Scatterlogical Bike Thoughts

 what I am describing is semi subtle and nuanced, like a wine snob telling you there is essence of pepper and oak in your glass of old grape juice, you take this verbiage with a pinch of salt and slug it down.

“Motorbike circling” is a low key, beer in hand, fully necessary ritual that gets repeated a thousand times nightly by bikers everywhere all over the world. We love these machines and in most cases, staring at them is almost as fun as riding them. After some general admiration, I usually inspect the bike for anomalies, leaks and missing bolts. Always a spooky moment when you find any piece of the bike with its screws backed half way out, so it’s a good tradition to wrench on the worst offenders from time to time, cutting them off at the pass well before the rules of entropy come to get you. The bolts on my exhaust pipes have come loose 3 times so they are on the short list of suspects when I check things out. I check the fluids, get another beer and hell, why not get a flashlight involved? Wouldn’t you know it? The screw that holds my chrome air filter cover is gone, but it seems like it is right cozy where it is and the plastic side covers overlap just enough to make it a non worrisome thing. Still, I wonder how long it’s been gone? Missing stuff is just plain irksome and things like this bring my eyebrows dawn to half mast, a sexy look in the mid Paleolithic I’m sure.

Zee Bike (The bike of my affections in the center of the garage) is a ten speed Honda CB900 Custom from the year of someone else’s lord 1980 and it’s a bit of a rare bird, making parts difficult to find but she’s no Italian mystery bike either. It closely resembles the CB750 and might actually have the same frame, I’m not sure. The Honda 750 was a success story in and of itself. Thousands of them blanket the countryside once you start looking. Every motorcycle parts yard has one sitting in some state of completion, if not three or five. It's the 750 I wanted originally with the sheer amount of available parts a top priority, but I am glad to have the odd 900 because it has a bit more punch for the mountains we live in and it’s a proper motorcycle by my estimation. Weirdities on this machine include a shaft drive that runs diagonally over to the right rear tire, putting the disk brake on the left causing the guys at Honda dealership in Fresno to put my tire on the wheel backwards. I tried to be as polite a I could when pointing at the arrow on the tire. They had never had one of these in their shop I guess. It caused a momentary stir and the shop disruption was a first inclination to how rare this bike actually is and how difficult it was going to be to keep it up and running should something fail. The gearing is 5 high and 5 low making this - the bike with two heads, a total freak. Motorbikes on the roads today have 5 or 6 gears and one shift lever, where mine has 10 gears and an extra foot lever to switch between two sets of five (High and Low) I am getting very adept at finding the perfect gears to save gas or chew up curves. On a motorcycle, it becomes very clear that your riding style has a lot to do with miles per gallon and I swear that I get 20 extra miles out of this bike per tank after a mere 3 summers' ownership. But. . . . . . this brings me to something worth talking about. When it comes to motorcycles, fuel economy is NOT at all synonymous with safety; in fact they are closer to polar opposites, especially in the hills (Yosemite area). Up here, you are either going uphill or down and you are constantly in transition from one curve to another, the way we stick these bikes to the road firmly is an absolute waste of gas.

))................................................................................... If you have a tachometer you can watch your RPMs (revolutions per minute) and the lower they are, the more gas you are saving in a nutshell. Over time you can just hear and feel the proper RPMs (depending on what you are trying to achieve).  I usually live between 4 and 5 thousand and I really like having the tach on there to see what I’m up too. But.. saving gas puts you in a dangerous position if you let it.......... ENTER THE SQUIRREL.................................................................................................................................................................... The problem here is that riding quietly through your turns at one constant gas-sipping speed is not exactly safe. It's counter-intuitive, but it's true. The guy making all the noise bumping through gears and looking a bit showy is (usually) fully focused and stuck like glue to the road and his counterpart, the casual safety commuter in the reflective yellow vest, is living dangerously and will one day try and brake in a turn for "zippy the wonder squirrel" and slide right off the road. His crime is simply riding too lightly. Something we hear less about than the usual case of someone hauling ass, then blowing the curve. Going painfully slow in the wrong gear on a motorbike is like remaining a pacifist when a man with a pen knife and a limp is walking towards the playground. Things are about to get real. You have to be proactive in both circumstances.

The cars on the road with you like to push the speed limit at all times and if you want to keep those cars off your butt you will have to kick it up a notch once in a while. Going safe and slow with a maniac on yer backside is a quick way to get run over. Have no faith in the driver in your mirrors, it's not so much that they don't SEE you (sometimes they don't). It's mostly that they just don't give a shit about you. The whole endeavor needs to be taken as seriously as piloting a plane or deep sea diving. Focus on the basics and focus some more. In fact, it’s almost entirely a game of focus. Motorcycles are no place for the attention deficit crowd. Go outside and look at your car. Are there any dents? If so, don’t even think about it. “No soup for you.”

The debatable gyro effects Have you ever had a gyroscope? The right revs gives the bike this otherworldly stability that feels just like one, but as far as actual facts go, I can only point at the feeling you get in a corner in the perfect gear with the perfect amount of throttle leaning at the perfect angle allowing you to put g-forces exactly where you want them in the turn. However you slice it, when you get it right it feels like you're tapping into magic forces, but when you get to penny pinching and you are thinking about saving gas instead of gravity and you round the curve at 2000 rpm’s (or worse,…neutral ahem..) you get none of those cool gyro benefits working for you.  Maybe it's only engine braking! I dunno, but there seem to be some extra supernatural forces working magic spells in the curves. I start to hear Santana music and congas…. Oh yes, I’m totally insane.. moving on.

This here bike of mine is an evolutionary link between the ubiquitous 750’s and the large cushy Goldwings that you see every day. A little too small to be a true Interstate cruiser and a bit too much to be a lightweight Brit bike impostor, it’s the perfect bike for me. I’m not a college hipster and I’m certainly not a Goldwing straddler… yet. ha ha. I believe the 900 was faded out to make a clear distinction on the showroom and the extra gears were all too much to think about in real world application. You have to hand it to Honda for never being afraid to push the inventive envelope. I imagine the think tank over there has mad scientists chained to desks on a full time cocaine drip laced with mushrooms and peyote to keep their ideas coming so consistently. The CB series of bikes of today hardly resemble their Neanderthal brethren at all. But the lineage is alive and the variations on a theme are all over the map (there is even a new "retro" CB1100 being put out soon), but the price tag is something like nine grand! If you want retro, spend $800 bucks on a cb750 at a yard sale and use the remaining $8,200 to take six months off and traverse the globe. Honda was the brains behind the Enduro and much like saying, “I’ll have a Coke” when you mean any soda will do, the word we throw round for a street legal offroad bike is Enduro regardless of the actual make... Now there exists a new breed that leans more toward the street but it ain’t afraid to get muddy and they call them “sport tourers.”  Not nearly as catchy as “Enduro.” In fact, quite lame. If they wanted to sell motorbikes they should have consulted me first on this one. You call them “Enduro Street” and you make a few million bucks. That’s a freebie, your welcome. I am not entirely sold on the new “sport tourers” because I only see them on the street. They seem a bit too heavy for any offroading more than a gravel road to me. BMW has some beauties, but I have to say that a motorized bicycle should never cost more than your goddamned car! My old used bike cost me nearly nothing and it puts me on top of the Sierra camping right alongside all of them fellas with the huge monthly payments to contend with.

Summer 2012 on my camping trip through Yosemite,there were Harleys and BMWs and Showroom quality Triumphs all over the place, all so shiny and pretty, but they make me laugh if I think about the enormous cost differences in our exactly similar road trips. In fact, I watched a brand new BMW G5-800 pass me by on the back of a tow truck on the way to Tuolumne Meadows and had a big ol’ chuckle at his expense. I could see him in the passenger seat wearing a very nice custom leather jacket and staring straight ahead as if to indicate his pre knowledge of the evil giggle fit I would be having inside my full faced helmet on my thirty-two year old CB 900. You got to laugh…just a little. People with old funky equipment take weather seriously and check their gas gauge and oil too.

the cliff notes. . .. ........ .Circling your bike in the garage with a flashlight and a beer is justified and necessary ............. .. . .... . . . Burn a little extra gas and stick yourself firmly to the tarmac.. . . Zippy the wonder squirrel is out to get you............................... “Enduro” is a killer name for a bike and a great middle name for your first born, such as (Kevin“Enduro"Gatsby................................................... “Sport tourer” is an awful name for a bike, but a great name for European tourists.

                                                              "Zippy"..

I always say “safety third” and I‘m always kidding. See you down the road. B.E.B.