Stray shards of light bounce off a twinkling black asphalt as the bike tips into the corner once more and I make yet another pass on this life. It’s an exaggerated, pendulum like movement that quickly tosses me from one side of the saddle to the other — with forceful haste and while it seems wildly chaotic and intrinsically unsettling, ironically it feels exactly the opposite… I haven’t felt this planted all day…

The far-flung movement, which at first seems overstated and highly saturated, somehow allows me to just ‘let it go’ and wrap my fingers around the moment. To exist alone among that rare blend of solitude and loneliness, where your best friend and greatest enemy is the desolate concrete realty that’s slicing, cutting and transcribing the outer confines of the countryside. And as I begin to forge a directly correlated relationship with the machine, I start bending the bike in easy, simple, graceful movements that seem so matter of fact and so sincere that I swear the tires are actually contort their contour directly to the road itself. The rubber morphing to the moment as the complex compounds cave in on the weight of the work week. Tossing out the pent up emotions of the past several days with each tilting pass. A wonderfully repeatable transfer of kinetic energy that’s called release – and today that’s worth more then any help a celebrity shrink could possibly offer, on TV or in real life…
A few miles down the line, I’m standing by the bike, peering out over the endless expanse of a California country abyss that’s in the midst of swallowing an entire farmstead whole, while taking a long, slow drag on the last smoke in the pack as the final embers of self-preservation fall away. Bright flakes of my soul that immediate illuminate before quickly dissolving into nothingness as they float away in the light ambling SoCal wind.

Looking out over the nearly infinite vista, it finally feels as if I’ve touched a bit of luck.

Not within the ride itself but rather because of it. Just a few hours ago this felt like a day that was tied in knots, straining for each breath and chasing what has to be done tomorrow, yet over the course of just a few canyon roads the Hypermotard has slowly peeled back the layers. Removed the angst, the concern, the ‘what have I got to do next’ mentality, until all that’s left is a raw, exposed, emotional tap on my humanity – that odd place where there is no clock, just pure emotions free to fumble towards enjoyment.
Shaking my head, I listen to the cacophony of canyon silence, which is intermittently interrupted by the odd cow that starts singing or the errant bird flapping away from Point A to Point B, when it slowly begins to dawn on me that the vast majority of time whenever I’ve tasted luck that meant it was just about to expire. ‘Luck’ after all is not an inception emotion. It’s not something we feel when it begins, but rather a reflection emotion which you feel in the afterglow. The kind of post-conceived feeling that you remark about after the fact. Yet here, today, on this road, in this canyon, seemingly miles away from everything else, there’s a palpable sense of ‘luck’ in this day and from the day and it’s the best thing I’ve felt in quite awhile… Because to champion lady luck is to avail yourself of the potential in what might be standing around the very next bend in the road…
More Picts after the Jump…