Twisting Asphalt - A SoCal Ducati Motorcycle Blog

I was forced to shift into a semi-conscious daze somewhere around 8:20 this morning when the dog started barking for who knows what reason… Actually to be honest that’s a blatant lie - I knew exactly why he was making such a ruckus yet I tried to ignore it anyway and rollover. But T was having none of that, he wanted to eat and all I wanted to do was continue sleeping. Of course dogs - and my mouthy springer spaniel in particular - have an amazing way of making their point. They don’t pull out judicial briefs or rally the pullet bureau behind them nor do they don’t lick your face or act in friendly dog like ways, rather they simply and consistently continue yapping on, moment after moment, until whatever you want to do seems so far less appealing then making them cease and desist what they’re doing. So there seemed little else to do but get up and fed the beast…

After that was done, I popped outside for a quick smoke and to my surprise found the blazing heat of the inland empire missing. As if it vanished in the middle of the night. Instead of being 90º at 8:30 in the morning, it was remarkably pleasant. A kind of warm and near tranquil kind of heat. The sort of luke-warm air flow that makes for perfectly wonderful riding. After weeks of nothing but traveling and editing I couldn’t help but think that this was a sign. Today held the promise of glorious riding. So I headed back inside and tried to ignore the second loud item of the morning, the one inside my head that knew something was amiss. Sometime was just a bit askew. The tiny voice which remembered checking the weather forecast the night before and seeing expected highs of 97º, not a semi-cloudy 78º…
Firing up the bike I found myself smiling like I have not smiled in weeks. Just hearing the bike roar to life was reason enough to celebrate. It’s been what feels like an eternity since I was last on a motorcycle of any kind. Weeks? Months? Years? I really have no idea. It turns out that the oddity of editing several motorcycle documentaries back to back is that by the time you actually have the a moment to ride for yourself you strangely feel like you’ve already ridden. There’s something extremely bizarre about that concept and yet at times over the past several weeks I’ve found myself ping-ponging back and forth between total extremes: On one hand I feel completely overly saturated with motorcycles (my lord I can’t believe I just wrote that… ) and yet on the other hand, I find myself missing the visceral sensation of being in the moment and in control while riding. It’s a crazy, near nutty, place to find myself and I suppose it’s fair to say that as of now I have yet to get my head around it.

In some ways I imagine that this partially explains why twenty minutes later while flying down the freeway towards Palomar Mountain, I totally ignored the first several splattered patterns of rain that pelted me. It can’t be raining, in Southern California… In August???, I thought to myself. But it was. Now it wasn’t crazy wet like an Eastern Seaboard summer shower, but it was enough to dampen the roads and muck up the face mask. Now I’ll admit that I’m not exactly keen to wet riding. It doesn’t scare me but it’s not my favorite either. I know some of you out there dig it and others are forced to do it to get to work or the like, but riding in the rain has simply never been high in my book. Perhaps that’s a completely California attitude, I don’t know.

However this morning, for whatever reason, I kept going, squarely focused on getting to the top of Palomar Mountain. It wasn’t the best ride of my life, nor the wettest, but it was perhaps the most needed. And perhaps the most comical - I mean rain in SoCal in August, really??? What is the world coming to? With all this working and so little playing, I found myself vibrantly remembering why I love to ride - as if it was the first time I’d ever done it. Perhaps sometimes we need to take time away to remind ourselves of what it is that we truly love…

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