When the shadow goes away

So the last report from the AirTag that was tucked in the toolkit shows it - and, presumably, my bike - near the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel at a quarter after three in the morning of December 11th. I remain curious about whether the thieves found it and destroyed it at that point or if they managed to somehow shield it from detection by the iPhone phalanxes in Brooklyn or what exactly happened, as well as how they coped with the intensely loud and annoying alarmed disc lock on the front wheel.

Both of these concerns, as well as the eventual fate of one 2022 Honda CB500FA, are academic now. At least this time around I got to ride it, dialing up almost five thousand miles over the course of about seven months of riding. But such is life in Manhattan; as one of the cops said, you just can't have nice things here.

There's a dark humor in seeing how the considerations that went into buying and keeping it while I did turned out to aid in its undoing: sure, let's get the inexpensive naked roadster that doesn't have a ton of easy-to-fence plastic (but which is built on a platform shared with a whole line of Honda middleweights at a time when spare parts are impossible to acquire) in a neighborhood full of rich-folks apartments and UN missions (all of whom are loathe to share footage from security cameras for various reasons) and where plenty of other motorcycles park (some beat, some weird, few which stay in one place for more than a day). I'll happily give lots of credit to my agent at Progressive's Suffolk office this time around for being as empathetic and supportive as he was efficient, which was a huge improvement over my experience from three years ago.

It's different on a personal level this time around too, less of a shock and more of a sense of disgust and odd humiliation and a sort of fatalistic shrug. Fine, whatever. It's not the end of the world, I didn't get physically injured, and yeah, crime is and will always be a thing and this gets added to the statistics regarding the current wave of vehicle thefts, which has to be one of the less obvious effects wrought by the pandemic. (Not long before my bike got nicked, someone managed to jack a brand-new Wagoneer in the same posh neighborhood. That one's actually kinda impressive.) Such is history, such is life. It still hurts, though.

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And yet...

I suppose the cops and the insurance company are on to other cases at this point, so I can finally say this without things getting extremely awkward: I wasn't going to keep it anyway.

And it's not even about that specific bike. This is about motorcycling in general, this decades-long unfulfilled fascination that was finally made real and turned out to be a bundle of concern and ill vibes and disappointment.

When people talk about bikes and riding, everything seems to revolve around some grand sense of liberation and the intensity of the experience and the joy of being swept along. No one really talks about how it feels to actually ride the silly thing.

Important note: I would eventually discover that my first few weeks on the bike were done on seriously underinflated tires. The book said 36 psi front and 42 rear; off the showroom floor in late April they were both in the twenties. Objective handling was fine - it did about what I told it to do and was perfectly accurate - but it just felt incredibly eerie and unpleasant. (Thanks and much love again to Sam Smith for reminding me to check that regardless of my fondness for a usually good dealer.)

I don't know the degree to which those first few weeks ruined the rest of the experience, but that uneasiness tended to persist in my thoughts as I was riding. I just never felt secure and stable, or at least secure and stable enough.

A lot of it was about cornering. The act of turning a motorcycle is a phenomenally complex physics problem involving steering inputs and lean angles and roll centers and multiple gyroscopic effects and the way the tire contact patches change as you bank over and God knows what else - and I felt every bit of it being processed and kept waiting to see if something wasn't going to work as it should. Successfully negotiating a good sweeping bend tended to give rise not to a sense of Oh, that was wonderful and gratifying but rather Whew, I sort of did that right and didn't end up in the trees or grinding along the median barrier or something. I eventually grew tired of the idea that riding was a (hopefully) continuing sequence of good-that-didn't-go-wrongs instead of something innately enjoyable.

The regular physical discomfort got old, too. Even here in the Anthropocene - maybe more because of it? - weather and conditions here in the Northeast militate against a consistent sense of good times in open air. May morning temps would still be in the forties up through Westchester County, which resulted in some deep-ache wind chill. The flip was humid heat while paddling through yet another backup on the Deegan wearing a heavy leather jacket. As much as I was willing to masochistically endure it and put up a brave face, every once in a while something in the back of my mind would suggest that, y'know, right now you could be in a Volvo. With a heater. And a cupholder for coffee. And Bach on the stereo. Kinda nice and civilized, no?

That sense of exposure obviously carried over to other parts of the experience. As much as I rationalized it and stayed as conscientious as possible and planed routes with risks in mind and internalized the specifics of the Hurt Report saying how I was not part of the blatant problem groups, I simply could not get past the sense that I was doing something that eventually would not end well. Departure in early mornings always included a longing look at the sleeping forms of Anna and Tom and thoughts of what might happen. A whisper of doom always accompanied me checking the fasteners of my jacket and taking my helmet off the shelf. 

By about October I was having serious misgivings about this whole thing. The proportion of enjoyable to not-enjoyable was getting desperately out of line; the very occasional blissful stretches of pavement framed by sun-dappled trees did not counterbalance everything else that was either immediately unpleasant or could get that way very quickly. The rear end would squirm over pavement seams. The tendency for people to change into my lane while I was next to them grew gratingly normal. I would have to debate the multiple stresses of lanesplitting versus the stifling tedium of waiting in a jam, and as the weather was changing the opportunity to get on the bike was gradually being reduced to switching parking places ahead of alternate-side days.

I finally cracked - really, something in my brain went "pop" - after seeing one too many death notices on Instagram. Great friend and wonderful human and the rest, accompanied by a photo of a fully geared-up person leaning on an adventure bike, they'd just gone down the road for a minute and it happened. 

Enough. Enough with the cloud of dread, enough with the sense of playing into a scene from some awful maudlin Lifetime movie, enough with worrying about what would happen with Anna and Tom - and, news item by the way, our next one due in June - if something happened to me. Enough with beating myself up in the name of some vague ego complex and rapidly-deteriorating ambition.

The night after that conclusion, I slept better than I had in months.

And then not too long after that it goes and gets stolen, and if that's not God and fate telling me to just get on with being irrevocably done with this whole line of reality then I don't know. It's over, now and forever.

Regrets? Only that it took so goddamn long for me to get to this realization. All those years of stopping in at dealers and poring over road tests and dropping semi-informed comments online and endlessly wishing, being a total wannabe without ever getting far enough into the reality of it, grind on me just a bit. Lots of circumstances involved in that wait, and I'll never second-guess doing this like I did, but just to have it work out this way is depressing.

Would it have been different if I'd been able to start twenty-five years ago? Maybe. Would my mentality have a different alignment if I didn't have a family at home? Probably not by that much. Would a different bike (or properly inflated tires from the go) have produced a different result? I doubt it, although it might have taken longer. And none of this navel-gazing matters anyway; life is what it is and as it is.

It's been surprisingly easy to cleanse most of the motorcycle content from my life, although I still have to figure out what to do with two near-new jackets and a helmet approaching its recognized end of life. I suppose the jackets can go on eBay; I've been resisting the urge to just throw the helmet in the East River as some sort of statement. But the ready ability to release this has been a pleasant surprise.

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That does't mean that the greater situation is completely at peace, though.

The bike wasn't just about motorcycling in its specific sense; it was supposed to be a solution to personal desires and interests within the constraints of life where and how I live. This was my sports car replacement or analogue, the more vivacious and ebullient complement to the good-natured everyday functionality of the Mazda - and one that didn't require another parking space. The Honda and the Mazda were a near-ideal two-vehicle garage, sans garage.

A brief togetherness.

Well, so much for that, and now there's a conceptual hole in that conceptual garage that I'm spending entirely too much time trying to parse and resolve.

Realize one thing, and I think this relates to a lot of the above: as much as personal transportation means a lot to me, it's not the most important part of my life. Anything that I do has to fit into the parameters that are defined by one very deep and long-lived and continuously wonderful relationship and its various derivatives (that would be the kids), and that most immediately involves our current address and its various built-in limits. I'll happily put up with the inability to easily fulfill my own selfish wants for the sake of our togetherness. I mean, I did just this for a long time when that situation wasn't a concern, so it's not a huge drag.

That said, I do still want something fun to drive and enjoyable to own. That understanding has never been challenged, even as I get older and the car world goes in directions I do not necessarily appreciate.

Yes, I could go find a different car, but there's two parts there: first, I have to find something else that works, and second, do I really want to be rid of something that works so ridiculously well?

If I'm looking for a new set of wheels, there's a few essentially mandatory considerations: It has to hold four adults (read: two adults and two baby seats). It has to have some modicum of safety equipment, which means three-point belts and probably ABS. It has to get minimum something like 20 miles per gallon on the highway. And it has to conceivably survive living on the street in Gotham.

Past that, the usual subjective stuff. I want something that drives well, sure, but also has an aura of dignity and elegance to it. I'm trying to bring my life around to a bit more of a sense of bourgeois respectability, and this would naturally be a good part of that.

What works here? I've been batting around a few ideas. I keep coming back to BMW E24s - not the M6, with it voracious thirst and harshness and unusable excess, but just the standard 635CSi. I did spent a few days entertaining the idea of a Maserati Granturismo until I found out that insurance wouldn't be much fun. I still have an image from a year and a half ago of a black Mercedes E-Class Cabrio on the Cross County being driven by a very model-looking guy and carrying three very, very model-looking girls, so that's not a bad association. Always wanted a convertible anyway. 

But the hard part is replacing the Mazda. Momoko is just such a perfect fit for everything right now; good size inside and out, terrific fuel economy, doesn't attract much attention from the wrong people, and just an excellent all-rounder. It's extremely hard to justify going in on the expense and unknowns of getting new wheels into the current situation when the status quo is so agreeable.

So I'm more into trying to have some fun with what I've got. I'm pretty sure that after nine years and 130,000 miles the suspension bushings are shot - directional stability and turn-in are both kinda blah lately -  so this seems like a fine time to indulge in some upgrades: Racing Beat springs and maybe exhaust, Koni Special Actives, 17-inch Enkei EV5s wearing Michelins, a better stereo amplifier and considerations on speakers, some attention to the scuffs in the paint. Not so much boy-racer as aspirations to a more upscale experience.

Is that going to be the Complete Solution? I don't know. But completeness is a weird idea now, and maybe it's more about being complete in the moment than grasping after some ideal that ultimately doesn't match this reality.

I think I've done exactly that quite enough lately.