Why I Like Some Things

Why do I like bicycles? There's a sense of freedom as your swing left to right, balancing your body, leaning into turns. Its symmetry. The near silence of it, as you propell yourself faster than you can run, it is incredible efficiency and freedom. Motorcyclists say that motorcycles are freedom, but they're always having to stop to get gasoline. Bicycles run on your energy. If you have food and water, you have fuel. Bicycles are freedom. You just have to work for it.


Why do I like Fall weather? In Fall, the nights are chilly and you have to start layering. The air is brisk and cold, yet the sun is achingly hot wherever it touches. Its the sharpness of climate as you drift through icy shadows and back out into scorching heat, and every breeze smells like polar ice, roaring down from Alaska, across the sea and over the coastal mountains before racing across the valley and arriving here and make fleece pullovers your best friend once more. I love my longsleeve wool shirts, my down vest, and soon I'll have to find a proper winter coat since the old army jacket belongs to my ex-wife and it would be wrong to wear that.

Why do I hike? Any hike is good. Get your muscles going, your heart thumping, the blood racing through me. I've been a hiker since I realized as a child that other kids were sadistic bastards. Just because they had mercury poisoning from our community well doesn't make me feel any particular sympathy or forgiveness for their violence against me. Hiking was an escape from them. Hiking was too much like work for their tastes, so off I went, trespassing (and well past the statute of limitations so I can admit it). If I were doing that today, I'd probably take a GPS and a botany identification book so I could run a bio survey of my favorite hike. The hike I did today, while it was still cool, I did with my GPS running. Its still nifty. I then uploaded the data to my PC and found that the period of time where it zooms from your last point to the current location? Yeah, it records that so you need to remove that data point. Thankfully, Garmin software (free) lets you edit the file. I used to do that kind of thing in Pathfinder for the Trimble GPS I used 12 years ago. It wasn't quite state of the art, but it was close.

Why do I like Motorcycles? A motorcycle, and a scooter, is a noisier bicycle you don't have to pedal. Considering that the roads I grew up on killed people, and you could hear the Cafe racer motorcycles buzzing like angry bees suddenly stop from a few miles away, followed by sirens from the local fire station as paramedics went to see what could be scraped up for the closed casket funeral (once in a while there was a survivor in those wrecks but mostly not), I think I'm showing a great deal of courage and maturity to appreciate these. The roads around here, provided you're slow and very patient, likely yield some lovely scenery, ideal for a scooter or a slow moving motorcyclist. Good brakes and bike wheels are mandatory, if only because of the steep hills and bad pavement. Motorcycles are also cost effective. A Prius is around $25K or so. A commuter motorcycle is closer to $2-5K depending on the motor size and condition. A brand new 500cc or 650cc bike will set you back around $7K but it will also get you better mpg than a Prius. Its just miserable in the rain. I think, like we see in SE Asia, that motorcycles are our future, that we'll all be riding them because its that or stay stuck in one place. We can joke about electric cars but the raw materials to get everyone an electric car is simply not available. I'm sorry, it just isn't. There isn't enough Lithium for the batteries. Contrast that with motorcycles which are more fuel efficient and an infinite number of them can be built because they're steel, aluminum, and plastic. They don't require reliable electric power or solar panels. They can run on booze or used cooking oil or synthetic gasoline or a bottle of compressed natural gas. Whatever. The point is everybody can have one because we DO have enough steel for that. Its not a fantasy like a world of electric cars, currently just as impossible as a world filled with Zepplins. I've always been VERY realistic in my scifi writing. Its why I'm writing this blog, after all.

Wouldn't you like this for your Sunday driver? 

Why do I like roadsters and convertibles? Great driving is NOT about fast in the straightaways. Any fool can do that. I saw many wrecked muscle cars in the 1970's having drag raced and flipped, right in front of the paramedics at the fire station where I grew up. It was an open secret that around 10:30 PM on Saturday night, the local guys would pull the headers off their muscle cars and see how fast they could go. And many of them died doing that too. I don't hate muscle cars, but I do recognize that what killed them, besides meth and alcohol, was having a crappy suspension that couldn't keep the wheels on the road, and the cars couldn't corner, which literally killed them. I grew up appreciating how to Apex a Turn, something my niece still doesn't know how to do.

Apexing is something I'm good at and my efforts back when I first learned to drive seems to be something like riding a bicycle. I will never forget how. Figuring out how many gees your vehicle can take, and whether the suspension will hunker down and hold or try to fight you and kill you when under max load? That's a special kind of fun. Its risky, of course, but my ex couldn't apex a corner either. She THOUGHT she could, but she never managed it while we were together. Maybe her new beau has had better luck. I like Apexing. I like feeling the car engine roar as I brake before turning in, coast to the halfway point, then power out of a turn. Its a wonderful slingshot effect. Most of the time I drive like an Old Man, but in a good handling roadster? Its wonderful fun. I think in a post oil world, I'd still want an ultralight roadster for Sunday driving just so I can Apex turns. I'm rather pleased that the Monterey Shale oil means I probably can. Others will too. It will be an expensive hobby, but no worse than owning a powerboat or an RV.

In the short run, there are many joys worth embracing. In the long run, most will be around if you're willing to accept their limitations. I'm sure that people will still go to the movies when you have to get there by bicycle, just as people went to air shows and car races by horse and buggy back in 1910. We adapt. It is our good fortune that things are not so bad that we much adapt too much at once.