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Michael considered fate at 15:02   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

I was rummaging through the attic the other day (read: sifting through google caches) when I came upon a copy of this site from WBW (way back when). It was the old design - the original design, I think - and it sort of struck me as clean, concise, and not too hard on the eyes. It was more typical, with links and quotes down the left-hand side and a big one-liner at the top, but it made me sort of nostalgic. Nostalgia, the vice of the aged, they say.

Made out with a girl last night and I think she was younger than me. Yup. 80's. Freaks me out to no end every time I hear it even though I keep hearing it again and again and again. Saw a girl the other day, thought she was cute, she turns 19 soon. Her birthdate? 3/20/NINTEEN-EIGHTY-SIX. That's 1986. '86. That, quite literally, feels like yesterday.. or if not yesterday than at least last week, when I was enjoying Mr. Rogers and wondering how old you have to get before you're not allowed to watch Mr Rogers anymore.

Turns out he just dies, and solves that problem for you.

Age is a vice in and of itself, even in this time of fast-go-go, I saw a Dr. Phil the other day with a "cougar" - 50, 60 year old women who "prey" on hot strapping young 20-something men. I dunno, but the crowd couldn't stomach it. I'm not sure I can, but it's like gay marriage or political suicide - what you do in your own time ain't none of my business... unless the results are ending up on my lawn.

Pig Fuckers.

I read a blog the other day where someone said that watching the news was liking sleeping and breathing to them; it wasn't an option or something they did, it just happened. It made me feel a bit like a backwoods azorkian with bad teeth and a banjo. Quite frankly, I can't stand the news.



So luckily I have blogs, and I have over-heard conversations, and I generally keep up with the goings-ons of the world.. So I know that the venerable 'ol Hunter S. Thompson has pulled a Cobain on us, and I can't imagine writing a post after this event without at least giving a hat-tip to one of the best Americans I've ever had the pleasure of judging a good American. Notice I bothered to capitalize America there..

The dude liked booze, guns, and speed, and he wrote like he was alive and I can't think of much else you'd ask for out of someone like him. He did it, for 50 years, like I could only dream of doing it for even a week. I mean, christ, look what happens to me after just one bad valentine's day party.. I can't even remember my own name.

Most of the time if you don't go looking for trouble then trouble doesn't bother come looking for you.. that's my motto a majority of the time and it basically works for me. I've told you time and again I live a very semi-charmed life.. sure, perhaps not (currently - knocking on wood) lucky in love and, I certainly haven't won the lottery, but to know my friends, my family, the people around me, and my generally good luck.. a wise man might say I did win the lottery.

Metaphors aside, I just can't complain much, and I guess what I'm saying is that Hunter - although he may have gone looking for trouble on occasion - he lived a pretty semi-charmed life himself and maybe this last bit of trouble just came looking for him.

If I was older and wiser and maybe watched the news more maybe I, too, would consider it a worthy time to shuffle off the mortal coil. If I was smarter and more wordly and understood better what those pig fuckers in the Oval Office are doing.. well, maybe I'd decide I couldn't take it any longer.

And I guess what I'm saying is that if I did make that decision, I certainly hope I'd go the same way, with a good old .45 betwixt the eyes.. and I'm not trying to be morbid there. It's just that, like any true American, if you're gonna do something you should try and do it right.. God knows there are plenty of dumbass Americans out there assfucking pigs sideways and calling it "right" and the less of those the better. The more people that stand up in this country and just do the job they set out to do, and do it well, and the best they can do it.. well fuck, I'm rambling now.

Let me just leave you with a short blurb I may have shared before by the one and only fearful and loathing man himself - A tribute to the Ducati: a nice, fast, visceral experience, just the way he liked his experiences:

"Song of the Sausage Creature" by Hunter S. Thompson:

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright red, hunchback, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them -- but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack -- and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you....

There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on other, you get what you need.

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said, "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."

"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures.... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days -- and many nights for that matter -- and it is one of my finest addictions....

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple.... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe racer. And include some license plates, so he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid.... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler, and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good -- and it may be, on some days -- but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be first to help me evaluate my new toy.... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it.... For that we need fine Machinery.

Which we had -- no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for reasons of their own, to send me the 900SP for testing -- rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track racer. It was far too fast, they said -- and prohibitively expensive -- to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers. The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find.... I am too tall for these New Age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Midsize Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed into the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, f-cked-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time -- and there is always Pain in that.... But there is also Fun, in the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant takeoff, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill. On my first takeoff, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4,000 rpm....

And that's when it got its second wind. From 4,000 to 6,000 in third will take you from 75 to 95 in two seconds -- and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth.

Ho, ho. I never got into sixth, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direciton at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desparate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evil Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry.... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a school bus on the right and then got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho.... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. If you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90 mph in fifth at 5,500 rpm -- and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you can do 90mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast -- it is extremely quick and responsive, and it will do amazing things....

It is a little like riding the original Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the takeoff runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new bred of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time. It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across railroad tracks on the 900SP. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot further.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE? That is the attitude of the New Age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."