The Perfect Harley Rider Party Tent

 

Impress your friend or your imaginary girl friend.

In It for Ourselves

All Rights Reserved © 2010 Thomas W. Day

I dropped off my grandson at school on a Thursday fall morning and headed back home, in my trusty, rusting Escort station wagon via I35E. About half-way home, I saw a fast-approaching orange hippomobile in my rear view mirror. The rider wasn't a small guy, either. Gear-wise, the rider was almost as naked as the day he was born; helmet-less and bald, glove-less, half-covered by a two-man tent-sized wind-whipped tee-shirt, loose butt-crack illuminating gangsta jeans, and low-top tennis shoes without socks. The rider was a one-man advertisement for the MSF's Basic Rider Course. Using his considerable weight to weave his 1,000 pound vehicle and flying along at 20mph over the posted speed in moderately heavy traffic, there was no way to avoid imagining how this dude's motorcycling career was going to end. His motorcycle motto was clearly, "Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." His bike had a lot in common with streetcars, too.

There were three lessons to be learned while being passed by this experiment in high velocity meat distribution: 1) the physics of sound and 2) the errors in common assumptions and 3) far too many motorcyclists are among the most self-centered people on earth.

Obviously, the hippomobile was exhaust silencer-free. In fact, the exhaust noise was so obnoxious that I could hear him when he was nearly out of sight. However, that same deafening blubber was non-existent until the bike was close to parallel with my cage. My windows were rolled up, the radio was on but not loud, and I saw the doofus at least 1/4 mile before I heard him. I listen for a living and I was paying particular attention to this goofball because he looked like a crash-waiting-to-happen from the moment I saw him. As he dodged between the cars around him, clinging desperately to the bars, heaving his belly from side-to-side pretending to be a real motorcyclist, he was violating the peace and quiet of thousands of fellow highway users and every neighborhood within a 1/2 mile of the freeway. However, all that noise was totally useless as a heads-up for anyone he was about to pass. As a life-saving device, his loud pipes only advertised his exit, not his approach.

I was at a friend's going-away party a couple of days earlier and when I was introduced as the author of this column, my new acquaintance said, "You probably hate superbikes, right?" After we talked for a while, he admitted to often "testing" his GSX-R 1100 on Dallas freeways at near top speed and to high speed lane-splitting in a state (like most) where any sort of lane-splitting is illegal. I suggested that a bike like his had no particular purpose in a 60mph world and that he might have more fun on a 250 or 500cc motorcycle on his daily commute. I suggested that, if he wanted to encourage lane-splitting in Texas, he might want to consider less ill-mannered tactics that the ones he'd been using.

He answered by telling me that it didn't matter. His bike had been dead in the garage for engine problems (one too many poorly engineered "upgrades" and the motor had fried). He said he was probably going to give up motorcycling when his first kid was born in a few months. With that change in the subject, I mentioned that my biggest complaint with his "superbike" and most of the hippobikes I bitch about is that they are useless toys, ridden aggressively and offensively until the owners either get hurt or quit riding before they get hurt. This leaves real motorcyclists with a bad reputation and a hostile voting majority looking to limit our access and rights. I don't hate the bikes, but I'm not fond of their stereotypical owners.

I'm not too impressed with people whose riding skills and common sense is so limited that they have to give up motorcycling because of a mild change in responsibilities, either. If you suck too much to ride and parent, I doubt that you were ever good enough to be licensed to ride on public roads. I'd suspect your capacity as a parent, too.

Where I live, I have the pleasure of hearing all sorts of un-silenced motorcycles blasting a boring, straight section of eight-lane freeway. All of those folks impress me with how lame and clueless they are. There is a common assumption among hippobikers that motorcycling's bad reputation mainly comes from crotch-rocketeers blasting through traffic and terrorizing cagers. The fact is that tactic is pretty common among all of the folks who don't care how many people they irritate; superbikers, hippobikers, and douchebags in clubcab pickups and wannabe sports cars. I'm beginning to suspect that if one set of manners is deficient, that deficiency may apply to that person's conduct in general.

Riding as if your parents were cannibalistic wolves and raised you in a cave with no human contact other than the Manson gang or Motley Crue is single-mindedly selfish. It demonstrates a distinct unconcerned attitude toward everyone but yourself. It says that you don't care about offending the general public. It says that you don't care about costing future motorcyclists their public road access. It says that you don't mind pissing off a cager so that the next motorcyclist may be put in danger.

South Park did a pretty decent job of describing what's actually being said after one of you noisemakers blasts past. (This is not a rare opinion. A friend, whose son is gay, seriously considered waving a "Fags go home" sign at the noisemakers who polluted her neighborhood at a recent rub-rub-rub rally in Hudson.) Loud pipes don't save lives, but they do something. Juvenile driving tactics don't save time, demonstrate your motorcycling skill, or impress the cage-driving peasants. Anti-social behavior just does one thing: it pisses people off. People who vote, write their government, complain to their local police, and write new laws limiting motorcycle access to public areas.

For most of my life, I've heard guys brag about how much attention they get on their loud, expensive toys. The only attention you're getting is negative. Nobody thinks you are cool, but a large number of people want you banned from public roads.

Got Soul?

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

On the shake-down cruise for our new miniature motorhome back in the summer of 2013, I managed to do something dumb and my bicycle slipped off of the trailer and dragged along for a couple of blocks before a Good Samratian (Look it up, that is supposed to be an oxymoron.) took sympathy on me and flagged me down. This is a 25+-year old, no-name (SuperGo) mountain bike that has suffered all sorts of depredations, but was my only bicycle and I'd intended to ride it when we got to the campground. No such luck, though. The rear derailleur was trashed and there is no hope for an 18-gear bicycle without a rear shifter. The rest of the bike was in pretty decent shape, road-rashed but ride-able. If I had $20 worth of parts, I could have resurrected the bike and the bicycling portion of the week.

While we were hiking the area, we ran into a shop that specialized in tasteless Velvet Elvis tourist crap made by "local artisans," sodas and packaged ice cream, and a bicycle rental/repair shop. I half-hoped the bike shop might have a used replacement shifter for cheap, since they rented a butt-load of cheap bicycles to untalented and uncoordinated tourists. It didn't take long to realize that was a non-starter. The bike shop guy claimed that he could sell me the parts I needed for less money than in the Cities and that their repair job would be the best available. "We're a bike shop with a soul," he claimed.

Ever since Mathew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work hit the bookstands, every breed of repair guy has been claiming to be specially soulful in his work. Since, for most of my life, I've been around musicians who are the original source of people with soul, I have a few bases for comparison. Like lots of trendy qualities, the rule for musicians is if a player claims to be a "Soul-man," he isn't and wouldn't be allowed to park any where near someone who is one. Mechanics and technicians, almost by definition, are the polar opposite of soulful. They might be spiritual, in one of the thousands of ways humans make claim to that status, but "being one with nature or machine" is usually not the attitude of the usual mechanic. It's true that a lot of small, independent bicycle shops are staffed by die-hard bikers who believe they are saving the world on human-powered machines and that is a damn soulful approach to life, but making claim to being specially soulful in that crowd is either clueless or arrogant or both. For a baseline, I looked up the word "soul" in Webster's little book, but the definitions are nearly useless: 1) the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life or 2) the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe or 3) a bunch of mindless crap that doesn't define an identifiable or useful characteristic. Ok, maybe the lake resort bike shop was a soulful place. It appears that anything that exists is. I had no idea the word "soul" was so useless in defining anything.

Apparently, being the "King of Soul" wasn't much of an accomplishment, no matter how much I thought it was? No, I'm not buying that. JB wrote the best national anthem in American history and that has to count for something. "Having soul" still accounts for something with me.

Not wanting to be suckered into dumping a bunch of money into a worn-out bicycle, even with all of the emotional attachments, I looked around a bit for signs of soulfulness. Almost immediately after I talked to the bike shop owner, he took off for the day and left the place in the hands of some teenage kids who looked about as soulful as Donny Osmond or that Bieber twerp. Not a good sign. I watched one of the kids "work" for about ten minutes and decided I could survive on foot for a few days. If there had been a case bolt on the bicycle the kid was working on, he would have used an eight pound sledge and a steel chisel to break it loose: a scene right out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if I ever saw one. I saw no evidence the kid knew a pipe wrench from a bottom bracket tool. My bike was busted, but fixable. I decided to take it home and administer resuscitation myself. The If I really needed to go somewhere, I brought the dirt bike with me and managed to keep it on the trailer without incident. We put in a lot more walking miles than I'd planned and that was probably good for me, too.

Once we were settled back home, I pulled the shredded pieces off of the bicycle and found replacements. A local seriously soulful local bike shop sold me a decent replacement derailleur for about $30 and a couple of hours later, I took the repair bike for a post-destruction road trip. It is worse for the wear, but still rolling. Best of all, a bike repair man "with soul" did the work; me. This isn't a new lesson, but a reminder of an old fact. The only person who really cares about my stuff is me. I can't fix everything, but the things I can fix I need to do myself. It's a soulful thing.

Levels of Stupid

This snazzy advertisement from J&P Cycles appeared in my inbox this morning. One one level, I wanted to write something about how incredibly inappropriate it is to be loading up your hippobike with alcohol advertisements. On another level, I sort of hit the limits on my patience for human, especially American, stupidity. If you follow the link, you'll find all sorts of cheap chrome crap with which you can decorate your cheap chrome crap Harley or yourself.

Why decorating yourself with stuff like this wouldn't be justification for pulling over a rider for a blood alcohol test, any time of the day, beats me. I would even be good with "putting a couple of warning shots into the head, as a warning," as my father used to say.

Crashes and Deaths by State

How crazy are the drivers in your home state? The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety does a nice job of providing data for you to decide. Unfortunately, my HTML/Google Blogger capabilities makes this harder than it should be to read. I apologize for that. Excel spreadsheets don't transfer smoothly to webpage tables and correcting the spacing and alignment is beyond my patience and interest. This is 2017 data, but I doubt ANYTHING has improved since then, since nothing else in this country is getting better.

State	Population	Vehicle miles traveled (millions)	Fatal crashes	Deaths	Deaths per 100,000 population	Deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled
South Carolina	5,024,369	54,859	924	988	19.7	1.8
Mississippi	2,984,100	41,387	614	690	23.1	1.67
Louisiana	4,684,333	48,094	696	760	16.2	1.58
Alaska	739,795	5,028	75	79	10.7	1.57
Kentucky	4,454,189	50,284	721	782	17.6	1.56
West Virginia	1,815,857	20,106	280	303	16.7	1.51
Arizona	7,016,270	67,821	919	1,000	14.3	1.47
Montana	1,050,493	12,738	169	186	17.7	1.46
Florida	20,984,400	215,810	2,922	3,112	14.8	1.44
Kansas	2,913,123	32,504	407	461	15.8	1.42
Texas	28,304,596	270,621	3,343	3,722	13.1	1.38
Arkansas	3,004,279	35,746	457	493	16.4	1.38
Idaho	1,716,943	17,676	223	244	14.2	1.38
South Dakota	869,666	9,341	111	129	14.8	1.38
Alabama	4,874,747	69,277	864	948	19.4	1.37
New Mexico	2,088,070	28,171	340	379	18.2	1.35
Oklahoma	3,930,864	49,228	611	655	16.7	1.33
Tennessee	6,715,984	80,128	959	1,040	15.5	1.3
Wyoming	579,315	9,492	105	123	21.2	1.3
Georgia	10,429,379	122,398	1,440	1,540	14.8	1.26
Missouri	6,113,532	74,005	863	930	15.2	1.26
Colorado	5,607,154	53,750	600	648	11.6	1.21
North Carolina	10,273,419	117,754	1,306	1,412	13.7	1.2
North Dakota	755,393	9,760	105	115	15.2	1.18
Oregon	4,142,776	37,528	400	437	10.5	1.16
Delaware	961,939	10,242	112	119	12.4	1.16
Indiana	6,666,818	80,282	836	914	13.7	1.14
Maine	1,335,907	15,063	163	172	12.9	1.14
Nevada	2,998,039	27,803	290	309	10.3	1.11
Pennsylvania	12,805,537	104,022	1,083	1,137	8.9	1.09
Nebraska	1,920,076	20,828	210	228	11.9	1.09
Rhode Island	1,059,639	7,997	76	83	7.8	1.04
California	39,536,653	353,868	3,304	3,602	9.1	1.02
Illinois	12,802,023	107,369	1,005	1,097	8.6	1.02
Hawaii	1,427,538	10,513	96	107	7.5	1.02
Ohio	11,658,609	117,194	1,094	1,179	10.1	1.01
Michigan	9,962,311	103,080	939	1,030	10.3	1
Virginia	8,470,020	85,335	783	839	9.9	0.98
Wisconsin	5,795,483	64,160	557	613	10.6	0.96
Iowa	3,145,711	34,241	301	330	10.5	0.96
Maryland	6,052,177	59,417	511	550	9.1	0.93
Vermont	623,657	7,436	63	69	11.1	0.93
Washington	7,405,743	61,569	536	565	7.6	0.92
Connecticut	3,588,184	32,126	260	278	7.7	0.87
District of Columbia	693,972	3,550	29	31	4.5	0.87
Utah	3,101,833	31,874	247	273	8.8	0.86
New Jersey	9,005,644	76,550	591	624	6.9	0.82
New York	19,849,399	129,146	933	999	5	0.77
New Hampshire	1,342,795	13,467	98	102	7.6	0.76
Minnesota	5,576,606	57,922	340	357	6.4	0.62
Massachusetts	6,859,819	60,560	336	350	5.1	0.58

For me, there were few surprises. I absolutely admit that I would assume that Red States have a higher percentage of pissed off assholes and the resulting sorts of highway deaths and mayhem.Texas is, as you'd expect if you've ever driven or (suicidal-ly ridden a motorcycle) in that nutbin of a state, Deathrace 2017 and Beyond: 10 million fewer people than California but 100 more people dead on the highways. The Southeast is consistently the most dangerous place to be on the road with only Virginia in the safest states at #14. Minnesota Nice appears to be reflected in our highway safety record. Traffic congestion seems to be less of a contributor to highway fatalities than you might think, since Massachusetts, New York, California, and many of the  states with significant urban traffic are under-represented in fatality numbers.