And Buying a Powerball Ticket. Good luck or bad luck supposedly comes in threes so I’m today buying a Powerball ticket for the first (or possibly second?) time in my life. I’m feeling lucky because this week Minnesota unexpectedly became the sixth state in America to formally legalize lane splitting. Separately, another bit of possible good luck may be about to happen at Aerostich (which will be described a little further below). That makes two. Perhaps a lucky Powerball number is out there waiting for me. How could it not be? There is a terrific story about how this new Minnesota lane splitting law suddenly became reality and it will soon be told elsewhere, but for now, a simple explanation is the planets all aligned and a few Minnesota riders in key legislative and leadership positions saw the opportunity and acted quickly, doing all the right kinds of things at exactly the right time. So beginning on July 1 of 2025, all motorcycle riders in MN will be able to filter through congested traffic as if they were riding bicycles. It will take years before many Minnesota drivers become comfortable with motorcycles filtering around them in congested traffic. To begin familiarizing them Minnesota is planning PSA announcements and other kinds of public information and education programs between now and next July. Essentially only two elements are involved: 1.) In congested areas worldwide the operators of smaller nimbler vehicles have always naturally and safely filtered through the interstices between the larger and clumsier vehicles. This is why lane-splitting is legal or well-accepted just about everywhere in the world except America. Millions of riders across the planet safely do this every single day, especially through the most road-congested densely populated cities in ‘developing’ areas throughout Asia, Africa, and South America. 2.) Only in America did almost everyone go right to cars, because a 1916 Model T automobile cost about the same as a 1916 motorcycle. People could get four wheels or two wheels for the same price, and everyone then in the market for wheels chose the Ford. This happened across America, and nowhere else. Since then, most bikes designed, manufactured, and marketed in the United States have been consumed as sport and leisure vehicles. Bikes became societally marginalized as leisure toys and sporting machines, and riding them came to be identified with rebellion, recreation, and sport, not useful utility transportation. Our unique moto-history continues to influence how motorcycling in America is understood and consumed, which is why there are so few motorcycle commuters and utility riders here today. But globally motorcycles are a well-established economically proven safe way to reduce road congestion, improve society, and place a lighter footprint on the earth. Very significantly, the behavioral differences between typical utility riders and recreational riders are immense and consequential.  People riding mostly for sport and recreation are far more likely to ride in ways that are unsafe, and those who ride for utility transportation tend naturally to ride as safely as possible. This is why lane splitting tends to be far safer than most Americans think it is. The second bit of potentially very good luck which came Aerostich’s way earlier this week is a lot simpler to explain. After fifteen years of fruitlessly trying to persuade the YKK zipper company to develop a slightly stronger and slightly easier-to-handle version of the main entry zipper in Aerostich suits, it looks like this may finally be happening. The zipper we’ve been using for about the past fifteen years is the very best available from any zipper company I am aware of, and it has worked extremely well for about 97% of our customers, but it isn’t quite perfect. Our long-time YKK zipper sales rep just sent me a photo of a new model that looks good. A sample of this zipper should show up on my desk next week. If it does work for us (?), then several months from now all Aerostich suits will begin to come with this new zipper and we’ll probably also figure out a way to offer it as a replacement upgrade to those with older Aerostich gear. Hopefully, I’ll soon be sending a bottle of fancy whiskey to our YKK zipper rep along with a sincere thank-you note. Good luck (and trouble) supposedly comes in threes. This afternoon I’m buying a Powerball ticket. Mr. Subjective, May 24, 2024. PS – Unfortunately, after writing this blog post, the ticket I purchased (shown here) had only one matching number. So maybe the old saying about ‘luck (or bad things) coming in 3’s isn’t as quite true as people believe. Or maybe some other good thing will still happen? Or maybe the new zipper won’t work out? Or? This is the photo of the possible new zipper: Here’s the text of the new Minnesota lane splitting law: PPS -- Also, unfortunately, when the possible zipper solution arrived, it won't work for us. But we'll keep trying.

An Email to A Co-Worker I’m not sure how we might use this photo, but I think it is funny.  I’m not sure why it appeals to me so much.  Maybe partly because it violates the PC stuff about never riding after drinking? Or maybe because it tells an important truth about the awkward clunky/bulky/pain-in-the-assed-ness of these suits unless one is comfortably inside one, in motion on a motorcycle. This photo would probably bring out the worst in some of our audience because so many people have been killed or seriously harmed by drunk drivers and riders. Or died due to driving or riding impaired. To be clear, I am very much against drinking and riding (and, of course, driving). So it’s tough to figure out a use for this image, even though it tells a real truth about one-piece armored riding suits. Maybe a ‘caption-this-photo’ contest, noting that: A) no drinking was involved, B) the photo was not set up or staged to be a provocative photo, and C) with an explanation about the actual circumstances of the creation of the photo to be revealed along with the winning caption? The title of the photo might be something like: "Here is one picture not worth 1,000 words.” The actual circumstances: I was invited to join my wife, brother, and brother-in-law for dinner last week at the OMC Smokehouse. Great BBQ food located only a block from Aerostich. The place wasn’t its usual busy normal. My three partners for this dinner had arrived by car a few minutes before me and were seated in a booth directly opposite this bar. Nobody was at the bar, so I draped my R-3 over an empty bar stool and joined my companions. My wife noticed the arrangement of the suit draped over the stool like a passed-out drunk and took the photo. After a nice no alcohol-for-me meal I put the suit back on and rode home. Compared to a riding jacket, these suits usually (and again) are a big pain-in-the-ass when going out for a social event. Before he died, the record-setting endurance rider John Ryan was famous for simply leaving his suit on all the time, wherever he was. But I always feel more comfortable if I can take my suit off when in a social situation like the one described above. Sometimes I can safely leave it on the bike, but in this situation and some others, that wasn’t or isn’t an option. When it comes to what to do with my R-3 after arriving at public and social destinations, there’s a wide range of inconveniences. Riders on full-dress touring and ADV bikes sometimes stuff their suit inside an empty saddle bag. Others drape it over the bike’s handlebars, about as shown in the above photo. This has the extra advantage of helping protect any cute handlebar-mounted farkels from opportunistic thievery but isn’t safe if it is too windy unless a bungee cord is also used to prevent the suit from kiting away in a strong gust. At the other end of the spectrum are places like the dance studio where I met my wife for lessons yesterday. She’s a great natural dancer who loves to dance while I’m nearly unable to keep time and memorize even the simplest steps and moves. “Opposites attract” is all you need to know about this. Anyway, right at the entrance is a bench and a big rolling coat rack. Upon arrival, I hang my backpack off the end of this rack and then drape my Aerostich suit over it, exactly like how it is draped over the bar stool in the photo, except this rack’s horizontal bar is high enough so the empty suit looks more like it’s fully standing. Then I sit on the little bench and take off my riding boots and I’m ready to…er, go ‘dancing’, if you’d call it that. But my wife always has a great time, and they have a nearly perfect place to hang the suit. I’ve known riders who will roll their suits tightly enough to be wedged under the bike’s frame against the rear tire, and those who use Aerostich Carry Straps to do the same, bungeed across a saddle, and there are a few riders like John Ryan who just keep the darn things on all the time despite everyone around them being in their comfortable street clothes. Unfortunately, there’s no sci-fi George Jetson press-a-button and it self-folds into a jeans pocketable size. (See 0:47 in this one-minute video for the idea.) An R-3 suit version sure would be nice. I wish I could write here we’re working on it. Maybe someday. Last week I went to a concert at the West Theatre which was part of the annual “Homegrown Music Festival” here. The place was standing room only, so when I did eventually find a seat, I just sat there in my zipped-open-to-the waist Aerostich suit, enjoying the music, and remembering the great John Ryan. For him and me, No matter what this might look like, riding there is always worth it. -- Mr. Subjective, May 2024

If you live somewhere with seasonally changing weather, one big secret about being able to ride more often is the need for what amounts to a large arsenal of different types and sizes of riding gear, all kept wherever it’s easiest to get to and use. For example, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, for my northern Minnesota year-round local riding I employ two different Aerostich R-3 ‘light’ Tactical one-piece suits.  On close inspection, these suits look identical, but they’re actually two completely different sizes – one is slightly larger and has been fit-altered to be comfortable over a sweater and down puffy, and the other is a size smaller and provides a standard (and closer) fit for the rest of the year. Each R-3 is now about ten years old. The bigger one gets worn daily during about five months of wintery riding and the other one is used the other seven. The luxury of having two identical-appearing Aerostich suits is like cheating and until now they were my secret to more year-around saddle time. The madness doesn’t stop there. For my out-of-town traveling during the ‘riding season’ I’ll wear either a Darien jacket or a Transit leather jacket over a pair of AD-1 light pants. Both of these ensembles have now seen years of wear. For me, a two-piece jacket + pants work best for all-day and day-after-day road trips, and the one-piece suits are faster and easier for commuting and running errands around town. Many long-time riders have come to this same conclusion: A diverse collection of gear is a necessity for dealing with variable weather and different riding applications.  For most riders making such large investments takes a while, and like all longer-term expenses, is harder to justify. This means it’s important to choose gear that really lasts, is long-term serviceable and repairable, and will not reflect only the moto-fashion-of-the-moment.   From day one my riding gear has always been more equipment than fashion, devil take the hindmost. Soon after I started riding as a 16-year-old high school kid I’d purchased an actual ‘motorcycle jacket’, a pair of ‘motorcycle gloves’, a helmet, and a pair of nice-quality boots (specifically a black Belstaff Trialsmaster waxed cotton jacket, a pair of red HI Point MX gloves, an international orange Bell TX500 helmet and a pair of reddish-brown lace-up Red Wing Irish Setter hunting boots). With all this gear I considered myself an extremely well-equipped young rider.  Fifty-four years later and I have three different helmets: An old ‘open face’ Shoei which is a lot like that first Bell TX 500, a much-less-old Nolan ‘modular’ for daily commuting and general riding, and an even nicer newish Xlite (Nolan) modular for traveling. I also now own two different types of riding boots, half a dozen pairs of riding gloves, two different types of balaclavas, two different electrically heated mid-layers, a bunch of scarves and neck-bandanas, multiple base and mid-layers, and the aforementioned set of Aerostich R-3 light one piece suits and two Aerostich jackets (Darien light and Transit) and two pair of AD-1 pants. It’s all become well-used and well-worn. I’ve accumulated this inventory, sorted out the keepers, gotten rid of the little-used items, and have pretty much narrowed my quiver of gear down to what works for me and what doesn’t.  It took years.  Today I have a bit less gear than I did as recently as ten years ago, but once in a while, I’ll still decide I need to try something I’ve never experienced before. This coming fall* it’s going to be some Neos over boots. We’ve carried them for years and they’ve never sold too well, but I have an idea about how I want to use them. Several years ago, I’d started riding/commuting through the winters on a bicycle with studded tires. A few years after that I moved a little farther from work and upgraded to an E-bicycle (though keeping and still using the non-electric one sometimes) and have not yet solved the problem about what to wear on my feet during really sloppy weather. When it’s cold and dry enough I’ll wear a pair of simple ankle-high fleece boots which look like winter versions of a high-top basketball shoe. I’ve worn these for many years before I started winter bicycle commuting and they are great. And for super-cold days I also have a pair of very old felt-lined mukluks which are lightweight and these also work great for bicycling. But when temps are around and just below freezing, the streets here are mostly wet and slushy, and my E-bikes front tire picks up this slop and flings it at my feet and lower legs, and I have nothing for this. These conditions seem to exist around here for about 50% of the winter, which is where the Neos come in. My new plan for E-biking through that sloppy cold weather will be to use my Chaco sandals (with wool sox, as I normally do on cold days) inside the Neos waterproof over boots, hoping this will prove ideal. If it does work (?) then after I get to work (or any other destination) I’ll quickly be in comfy dry sandals.** Gearing oneself up to comfortably ride nearly every day and nearly everywhere for nearly everything is far tougher than gearing up primarily for sport and leisure. Taken together, all the necessary gear is so expensive to acquire and so time-consuming to use, that few riders have the combination of determination and means to attempt it. Which partly explains why motorcycles in advanced and wealthy countries are widely understood by the general public, law enforcement, and judicial communities as self-indulgent toys. Which is unfortunate for all of us. In theory, we could change that, but it would be a lot of hard work. Riding all the time to nearly everywhere can be done. It just takes planning, patience, a fairly generous gear-purchasing budget spread across more than a few years, and some sort of set-aside ‘bat cave’ location in one’s dwelling to keep this stuff organized and at-the-ready.  It’s always been worth it, at least for me. Mr. Subjective, October 2020  (Published April 2024) *Those Neos over boots have now worked great for four years. As I’d projected back in 2020, when this blog post was written, when motorcycling I mostly wear them on rainy slushy days to protect my very old-school (Gokey brand) leather ankle-high laced ‘around-town’ riding boots. Those boots have been around long enough to have literally required re-soling twice. I also wear the Neo’s during really bad wet weather over the lightweight shoes I wear whenever I’m pedaling (E or regular bike). [Please Note: For reasons beyond our control, the Neos Overshoes are not currently available, but we expect them to be again in the future.] **The Neos did end up solving this problem.

The longer most rider’s gear is worn, the better it seems to get. Up to a point. Everything eventually wears out.  I bond with a new Aerostich suit after about three months of regular use. If I’m able to wear one for several years, I’m unhappy having to break in a new one to try out some small prototype design feature.  There are more 'teched-out' products in the world today than ever, and there’s also an appealing backlash against overdosing on tech. Witness the renewed popularity of traditional selvage jeans and flannel shirts. Even with the most highly engineered technical protective clothing, simplicity can be a feature, not a bug.  Over forty years ago, the first Roadcrafter suits seemed incredibly complicated and high-tech compared with classic denim jeans and riding leathers. They were. Aerostich’s recipe combining Cordura and Gore-Tex fabrics, Scotchlight reflectives, Velcro hook-and-loop, and even YKK’s highly engineered Delrin zippers created an entirely new type of gear. A rider’s lightweight water-resistant highly protective coverall. Many laughed at them, but as years passed and the Aerostich rider’s gear recipe became increasingly adopted by businesses intending to improve it, many more riders came to appreciate the intentional simplicity of their Roadcrafters and Darien's. Simplicity has always been -- and remains -- a key Aerostich feature. More than a few Aerostich customers have now worn out their old Roadcrafters and then tried something else, only to discover some elaborate 'tech' is for styling and marketing that works best in cad-cam design programs and ad agency photo studios but not out on the road in day-to-day use.  Tailfins were added to most cars during the 1950s because they helped sell more of them, but they didn’t do anything to improve automotive function, durability, comfort, or performance. Decorative stitching was added to the pockets of denim pants during the 1980s and this sold a lot of designer jeans but did not improve the value, function, or comfort of basic jeans. Eventually, those popular fashions declined. Sometimes there’s an actual backlash, and such large trends are usually viewed as having been a bit silly and harmless -- after they pass. Fashions come and go. The Roadcrafter suit has always represented our best effort to solve, as simply as possible, the timeless problems experienced by motorcycling commuters and high-mile riders: Comfort, convenience, safety, protection, and durability. An Aerostich suit is a simple coverall made for riding more. That’s all. Small nuances matter. Hidden inside every Roadcrafter sewn during the last fifteen years, there’s a short strip of Velcro hook and loop located behind the left 'hand warmer' pocket. It’s there to help seal a small gasketed wire port that is even further up inside the corner of that pocket and to help capture a short jumper wire that can be pre-positioned there to make using electric gear easier. A Roadcrafter-wearing Aerostich customer named Steve Hall suggested this refinement, so it became known as the ‘Hall Pass’. Without it, using electric gear inside a coverall is harder. Not impossible, but a lot more cumbersome. A small, simple solution. One of many. -- Mr. Subjective PS - A Personal Story: Armored Coverall Basics Last Dec 19th, 2023, at 8:15 AM, a customer named David emailed me this: “So it appears that (brand XXX) has "stolen" your one-piece design with some changes made to it. Sure looks a lot like your one long zipper design ? Perhaps (brand XXX) convinced (another brand YYY) to only sell to them now ?  I hate when someone steals a good idea from the inventor ? Dave” I replied: Thanks Dave, Yes they have made a copy of our innovative armored coverall. They are not the first, either. Hopefully this will be viewed by many riders as further testimony to the value and utility of wearing armored textile coveralls for riding motorcycles. Especially in short-hop applications like urban commuting and daily errand riding, etc.   For many riders, the largest disincentive to dressing this way is you don’t feel as cool as you do when you are wearing more traditional and conventional gear. Walking through a grocery store in an armored coverall you get a lot more looks than you do if you are wearing a leather or nylon jacket over denim pants. It would be nice if this way of dressing to ride became more widely accepted as ’normal’. As an individual rider, I’ve been wearing these coveralls (Roadcrafter, R-3) for so long I no longer am troubled by both knock-offs or the funny looks people give me when I’m wearing one. It’s occasionally even amusing if someone asks what I’m wearing, or if I’m riding a motorcycle as I stand in a grocery check out line holding a motorcycle helmet in one hand. I wear my R-3 mainly because without this suit I’d feel less safe and less comfortable, and would be riding a lot less. So it’s worth it for me and other one piece suit buyers. But most riders don’t prioritize frequency-of-riding in all weathers as much as I do, so they don’t think armored coveralls are such a cool way to dress.  Andy Audio Version (6:59), reader: Mr. Subjective

Long before internet commerce was mainstream, we enjoyed making and mailing print catalogs. Our idea was to present motorcycling, and Aerostich products, and related items, in ways that were not only accurate but also inspiring. We wanted to tell stories about riding which reflected a worldview I privately called ‘Andy’s Planet’. This was a small motorcycle-centric place that in my imagination resembled America fairly closely, except for one important difference; lots of motorcycle and scooter riders used their bikes in ways that went far beyond the narrow confines of recreation and sport. Those riders commuted, did everyday errands, and traveled to distant locations for both business and pleasure. Not by car but using their motorcycle. To help put this idea into the catalogs we divided them into sections like: ‘Off the Road’, ‘A to B’, and ‘Prevent and Repair’, and also included lots of non-commercial content: Short sidebar quotes I’d collected were at the bottom of many pages, and full-page guest essays and contributed stories were scattered here and there. I called this mixed presentation “the world writ whole” as if seen through a pair of motorcycling tinted rose-colored glasses. Maybe the all-time best guest content we presented in one of those Aerostich catalogs was a poetic essay called ‘Season of the Bike’ by a guy named Dave Karlotski. I contacted him in 1998 or 1999 and received permission to put it in the catalog in return for an Aerostich jacket. This was more than twenty-five years ago so I have no idea where (or if) those records might be now. Last year, the Progressive Insurance company started publishing Dave’s prose poem in pieces, single-line excerpts positioned at the top of full-page print ads selling motorcycle insurance. After seeing those ads for this past year, I thought you may also have seen a few, too, and might enjoy reading the entire work as originally written. Here’s a link to a video the Progressive people made about the ‘Season of the Bike’ ad campaign, and here is Dave’s timeless prose-poem: Season of the Bike By Dave Karlotski There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with coldhammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds. Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition. But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets. On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles an hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane. Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over a half dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done. Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride. Here's a little more about this poem, and Dave himself reading it. And finally, here’s Dave’s website, with a large collection of his wonderful motorcycle writing. You will not find better writing about motorcycling (and moto-traveling) anywhere. Thanks, Dave. Audio Version (8:22), reader: Mr. Subjective

Here’s an interesting 57-minute video about how highly processed foods connect to increased levels of obesity. This seems unrelated to motorcycling, but dig a little deeper and it is not difficult to connect a few core ideas to similar considerations involving riding and other personal mobility choices. More specifically, this video indirectly supports what I suspect about the differences between riding and driving, and how riding is comparatively more ‘nutritious’ than driving, even (especially?) during crappy weather and in difficult conditions.   Like most people, I live in one of those glass houses where one should avoid throwing stones. That’s because I own a car and enjoy driving and eating junk food and many other highly engineered processed foods. And I’m maybe ten pounds over the recommended weight for my height. But hypocrisy aside, I try to do most things with some appreciation for the pluses and minuses involved, especially when it comes to eating processed foods, and driving a car instead of riding there.  The video reflects a ‘paleo’ nutritional logic - a currently fashionable way of thinking about how the past several hundred thousand of years of human existence shaped us in ways that are now not such a perfect fit with many kinds of recent technological, cultural, and economic advancements. Examples include desirables ranging from central heating to efficient industrial agriculture, Excel spreadsheets, nuclear weapons and power, social media simulacrums, artificial intelligences, and, in this story highly engineered processed foods, and efficient, comfortable, and safe automobiles. The overall conclusion: 1.) For every benefit technology provides, something else useful is also taken away, and 2.) it’s not always clear the overall gains outweigh the negatives.   Fortunately, nobody is required to live within the technical and knowledge limitations of last week, last year, one hundred years ago, or several hundred thousand years ago. We expect access to the latest advancements in ice cream, pizza, motorcycles, smartphones, medical care practices, and everything else as it exists in real-time. At the same time, more than a few people seek the wisdom to somehow evaluate relative +’s and  –‘s involved. Including yours truly.  Also, it’s not so easy to improve artisanally crafted pizza and ice cream and thousands of other hand-crafted and traditionally made, raised, or grown items. Like many examples of Aerostich gear. When it comes to moving myself from A to B, motorcycle riding fits on the continuum somewhere between walking and flying in a jet airplane or helicopter. This is due to a mix of fortunate circumstances, deliberate planning, and compromising. Most importantly, I’ve never lived too far from where I work and shop, and this allows me the daily luxury of choosing between several wonderful personal mobility options. My commute was only three miles (4.8km) one-way between home and work for more than forty years, and during the past five years, I’ve lived only a little over five miles (8.2km) from Aerostich. My routes are also a dream, being mostly via 30mph two-lane surface streets with little traffic. And my errand-shopping-home routes add only another four or five miles and many feature easy bicycle lanes and low-traffic surface streets. I’ve always lived, shopped, and worked in older pre-automobile platted areas, not modern sprawl. After moving five years ago the additional two-mile distance was important: What I’d been used to, three miles, translated to a one-hour walk, a twenty-five-minute rollerblade skate, a seventeen-minute bicycle ride, a thirteen-minute drive in a car, and a twelve-minute motorcycle ride. Now being five miles from Aerostich translates to an hour and forty-five-minute walk, a forty-minute roller blade, a thirty-minute bicycle ride, a twenty-two-minute e-bike ride, a nineteen-minute car drive, and a sixteen-minute motorcycle ride.  Riding is always fastest (including putting on gear) and the most fun, but now most of the time I choose an e-bike. Mine is a beat-up four-year-old model having 37 volts and 17amps of battery turning 500 watts of motor, and it's already seriously obsolete, but for this application that doesn’t matter. It was easy to set up when new and now has over 6,000 miles beneath its wheels, though it’s on the second motor and battery, third chain, third chainring, third cluster, and second derailleur. My average speed of pedaling it across level ground is 19-21 miles per hour. Eight months of the year this E-bike rolls on smooth ‘street’ tires and the other four months it’s on different wheels set up with carbide-tip studded knobby tires, which, compared to smooth regular tires are completely terrible. They are noisy, vibrate-y, and feature much lower cornering limits, but I’m living in northern Minnesota where one is forced to make seasonal adjustments and sacrifices.  E-bikes are ‘gateway drugs’ to motorcycles. Many are enough faster than a regular bicycle you intuit the need to wear a helmet. In some areas, motorcycle rider training and licensing programs are starting to see influxes of students with e-bike backgrounds. E-bikes are more approachable and less threatening to new riders than even small scooters and motorcycles. This is good. But if one wants to be able to ride all the time, and to the widest possible range of destinations, in the widest range of weather, you flat need to have a motorcycle. There is no substitute.   My relatives, friends, and acquaintances living in large cities all must live farther from their workplaces and deal with tremendously more complex and challenging kinds of traffic environments and transportation infrastructures than I. So, they don’t have the luxury of as many personal mobility options. Separately I’ve visited a few developing countries where population densities are high and the road environment is so chaotic it is frightening enough to discourage daily transportation riding.  Such riding is far more doable where: A) There’s already a reasonable number of bikes in the traffic mix as then drivers expect and accept riders, and B) Where population and traffic densities are low, and C) Where ‘rules of the road’ are highly respected and enforced, and driving behaviors are disciplined. Think places like Northern Europe and Scandinavia.  Despite all this variability, a classic observation by fishermen, golfers, and other sportsmen and sportswomen goes: “A bad day of fishing (or golfing, etc) is still better than a good day at work.” But setting your life up so you can ride nearly every day is neither easy nor simple. It can be about as difficult as eating a healthy diet of mostly fresh foods. The benefits are similar though because riding is just a lot more ‘paleo’ than driving. There is no single specific best way to eat properly for optimal health and long life or to logistically organize, maintain, and employ a quiver of personal mobility options. But there are some useful generalizations: When I have enough time and the winds are not high, and it’s not terribly storming, I’ll choose the semi-crappy e-bike, year-around. And for me the worse the weather is, the more likely I’ll choose the comfort of an Aerostich suit around me, a modular helmet covering my head, and a motorcycle under me. Almost any motorcycle. But for my small-town route’s moto-choices are between a very old 1994 650cc bike, an almost very old 2006 400cc bike, or newish 2019 200cc bike. None of these have been modified for higher performance, though over years of use each has been ‘personalized’ in various ways. Lastly, the more you do anything, the less vulnerable you feel and the more fluent and proficient you become.  Riding in a busy city only a few nice days a year is a far different experience than riding nearly daily.  The old saying about how “a long journey begins with a single step” is never truer.  The first time you try using your motorcycle instead of your car is guaranteed to be stressful. Even getting the gear on is awkward. But a week later if you’ve managed not to get killed or injured everything has become more natural. Rain-or-shine, riding a motorcycle, bicycle, or e-bicycle is good for you, both mentally and physically. It clearly is a lot like eating a ‘paleo diet’ of fresh less-processed food. But it’s never easy and in some situations, it isn’t appropriate. So, use your head and “be careful out there”. (Oldsters may remember that phrase becoming an every-week signature line of dialog in a popular police TV drama called “Hill Street Blues”.) PS – If you haven’t yet watched the short ‘paleo’ food video linked above, do it. As you watch, think about applying its ideas to your everyday utility mobility choices. PPS – Here’s a link to a short essay I liked about how most people today tend to “over-consume” and are easily manipulated to do so. This story fits with a kind of mosaic precision adjacent to the above video about processed food and with my personal views about the health and societal benefits of riding bicycles and motorcycles. Warning, it’s thirty pages, so you may want to print it out to read that way. Which is what I did. PPPS – Here’s a link to a recent story in the New York Times about how overeating highly processed foods apparently has an adverse effect on brain health.  Mr. Subjective, November 2023 Audio Version (12:31), reader: Mr. Subjective

(Thanks to Dr. Greg Frazier, who used this phrase in an email to dryly describe an especially difficult cold weather experience he once had, which inspired me to respond accordingly, as you’ll see here. We sell a couple of Dr. Frazier’s books and if you order more than $100 in Aerostich merchandise this week, we’ll send you one as a gift for a limited time only.) My late father was a lifelong recreational boating enthusiast and an active member of two boating organizations: (1) the Great Lakes Cruising Club and (2) the United States Power Squadron.  One of the latter organization’s stated purposes is to provide small boat safety classes. They offer a curriculum of courses starting with basic introductory Safe Boating classes and culminating with classes on things like celestial navigation. (I’m not sure if they still offer that one in today’s GPS-enabled era.) These classes are scheduled during the winter months, and for years my father taught a popular one-night class titled “River Piloting”.  For several years during my youth, I went along, at his request, “to keep me (him) company”. Dad didn’t know anything about river piloting, but he was a good public speaker who believed in education and safe boating, so he’d stand behind a lectern, smile broadly at usually around two dozen newer boaters in the classroom, and begin something like this:  “I don’t know that much about river piloting, but I have been a boater for many years so tonight I’m going to teach a subject called ‘Accidents I Have Had’." This always got a nice laugh. He’d then proceed from an outline covering the time he was a new boater launching his first (22’) boat but forgetting to first install the hull drain plug (which was still inside a manila envelope along with the owner’s manual, on a counter in the small cabin), to later episodes of rocky groundings in remote anchorage coves on the northernmost shore of the Lake Superior, which opened good sized holes in the bottom, letting both daylight and garden-hose streams of water in, to a few onboard galley, engine and minor electrical fires. At the end of his lecture, the overall message seemed to be that when things go sideways having good luck + not panicking will always be more important than knowing exactly what the correct thing to do might be. Taking after my old man, the rest of this story is about one of my worst motorcycle riding decisions and experiences.  My coldest-ever ride was also my hardest: Eighteen hundred miles across two 900-ish mile days back-to-back in mid-March, from Daytona Beach, Florida after ‘Bike Week’, to Duluth Minnesota. By the time I was halfway through Alabama or Georgia, temperatures were down in the forties, and by the time I reached an overnight stop at a motel somewhere on the Mason-Dixon line, it was around freezing. My bike was unfaired and windshield-less and the next day was a lot worse. Roads were dry the entire way, but as I was northbound on I-94 out of Chicago there were large snowbanks on the sides of the road and deep white snow to the horizon in all directions. Eau Claire Wisconsin is where one goes either straight west to the Twin Cities or turns due north for another 2.5 hours to Duluth. The ambient temp when I got there was in the mid-twenties. To warm and prepare for the final pull I stopped at a Perkins restaurant for some calories and to steel myself for the ordeal I knew was ahead.  I ordered and ate enough hot food for two people: A large bowl of burn-your-tongue-hot chili, a double cheeseburger and fries, a ‘bottomless’ cup of coffee, and a chaser mug of hot cocoa. Forty-five minutes later I’d peed (which had required both patience and care due to overlapping non-aligning base layers) and was fully bundled up with multiple electrics*. My over-tired body was vibrating from the food and double-shot of caffeine because I never drink coffee or any beverage containing caffeine – I’m hypersensitive to it. Fortunately, a couple of hours later I rolled into the driveway of the little duplex apartment where I lived. There was a foot of snow. The bike went immediately onto its sidestand and great clouds of steam came up from the hot engine melting itself into the snow. Still wearing my helmet and gloves I slowly and stiffly staggered inside and began shedding clothing the way a two-year-old does and collapsed into sleep for maybe ten or eleven hours, too tired to even consider taking a hot shower. After that long sleep, I woke still exhausted but alive. From start to finish this entire experience was the result of “a serious error in judgment”.  Six months earlier I’d left my bike in Arizona and then just before Bike Week had flown there to ride across the sunbelt to Daytona. This part of the trip went fine but I sure didn’t luck out with the weather for getting back home to northern Minnesota.  One moment especially stands out. At some gas stop on day two at around 3 PM (it was still light, so probably I was in northern Indiana), I’d stepped off the bike, unplugged the electric mid layers, and with my helmet still on my head because it was so cold, rotated it slightly downward and immediately heard and observed a bunch of pencil diameter curlicued breath-caused icicles break off the helmet’s chin bar and tinkle to the ground around my boots. Cool! I thought, and I had to see if there were more, so I stiffly bent down and looked at my helmeted and balaclava’d face in the bike's left rearview mirror. What looked back resembled more an Antarctic explorer or a Himalayan mountaineer on the last pitch of Everest than any motorcyclist I’d ever seen. Huge hoarfrost was thick across my upper chest and there were several remaining icicles curlicuing from the helmet’s chinbar in wind-twisted shapes. I wished I’d had a camera and someone to take a photo of this, but it was years before smartphones and selfies, and I was freezing, so no such images exist. The image remains crystal clear in memory, though. A serious error in judgment for sure, but somehow I lived to ride another day. Here’s an even worse story of a Canadian rider who routinely rides in the far far north, in far colder weather than I, who made an even greater error in judgment. It’s right out of Jack London.** Almost every long-time rider has at least a few stories like this. I have several others, both summer and winter, but none are more frozen-extreme. What are your “serious error in judgment” stories? -- Mr. Subjective, February 2024 PS - You know how fishing stories tend to exaggerate the size of “the one that got away” and how over time the lost fish gets larger? In this story, the more I think about it now, the lower the ambient temperatures were then. I’m thinking that by mid-Alabama it was probably already down around 32ºf, by the time I stopped that night it was maybe 25-29ºf, by the time I passed through Chicago it was around 22ºf, and by the time I finally got home it was somewhere in the teens, maybe 16-18ºf. It was really cold. I also now clearly remember eating a slice of hot apple pie at that Perkins in Eau Claire. * Electric grips (BMW), gloves (Widder), vest (Widder), sleeves (Widder), and chaps (Widder).  All over a base layer or two, and in combination with mid-layers of thick fleece. For you youngsters, Mr. Widder was a USAF WW2 bomber crew member who wore a USAF-issue 110v heated flight suit inside the unpressurized, unheated frozen fuselages of those warplanes.  After he came home from the war he pioneered heated rider’s gear, and by the time I came along his son was running the business from a large two-car garage directly behind his Los Angeles-area home. We met a few times at trade shows and once when I’d ridden out to LA for some other business, I’d met him at his home there. A few years later Aerostich acquired a couple of huge old well-used fusing presses which are a type of equipment necessary to make heated gear. These presses heat and fuse together a non-woven fabric layer holding the special resistance heating wires in place. Then we began making Aerostich’s range of Kanetsu heated gear. **And here’s a link to that classic Jack London story, ‘To Build a Fire’. Audio Version (10:09), reader: Mr. Subjective

I love my iPhone, but apparently have almost no use for it. This is not a competition, just an observation. I see I’m using my motorcycle a lot more than my iPhone. Hmm. See image below. Wouldn’t it be cool if the instrument panels on motorcycles automatically provided a weekly summary like this? Many years ago there was a popular bumper sticker that read: “Have you hugged your motorcycle today?” Hard to believe, but true. Personal sidebar: This is also an example of my own youthful hubris. My late father was a hard-working businessman who had a degree in accounting. He worked with numbers the old-fashioned way, longhand, on pages and pages of yellow legal pads, but at some point during his sixties, he added a then-new pocket-size Texas Instruments calculator to his analog paper-pencil-pen tools. He stubbornly never wanted to go further and learn how to use a personal computer, even though they were increasingly everywhere around him. Today, when I look at this screenshot my father stares back. I don’t use social media or play video games. Partly no interest. Partly near the autistic spectrum (little social interest). I became my dad. Crap. Sigh. Audio Version (2:08), reader: Mr. Subjective

A Year-End Collection of Assorted Drivel “Riding makes every trip a bit of an adventure.” - Mr. Subjective Several years ago a couple of my co-workers encouraged me to start writing an Aerostich blog. This was about when we did the Zero Below Zero project during the winter of 2015-16. Here’s a collection of random topics from the past year which for one reason or another were not appended to one of our regular email offers. If you’ve read some of my blogging efforts over the past year, thank you. Happy Holidays from all of us here. We wish you and yours a good new year, with lots of riding. – “Mr. Subjective" 12-2023 Shiny Stainless Reflections On December 8th of this year (2023), a week or so after the initial release of the Tesla Cybertruck, Road & Track magazine’s Victoria Scott wrote a wonderful short essay that included this: “…our vehicles reflect (widespread cultural) anxieties. More than half of vehicles sold today in America are trucks and SUVs; this fueled a new all-time high for the average weight of a new passenger vehicle in 2022, which hit a staggering 4329 pounds. Pickup buyers, more frequently than other types of vehicle owners, say they enjoy their trucks because they are “powerful” and “rugged”. Most new vehicle buyers rate vehicle safety as a top priority in their purchases, and larger vehicles are indeed safer for occupants than small ones (although they have vastly more negative externalities, such as tire particulates and dead pedestrians).” Continue Reading... Totally Rideable After I made the youthful transition from pedal-bicycling to motorcycling I’d often find myself daydreaming about riding motorcycles. Almost anything could trigger a lapse from reality into moto-fantasizing. The moment I’d obtained my driver’s license and a small license-plated moto I was out exploring my local world by simply wandering around looking for interesting trails to explore, obstacles to overcome, and hills to climb. Even when not actually riding it was hard to be in the natural world without silently visualizing, evaluating, and projecting its ridable potential. Didn’t matter if the passing landscape was a smoothly mowed manicured residential lawn, a golf course or park, an overgrown dense forest, or a steep rough, rocky slope. I’d be sitting in the rear seat of my parent’s car going somewhere just looking out the side window daydreaming and constantly calculating what riding ‘there’, and ‘there’, and ‘there’ would be like. Suddenly I’d see a gap in the passing scenery which suggested a route and think: “That is totally rideable.”  A few moments later I might spy a forest with a relatively open understory and I’d look into the gaps and tell myself this forest was “totally rideable”. Continue Reading... Not Another Paradox We humans have spent the last few hundred years very earnestly, carefully, and diligently building a world where it is ever easier to move about efficiently, comfortably, and conveniently in order to obtain all of the things we want or need.  From groceries to manila envelopes to lipstick to health care to haircuts, to you-name-it, everything we seem to require or desire has become ever more interconnected via a superbly organized carefully constructed highly engineered system of roads, rails, and other mobility augmentation technologies. Including ever-improving motorcycles and rider’s gear. After centuries of work and an incalculably large investment, getting stuff and going places has never been easier, safer, and more comfortable. But in this pursuit maybe we’re about to be like the proverbial dog that chases passing cars until one day finally catching one and is bewildered because it doesn’t know what to do with it. If the car had been a rabbit, and the dog had been a wolf, it would be a meal. But those days for dogs are long gone. Continue Reading... A Funny Science Experiment This link is to a write-up of a very funny science experiment. Back in 2014, someone wondered what would happen if a hamster wheel was placed in a forest. Would wild mice use it? And if they did, why? I only fast-scanned this. I’ll spare you the effort: If you place a hamster wheel in the forest, wild mice will run on it when nobody is around. The scientists who set up this experiment are not sure why. Continue Reading... ICE vs. Electric These days lots of people are thinking about the future of ICEs (Internal Combustion Engines) vs ‘electrics’ and are trying to make realistic projections about various things related to the widely anticipated transition. One personal thought experiment involves today's excellent electric fireplace inserts, which provide both room heat and a highly realistic simulacrum of a traditional fire. Managing combustion is so old within us it may have become partly encoded in our human DNA. I recently read about an experiment done by scientists in the UK which slightly bears on this. They wanted to find out if wild mice in a forest would use a randomly encountered hamster wheel. They do, which means this behavior is something deep within the neural architecture and chemistry of field mouse brains. Aside from questioning how those scientists obtained the funding to do this crazy experiment in the first place, it probably usefully informs lots of other kinds of mammalian things like, for example, why we enjoy riding motorcycles, making and hearing music, dancing, why we seem drawn to fire, why some run for recreation and why dogs put their head out the window of a moving car. Continue Reading... By The Numbers Based on over 140 years of record keeping, today, January 17th (2023), is supposed to be the coldest day of the year in Duluth. I think the average low temperature here on this day is something like minus two (ºf) and the average daily high is nineteen. Instead, what we actually got was a high of 37º under dark cloudy skies. This after an unusual two-day steady and sometimes hard mid-winter rainfall which cut our five feet of already fallen snow down by at least half. Continue Reading... A Quirky Video This morning (March 29, 2023) I watched this sort of tedious and longish educational video about traffic problems in the largest city in the Bahamas. Enjoyed it enough to think maybe you’ll find it interesting as well, if you have the time... Continue Reading... What is Technology? Technology is our creation and the resulting array of physical things that are useful. There are two types of technology: Physical and metaphysical. Physical technologies are things like making a fire, doing agriculture and husbandry, and making tools and buildings and machines. Metaphysical technologies are ideas and beliefs. Things like (for example) religions, which are useful for raising good children and dealing with the forever unknowable vastness and neutrality of the universe. Mathematics is a kind of bridge between the realm of physical and metaphysical technologies. What is Morality? The creation and application of metaphysical technologies. Continue Reading... Happy New Year, 2024! Let's hope it's a good one. - Mr. Subjective, 12-28-2023 PS – A note about blogging and vlogging. I have some good help. I never thought of myself as a blogger or a vlogger (video blogger) but these days print catalogs are largely obsolete and everyone does business online, so I have been forced to adapt. Still, I miss the challenges and fun of making print catalogs. Now that Aerostich’s pioneering recipe for modern rider gear has gone worldwide via many others, one way for us to differentiate our brand and ideas (simplicity, non-fashion, many sizes, etc) from all the other constantly “new and improved” (mostly marketing BS) gear is to tell stories by blogging and vlogging, in the hope that our audience will find us and our products and service more appealing than someone else’s. This is working, in the sense that we are stable in our niche but most recreational riders are vulnerable to the marketing claims of "new and improved”. And again, we are grateful to be where we are.  Apart from most of that.  Despite developing/designing many rider-gear products, I’ve never been a “new and improved” person.  Last week I was grocery shopping and picked up a bag of my favorite chips (blue corn chips) which I’d been buying for many years.  The bag read “Now even better tasting!” and I silently wondered if I had been eating bad-tasting chips all these years without realizing it, and regardless of that, I was perfectly happy with the way the chips tasted before. Marketing is ridiculous. People are so vulnerable to techniques like this. If you have read all of this, you know marketing. You know this. Audio Version (30:53), reader: Mr. Subjective

On December 8th of this year (2023), a week or so after the release of the Tesla Cybertruck, Road & Track magazine’s Victoria Scott wrote a wonderful short essay that included this: “…our vehicles reflect (widespread cultural) anxieties. More than half of vehicles sold today in America are trucks and SUVs; this fueled a new all-time high for the average weight of a new passenger vehicle in 2022, which hit a staggering 4329 pounds. Pickup buyers, more frequently than other types of vehicle owners, say they enjoy their trucks because they are “powerful” and “rugged”. Most new vehicle buyers rate vehicle safety as a top priority in their purchases, and larger vehicles are indeed safer for occupants than small ones (although they have vastly more negative externalities, such as tire particulates and dead pedestrians).” Humpf. I get it. She’s 1000% correct. It’s easy to see, literally everywhere. One would have to be heavily sedated or sleeping like Rip Van Winkle to miss this, and importantly it’s not wonderful news for everyday street motorcycling riders here in America. While some places in Europe have recently noted increases in lightweight and mid-sized motorcycle and scooter sales, here with few exceptions (dual-sport and ADV bikes), sales of most kinds of motorcycles have been flat or declining for several years. Editor Scott’s wonderful short R&T essay helped me better absorb the zeitgeist surrounding motorcycling in America. Her full essay is here, and it’s not behind a paywall. And, for a slightly deeper dive into the increased popularity of light trucks and SUVs, this is another excellent essay. Adding anything to this without mentioning political aspects probably isn’t possible. For example, on March 4th, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt in his inaugural address to the nation famously said: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Those were dark times as most Americans struggled through the depths of the Great Depression. Consciously and unconsciously motorcycle riders confront a diverse range of fears directly and in real time. Motorcycling teaches riders the ‘nothing-to-fear-but-fear-itself’ lesson in so powerful a way riding is not only good for individual riders, but is also good for society. Is there independently verifiable evidence for this? No. Can I offer documented historical support for such a claim? No. Only my years of personal riding experiences, which for better or worse, helped form those beliefs. Riding, even for short distances, and regardless of the model, style, or age of the machine, always helps me feel better and better understand and appreciate more completely and gratefully my place in the universe. My body naturally craves the neural endorphins released by all kinesthetic activities, from walking to skating to skiing to sailing to riding. Among these, motorcycle riding is the most easily incorporated into routine daily life. I can’t sail, ski, skate or surf to work and for errand-running. Do I admire the new Cybertruck? Yes, without reservation. It’s an amazing machine from an amazing company led by an amazing fellow. Would I want one as a gift? Nope, at least for any purpose other than quickly selling it to provide money for other things, because whenever I try to imagine myself using one, all I can think of is the unwanted attention I’d receive. For the record, whenever I’m motorcycling, other than the conspicutity aspect, I don’t appreciate whatever non-traffic tactical awareness’s may be directed toward me by drivers of four-wheeled vehicles. But there’s a difference. For the moment using Cybertruck evidences one’s strength, wealth, bad-assedness and coolness – and to most non-riding people any motorcycle, no matter how technically or artistically interesting, evidences its rider to have a bit of immaturity mixed with an unwise disregard for personal safety. Production Cybertruck at Tesla Fremont Factory parking lot, taken by Lcaa9. We are all evolutionarily pre-disposed to admire, celebrate and follow heroic, strong, confident leader-types. Not individuals who may be compensating for some kind of unknown missing psychological piece. Unfortunately, this is probably how motorcycle riders in general are  being understood by the largest majority of car, SUV, and light truck drivers. It is a profound lack of understanding. Regardless of how many are ever sold, the innovative Tesla machine is a great halo-vehicle for that business. Way back in 1953 the Corvette sports car provided a similar halo-effect for Chevrolet. Just as its creators had hoped, the two seat sports car drew more driver-consumers to the brand, who then bought sedans and station wagons. In 1964½ the fresh Ford Mustang did this same halo-thing for Ford. All three machines captured the zeitgeist at the time of their introduction perfectly, and cast a bright halo around the brands they represented. For Chevy, back in 53, most Americans were enjoying rising postwar affluence and the beginnings of the interstate highway system. New roads were opening everywhere and all of them seemed to lead toward exciting experiences. For Ford, the 64½ zeitgeist involved new levels and kinds of self-fulfillment, liberation, a sexual revolution, and the seemingly unlimited potentials of an approaching aquarian age. For Tesla in 2023, the dominant mood is everone’s broadly underlying fear that everything is falling apart, so a Cybertruck could be your aspirational personal tank: a powerful sci-fi car for safely driving through a presumed oncoming apocalypse. Today we apparently have everything to fear. All technologies exist to improve our lives and increase our personal odds for longer-term survival. They do this partly by protecting and insulating us from the unknown difficulties, discomforts and uncertainties surrounding us. But there’s a Catch. The less we know about the people and situations around us from shared direct first-hand experiences, the greater is the potential is for us to become more and more afraid. Cars, light trucks and SUVs, as wonderfully useful and enjoyable as they are are, provide an everyday example of this simple truth. For multiple reasons, compared to conventional light trucks and SUV’s, the Cybertruck dials this up to eleven. Side note (now a word from our sponsor…): The various digital technologies which so recently have given us the internet, social media, email, online gaming, and many other powerful and useful tools, do this as well. Despite the increased ease of connecting and working with others (by phone, text, email, etc)  these technologies provide, we are all increasingly being isolated each other and from nature.. Most technologies come with this same double-edged blade. Enclosed motor vehicles and digital simulacrums inescapably dissolve some of the glues the traditional less-sheltering and less-siloing human experiences provide. Those experiences nourish all of our social contract protocols, and those in turn are foundational for broadly civil behavior, and for advancing civilization-in-general. Back to the Cybertruck and motorcycles. Most riders are well aware the average age of American motorcyclists has been increasing in a kind of weird synchrony with the rising popularity of well-sealed, infotainment-enhanced, slab-sided pickups and SUV’s. These parallel yet intersecting deltas not only make it more difficult for those working at providing motorcycles and related goods and services for riders, they also make a few things worse for everyone. Riders and non-riders alike. A Cybertruck teaches its owner to be ever more fearful on each drive because it is so superior at isolating its driver and passengers from the rest of us, and from nature. No motorcycle does that, despite many riders choosing gear seemingly stylized to be a means of amplifiying this result (Example: a flat black helmet with a de-humanizing mirrored face shield, etc). Every motorcycle teaches its rider to be a bit less afraid on every ride. This is especially true if one figures out how to ride more or less safely and comfortably through lousy weather. In most circumstances, I selfishly prefer riding my motorcycle and what it does for me: biologically, neurologically, and philosophically. Regardless of the thickness of your wallet, the choice is yours.

After making the youthful transition from a bicycle to motorcycle, I often found myself daydreaming about motorcycle riding. Simply looking out over the countryside was enough to trigger a lapse from reality into moto-fantasizing. In reality, I was exploring my local world by simply wandering around looking for interesting trails to explore, obstacles to overcome, and hills to climb while in my imagination I was also in the natural world, silently projecting its ridable potential. Didn’t matter if the passing landscape was a smoothly mowed and manicured residential lawn, a golf course or park, an overgrown dense forest, or a steep rough, rocky slope.    I’d be sitting in the rear seat of my parent’s car going somewhere just looking out the side window and daydreaming by endlessly calculating what riding ‘there’, ‘there’, and ‘there’ would be like. There’d be a small gap in the passing scenery which suggested a route and think: “That is totally rideable.” Moments later I might see an area of mature forest with a relatively open understory and I’d look into the gaps and tell myself this forest was “totally rideable”.  Passing a golf course, marina, or even an unexplored alley in a residential neighborhood I’d automatically visualize riding there and think “that ______ (whatever) looks totally rideable.” This phase of low-level autistic-y fantasy games lasted years. It all looked like fun. As my actual riding experiences accumulated, my skills and the motorcycles beneath me improved, so the range of totally rideable terrain expanded. Eventually, maybe 80% of all passing landscapes looked “totally rideable”. I remained lost in my own world like this for years, silently and nearly continuously evaluating an infinite geography that my motorcycle’s tires could be directed to encounter. Now I’m an old man and though this isn’t the first thing I think about as I ride or drive along, this calculus remains deeply embedded and can be called up instantaneously. I’ll still look at any hillside or landscape and think “that ______(whatever) is totally rideable.” In a few years, I’ll be lying inside a coffin heading for interment somewhere, and as the solemn pallbearers, mourners and I enter the graveyard together, my spirit will poke its head up through the lid of the coffin and look across the peaceful surroundings, and I’ll be thinking “this place looks totally rideable.”

We humans have spent the last few hundred years very earnestly, carefully, and diligently building a world where it is ever easier to move about efficiently, comfortably, and conveniently in order to obtain all of the things we want or need.  From groceries to manila envelopes to lipstick to health care to haircuts, to you-name-it, everything we seem to require or desire has become ever more interconnected via a superbly organized carefully constructed highly engineered system of roads, rails, and other mobility augmentation technologies. Including ever-improving motorcycles and rider’s gear. After centuries of work and an incalculably large investment, getting stuff and going places has never been easier, safer, and more comfortable. But in this pursuit maybe we’re about to be like the proverbial dog that chases passing cars until one day finally catching one and is bewildered because it doesn’t know what to do with it. If the car had been a rabbit, and the dog had been a wolf, it would be a meal. But those days for dogs are long gone. It is an important difference. Suddenly, after making everything easy to obtain and every place easy to get to, all a lot of us want to do is stay home and have stuff brought to us, assuming it is within our means to afford. The next level of convenience and luxury is to have everything delivered. Nice, but what does this teach us? It’s not narrowly about the advent of the internet, the smartphone, online retail, and social media. Nor is it about lessons from the recent Covid pandemic/plague. Nor the aging demographics of richer more advanced cultures. Nope, none of that. Rather it is about our insatiable desire for control and comfort. We simply enjoy our comforts and one of them is the calming security of familiar surroundings. We are comfort seekers above all else. Having everything brought to you is simply what comes next. On a silver platter, if possible, and by uniformed well-groomed footmen. It’s what royalty and privilege have always been about. “Farmboy, peel me a grape.” “As you wish…”  Consuming acts of service is the ultimate convenience and luxury. When I was a little boy, going for a ride with Mom and Dad after work meant fun, and possibly an ice cream cone along the way. The family all happily piled into the car, rolled the windows down, and off we went into a great unknown. Sometimes this involved visiting relatives, occasionally it involved shopping or exploring, but most of the time it was simply sightseeing with a stop for ice cream somewhere. Can you imagine any of this happening in an American family today? For whatever reason, the coolest thing about moving myself through the world behind the handlebars of a motorcycle involves managing the logistics and kinesthetics more than the destinations or scenery. I enjoy the calm comforts of home as much as the next person but I also enjoy the experience of riding greatly enough to prefer a trip to a store or workplace over ordering whatever is needed online. It always makes me feel better to ride there, and then return home with whatever I’d gone out for. Could this be partly why heating with self-gathered wood when camping feels so nice? Sitting securely inside the safe comfortable near-hermetically sealed capsule of a modern car, I almost may as well have ordered the ______ (whatever) from the comfort of my home. About fifty years ago Bob Dylan sang:“Something’s happening here and I don’t know what it is.”  I don’t know what it is either, Bob. But whatever it is, it sure as hell is something.

This link is to a write-up of a very funny science experiment. Back in 2014, someone wondered what would happen if a hamster wheel was placed in a forest. Would wild mice use it? And if they did, why? I only fast-scanned this. I’ll spare you the effort: If you place a hamster wheel in the forest, wild mice will run on it when nobody is around. The scientists who set up this experiment are not sure why. It’s possible to imagine the existence of a space-traveling intelligent race (or a diabolical Bond movie villain) devising a similar experiment for all of us humans, but I’m not sure what the point might be, any more than why some scientists wanted to know if mice-in-the-wild would run on hamster wheels. That our world contains scientists who are curious about questions like this is, in itself, wonderful. I suppose on a prosaic level this helps explain why so many people run for recreation, to simply enjoy the endorphins. Does this experiment prove life is just a rat race after all? You can watch it here: By the way, this also explains why I ride.

These days lots of people are thinking about the future of ICEs (Internal Combustion Engines) vs ‘electrics’ and are trying to make realistic projections about various things related to the widely anticipated transition. One personal thought experiment involves today's excellent electric fireplace inserts, which provide both room heat and a highly realistic simulacrum of a traditional fire. Managing combustion is so old within us it may have become partly encoded in our human DNA. I recently read about an experiment done by scientists in the UK which slightly bears on this. They wanted to find out if wild mice in a forest would use a randomly encountered hamster wheel. They do, which means this behavior is something deep within the neural architecture and chemistry of field mouse brains. Aside from questioning how those scientists obtained the funding to do this crazy experiment in the first place, it probably usefully informs lots of other kinds of mammalian things like, for example, why we enjoy riding motorcycles, making and hearing music, dancing, why we seem drawn to fire, why some run for recreation and why dogs put their head out the window of a moving car. The hook for widely adopting electric cars and bikes for utility will end up being, as has already been proven across much of Asia, their far lower cost of operation and their extremely low maintenance requirements compared to ICE vehicles. This type of technology shift has occurred with every kind of machine the industrial revolution brought forth for at least the past 150 years and has almost nothing to do with environmental impacts or objective performance. It’s all about cost-of-operation, reliability, and convenience. Except my personal experiences with an e-bike do not quite support this: After roughly 6,000 miles of year-around e-bike commuting and utility riding miles during the last four years using a relatively crappy 500w 37v Chinese e-bike, plus further miles aboard an excellent  Zero electric motorcycle shared with several of my Aerostich co-workers, plus lots of still-continuing miles of utility and recreational ICE motorcycle riding, I still prefer the experience of using and taking care of an engine. All these riding machines are great, but guess which I most love? Hint: It’s difficult to roast marshmallows and make smores using a convenient electric fireplace insert. For more than a few of us, the years just ahead will be an interesting ride.

Based on over 140 years of record keeping, today, January 17th (2023), is supposed to be the coldest day of the year in Duluth. I think the average low temperature here on this day is something like minus two (ºf) and the average daily high is nineteen. Instead, what we actually got was a high of 37º under dark cloudy skies. This after an unusual two-day steady and sometimes hard mid-winter rainfall which cut our five feet of already fallen snow down by at least half. The unseasonable rain had washed most of the road salt away so I rode to the grocery store on my non-studded-tire Suzuki DRZ400 and stocked up. Statistical summary: Dollar value of the groceries carried:  $160ish Number of items bungeed to the bike: 0 Number of bags used: 2 (1 backpack, 1 Aerostich LP bag on left grip) Total distance ridden:  About 15 miles Number of passers-by or pedestrian thumbs-ups: 2 Amount of fun this was on a 1-10 scale:  11+ I'd started out on this errand riding Aerostich’s loaner Zero electric bike but got only about two miles before turning around. That machine had been sitting unplugged for months waiting for me to stud its tires for winter, and I’d forgotten its massive battery had been low the last time it was parked. As I rode away, I watched as the gauge went from 30% capacity down to 22% capacity within two miles, at which point I turned around, making it back to the garage at 16%. Then I plugged it in and got on the Suzuki which fired right up after sitting unridden for at least eight weeks. A couple of months ago I’d given the Suzuki a tank full of stabilizer-treated fresh gas and at the same time had forgotten to check the state of charge in the Zero. Today vintage ICE dramatically won the first annual side-by-side unattended shelf-life motorcycle availability contest.

This morning (March 29, 2023) I watched this sort of tedious and longish educational video about traffic problems in the largest city in the Bahamas. Enjoyed it enough to think maybe you’ll find it interesting as well, if you have the time. A few of my takeaways: 1.) I saw this exact same thing during my honeymoon five years ago in Jamaica, a similar Caribbean tropical island. 2.) Though motorcycles and scooters are never mentioned, I have always believed small to medium-sized motorcycles (up to about 500cc ICEs) could be a partial solution (along with bicycles, public transit, etc) to some of the things this video is about, which is why armored textile coveralls have always been the Aerostich’s most important product. 3.) I have spent most of the past forty years primarily commuting year-round via walking, bicycling, skating, and smallish motorcycles. One-way distances varied between three and six miles. Routes have varied as well, but for most of this period, I went three miles each way through the center of my small town, which allowed me to experience and observe traffic things a lot more closely than one can when using an automobile.  This closer-view effect is significantly mentioned in the Bahamas video. Without further ado, and for whatever it’s worth, here’s the video link.  Hope you’ll enjoy it:

Technology is our creation and the resulting array of physical things that are useful. There are two types of technology: Physical and metaphysical. Physical technologies are things like making a fire, doing agriculture and husbandry, and making tools and buildings and machines. Metaphysical technologies are ideas and beliefs. Things like (for example) religions are useful for raising good children and dealing with the forever unknowable vastness and neutrality of the universe. Mathematics is a kind of bridge between the realm of physical and metaphysical technologies. What is Morality? The creation and application of metaphysical technologies.

This is a photo of me at the local old biker guy gathering a week ago. Two tables at Sir Ben’s tavern pushed together + a dozen old guys. Mostly acquaintances, some friends. Once a month. I got there via e-bicycle. There are several reasons I’m sharing it here. One is because graininess-and-all, this image captures the relaxed random feel of such gatherings, two is because I’m shown at the center of the age-old human story it tells, and three is because it’s low quality resembles lots of old-fashioned film amateur photography, which (even though it was made digitally) seems authentic to this moment. Old men talking motorcycles. As my wife and these moto-geezer acquaintances all know, I go to monthly gatherings like this only a few times a year, even though I enjoy them. This was a randomly scheduled no-club-open-to-anyone meetup in my smallish community of Duluth Minnesota, a semi-remote northern plains town of approximately 85,000 souls within an overall metro area of maybe 150,000. The surrounding geography and biomes include forests, swamps, and lakes, with nearly zero nearby agriculture or husbandry. Our long difficult winters combine wetlands and rocky poor soil with a stoic Nordic immigrant culture which influences even local old guy motorcycle gatherings. I learned of this one only because I’m fortunate to be on someone’s cc-all email list, and though I’ve been riding with a few of these guys (only once, earlier this year), I’ve become reasonably acquainted with most of them by occasionally being at these types of gatherings across a span of over four decades. Normal small-town stuff. There’s another monthly ‘bike night’ event here at ‘Clyde Iron’, a wonderful pizza + craft brew place operating inside a recently refurbished vintage industrial fabricating building (see photo).  And a third weekly old-guy rider 8AM breakfast which moves between half a dozen small home-cooking cafés. About a third of the regulars at that gathering no longer ride very much, if at all. Nobody cares.   The day I happened to be at the event in the photo was particularly nice weather-wise, perfect for an e-bicycle ride, which I’d ridden to work that morning. I went directly from there, a distance of four miles, very happy to be outside playing hooky for an afternoon during what was certain to be one of the last warm(ish) sunny days before everything outdoors became northern Minnesota winter, I.E. miserably cold, cloudy, dark, and snowy. But this exceptional day was sunny and warm. Leaves had all fallen weeks earlier, but the temp reached sixty (15.5ºc), which was only a couple of degrees below the all-time high on this date. The gathering started around 4PM and ended about 5:30PM. The antique flip-phone camera used to make this image is a hallmark of the fellow who likes taking such photos. I’ve never paid attention to the specific device he uses, other than noting it is a beat-up flip phone. He regularly shares lots of grainy in-the-moment photos with a small cc’d group of friendly moto-geezers. Most images record various motorcycling exploits, and almost all are about as rough as this one, whether they were made in his workshop to share some old bike mechanical repair project, or far out in the backcountry of Texas or Mexico where this guy winters as a professional varmint hunter/exterminator riding his trusty well-used dirt bike. Behind the Coke can on the table directly in front of me is a worn piston from an ancient Norton P11. This one and its equally worn mate were brought to show how they had recently been ‘nuralized’, which is a way to make worn-out old pistons fit a bit more tightly into the bores of an engine so they could be used a little while longer. (https://www.enginebuildermag.com/2017/09/lost-art-knurling-pistons-takes-skill-guts/) You can tell a worn-out piston by its sound. The noise is called ‘piston slap’ and if you’ve heard it once you’ll be able to recognize it forever. It gets worse and worse, which means louder and louder, with time. For a geezer gearhead who’s got some tired old motorbike, it is a bad noise. To fix this problem on a tight budget the engine’s pistons are removed so each piston’s skirt can be mechanically dimpled with rows of short, tiny bars pressed hard enough into the aluminum to cause the metal displaced by the bars to expand outward and upward, making the effective diameter of the worn-out piston slightly larger. At least for a while, anyway. There are a variety of machines and tools made to do this in several ways because it works quite well and is inexpensive. Necessity being the mother of invention, it’s the kind of thing one did back when they were young and poor when pistons didn’t last as long as they do today, and when replacement slightly oversized ones were neither easy to find nor very affordable. When I was young, I had a machine shop do this nuralizing procedure to the worn-out pistons from a car I had and it worked reasonably well. Almost a lost art now, except maybe in economically ‘still-developing’ parts of the world and also for geezers on Social Security trying to get a couple more years out of some long-loved mostly worn-out old bike. It’s also a perfect example of why these guys come together to talk about their motorcycles and lives. Telling stories far too boring for youthful riders, but meaningful for those who’ve shared such long-lost experiences and are now old. Whenever motorcyclists gather at a tavern, rally, or racetrack to share stories, the generic term for the conversation is ‘bench-racing’. The younger the riders, the more hairball/incredible/borderline unbelievable their stories seem to be. When I was young, I distinctly remember a fellow slightly younger than me who was at the time explaining in detail how he was able to ride very VERY fast for long periods in a variety of road situations and never receive even a single speeding ticket due to his advanced on-board anti-radar technologies and supposedly brilliant ultra-stealthy high-speed riding skills. After listening to him go on about this for a minute or two, and when he seemed to have finished his boastful account of high-speed heroics, I said “That’s impressive, but if you are not getting tickets, you are not really riding that fast, that much, that consistently.”  Which was my truth at the time, for despite having a nice radar detector and three (!) speedos on my handlebars (the one that came with bike, an added digital bicycle speedo calibrated to the exact circumference of the front tire, and the instantly calculated speedo function in a small early GPS), I was for a few years nearly always a single ticket away from losing my license. (Once during this period I’d done something stupid* while riding south toward LA on the I-5 freeway in California and got one where the CHP officer had written simply “100+” on the ticket, but that’s another story.) As an old geezer-rider these days, the stories I hear going around the table are considerably gentler and far less heroically inflated. They’re also more wide-ranging and often involve wives, kids, grandkids, home maintenance and mechanical jobs, sailboats, fishing, hunting, cool tools, almost-forgotten or long-absent acquaintances, non-motorcycle travel experiences, and sometimes even politics (!!). Topics that go far beyond riding experiences and riding heroics. Despite today’s easy and amazing technology for filming and photographing everything, and the general popularity of doing this now, very few visual records exist of one of these old-fashioned bench-racing moments. Unlike today’s youth, geezers seldom think about making visual records of ordinary events like this, unless a rider with a crappy flip-phone happens to still be as young at heart as he was fifty or sixty years ago. The old saying: “You’re only as young as the games you play.” is an eternal truth. This image accidentally was well-composed and framed. Its grainy fuzziness captures the atmosphere around some old guys talking about motorcycles in a tavern. Plus, (repeating myself as old people do) I’m the old guy in the foreground.  Pontificating on something of crucial importance. Happy Holidays, and good riding,Mr. Subjective, Nov 2023 *That big ticket in California story is this: It was a gorgeous warm spring afternoon under a cloudless sky with extremely light traffic, often not another vehicle within sight either ahead or behind as far as I could see. There’d been enough recent rain that year so the nearby low hills provided a spectacular wall-to-wall display via hundreds of millions of colorful flowers in full bloom. I was enjoying all this while moving along happy and relaxed at +- eighty (mph) which was slightly over the speed limit, without paying much attention to anything. Just enjoying the overall bliss of this ride. The bike was happy too, thrumming along smoothly and perfectly. Suddenly, and somewhat surprisingly I was passed by a very black BMW seven-series sedan going maybe twenty-five miles per hour faster than I, which woke me right up from my blissful daydreaming. Those things were semi-exotic very expensive twelve-cylinder sport-oriented luxury cars favored by wealthy doctors or lawyers. They were easily capable of speeds around one fifty or sixty (mph) as they’d been designed for German Autobahns, which have no posted speed limits.   In an instant I decided I could use this car as an effective ticket-blocking ‘shield’ if I sped up and matched its speed from about a quarter mile back or a little more, which is exactly what I did, settling in at something a bit over 100 (mph). From such a distance, all I’d need to pay careful attention to would be the brake lights on that thing.  If they flicked on, even for a moment, I’d need to grab a big handful of front brake and immediately bring my speed back down to the legal number, even it looked a bit comical or smoke curled off the tires (in my imagination).  This new higher speed would cut about half an hour off the rest of my trip that day and was perfectly safe because the highway was smooth and wide, the weather was perfect, and there were very few other vehicles around. I was looking forward to a playful, fun, illegally fast riding game for a little while. The bike was willing, too, seeming to enjoy it’s greater load and higher RPMs. California did not use radar for speed enforcement at that time so if I was vigilant and played the game well, I should be ok. Wrong. Ten minutes later a CHP officer had us both cooling our heels on the side of the road. For whatever reason, the highway patrol car was positioned in front of the BMW and I was maybe twenty feet behind it. As soon as the ‘Chippie’ walked up to the BMW driver’s door, the driver stood fully upright on the car’s driver’s seat and took the ticket through the open sunroof, standing there calmly under that perfect California sunshine. Turned out he wasn’t some smart rich MD, business entrepreneur, or attorney. This guy looked a lot more like a clueless entitled kid in a worn t-shirt and long unkempt raggly hair. He would have easily passed as some spoiled Beverly Hills brat or performing artist from LA’s music or film industry. A few minutes later I signed my ticket feeling like a complete idiot for following this car under the mistaken assumption anyone driving such an advanced machine would not be a dummy and would know what the hell they were doing.  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. After I got back to Minnesota, I spent the next several weeks worrying if this ticket would cost me my driver’s license since I was already carrying two lesser (lower speed) speeding tickets. This big one was worth so much more on the ‘points’ system most states then used to keep track of such things, that if it showed up on my Minnesota driving record, I’d immediately become license-less. Supposedly the ticket was serious enough to require an appearance before a judge at a traffic courtroom in California, but with the help of an attorney that requirement turned into a fine somewhere in the $500 range, so I didn’t need to go back and appear. But I remained fearful of receiving some kind of letter or phone call asking me to surrender my Minnesota driving license and stop driving for a year or two. Eventually someone told me I could simply go down to the driver’s licensing place, pay five dollars, and they’d run my record and give me the printout, so that’s what I did. It came back without listing the big California speed violation. I asked the person who handed me this paper if Minnesota and California had ‘reciprocity’, as many states did. “No.” was their answer, and an immediate huge wave of relief spread through me as I rode back into my everyday life feeling like fate just gave me a great gift, but this joy didn’t last long. Later that afternoon, or maybe the following morning, my insurance agent called and said in a familiar but slightly amused-sounding voice “I see you got a big ticket in California last month….”.  My policy was a bit more costly the following year. If you think you are riding fast a lot, and you are never getting speeding tickets, you are not really riding fast. Audio Version (16:25), reader: Mr. Subjective

Or, "I sure with it would stop raining." The ancient Greeks had a useful story about a guy named Sisyphus, who forever strained pushing a large heavy ball up an inclined plane.  In our time, the famous (but little-known in America) long-time (1960s-80s) president and CEO of the Toyota automobile company, Kiichiro Toyoda, lived, wrote, and spoke this Japanese aphorism: “To shoulder a heavy burden down a long road — such is life.” Across centuries of history, many wise people have presented this same idea in similar ways.  Not so long ago motorcyclists were generally regarded as rebels. That was mainstream thinking in America through much of the post-World War 2 era, when social conformity and broadly increasing prosperity were the order of the day. Suburban fathers would not allow their daughters to go out with motorcycle-bums and many motels and restaurants would not serve them. State and local police harassed them. Much of middle America was afraid of them. Hard to believe now, but true. Back then many good motorcycle bums chose to ride simply because it felt great and was tremendous fun. Plus, it was affordable. Those riders knew riding was cool for many reasons; It was the perfect way to get from A to B enjoyably while also showing a little rebellion against the era’s dull social conformity, and also mildly rejecting the era’s rapidly expanding commercialized hype. Win. Win. Win. As those years went by much of riding’s rebelliousness became co-opted, sanitized, and commercialized. By the early 1960s, all those small high-quality utility-transportation Hondas, and the many similar imported machines that had all become hugely popular across postwar Japan, became tremendously successful here as simple leisure toys, and then shortly after that in variations that were more specialized for performance, sports, and recreation. “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” was the ascendant commercial story, while on the traditional biker side, Marlon Brando’s scary rebellious “Wild One” cleaned up and morphed into Henry Winkler’s mega-popular “Fonzie”. Meanwhile, year after year there came more better-quality cars and light trucks, moving along broader and straighter high-speed roads, with larger numbers of well-stocked retail stores, an increasing number of nice places to visit and eat out, and many additional ways to entertain ourselves. Everything was measurably becoming better and better. Earlier motorcycling expressions of rebellion faded and were replaced by new variations and forms of rebelling, most of which didn’t involve one’s chosen mode of transportation and/or recreation. Today’s roads are filled with larger and taller slab-sided vehicles providing their occupants both with a better view and a more securely sealed and climate-controlled internal environment, so much so that even during perfect weather nearly all the openable windows on nearly all of these vehicles are nearly always fully closed. Primary control interfaces recognizably remain for steering, braking, and accelerating, but today interior ‘climate control’ and ‘infotainment’ systems are of seemingly equal importance. It’s not a stretch to imagine a future where the first three of these will become less important than the last two. Long-time New York Times writer/opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie recently wrote about the sudden sharp increase in pedestrian and bicyclist deaths, under the title ‘The Path to Reducing Pedestrian Deaths Is Steep but Straight’. He correctly attributed the cause to today’s greater numbers of tall, slab-sided, climate-sealed, infotainment-maximized cars and light trucks. Duh. That shift, more than anything else, is probably partly why street and touring motorcycling has been experiencing a decline across most of the advanced and rich parts of the world. Just as with walking and bicycling, moto-riding has become noticeably (and statistically) riskier, which translates to less urban and distance-traveling road riders, and more off-road sports and recreational riders. This is because at its essential core motorcycling will always be attractive in one form or another. This is a lot like how domesticated horses transitioned from centuries of utility applications to becoming recreational pets because of the wide adoption and popularity of automobiles and motorcycles. There now are a greater number of horses in the latter role than the total number of them back when they were near-exclusively bought, sold, and kept (enslaved?) as functional work, military, and transportation tools. A classic story from the near beginnings of automobility goes like this:  It’s 1916. It’s pouring rain. The driver of a fully enclosed period car and the rider of a similarly period motorcycle each arrive at the exact same destination at the exact same moment. The driver looks at the soaking-wet rider and says unsympathetically: “I bet you wish you had a car!” The rider smiles back and replies: “No, but I wish it would stop raining!” Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote: “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.” He was one of the greatest writers and thinkers in history.  Today’s wonderful high-tech, safe, comfortable, well-sealed cars and trucks have become pretty good at breaking this link. Yuval Noah Harari (1976- ), a contemporary Israeli author, historian, and professor in: "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" | Talks at Google, said: “The way we design technology can make us less compassionate.” Today’s wonderful high-tech, safe, comfortable, well-sealed cars and trucks have perhaps unintentionally (?) been designed in ways that may be doing this. Combine these two important ideas with the old “…bet you wish you had a car!” parable and it is something to think about. Now, add an idea from French philosopher, author, journalist, and political activist Albert Camus (1913-1960): ”What is a rebel? A man who says no.”  Ok, campers, for extra credit what would you call a utility transportation + commuting motorcycle rider today?  Or, for that matter, a transportationally-dedicated pedestrian or bicyclist? - Mr. Subjective, Oct 2023 PS – “I don’t want a pickle; I just want to ride my mo-tor-sicle.” – Arlo Guthrie (1947 - ) American folk singer

Here’s a short-ish story about my old motard-modified Honda XR650L. I bought this bike new in 1994, intentionally planning to make it a motard. That year there was only one factory-made motard available, the very first generation KTM Duke. A friend of mine living in Minneapolis had purchased one and loved it, but within the first few hundred miles the needle fell off its speedo (all speedos were mechanical then) and was rattling around the bottom of the instrument, and there were no KTM dealers in Duluth, a far smaller town than Minneapolis. So I decided to try and make one out of the then first-year-released Honda XR650L. After working on it for two years (funding limits) I had the little wheels made by Buchannan’s Wheels, a big front brake, shortened forks, and a shorter shock. Plus, different taller-geared sprockets. Everything came together with stiffer pre-shaped foam inside the saddle and a few other changes and soon I was learning how to do nice stoppies in traffic and use its overall ‘entertainment’ potential.  It wasn’t fast, but was good enough for city use and commuting, and spectacular on bumpy surface streets, which we have a lot of here (Duluth Minnesota) due to the hard winter road damage. Now it’s twenty-nine years later and unbelievably the Honda company is still producing this same exact model with essentially zero updates or technical changes. In a few months, this bike will have been in production for thirty years. Which is completely unbelievable. In August of 2001, I decided to see if I could take a longer trip on it, packing very light, riding backroads, and camping. Almost nobody was taking long trips on smaller bikes then. My own travel and highway bike at that time was a BMW 1000cc boxer. I rode the little Honda 650L from here to LA and back. No problems. Wonderful trip. Got pulled over once for speeding in a canyon somewhere but only got a warning. Camping was primitive, due to packing very light. Did not carry even a stove. Didn’t miss it. The funniest thing about this bike was during the first year or two after I lowered it and put the little wheels on it, several of my local riding friends looked carefully at the results of my work and then very seriously asked me: “Why did you ruin a perfectly good dirt bike?” All I could do was shrug my shoulders and smile. Most riders at that time had no idea what a motard-style bike was. -- Mr. Subjective, October 2023 PS - Because my Honda 650L motard was specifically purchased to be modified and employed as a small-town daily utility-transportation ride and commuter, and not for speed or higher performance, it still has its stock, stupid and fairly quiet muffler. *shrug* Do you have a ‘Long Service Model’ story?  Send it to us here. We’d like to read it. This is one such story. PPS – This substack essay is about the disappearance of high-quality window ‘box fans’, because air conditioning became more affordable and universal. This essay actually relates fairly closely to maintaining and riding a long-service model motorcycle like my ancient Honda XR650L. When I started in college a long time ago, I bought myself a medium-quality window box fan, and just like the Honda I still have it. Despite its age and ordinariness, this fan is much better quality than the box fans sold today. Mine probably came from a Target or Walgreens store and was no more special in its day than the box fans those stores sell today. Assuming they still sell box fans. For many summers I had it placed in an open window in the guest bedroom of my apartment, running on a lamp timer set switch it on in the evening. It would run unattended all night exhausting warm air, and this system kept the place comfortable as the cool evening ‘in’ airflow entered via open windows on the north side of the living room and larger bedroom.  At some point, this fan’s electric motor failed so I took the grill off one side and removed the motor. Then I took the motor to the parts counter at a business called “Melke Electric” which is an industrial electrical contractor place. They either had or ordered (I don’t remember) a similar electric motor, which I used to replace the one that failed. That fan is still with me, though I don’t currently have a use for it. I was surprised to find this young kid’s substack essay lamenting the commercial obsolescence and disappearance of moderately high-quality box fans like mine. As an ‘old guy’ now, I am surrounded by old stuff accumulated with some effort during my lifetime. I have a quite nice box fan, now about fifty years old. Mostly metal, including the blades. A better electric motor than the one it came with. Probably the motor, frame, and blades all were made here. It’s almost embarrassing. Wait. Not almost. It is embarrassing. PPPS – Going from three simple stamped aluminum box fan blades to molded plastic or (even better) ultralight ultra-stiff compound-curved, pressure-molded carbon fiber fan blades, shaped to biomimic the evolved and highly specialized aerodynamic wings found in nature on ultra-quiet predator birds like owls, would greatly increase airflow efficiency and reduce the noisy propeller thrum of my old slide rule-engineered aluminum-bladed box fan. Today’s digitally-controlled higher quality electric motors are surely more efficient than the motor in my fan as well. A higher quality old-fashioned thing does not mean new versions of that thing must necessarily be of lower quality. Had air conditioning never been invented, many of the box fans being produced today would be of better quality.

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