Mellow Movements and Perspective
On The Road to Recovery
Tugging on the brake, deep in the corner, there’s a loud ‘thunk’. Then a blip. Or more appropriately a rev or two. And the bike bounces.
It stands up. Says I’m here. I’m free. I’m out to play. And then the pace picks up…
The machine basks in the glory — The sounds of an L-twin being let loose on curvy roads uninhabited by traffic …
Suddenly I feel a strange mixture of excitement and fear…
And I smile.
I think to myself, this is exactly what it’s supposed to feel like. This is in fact me…
And I smile again.
There are only so many moments one can allow to pass by - and today, of all days, it finally feels as if I’m meant to be in this bit of time, this space, this cross-section of the here and the now. Because I finally feel like I’m coming back around.
I’m returning to who I am.
It’s been a mere 56 days since I dump the 999. And they have not been easy days…
I think about what happened constantly. I analysis it. I reflect on it. I ask myself what I could have done to avoid it.
Perhaps that’s just human nature at play. Or perhaps I’m making a far bigger deal out of this than I should… I don’t know…
However to say that I’m over it is a total exaggeration. I’m not. And I’m not sure I should be. However, while the inevitable weights on my mind, there’s a certain glory, and pleasure, in being set free.
A certain sensibility in coming back around to the mindset that it’s possible to lose oneself in the uncontrollable. To lose oneself on the open road. To feel as if life is alive. That whatever organic nature there is to our being, it exists in the asphalt that gets us from the here to the there… That while none of us can ever really choose our time or place to go out, there’s something unique about feeling like you’re living in the chunk of time you’ve been granted…
I don’t mean to get all mystical here, but today I took the 1098S out and felt alive… Obstinately because the 10 needed to be run. It’s been in a track configuration for quite awhile now. But as we all know old gas in the tank is bad gas in the tank. And, more importantly it seemed like it was time… Time to take the beast out…
Of all the bikes that the old man and I share, the 1098 is undoubtedly the most twitchy. It’s the most real. The most powerful. The most alive. The one with the holier than thou brakes. The one that revs the loudest, bangs the best, and seems the most scary. It’s a machine that asks quite a bit from you — not so much physically, but rather mentally. It’s a machine that does specific tasks quite well — but to make that happen, you’ve got to on the top of your game… You’ve got to be living in the moment…
And yet today, it was perfect. It was sublime. And it was absolutely wonderful… It did everything I asked and more… Yet…
When waking up at 9am, I roll over and ask, am I awake enough to make this work? Am I where I need to be in order to take this bike out? Can I control it? Can I be what I need to be in order to make it work?
These are questions I never used to ask myself. Thoughts that I never fathomed.
I was the guy, who incorrectly thought, given enough time could learn to do just about anything on a bike. But mortality, and crashing, and reality, have a nasty way of proving their point….
I am not a god. I am not a pro racer. And I will never be.
The learning curve, while exponentially increasing over the years, quite possibly has hit its mark.
I say that not to sound defeatist, but rather because post-crash I find myself questioning the very nature of how I ride and where that riding takes place…
Up until now I’ve ridden with the sole intention of trying to getting better — to improve — each corner was challenging not because of its own virtue, but rather because of the virtue I imposed. At times I looked at a kink in the road and thought to myself, ‘this could be a knee down corner’ or ‘this is a bloody fast spot’… But post-crash it occurs to me that perhaps there is a point where the street no longer allows you to improve. Perhaps there’s a point where riding amongst everyday traffic effectively gets graded on a curve… A moment where the skill of riding and the enjoyment of riding settle their differences and diverge once and for all. Perhaps they take different paths and never look back. Never cross over again…
And tonight, I find myself wondering what it is that truly I love about riding?
Is it the speed? The adrenaline? The rush? The journey? The vistas? The thought process? The living in the moment? The ability to get lost and yet be somewhere? The imagine of the machine in its own environment? The reality that I’m controlling the uncontrollable? The excitement of the back and forth movement in a chicane? Or is it just being out there? Being alive? And being alone amongst the picturesque bits of nature?
I ask, because I’ve just spent the last four hours getting mentally lost on a road that up until now I would have told you was more or less boring, but today, post-crash, it seemed riveting. It bent and twisted and came back over itself in a way that felt entirely new. As if I it had been reborn — yet it wasn’t. I was. Instead of looking down on it, today I found myself enlightened. I looked through the visor and saw nothing but excitement and potential, and thought to myself, ‘was this here before?… Did I miss it?’.
I don’t quite understand how that’s possible… How one can look past something for so long and then wake up one morning and go ‘wow’…
It’s as if the road was the symbiotic twin of the awkward gal in high-school who blossoms later in life… The one you never saw coming… Until one day, she arrives and you wonder, why didn’t I see that before? How could I miss such potential?
Part of it, no doubt, is because I’ve tried to go back to basics, but beyond that, I find myself wondering what it is that I truly expect out of the street and what chances I’m really willing to take outside of a controlled racetrack…
What is safe? What is secure? What is acceptable? What is it that I truly love about riding on the open road? And, ultimately, what do I need to do to feel that sense of living? If 70% gets you to that feeling on the street, why go to 80% or 90%???
These are all questions that keep coming to mind… And ones, I didn’t really ask before…
And while I don’t exactly know the answers, what I do know is that it’s not the bike, nor the tires, or the road surface, but rather it’s my inability to trust myself that haunts my riding right now… The demon that haunts me isn’t based in logic, reality or the here and the now… Rather it’s the inability to let go of the past, to see through the moment of concern and the ability to forget that holds me back…
Reaching For The Keys
Equal parts of trepidation and excitement are crossing inside my head as I desperately try to distance myself from the workweek. Lethargically the mind sends the message. But the body does nothing with it. At first seconds go by, then what feels like minutes. It seems as if there are simply too many thoughts to overcome. Too many bullet points on the to-do list to still check off. Eventually the message goes through and I can hear the ‘whoosh’ sound whirl by as my thumb reaches over and presses down on the starter button. Suddenly life gets a whole lot better thanks to a mere rumble…
After yet another month of inactivity between rides, it’s finally time to break away once again…
Lately the mere suggestion of squeezing a ride in has been completely challenging in its own right. There has just been to much to do; to many emails, to much editing, to many phone calls, to many conversations about future conversations. Adjectives alone can’t even describe the constant voracity with which the grind has been grinding… And yet today something changed… (more…)
A Gear Up
The exhaust is bellowing with deathly, evil notes of noise – big throaty gasps that come and go with increasing frequency - as the engine continues to blast away. The nearby canyon walls letting each breath live just a tad past their prime on exit, as the sounds echoes from one cliff face to the next.
The power plant turns over again, and again, and again as the throttle continues to evade logic by simply pushing on — Harder and faster then each previous bend in the road. Continually building the momentum and moving it forward. With a hurried, frenzied sense of pace. Each series of newfound revolutions foreshadowing the next pulsating sense of purpose that’s come to life beneath me.
It’s a feeling of excess that while unexpected for today seems utterly, and perhaps surprisingly, ‘comfortable’. As if it’s always been here, always been along for the ride. Then the corner comes to its natural conclusion. Dying out before altering its path completely. The change of plans evoking a series of actions and then reaction that all ultimately plant the 999 squarely on a path of conquest. Knocking off sections of road one by one as it tally’s the score.
It’s an inspiring sensation — The kind that rekindles the mean of the word ‘passion’ with each crack of the throttle. Each brash graze of concrete. Each new moment bringing the sport of sportbike riding back in vogue once again. Ultimately reminding me why I got hooked on this kick in the first place.
It’s an attraction that starts innocently enough, brimming to surface somewhere down low, before it ascends through the crankcase, climbs into and then out of the chassis, before finally working its way into the rider. A rustling, wicked, throbbing sense of promise. As if today, of all days, you simply cannot do any wrong.
And so goes the life of riding the 999 once again.
In all honestly it feels like it’s been quite awhile since I last slide my leg over the 9 – and perhaps it has been or perhaps it hasn’t - my sense of time and space right now is frankly a jumbled mess. Days and weeks don’t seem to hold much meaning at the moment because it’s one big continual blur. The framework for life has dissolved in to a never-ending to-do list that only seems to get added to, not reduced.
So today after deciding that I had to snag a few hours of daylight for myself, I entered the garage and looked at both the 1098S and the old man’s 999 – each proud, strong, deviant motorcycles in their own right – yet I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t resist the temptation to climb aboard the 999 and take it out.
Having been off the bikes for awhile, my initial rational was that taking the 9 out was a safer choice – still plenty fast for the day, but less extreme, less powerful, even less dangerous. Of course all sportbikes are dangerous, so this wasn’t exactly a lucid line of reasoning. It was a reactionary line of reasoning – because I was searching for a rational motive to explain an illogical decision.
Grabbing the keys, it occurred to me that whenever I’m in doubt and both bikes happen to be at my disposal, for some reason I always seem to be drawn to the ‘9’. Logic would seem to suggest there’s something wrong with this sort of choice – the 1098 is a substantially better motorcycle. It’s lighter, it’s faster, it’s more powerful, it stops better. It does everything the 9 does in spades. Yet since when has riding been exclusively about pure logic?
Several miles down the road, when the asphalt transformed from a docile conduit for mainstream transportation into a curvy avenue for the adventuresome, I was rewarded for the choice. It took just two mild corners into the ‘real’ part of the ride to intrinsically understand that this was going to be a great day. The weather was perfect, the asphalt was good, and perhaps most importantly, the bike was effortlessly moving. Making a complex world seem simple and easy again.
It’s a sensation that quite frankly has eluded me for what feels like eons. That sense of omnipresent individual control – when you’re so locked into the ride that the bike no longer acts as if it were merely a mechanical object but rather behaves as if it were an extension of your own body and soul. So what then is it about this particular bike that somehow always seems to get me going? And why do I so strongly gravitate towards it?
I suppose there are dozens of real quantifiable reasons; My first trip to the Ducati factory coincided closely with the release of the 999 and 749, I came of age as a rider on this bike, I’ve always appreciated it’s sense of style and grace. Certainly I owe much of my sense of sportiness to this bike. Yet ultimately the deeper I looked in that dark place that sits somewhere between our hopes and dreams, near the pit of our existence and just beyond our ego, there was only one reason that really mattered – I know that this bike will always protect me. It never does anything wrong, it never upsets me or worries me, it never acts out, it never asks for to much or puts me in harms way. It just lets me ride it. Any way I want…. Which ultimately begs the question; can a motorcycle be your Guardian Angel?
More picts after the jump…
Gleams of Light and Luck
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… (more…)
To Ride or Not To Ride
[Photo by Rick Clemson]
The sun is well past its prime and I’m feeling unbelievably angry — angry at the motorcycle, angry at the mountain, angry at myself, even angry at the new CRG levers…
Because I waited to long to get on the bike and just go…
I let the day slip past me under the false pretenses of a cloud-covered disguise and a morning filled with wasted time. Now halfway through the ride, my penance seems to be a road that’s permeated by an apprehensive collection of near constant tension.
It’s the kind of strain I try to avoid by going for a ride in the first place – but today it lurks under the asphalt like a hunter stalking its prey. Holding low, hiding out, just waiting to see your weaknesses. Waiting for that one single mistake when it capitalize and take charge for the foreseeable future.
And I can feel it bearing down… With each flick of the front end…
The strain of its eyes. The heat from its breath. The emotional turmoil it creates within. It’s the kind of foreboding thought-process that somehow ensnares you - traps you in a self-fulfilling circular prophecy written in your own continual failure.
Worst of all, you witness at each bend in the road; within a missed mark or an overtly loose line or that one stone that somehow stand tall right at the apex… And right now I find myself feeling this amazingly powerful sense of internal rage – the kind of raw, bitter, unrelenting anger that I haven’t felt in ages – because I can’t shake this feeling, I can’t just enjoy the ride, and perhaps most importantly because I – and I alone - created it in the first place…
I decided far to late in the day to go for a ride when I clearly lacked the mental space to enjoy it, and now I’m paying the price, one corner at a time.
A 1,000 Mile Month
It’s been a rock’n few weeks for riding — With the weather turning, the skies clearing (relatively speaking) and a bit more free time then usual, I’ve some how managed to rack up just over a 1,000 miles thus far this month. While that’s just a drop in the bucket for the high mileage crowd, for me it’s historically quite good. Also probably explains why I’ve felt rather relaxed - even on days when the weather went to hell and the bike got tossed about, because there was always ‘tomorrow’ or the ‘next ride’… There’s simply something quite comforting about knowing that you’re actively - and perhaps excessively - engaging in the sport of riding and doing it with a regular consistency… Of course from my perspective, the best part is that there’s still thirteen days left on the calendar 
So a really good month might become a really great one rather quickly…
As some of you might have noticed, while I’ve been racking up the miles, they’ve been almost exclusively on the ST3. There’s a good reason for that - The 1098S had it’s first real mechanical mishap since I got it last year. Air managed to seep into the clutch line and while I’m mechanically inclined, it seemed like a better use of time to let the boys at Pro Italia deal with it while I got some much needed riding in. I suppose that’s one the strange contradictions of owning multiple bikes, if it’s a beautiful day and one of the bikes is down for whatever reason, I’m much more apt to get out and ride the other one then fret over what’s wrong with the bike in question… And while the 1098S was in the shop, I had the PI boys install some new bling that MotorMilt (aka the old man) had picked up for me over the holidays; a pair of brilliantly gold ’shorty’ CRG levers. While I totally dig the ‘look’ thus far I’m not sure if I’m sold on them or not - perhaps it’s just that I’ve gotten used to the standard Ducati lever set and they feel ‘comfortable’ to me. Time will tell I guess… I figure I’ve got thirteen days to see how they get going 
An Angry Mountain That Needs Some Respect
Sliding over the saddle, I duck to the inside. Bask in the sunshine and feel the harmony of the bike, the road and the reason come together. The tires grab the chunky asphalt and tilt to the match the moment. It’s fast and swift and marvelous.
All the ingredients of perfection.
Twisting my neck, I stare down the edge of a peripheral vision. Try to connect with what’s remotely perceptible. Watch the yellow lines comfortably contort around the side of the mountain before they disappear behind the next jutting collection of rocks and weeds. An L-Twin revolution later and I’m aiming for the apex as the bike begins to hit its marks… When I feel violence descend…
A ferociously evil, nasty gust of wind rushes down the face of the mountain. With an instant and unrelenting velocity that’s impossible to ignore or avoid.
The bike stands straight up. With deathly immediacy. The tires get tossed. Wickedly. The moment turns awkward and uncontrollable. A sense of helplessness drowns out the whirl of the engine and any remnants of joy. I feel my heart rate skyrocket while it jackhammers away at my chest. Then there’s an instant sensation of dread. A moment of panic. And a half a second later, a day which seemed destined for the divine suddenly becomes nothing but chaos as the bike simply floats three-feet towards the edge of the outside of the corner… All by itself.
Straight away I feather the brakes. Try to remain calm. Try to regain a sense of composure. And then I look up… At oblivion… And watch the last vestiges of my confidence swirl away into a rising spiral of ether in a completely unbeknownst manor. I’m alleviated of any illusions that I’m the one that’s in charge.
The sand kicks up. The rocks on the side of the road jingle. Debris soars as I continue to veer off course. The brightly shinning guardrail radiating with a sense of destiny – and beyond that lies mortal disaster. Hundreds and hundreds of feet of falling.
Quickly I force myself to snap out of it - or at least try to - and ignore the target-fixation that’s crimping my mind. Squinting at the apex while trying to look through the dust, I find myself thinking, “You’ve got to do something – Now!”
It’s an immediate and omnipresent thought. Instinctually I start pushing on the inside handlebars — and praying. To whom I have no idea, but as the bike begins to battle the atmospheric pressure it seems like a damn good idea. At a moment like this, what’s there to lose anyway?
Of course this theological indecision is nothing new, even the Greeks couldn’t quite figure out who ruled the wind. At various points in their mythological history they believed that one of seven different deities controlled the flow of air. And the confusion didn’t stop there - Most scholars believe that Aeolus was the most famous of the wind gods and there were merely three different variants of him throughout the ages. Apparently humanity has always held a certain kind of indecisiveness when it comes to convection currents. (more…)
