss baseball.)  I don’t have any objection to the Village People or any other kind of reverse-macho posing you’re up to, but I do object to hearing that this kind of motorcycle is somehow connected to American cowboy history. It isn’t. In fact, nothing about the cruiser heritage has anything to do with horses or cowboys.

 

If you look at the idiot extremes, like the picture at right, it’s hard to imagine what sort of weirdness is being imitated. My best guess is some sort of handcuffed-to-the-ceiling fantasy. Creepy.  It’s not cowboy, though, in any way, shape, or (especially) form.