Something You Probably Already Know.

Here it is, anyway… Summer finally arrived. All is well here.  The temperature reached near 80ºF yesterday. Everything was absolutely lovely until about 8 PM when the skies opened and a hard rain began. In the morning, I’d opened the R-3’s pit zips and back vent zip (each slider to the center) for the first time this year. A well-worn all-black Aerostich with at least a dozen years of regular day-to-day wear, and one replaced zipper slider which I’d only broken by impatient zipper operator error. Replacing it was a simple DIY five-minute fix. Worn underneath the R-3 was a pair of similarly old cotton casual shorts and a short sleeve ‘beach’ type button down shirt. I was riding mostly surface streets with my modular helmet’s chinbar tipped up showing my face continuously grinning from ear to ear, simply enjoying the summer riding experiences: An ever-changing endless kaleidoscope of sights, smells sounds and sensations coming at me at forty miles per hour while the bike was delivering its usual sixty miles per gallon. The rains came in the form of many large very cold drops, all from a bank of cold-front leading dark clouds. A moment earlier I had been enjoying an outdoor music event called ’Superior Porchfest’ which is a uniquely old-fashioned midwestern small-town weekly summer event. The musicians get paid, but everyone else, including the homeowners who donate their yards and electricity, volunteer. There’s a food truck or two, a porta-potty and a wide range of live music. Silk screened Porchfest logo T shirts and home-made dog food (no kidding!) are among many fundraiser items being sold. It’s a very pleasant event which builds community spirit and connection and a great way to end a workday or just get out of the house for a couple of hours. Each week the event is at different volunteered homes, with different musicians performing different types of music. When those rains arrived I was sitting in an ultralight camping chair I’d brought, enjoying a nice food-truck burrito thing (my dinner). At the arrival of rain everyone hurriedly packed up and fled, and the event ended a little earlier than we’d all hoped, but it was still a very enjoyable evening as long as it lasted. After I’d put my little chair back into its bag and deployed a travel umbrella and walked over to my bike (where the R-3 was draped over its saddle), I zipped closed those underarm and back vents, deployed the boot rain covers from their little pockets Velcroed onto the backside of each shin-covering leg, and stepped in -- zipping the suit around me, securing the collar, helmeting up, and then rode home through a gutter-filling downpour, still smiling all the way. First time this year for riding through both a hard cold rain, and a nice warm day. This combo was strong reminder of what partly the purpose of these suits was in the first place. Every time I arrive somewhere and step out with dry clothing underneath, I shake my head and grin. When I started street riding back in 1969 (ugh…), It was impossible to use a motorcycle this way without frequently experiencing the discomfort being too hot, and then (later) getting soaked by a cold hard rain. With all of today’s great technical gear, why don’t more people do more everyday riding? I was the only rider at the Porchfest’s free music event, and then the only one on two wheels riding through the downpour. Just to be very clear (and repetitive, sorry) despite the perfection of yesterday’s sunny delightfully temperate pre-rain weather, 97% of those around me in their cars in traffic had every one of their car’s windows fully up. They do this every damn day. It is an unbelievably uniform demonstration of mass-self-isolating behavior. How did this ever happen to us? I’m no heroic motorcyclist, but it would seem like our deeply ingrained human social contract, upon which ALL forms of collective action, and all forms of good governance so heavily depend, requires we all accept that we are, as the cliché goes, “all in this together”. And what seems to most strongly nourish and sustain this stuff is a universal shared exposure to common everyday experiences which transcend the infinite range of our individual self-interests and opinions. Until quite recently that awareness resulted in the creation of technologies and infrastructures which were made as much as possible around recognizably shared needs of people. Look at a street-scene photo of any city anywhere in the world before 1940 and you’ll see streets and sidewalks filled with people on foot. All of the worlds older cities are still like this. Those places remain crowded with pedestrians, bicycles, scooters and (of course) motorcycles.* Modern cities are different. Here in little Duluth Minnesota the older urbanized hillside directly abutting the Lake Superior shoreline is a dense mix of older commercial buildings and old homes and apartments. But just over the hillside away from the lake, it’s sprawled-out malls, big box stores, huge new apartment buildings and big and small homes on very large lots. Everything is spaced out to better accommodate the needs of cars. Not people. There are few pedestrian-friendly sidewalks because the distances between places of business and schools are way too far to walk in a reasonable amount of time. You already know which infrastructure better suits motorcycling, scootering and walking. I am a privileged car owner and occasional car user, though I enjoy riding a bicycle, scooter or motorcycle quite a bit more than driving. Even through pouring rain. For me, the satisfactions of single-track balancing motion is worth the extra effort. This means wearing an armored, vented, waterproof, abrasion-resistant coverall (or jacket-and-pants) plus gloves and a modular helmet. All this gear takes extra time and effort to put on and remove, and money to acquire. It also makes one feel like the perpetual oddball in traffic, even on the nicest days. But if your bike has fenders and you have the right gear, you never fear puddles or rain clouds. Riding nourishes us in real ways, and indirectly nourishes our shared underlying social contract, the bonds upon which you and I -- and everyone – depend on. Riding is like consuming a steady diet of fresh, flavorful organic food - while driving anywhere inside a sealed climate-controlled car, with all its windows fully up on nice days, feels more like enjoying highly engineered processed junk food. A continuous diet of mainly that highly processed food stuff eventually messes with our insides, and I type this as a lover of Cheetos, ice cream and “processed cheeses”, same as I love the comfort, convenience, efficiency and safety of cars. But whenever I am able, and have the time, I like to walk, pedal or motorcycle there even more. If you’ve read this far (?) you already know all this. Why don’t all those very nice people sitting around in folding chairs on someone’s freshly mowed lawn on a warm summer evening enjoying free well-played live music not seem to know it? Ok, maybe a third of them had to us their car to haul little kids to the event. They get a pass. What about the rest of them? -- Mr. Subjective, June 16, 2026 * This famous 1942 painting ‘Nighthawks’ is partly a comment about how industrialization and technology isolate us from each other. If it’s not too much trouble, please get off your butt and ride a little more often.

Guest post by Mrs. Subjective I saw husband tracksIn the snow the other day,Leading down a pathFor his own getaway. Those tracks of hisThey show me his grit;Being willing to ride in snowIs a whole other kind of lit. Preparing his bikeTakes work (and I’m sure some fun too),From siping tiresTo finding his groove. He said to me once,“The snow has to be just right.Better to have snow on the groundThan none in my sight.” He’s true to his motto —Ride to Work or work to ride,These words to whichHe will forever abide. The Suzuki Van Van,It’s his favorite winter bikeWith big, wide tiresThat’s what he likes. All bundled up,Facing the winter wind,His helmet secureAnd, I’m sure, quite a grin. Do I worry? Do I fear?Oh yes, but just a little bit,For I know he is clothed withThe best gear one can get. American-made —A Roadcrafter Aerostich!Equipment for ridersStraight from their pitch. His one-piece zip-in suitWith padding galoreGuarantees him the chance to rideMore and more… and more. Now you might think this is an ad,But no — I’m just a little savvyTo include a renditionOf my husband’s Duluth company. Although I must sayTheir products are quite stellar;Many a hideThey’ve saved from the gutter. But now back to the storyOf seeing husband tracks —I knew that since he left,He must also come back. It was nearing dinner timeWhen my belly cried out,So I texted him these words:“How about some takeout?” Pizza? Sure thing.So I put the order in.Away on his Van VanHe rode with a grin. It wasn’t the first timeHe managed a pizza on his bike,But this time aroundIt was quite a different sight. Opening the boxWas quite the surprise —Our perfect pepperoni pieSlid in that two-point-four-mile ride. Cheese off the slice,Pepperonis scattered about,I gave a little gaspAnd then laughed out loud. The way I look at it is this:If riding makes him smile,He should keep on keeping onmile after mile. If the only casualtyIs cheese off the slice,Well, I think that’s a win —’Cause it still tastes pretty nice. So get out and ride!Leave your tracks wherever you go,Whether you decide to rideIn rain, sleet, sun… or God forbid, snow.

And Another Box of Chocolates. The fellow who became the owner of the first Aerostich suit is a highly accomplished writer with a bunch of published books, a degree in history, considerable expertise in Air Force subjects, airplane and flight history and technology, and a successful career as an automobile and motorcycle journalist. He rode twisty backroads FAST and was a skillful motorcycle road racer, too. During my twenties and thirties his smart editorials in Auto Week and Cycle World taught me a lot. Many of them offered a deeper understanding of motorcycle culture and mainstream culture than anything I’d read elsewhere or could have come up with myself. Steven L. Thompson got that first Roadcrafter unsolicited, with a cover letter introducing it and attempting to explain what the suit was for, and letting him know if it was not his size to please let me know. I hoped he’d give it a try. Fortunately, he immediately understood what it was, and liked it very much. He also wrote encouragingly about it ('Dressing Up’). Aerostich would not exist today without his generous encouragement, support and recognition, literally from day one. As the years passed, we became friends and eventually collaborators on his insightful book ‘Bodies in Motion’ which analyzes some of what underlies our profound attraction to motorcycles. Steven is still around, and we’re still friends. Recently he sent me a link to a story about the ‘Big Wheel’ children’s trike. Unfortunately, it was behind a paywall, so I was unable to read it, but the story’s title alone was enough to get me going and I wrote what follows. (That behind-a-paywall article is here: “The Wild—and Weirdly Dark—History of One of America’s Most Iconic Toys - How the Big Wheel turned plastic, physics, and pure chaos into a generation’s first taste of freedom.” from Popular Mechanics. If you subscribe to Apple News at $12.95/mo and want to make me a .pdf, I’d love to read it.) What follows is an autobiographical story from my childhood. Among other things, it reveals how much of an insufferable, overly-opinionated little sh-t I was. The first Schwinn ’Stingray’ bikes came out when I was in the 5th grade. With their innovative chopper-esque styling they quickly became the company’s best-selling bike and were soon copied by many other bicycle manufacturers. Nearly all kids loved ‘em. That year I was still pedaling my trusty red and white 20” Huffy traditional bicycle with painted steel fenders, ‘paper-boy’ style bicycle handlebars, ‘balloon’ tires, a Bendix coaster brake and a normal bicycle seat. It handled great and was good on both sidewalks and single-track ’shortcut’ trails through overgrown vacant lots. Excellent at jumping curbs, too, this was a true do-anything little bike, and I loved it enough to periodically use auto paste wax to shine it up. It became my faithful wings as soon as its bolt-on training wheels were removed. So when I examined those flashy new Stingrays it was with narrow eyes and a mix of anger and sadness, in roughly the same way as a decade later pop singer Don McLean described America and American music culture changing in ‘American Pie’, his wonderful song about the “Day the music died…” Here’s verse three of that song: "Now, for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin' stone
But that's not how it used to be
When the jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me
Oh, and while the king was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died” (Notes: “jester” = maybe Bob Dylan, “rollin’ stone” = maybe the Rolling Stones band, “the king” = maybe Elvis, “Lenin read a book on Marx” = maybe John Lennon, “quartet practiced in the park” = maybe The Beatles. Personally, I love both pre-and-post ‘American Pie’ pop music.) Those Stingrays embodied everything which seemed to be going bad in America in the worlds of bike marketing, and about the inherent wonders of riding a bicycle. The overly stylized machines seemed like pure evil on two wheels, yet they were selling like hotcakes and ’sliced bread’. I had neither the age, wisdom, or experience to understand what was happening to America, but I knew this terrible bike represented the beginning of the end for something amazing about the experience of riding a bicycle. At age ten I was unable to appreciate and describe it, yet one look at a Stingray and I instantly felt a kind of anger through my every fiber: “The jester stole his thorny crown, the courtroom was adjourned…and we sang dirges in the dark, the day the music died.” For a couple of months every spring and fall, from the third through fifth grades, I rode that Huffy about two miles to and from my elementary school. On September 24th, 1963, a couple of months before President Kennedy was assassinated, he did an overnight campaign stop here in Duluth, speaking in the basketball gymnasium of our local university (UMD). Their campus was less than an eighth mile from my elementary school and that night my parents went to witness the President speak. They had either left me with a babysitter, or maybe I was left on my own - I no longer remember this detail clearly - but I also went there, pedaling my trusty Huffy just to see if I could somehow get in. As I left our house it was already twilight, and if there was a sitter (?) I‘d have sneaked out very quietly, powered mostly by adrenaline and curiosity, hoping to sneak into that gym. I knew the best route even in the dark since it was the same one I’d been pedaling to school every weekday. When I got there some guy at a side door actually let me in and I stood with a few others, crowded into an aisle between folding bleachers, looking around at a sea of people, and trying unsuccessfully to spot my parents because I did not want them to see me there. That trusty Huffy got me into lots of trouble like this and then always got me out of trouble, every time. After the President finished his speech, none of which I remember (…or understood), the city was already in full darkness. Despite the gloom I pedaled back home like the wind and fortunately made it there before my parents. I was in bed faking sleep by the time they arrived. None of this would have been remotely possible riding an idiotic ill-handling Stingray. When the Big Wheel trike came out a few years later I was already older. Little kids had them. The roto-molded polypropylene frame and matching soft plastic tires were as ridiculous and useless as it’s ‘chopper-esque’ riding position. Those G-d Damn’s Stingrays had somehow led to this abomination, I thought. But parents and little kids both loved them because on asphalt or worn concrete driveways they were pathetically easy to drift and slide around in safe and controlled ways, thanks to the near-zero frictional coefficient of roto-molded polypropylene. Plus, they were cheap and less tippy than a traditional trike. When used as intended, which they all were, it did not take super-long to wear through the oversized front wheel’s molded plastic tread, at which time the entire crude and cheaply made thing went into a garbage bin, and then a few days later to the local landfill. It was still years before today’s semi-fake plastic recycling programs existed. Despite (or because of) those dynamic and durability limitations, little kids everywhere begged grownups for them and thanks to a very low price it was not difficult for even lower income parents to comply and shut them up. A few years later those kids would be pedaling Schwinn (or imitation) Stingrays and a few years after that they would be making horrible ‘sissy-bar’ equipped almost-choppers out of completely inappropriate used Honda CL 77 scramblers, all while Evil Knievel was bloviating about jumping the Snake River, true courage and good ol’ American pride while wearing rhinestones on his fingers and a snazzy leather suit which looked like it had come from one of fat Elvis’s concert wardrobes. These days I’m still riding those same streets as I once did on that Huffy, except now I’m doing it year-around thanks to a lightly-modified a 200cc fat-tired Suzuki Van Van ‘winter bike’, which turned out to be a dependable cold-temp starter and seems/feels safe-ish for use on snowy and icy streets. You don’t know what strange is until you’ve ridden a studded-tire bicycle, e-bike or Van Van for day-to-day transportation though one of our always slightly too-long northern Minnesota winters. “To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.” – Charlotte Rampling, Actor, interview in The New Yorker, 16 May 2021. I’m no poet or Henry David Thoreau philosopher and weirdo, but in America today there’s something inherent about riding which estranges you from all those who do not ride, and which also helps you see the world a little more clearly, probably a little more cynically, and possibly with a bit more humility and a little less hubris than all the good and sensible people surrounding you. Most of them from inside their sealed/safe/comfortable/convenient cars. Also, I was not ‘born old’, or with a good sense of self-discipline and a desire to be on a scholastic ‘honor roll’, and an ambition to be an Eagle Scout, admirable as those things all are. Back when I was riding that Huffy my simple plan was to become a paleontologist who drove a Corvette across the sands of outer Mongolia to find and dig up dinosaur bones. I’d also hoped someday along the way a pretty HS homecoming queen might fall in love with me. Never got that Corvette or any dino bones, but finally - and entirely by chance – did end up married to a smart, feisty, pretty homecoming queen almost as lonely and (forgive me honey…) weird as me. It sure took a good long time, though. By the time we’d met at random, I was old enough to be eligible for Social Security. “Life” really “is like a box of chocolates.” You never do know what you’re gonna get. She and her brothers all loved their Big Wheels. If you loved your Stingray and Big Wheel, that’s ok, too. From a certain viewpoint those things did look fly and were great fun. You probably looked really cool on yours, too. But they still rode like absolute crap… Mr. Subjective, February 2026 PS – Possible future blog post: “Every Dog Has Its Day: The Fall of Schwinn and the Rise of (good handling) Mountain Bikes” PPS – I was completely wrong about the Big Wheel. Though it resembles a tricycle in form it’s actually and more simply a perfectly genius toy. Children of all ages love the sensations of skidding, sledding, skiing, sliding,surfing and every other form of semi-controlled drifting. Many kinds of mammals (think otters, etc) do. This toy was cheap to make, safe to use and introduced kids to exactly this kind of fun in a beautiful way. At a fast glance it looked like a trike, but it was always so much more. These days I am sorry I misunderstood and maligned these things for most of my life.

Interstices, Mashups and Fusions. When I was very little my mother would read me to sleep with bedtime stories. Most nights I wanted favorites read again and again. One was Dr Suess’s ‘Horton Hears a Who’. Another was ‘Anatole’. It may have been their illustrations, or my mother’s attention, or some deeper message those stories carried, but whatever the reason for a year or more they topped the list of favorite bedtime literature. ‘Horton Hears a Who’ is about a nice elephant who, because of his extra-large ears, is the only elephant able to hear the voices and other noises made by a community of extremely tiny people living out their otherwise unknown lives. Horton knew others were unwittingly about to destroy this entire miniature world. Fortunately for them he was nothing if not determined and eventually was able to help them be discovered, thus saving the entire microscopic community. The lesson was if you happen to discover or learn something nobody knows, it’s ok to tell the world about it even if no one else believes you. Stick to it long enough and if you are persistent, eventually they will. (Side note: this is essentially how I feel about useful day-to-day utility-transportation motorcycle and bicycle riding.) ‘Anatole’ is about an industrious little Parisian mouse raising a family and how he makes a living.  Every night he sneaks into a nearby cheese factory after it closes for the day and samples all the different types and flavors of cheese they manufacture. This mouse knows his cheeses. He learns the company is struggling so to help he starts leaving tiny notes on the various cheese varieties about how their flavors might be improved. When the cheese makers arrive in the morning and find his tiny notes, they modify their recipes accordingly and soon those reformulated cheeses start winning gourmet awards. The business prospers and eventually Anatole receives well-deserved recognition and he and his family live happily ever after. Both stories carry important lessons for a young person to learn. Thirty years later as I was trying to get Aerostich going I must have remembered them, at least unconsciously, because some of the design and business decisions I made reflected those ideas. At some point I also picked up an understanding of ‘interstices’, ‘mashups’ and ‘fusions.’ Interstices are the empty spaces between larger things. Think of a bucket full of soccer balls and marbles. The marbles fill (or infill) the interstices between the larger soccer balls. Mashups are combinations of two different kinds of things, and fusions are when a blend of two different things yields a third all-new thing which then fills some formerly vacant space – the interstice - between the two already existing things. Examples are infinite: Combine two musical genres and create a new genre. Combine two ethnic cuisines and you end up with a new cuisine. Combine a riders rainsuit and an armored crash-protective suit and you end up with an Aerostich Roadcrafter. Combine a motocross boot and a street boot to get an ‘adventure riders’ boot. The well-remembered Aerostich Combat Touring Boot was that and today there are dozens of variations based on its pioneering fusion. Combine a lightweight street bike with an off-road bike and you end up with a ‘street scrambler’ or a ‘supermotard’. Combine a dirt bike with a touring bike and you end up with an ‘ADV’ bike. If you are lucky the result originally intended to fit the interstices between well-established market categories will exceed the popularity of the existing categories. BMW’s GS bike family is a blend of street bike and dirt bike and became their best-selling motorcycle type. Ten years ago, we started fooling around with a lightly modified Zero electric motorcycle for local winter transportation in our hometown of Duluth Minnesota. Our purpose was: A) To test Aerostich rider’s gear in cold weather, and B) find out how an electric vehicle of any kind might work in this climate. Until then nobody had ever tried to run an electric car or motorcycle through a Duluth winter as daily transportation. It gets cold and snowy here: Average annual snowfall is 80-90”, average January/Feb low temps run around minus ten degrees F. But riding for daily transportation is always worth it, right? Horton was hearing another Who... As the winter-motorcycling years followed, the result became a lightly modified 200cc Suzuki VanVan. These are good low-temp winter starters thanks to fuel injection. They are also easy to keep upright thanks to a very low saddle, light weight and fat tires. But with a little work they could be made even better for winter-transportation applications. Nobody manufacturing motorcycles offers one specifically optimized for use in cold snowy places. There is an old saying in business when one is trying to figure out some business deal.  The phrase became so common it’s now a cliché: “There’s a pony in there somewhere.”  Yes, there is. For local transportation and the Suzuki motorcycle company that small horse is an interstice you could ride a VanVan through blindfolded. Many of the world’s peoples living in cold and snowy places would enjoy owning and using a lightweight winter-focused motorcycle -- if one existed.  Calling Anatole, the famous mouse with the extraordinarily well-educated cheese tasting palette… Dear Suzuki, You manufacture the basis for an excellent winter-focused lightweight motorcycle. With only a few changes a variation of your VanVan 200 model could be that bike. It would not take the place of any snowmobile or ATV. It would be something entirely new -- a uniquely versatile, practical, useful and enjoyable winter-adapted bike. Those peoples living in cold, snowy, icy places would find many reasons to buy one. Nobody else makes any type of winter-optimized lightweight utility motorcycle. You’d have this market entirely to yourself.  There are essentially two tiers of modifications needed to develop your Van Van in this direction, measured by cost and relative importance. Here are the ten least-costly most-critical items: Heated Grips An easy connection for a heated vest or bib Gaiters protecting the fork seals Optional removable handguards and ‘hippo hands’ An optional windshield A center stand An extender for the front fender The larger-sized rear tire and wheel also mounted on the front An O-ring final drive chain An insulating sleeve on clutch and brake levers The next tier lists five more expensive but also critical items (some would require a substantial investment): Aluminum rims (the current steel ones are far, far, far, far too heavy) Snow tires (a low temperature-optimized rubber compound and tread design, low-profile-stud-able, heavily siped) Lighter weight muffler Brighter headlight Slightly larger (+ one gallon) gasoline tank Plug-in electric battery and engine block heaters (for extreme cold operation). Finally, here are a few luxury and fantasy items, some maybe optional: An (optional) heated saddle An increased capacity alternator An on-off switchable two-wheel drive system using a small front hub electric motor A remote starter system A nice (optional) rear cargo rack A sixth gear Steel fork sliders (subzero temps shrink aluminum enough to lock the forks) Motorcycle riders across the entire northern half of the USA, all of Canada, most of Russia, the northern third of China, all the high elevation ‘stans’ (Kazakhstan, Afghanistan etc), Greenland, the northern half of Europe, the southern fourth of South America and all those living at higher elevations in the Andes mountainous places are waiting. So am I. A bike like this would offer all peoples in the world’s colder areas a kind of versatility, efficiency, economy and functionality no snowmobile, ATV or conventional motorcycle could ever achieve. This ball is in your court. You can pioneer and own this. Sincerely and respectfully yours, - Mr. Subjective PS – If you wanted to make this bike a bit more ‘freeway compatible’ (a very low priority for my application) enlarge the engine to 300cc’s. The 200cc’s it has delivers enviable MPG but only takes this bike to around 60mph. Even the slightest headwind or grade means 55mph - pinned. Which is fine for small town surface streets, and for villagers in northern Norway or Alaska, but these days many riders must deal with high-speed ‘freeways’ for at least some portion of their everyday A to B. PPS – Interestingly -- at least to me -- is how, after my ‘winter’ VanVan was set up with DIY modified tires (inflated to only 4-4.5lbs), it feels safer on snowy icy roads than my e-bike or regular bicycle on their studded ‘winter’ tires. I’ve been riding single track machines on snowy icy urban streets for many years now, and even though I’m moving much faster on the VanVan than I do on those bicycles, riding the well-traveled auto-packed down and sometimes rutted tracks aboard the VanVan still feels a lot safer than navigating the areas of deeper snow nearer the road’s shoulders aboard a bicycle or e-bike. Car traffic leaves the sides of the roads piled up with snow with the well-used lanes comparatively clearer. And more-closely matching the speed of surrounding traffic also feels a lot safer. And at night (winters being long and dark) a motorcycle’s better lighting makes a nice difference, too.