Nuts to Ginsberg.
There is a subculture here.
We are like nothing stereotypical; we are the rapid riders; we are those who exist on the interstice of sports bikers and the hairy crowd.
We get off on the adrenaline, we have a million tales of near misses and we love to tell them, tell them over and over.
We ride inappropriate bikes to the limit. Sometimes we cross the line and then the world comes up to hit us. Sometimes we just cruise. Sometimes it is sunny and we are in love when it is sunny. We ride all year round, through the ice and the snow and the rain; we would disintegrate if we were deprived of this communion.
The bike is a way to stop thinking; like a cortex jammer, it makes the world seem simple; like the great prophet Newton said unto the people, the universe is merely bodies, forces, moments and moment arms. It is simple and we control it all; actually no. that is the lie that we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves that we are in control when actually at any moment a huge metal death may occur, and our kevlar and leather will not protect us then.
In knowing this we are distant from our selves, the Id and ego are switched off, the worries and aches and pains are forgotten. We have all fallen off before. We know it hurts, so we go faster, knowing that the next time will not hurt. Third time's the charm.
It is when you stop thinking, become one with the machine that we discover how truly beautiful we are; we proceed, we make progress and there is no purity greater, and no drug more powerful; the bike makes us stop feeling and stop thinking about ourselves, cortex jammed with 100mph-road-data-flow. It is the road, it is the curve, like Robocop your mind scans and plots, parabola after parabola, you are as a curve in a universe of sinusoidal attractors. The oscillation of adrenaline and ecstatic neurotransmitters hail through your soul, your mind having quite washed away in the torrent.
This is the silence that we all miss. This is the brief moment of peace. Deep breath
Then there's the physicality. You are in touch with your body and the body of the bike; with the power of a hundred horses, it is prosthetic, a limb that allows you to ballet at two hundred kilometres per hour, and when you get there you sing as one, as you howl and plough silently yet noisily, operatically and erratically, your carburettors mixing oxymoron and petroleum and your entropy engine propelling you.
Don't forget us when you vote for new road laws; we're too busy and too damaged being beautiful.
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