Laughing in the rain……

My buddy, No Problem Pete called around with his little 400 sporty Honda yesterday. I forget the model, but kinda like a CBR 400, an early R45. A Jap import. Cute little bike, 1985, a bargain buy on eBay.

“Take it for a spin”, he said, so I did. Couldn’t go far, as the alternator wasn’t charging the battery, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to run her up the blacktop and back. Haven’t been out on the bike in a few weeks, for various reasons, not one of them being all that good, but there you are. No matter. Got my lid and gloves and off I went in just my workshop overalls under the black rain clouds and soaking wet roads for a quick blast on this cute little number of a bike.

No, not this one, but one very like it………

You fit in this little bike, as all good bikes, like you were born as a part of it, like you always were a part of it, like you’ve known it for years and not just been introduced. Everything fits, she feels good under you. Feels like she approves of you right off, and you feel just the same. It’s an instant thing. Like women, some bikes are introduced to you, unexpectedly met or whatever, and there is a polite time when you are more than aware you are strangers, but some, oh boy, some feel like they were always around, like you knew them before. Familiar. Comfortable.

Doesn’t happen all that often, but, bike or chick, when it happens it feels real good. Real special, and you know it’s going to be good from the get go. It’s a bang, crash, wallop love thing, and you can’t wait to get together. Wanna forget all the getting–to-know-you protocols, and get stuck right in.

Know what I mean?

If you don’t, I sure hope you get to knowing before you grow old and die, because you can live years out in a few seconds when you gel like magic. I’ve had moments in life when I’d sacrifice all that was to come for another second of it.

This bike felt like that good. We went off, me and this little gem of a bike. She was old by today’s standards, but even so she felt so damn good. Revved clear to the red line at fourteen thousand without a hesitation and would go past it eagerly given half a chance. So light, so small, so agile. Wet roads, old tyres, but she was as eager to please me as could be.

Hungry for me. I felt suddenly alive within yards, and the years dropped away, like they always do when I go down the road on a good bike. Hell, it happens on any bike really, but on something so cute and special, it really kicks in and the world beyond the bike and the road just vanishes. Like magic I’m not fifty-bloody-seven any more. I’m a young greaser on a motorcycle and once again free of the years that age us. The willing engine revved up and I shifted her through the gears in split-second clutchless changes, with barely a slight off and on flick of the throttle.

The old magic returned and I let her run free. She was loving it. What she was created for, what we were born to do together. Slipping off the side of the seat into the bends, wary of the old tyres on the wet road, and hugging the bike up real close, we gambolled together down the road as one in the spray we kicked up behind us. Laughing together at the fun of it all, the world stripped away to the simplicity of the moments flashing by second by second.
The only way I know to be a boy again, at least momentarily, free of all the crap the years have heaped onto my once free and wild spirit.
We hit a huge downpour and I was soaked through in seconds, the rain hurting my naked skin under the thin blue overalls. I was laughing out loud and screwing her open wider, making her wail harder, and she was so alive under me, urging me to whip her harder.

“Harder, big boy, harder, and fuck the rain.”

It was real hard to turn her around and go home again.

On her back, I was just a boy on a bike, ……. laughing  in the rain.

The wonder of British Plod………and the IOM Plod’s money-crop on Mad Sunday. :o)

Hi Y’all,
Thursday, and another day of my weeks holiday grinds into life, and with some hope of it being a sunny day too. Here I am, reporting in at the writing station, and I must say it’s getting to be the first thing I want to do of a morning………. to write. that bodes well for November’s Nanowrimo. :o)

Mostly it’s emails, mostly to prospective New Chicks. Spurred into productivity, I admit, by my having hit a rich and glinting seam over the last couple of months, it’s golden reflections illuminating the digging and hacking away in the candlelit gloom of Kevin’s Mine of Hope and Comfort Sometimes too, I’ve recently been hitting the blog with some thoughts, random and rambling though they may usually be. Occasionally I’ve written stuff no one will ever read. That’ll be the real Wild Stuff then. The stuff no one would most likely understand. The stuff Plod would love to read.

‘Plod’, being a quaint and old-fashioned term for out great police force, and I actually mean that. The last police force in the world you can tell to fuck off, and not get shot for the indiscretion.

Mind you, it’s been a long time since I expressed such an imaginative course of action for our enforcement officers, the last time being way back in ’98 for leaving a thirty-limit on the Isle of Man, at double the limit I must admit, but, in my feeble defence, just before being outside the limit. They had, quite accidentally I’m sure, set the speed trap up thirty feet inside the limit and with the Goforit, or Golf Lima Foxtrot de-restriction black-stripe-on-white plainly in sight. I was quite upset at what I saw as an unfair and dastardly reaping of a abundant crop, there being some 35,000 of we bikers over there for the TT races, and a fair percentage of us being Adrenaline Freaks on a rush of speed.

(Golf Lima Foxtrot??…… There was hell-up amongst the Politically Correct weenies (small ‘w’) a few years ago, when it was disclosed that it was a common police radio instruction amongst traffic cops when chasing speeders…….. and it stands for, if you haven’t worked it out, Go Like Fuck.)

Let me point out that the spot they picked, quite accidentally I now realise after the calming of the years, was at the bottom of a downhill left-handed sweep and in deep and high hedges in the countryside. The last of the village buildings had been passed, and it was “Whoopy-doo” time with the scent of the speed-unlimited roads opening up again.

On the Isle of Man, there are no speed limits outside of the villages and towns. Let me tell you, it is an Adrenalin Freak’s Paradise.

They pulled me over, and, being a man with a strong sense of what is Just and Fair, I was a bit upset at their apparent cunning. Actually, ……….I was fucking livid, and then some. I suggested, quite graphically, that they might explore the pleasures of inserting the hair dryer up their ass (hand-held speed gun), and that they’d missed their vocation by not seeking employment with the IOM Tourist Board. Throwing the skid-lid across the road (I kid you not. I was bleddy mad as hell), I doubted the authenticity of their parentage, and offered to wipe my bottom with the speeding ticket.

Why was I so upset about such a thing? Well, see, there were a few reasons. Being whacked out on antidepressants that weren’t working, being over there with no chick, and it having been the wettest TT in living memory all added up to my being mentally right down on the floor. It was also the third time I’d been so sneakily ‘had over’ by the cunning IOM Plod in the last three visits to the Island of Speed, and on every occasion it had cost in excess of £160 in fines. That’s each time, so we’re talking about £500 in total (each being in excess of £160), and I do freely admit I was in considerable excess of the limit, before you point it out. :o)

You see, not unsurprisingly I guess these days, they set these traps up all over the place, and one copper over there told me that on Mad Sunday they gather something like 200 of we poor unsuspecting, safety-conscious, Speed Freaks an hour over the whole island. When you go to pay the fine, you just pay the fine, no licence, insurance, or proof of identity is asked for………. Just pay here, (sir), and sign here, (sir), and thank you for your cooperation in the matter, (sir). :o)

And, whaddya mean you’ve never heard of Mad Sunday??? Where y’all been all your lives??? :o)

Briefly, Mad Sunday is a long-standing tradition of mayhem and an open day for we nutters. It’s one mental day, where the mountain Course of the Isle of Man TT circuit of public roads used for the racing are opened up to one way traffic, and so becoming a race-track as it is on race days. Then let loose to all who dare to ‘ride the mountain’ on Mad Sunday. Many don’t dare, and with good reason. Safety is not a word that goes with the day. It’s the single reason I go over there, and quite secondary to watching the fantastic racing, which makes mainstream track races look like a kindergarten tea party.

Have a look…….. have a taste…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRmNZlEXjQ0

Anyway………. the bottom line is, that our police force really is the best in the world. Mad and wild as I was, those two coppers just politely pointed out that maybe I might consider the pleasures of being arrested if I didn’t calm myself (sir). They just completed the paperwork, explaining that should I use it for the purpose I’d suggested, that more paper would not be provided to complete such an undertaking.

No gun was involved at any point, no handcuffs deemed as necessary, and no sudden appearance of any overwhelming ‘backup’ either.

Then they watched, as I cleared the thirty-limit sign a few yards away, and nailed the bike to 140 down the road away from them.

God bless them all. :o)

K.x :o)