Riding Is Cool

“Younger rider’s reactions to my suit (Roadcrafter Classic, R-3) are not entirely positive.”

- Any number of experienced motorcycle journalists.

That’s an understatement. I’ve thought a lot about why this is.

First, youth-in-general looks very hard at the micro-granular details of everything but often has a more difficult time seeing the so-called bigger picture. Looking hard at each tree means one usually doesn’t or can’t see the forest so well.

When it comes to rider’s gear this means having the ‘right’ kinds of gear and knowing this or that brand is fashionable or cool in-in-the-moment, and almost nothing else matters. I experienced exactly this youthful myopia when I was younger, just as most kids do to one degree or another. Fashion and fitting in matter a lot more to the young (and young-at-heart) than to anyone older. Personal note: When I was a kid, I remember desperately wanting a Schwinn bicycle, Jack Purcell tennis shoes and Gant button down shirts. Got the shoes but not the other two.

Today’s younger riders are no different than past generations of young riders. Most hope to ride the exact ‘right’ bike, wear the exact ‘right’ gear and be among the exact ‘right’ peers. This socializing-stuff is as developmentally and neurologically hard-wired in most of us as are our physical features. Aerostich’s geeky one-piece coveralls, which enormously help make it easier, safer and more comfortable to ride a motorcycle more often, in more kinds of conditions and to and from more situations, doesn’t quite compute. For most young riders, this is not why or how they want to consume motorcycling.

But after one has ridden for a longer while a few things become clearer:

• No matter what one rides or wears, street riding itself always makes you the oddball in traffic, and in almost every other situation.
• Riding can be a vastly better and more satisfying way to get from A-to-B than most people realize, if one doesn’t mind being that oddball-in-traffic.

In other words, once one throws looking cool under a bus, one’s life actually gets a lot better in so many areas and ways. This includes riding more.

Almost everything in our post-industrial-consumer-culture is sold to us on the basis of making us cooler -- From whiter teeth to better nutrition to you-name-it. The assumption is everyone wants to be a legend and live forever. When I was young, I did too, and to be honest a part of me still does.

Bikes were more popular and much more mainstream-cooler back when I was in high school than they are today. My HS class had about six hundred kids and most school days there were maybe twenty-five bikes in the parking lot. All neatly lined up in a row. On a few really nice spring days there were three or four times that many. Back then my moto-interest was dirt bikes. I didn’t know much about riding, more specifically dirt bike riding, but after school and on weekends I’d find some trails to explore and a gravel pit to go practice in. This culminated ten years later in riding local AMA Enduros for a couple of years, but this level of commitment still wasn’t sufficient. I could not get enough riding only on weekends and practicing a night or two after work.

During this part of my life I’d occasionally randomly encounter former HS classmates and they would sometimes ask: “Are you still riding those dirt bikes?” The implication being that at some point I would outgrow this phase. I half-believed it myself and unconsciously was waiting for this to happen but by around thirty I realized I was going to want to ride motorcycles for the rest of my life, as often as possible. Riding was simply too much fun. Even sitting at an intersection waiting for the light to turn green was better on a bike than it was in a car.

At that point most of my pretenses about riding's coolness and what-to-wear went under the bus. All that mattered was that I could be riding instead of driving and soon afterward the Aerostich coverall was ‘born’. Improvisation being a mother of invention.

All these years later now I’ve become sort of an amateur anthropologist-connoisseur of social ostracization. Not that I deliberately seek out being uncool, it’s just the embedded cost of riding all the time and G-d or the universe has a funny way of arranging things to work out like this. So, whenever someone in a grocery store or any destination stares, giggles or asks a really stupid question about what I’m wearing, or if I was riding a motorcycle (after all, it is raining…), all I usually do is silently grin. Inevitably those dumb remarks, stares and comments are later remembered as the best non-riding parts of my day.

So if today’s young riders want to be young riders, I say let them. A few will continue riding long enough to realize that it’s riding itself which makes you cool, not the color and model of one’s bike or if you wear the latest helmet, or what jacket or kind of boots one has. In the big wide world, nobody in any of the cars surrounding you in traffic cares even the smallest fraction about any of that.

Riding itself is what is cool.

- Mr. Subjective, 2020

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