Monday, April 2, 2018

The Longest Lap

I fired the street bike up for the first time in over a month yesterday.  It was covered in dust, and I could just feel the reproachful vibe the Suzuki was giving me after all that neglect.  The weather had been shit for weeks, but mostly I had been lazy.  Taking the easy way everywhere.  The four wheeled way.  But like an old friend that's always there when you call, the engine came to life, four cylinders greedily gulping the highly combustive fuel/air brew they'd longed for.

I looked at the most recent modifications I'd done to the GSF1200 Bandit in an effort to make it more commute friendly.  Better mirrors, quieter exhaust, new seat cover, I even wired it to run my new expensive heated gear.  There had been a reason for all these upgrades.  A special one.  One I figured putting on the miles for.  Like so many reasons that seem important one day and gone the next, this too evaporated like a puddle of rainwater under the noonday sun.

The blog has never been a place for too much personal business.  I figure if you want to read about people's private shit you can swim over to the sinking ratship of Facebook and get your voyeuristic fill of fuckwads.  Speed of Arrival is about my experience with motorcycles and racing and the lessons I've learned doing it.  But life bleeds over sometimes.  It's inevitable.

2017 was a shit year.  And the first third of 2018 hasn't been much better.  Too much loss, some that was written about here, some that will remain unspoken.  Death, disappointment, failures, promises broken, dreams dashed.  You know, typical life shit, no different than anyone else.  But it certainly starts to add up after awhile.

 So what does it all have to do with motorcycling?  Give me a minute, I'll get there.  In the types of racing I've done, (roadracing, now hare scrambles), there is always more than one lap.  More than one chance to get a corner right if you fuck it up the first time.

There is only one lap to life.  You can't spot your landing before you jump.  And most of the turns are blind.  A body rails around them once, hoping to make it through to the next.  And there are always more unknown corners ahead.

I am very thankful to have taken at least a few of them on a motorcycle,in spite of the crashes.

It's gone a long way towards making this one lap worthwhile.

I think I'll go for a ride. 




It's always a lonely jump into the void.





  

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