6 Things Nobody Tells You About Owning a Motorcycle
Spiders
Go to craigslist and search for motorcycles. You'll see people advertising their bikes as "garage kept." It makes sense: Less weather, less random molestation, better bike. Right? This is a lie. What you are seeing is a front perpetrated by motorcycle owners. People that have ridden before know what is really being said here: No spiders.
Due to necessity, I have to park my bike outside. Often under a tree. For seven months of the year. In Austin, Texas.
Due to necessity, I have to park my bike outside. Often under a tree. For seven months of the year. In Austin, Texas.
But for the real excitement, you turn to wasps. Wasps that nest in your exhaust, building the equivalent of an Apocrita daycare in the middle of an active volcano, just so they can fester in hatred when you start your bike up and proceed to barbecue their young. Because that's how wasps work. They only build as an excuse for murder, and they have the uncanny ability to find any opening in your clothing to accomplish it. This is such a problem, people have even patented a quick release helmet ... for the select few steely individuals capable of working a release catch with one hand while maneuvering a street-bike at high speeds through heavy traffic with the other, and all while simultaneously being stung by wasps on the fucking face.
Most red lights work one of two ways: They're timed or they're triggered. The triggered lights usually work on an induction loop, which is basically a bit of coiled wire that completes a full circuit when the weight of a vehicle squishes it together. This is a problem, because unless you're Lord Humungus out riding your massive 800-pound armor-plated tank-bike, you aren't triggering any lights. You're just sitting. Sitting, impotent, while Mad Max escapes with all your precious oil.
When you get a motorcycle, you join a club. Enrollment is automatic, and you cannot opt out. It's a club that you will always be in, right up until you get kissed by an amorous semi, or wise up and sell the bike to invest in a safer, more practical mode of transportation. Heroin, for example. But until you sign up for one of those two inevitable fates, you are part of the club. And there's only one simple rule: Motorcyclists wave at each other. No big deal. Right? Well, until you consider that:
1) It seems like every time another bike passes you and waves, you are in the middle of a shift. This leaves you fumbling to expedite the shift and get an arm out there, which will either lead you to stall, or else weave around the street like a drunken toddler experimenting with mom's high heels. Either way, by the time you've managed to get your hand up in return, they're long gone, and completely despising you and your rudeness. Oh yeah, and you're probably also sliding your bike through the median. But it's the dislike that really smarts.
I ride to work, which means I ride through exhaust, swarms of bugs, and whatever joy the elements bring me that day. If I wear protective clothing, well, you can't wash that stuff too often, so it ends up smelling pretty funky, and that transfers straight to your body. And then there's rain. Has anybody ever told you what it's like to feel rain against your body at 65 mph? If you want to simulate this experience for yourself, that's easy: Just go stand in the yard in the middle of a Category One hurricane.
Motorcycles are straight up invisible. But not in the awesome, you get to sneak into the girl's locker room kind of way (they do tend to notice naked-save-for-a-helmet men idling motorcycles in the shower stalls. Weird, right?). The number one cause of motorcyclist death is people taking an ordinary left hand turn, right in front of the bike. They check their mirrors, they flick on their turn signals, and then they calmly and deliberately proceed to murder you.
It Turns You into a Moron.
Riding a motorcycle is dangerous, and it's compounded by the fact that you basically have to do dangerous things like run red lights while you ride it. That doesn't get better with experience. In fact, as you get better at riding, you'll become more and more functionally retarded. You'll pull maneuvers you would never attempt in a car, where you're surrounded by steel and airbags and seat belts -- like lane splitting, a practice that's straight up legal in California and more or less tolerated in most other states. If you're not familiar with the idea, lane splitting is when you ride between cars on the passing line. The thought process goes something like this: Traffic is stopped (perhaps for one of those silly little red lights that I can just ride through) and cars are ahead in both lanes, but nobody is actively straddling the center line. Bam! New, bonus lane! What are you guys, stupid? Look at all this unused space!
