What I love about motorcycles is that when you crash, you usually just die. If cars were driven properly, then they too would be in the same boat, but the problem is people, not cars—not cars or motorcycles. You probably think that obeying the speed limit will protect you—and most times, it will. If you crash at a reasonable speed, you probably won't die—maybe break a few things, have the daylights scared out of you, piss yourself, lose your license—but you won't die, not if you adhere to all those ridiculous commonplace standards of vehicular etiquette as you most likely do, anyhow.
A motorcycle is a real machine—invigorating and wonderful, it truly excites the senses. And when you're really riding—riding down a freeway at 215 and braving a storm all while the wind makes countless unsuccessful attempts to throw you back into oblivion, the sun shines upon your face, and gravel flies in every which direction—you'll taste the sediment spat up by the burning rubber of your tires, you'll feel the vibration of your pistons deep inside, and you'll be one machine, one stallion.
You'll sever your calves as you make unreasonably sharp turns at speeds that ought to throw you off a roundabout and hurl you through the air in a mighty hurdle of velocity and strength, and as you hear The Stones playing somewhere in the background, you'll cry out with ecstasy just as God cries out with thunder—and you won't stop flying until you crash and explode with the unbearable sonic boom of some magnificent Roman deity. And you'll bite the dust with nothing but a great big fucking smile, because you'll know that you made it.
You'll know that your life was a series of absolutely fucking nothing in moderation—you'll know that you cried rivers of whiskey and spoke only in verse and wondered like a child long after you were told to stop, that you loved far more than your heart could possibly bear—exceeding by no small margin the bullshit voluminous capacity they said your blackened lungs could hold—and that you danced like Swayze and never stopped moving and grooving and feeling that god-damned two-timing beat, and that you ate like a king on a poor man's budget and drank like a sailor at every meal because you loved it, and you'll know that you got to live a life that people don't really live anymore—you'll know that you got to live a life of meaning.
And then you'll finish your book or your pen will run out of ink, and the fantasy you've been spinning—the one you work on between your suited desk job and dinner with the wife who nags and the spoilt child who whines—will come to an all too abrupt and screeching halt.
And so, you'll put the little one to bed, pour yourself a drink or three, and maybe even have a couple of cigarettes before you fall asleep under the great white stars of the beach and the night, wondering how in all of the infinite contingent possibilities of the universe, you managed to end up here.
