Road Ramblings

by: Lost McGoon

I went to the Harley shop the other day and all those fat dirty guys on their slow bikes looked at me funny......

All those damn crotch rocket squids just fly down the road, stupid kids with their parent's money......

Don't those dumb asses on those stripped down fighters know that the fairings are on there for a reason.....

Stupid metric pieces of shit, the only true bike is an American made bike...

Damn full fairing cookie cutter bikes, they are such posers....

It is funny to me, to listen to all the bullshit that each sub group likes to talk about the others within the motorcycle community. I am a fan of motorcycles in general. Sport bikes, fighters, Harleys, Metric V twins, touring bikes, they all have their purpose and a certain type of riding they are best suited for. Each rider has their own style, requests, and demands from their machine. Most riders pick their rides based on what they want to get from them. Yet somehow it seems that based on their choice of machine they get pigeonholed into a group and any machines outside that group are inferior. Well, I have to take a moment this month to say that the others are not inferior; they are just suited to a different style. I am a member of quite a few varied internet motorcycle groups. Without fail each and every one has a thread at some point because someone saw ____ type of bike and how much it sucked. These threads are generally continued by a lot of brand bashing.

We are all in the minority as far as the public goes, yet we seem to have the need to segregate ourselves even further depending on what we ride.

Personally I ride a chopped and bobbed metric V twin. I ride with a Motorcycle club, and am pretty much the only metric bike in our group. I catch some hell but then I remind the person down talking my metric bike that I have been in 3 countries and 28 states on my bike, and ask how much they have actually ridden their bike. I am a fan and enthusiast of just about every imaginable facet of the two wheeled community (and a lot of the three wheeled one) I don't ride in the dirt, but if I did I would have a machine that is best suited to what I wanted to do in the dirt. I enjoy watching stunters do their thing, and am often one of the few V twins that go out to the drag strip for the shootouts. My bike will not do 150mph, but it gets me where I want to be. I respect the sport bikes and the riders that take them into warp speed; doing so requires a level of concentration and testicular fortitude that cruising around at the speed limit does not. Yet I do not downplay the cruiser rider with their hair blowing in the wind because they are in their element, their moment.

So remember next time you are cruising, stunting, screaming, putting, going down the road and you pass a different type of machine; It is not better than your machine, but yours is not better than it either... It's just different. Enjoy those differences, and coexist with each other, because in the end we are all a minority to the public. We are the few that choose life on two wheels.

-Lost McGoon