A woman has to have an obsession. That is, angry, passionate, obsessive women like me need to have an obsession. Motorcycles are mine.
Riding is the answer that makes all the questions go away, and I have a lot of questions that need to go away. I’m the one who lies awake at night, compulsively processing information and calculating all the things I don’t know, monitoring all the things I can’t control. I dream about the problems I have to solve, and about solving things that aren’t even problems. I’m a lawyer, and I’ve been known to draft pleadings in my dreams, only to wake up and have to draft them all over again.
That sort of thing will drive you mad. Trust me.
It’s easy to worry about life so much that you forget to live.
But it’s hard to forget you’re alive as you smash through a hairpin with your knee down and all the forces of nature and physics marshalled and waiting to take you out at the slightest mistake. Hell yes, at that moment you’re alive. And in that moment life is simple: life is adrenalin and physics and petrol and right f**king now.
Even when the adrenalin subsides and you’re not doing silly things – when you’re just fanging towards the horizon on a clear day – there’s nothing else you have to be or do except find out where that road leads you. And maybe find out what your bike can do on the way there.
I’m obsessed. I think about riding when I’m awake, I dream about when I’m asleep.
I own two bikes and I’m stony broke.
I buy my bikes expensive oil for Valentine’s Day.
I’ve never been happier in my life.
Welcome to my obsession.
I love this, it sums up the head space that some of us live in and the need to jump on our bikes and get out there before we lose our souls and that sparkle in our eyes cloud over. We do it totally for our selves on such a personal level that at days end little is said. Eyes and Smile do the talking.
Love the photo … Meet Beastie says heaps
Grace, I really admire what you’re doing. We live in a troubled world, enjoy what you can, while you can. I have always rated having fun above being well-off. I retired at 50 so that I could do what I wanted, which was mostly ride my moto around Europe.
You deserve more YT followers, I hope they come soon.
Good woman yerself…x
Once the basics are taken care of, experience is the ultimate the richesse… or so I think. Everyone lives their lives differently but I think it sounds like you and I are on the same page. Thanks for your support. 🙂
There is an East of Existentialism quest that motorcycling can bring to the table of emotions that oscillate from rationalism to empirical pursuits- as high jinks adventurism- that border on the absurd from a social science perspective. Though that being the case normative rationalism has become an absurd form of modernisation that funnels folk behind picket fences, if lucky enough to afford that kind of luxury. Anyway there are ways between rationalism and empirical competition, and that might be a causious wanderlust which seems to be happening for individuals who dare to explore novel ways to enjoy forms of modernisation qua bikes and personal identity over cultural norms.