Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Motorcycles are sexy
There’s just something roguish about a motorcycle. Maybe it’s because people who ride them tend to have a rebel streak in them, and a certain measure of fearlessness. You have to be fearless in order to ignore the fact that a single wipeout could kill you.
Women on motorcycles are sexy too. I don’t see very many of them, but I tip my imaginary hat to them for their bravery. I’ve often entertained the thought of learning to ride a motorcycle. I’ve only seriously considered it once, when traffic congestion was quite unbearable on the freeway one year. But I was born a cautious soul. In otherwords, I’m too chicken-shit because I keep imagining myself being knocked over by a car, then being run over by 10 other cars. Even when I used to ride a bicycle to get around the neighborhood as a kid, there was this one huge hill that I would ride down sometimes. It was neat to go that fast, but often I would get to looking down at the ground rushing past me at who knows how many miles per hour and my overactive imagination would start conjuring up images of me hitting a pebble and flying over the handlebars, skidding for a quarter of a mile and shredding all the skin on one side of my body. It’s a cartoony image, but an image nonetheless that I pictured myself in.
I still think it would be cool though for my sweetheart and I to learn to ride, maybe take a class together. Even if we never ride motorcycles again, at least we would have experienced a little of what it was like. It would probably be fun, even if it’s just doing circles in a parking lot.