Geezer with a Grudge: None of Us Are Too Smart

May 14, 2021

None of Us Are Too Smart

One of my favorite books and podcasts is You Are Not So Smart (YANSS). In episode 1 of the podcast, “The Invisible Gorilla,” at about 9 minutes, Daniel Simmons discusses the “inattentional blindness” issue and directly relates it to why so many cagers do not see motorcyclists.

Especially during these years of Trump-insanity I’ve been distracted and fascinated by how poorly human brains work and how distant we actually are from the “rational animal” we pretend to be. YANSS is a wealth of information about those defective, funky, weird things that mostly reside between our ears. Since safe motorcycling is mostly a skill of the mind, rather than a physical skill of magical and mythical “muscle memory,” figuring out how our minds function or fail to function is a lot more important to those of us one two wheels than it is to cagers or mass transit commuters.

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The Geezer Story

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

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

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