Item the first: Thanks to COVID I recently enjoyed about the nerdiest YouTube video ever -- an 18-minute presentation about why Timex wrist watches are considered neither valuable nor collectable by watch experts. You would think such arcana would be boring, especially to people with only the mildest interest in watches. Like me. And you’d be right. But in addition to motorcycles and riding, I am also interested in the relationship between culture and technology, and this Timex watch video is all about that. Since it has nothing to do with motorcycles directly, I sort of hesitate to recommend it, but because so many are more-or-less locked down, and since wristwatches are, like motorcycles, examples of a mechanically engineered technology, here it is. Warning. It’s boring and nerdy. Prepare to be geeked out: Spoiler and executive summary – The reason Timex watches are not collectable isn’t because they are inexpensive and common. Lots of people happily collect things which are neither rare nor valuable. Collecting, sorting and categorizing things is partly human nature. No, these watches are not being collected (according to this video’s narrator) because they were never intended to be repaired or rebuilt after the inside mechanism wears out. They were made to keep pretty good time until they died and then you were supposed to go out buy another one. Yet lots of other avidly collected products are exactly like that. Vintage Levi’s denim pants are collectably valuable. Old worn out hand tools are collectable. View an episode of ‘Antiques Roadshow’ (or any of television’s syndicated riffs on this formula) and you’ll see plenty of other examples. It’s unbelievable what kinds of things have a collectable value. The reason this Timex wristwatch video is part of a motorcycle blog is because it caused me to think about old motorcycles, and my irrational emotional attachments to my own stuff. Especially to things which embody mechanical and digital technologies. For example, I’ve always written, read and surfed the internet using a notebook computer. I get between four and six years of use from these machines and after they become worn and obsolete, I replace them. But there are now five of these old notebook computers stacked on a bookshelf here going back to one from 1992. Hard to believe the first one cost $2,300 and featured a gigantic 33mb of memory, while the notebook purchased six months ago, and which I’m typing this on right now, cost almost the exact same amount in non-inflation-adjusted dollars, and it has 2TB of memory. I never loved these computers, so why did I keep them? It can be difficult to understand why some no-longer-made bikes are so well thought of, and others (like old Timex watches) are not. The difference doesn’t seem to correlate with any objective machine-itself thing. Racing accomplishments? Sales popularity? Aesthetic beauty? Sometimes a bike which was successful by more than one of these measures still becomes forgotten. Compare the wonderful and historically important Honda Cub and Vespa scooter with the equally brilliant ‘Bee’. All three were created to be small utility-oriented personal mobility products at about the same time. And all three are recognized as truly great designs, but only two are well remembered today. Again, why? The virtue or divinity of any particular motorcycle (and many other engineered artifacts) may lie partly in the intentions of the engineers and designers who created it. If the device was intended to be ‘forever’ in some functional way so it’s user could in theory employ it for the rest of their life should they stubbornly choose to, maybe that is an important intangible ingredient. I’m thinking not just motorcycles and wristwatches, but also about Stonehenge and the Brooklyn Bridge. Consider a now-ancient BSA 441 Victor motorcycle, known by old guys world-wide as the ‘Victim’. Light, spare, elemental and pretty -- but what a piece of crap to own, ride and maintain. Yet just like the Honda Cub and Vespa, they’ve became beloved and iconic. These three very different bikes are easy on the eyes and straightforward enough in design and engineering so almost any rider can see (and in their minds eye, accurately imagine) how to take them completely apart and then more-or-less completely reassemble them using little more than a few simple hand tools. My own vehicular example of this kind of quasi-timeless ingenuity is an old 4x4 car. I purchased it brand new forty-seven short years ago and still enjoy looking at, driving, maintaining and fixing it. But dang if I can explain why. (With benefit of age, wisdom and hindsight maybe I was subconsciously thinking of it as a brutalist rebuke and an aesthetic critique of the popular pimped-out overly chromed cars coming out of Detroit at that time?) Before I’d driven it 100 miles, I knew it was crap, but this did not stop me from falling in love with it and driving, repairing and maintaining it as my (very slow) ‘daily-driver’ whenever I was not going to be riding or walking somewhere. Funny thing is, it’s now gone over 105,000 miles and with the further benefit of hindsight my stubborn commitment to it probably is partially due as much to its flaws as its virtues. Today this no-longer-produced model (after a run of more than sixty years…) has strangely become an aspirational and iconic fashion accessory for millennial hipsters, though not because it represents a brutalist rejection of mass-produced cars-in-general, but because it visually looks relatively timeless in sort of doomsday-prepper way. And just for the record, most motorcycles also provide this same sort of brutalist rebuke of the universality of automobiles, if one chooses to overly intellectualize about them. Which brings this back to old Timex wristwatches. The only thing my high-tech modern motorcycle and low-tech old 4x4 car have in common is how both can be nearly infinitely rebuilt. Whenever the makers of our machines attempt to create something which potentially could (with care) have a life-long relationship with its user, they achieve a special kind of immortality. Just like Stonehenge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Mona Lisa, and even an ordinary 10,000-year-old flint knapped knife blade. Those Timex people were not going for that, while the crappy old 4x4 car, the wonderful Honda Cub and Vespa and lousy BSA 441 people apparently were. One cannot help but fall in love with such vainglorious embodiments of engineering (and artistic) idealism. At this point any half-assed amateur philosopher might continue by making a pretty good argument about how a disposable Timex has more in common with a banana than those great watches admired by wristwatch nerds. Not me. There are too many other things to do. ---------- Item the second: If you can make it past the first five or ten semi-awkward minutes, this thirty-five-minute interview with nerdy engineer/futurist Sandy Monroe is pretty fun. Mr. Monroe first came to my awareness a few years ago when he made some videos promoting his engineering-and-testing-for-hire company. They do stuff like taking apart and analyzing electric cars and their batteries to see how they work. I’m not a subscriber to his channel, though. It’s been a few years since the last time I watched one of his YouTube videos. Until this one, just now. ---------- Item the third: Before writing this blog essay I sent both of these links to about ten friends, the first one by ‘cc’ a few weeks ago and this second one earlier today by ‘bcc’ to nearly the same group. These days many people prefer to not have their email address available to unknown persons, and some of my friends don’t know each other. Nowadays fewer people share links-in-general with their like-minded friends, at least compared to how internet and email cultures were ten or fifteen years ago. This change makes me feel like such a clueless geezer. I don’t know why email forwarding-and-sharing activity changed, but I sense it’s a loss. Decades ago, my mother and her siblings would snail-mail mail each other clippings from newspapers and magazines, and later photocopies of stories they’d read and enjoyed (or found interesting in some way). There would sometimes be a follow-up face-to-face or telephone conversation about the shared story. I remember rolling my eyes when an envelope containing a few clippings from my mother would arrive, but I’d always give her a call and thank her for sending them, and sometimes a clipping-topical conversation would follow. Why has this kind of social practice, which was such a large part of early emails, declined? Too much spam? Facebook? Twitter? Other social media? Social media is probably part of the reason, but regardless, I’m not too excited with the depth of intermediation and content tracking which are an integral element of today's popular social media forms.

Note: This is an excerpt from a longer email I’d written to a very old friend last October. When he recently replied at similar length it caused me to re-read what I’d written and realize you might enjoy reading it, too. Remember, this was written late in the fall of last year. Nope, I’ve not had any new, or new-to-me used bikes during the past nine years but continue doing things with my small motor pool of older motorcycles which keeps riding at the center of my mobility life. After letting my two old (78 and 81) airhead BMW’s collect dust in the corner of the garage for about the last eight years, I finally put them away semi-correctly only a few weeks ago: Washed off layers of accumulated dirt and bugs. Waxed. Drained the gas tanks and float bowls. Put oil in the cylinders. Moved them from the cold dirty garage into a corner of the basement not far from the washer and dryer where they can sit safely for years. I like looking at them there. Squeezing them in through the door between the garage and basement was difficult because boxer engines are extra-wide but after about ten minutes of wiggling, they fit through. One has around 350K and the other probably about 150K. I rode one for roughly ten years and the other for twenty while doing nearly all of the work caring for them mysef. Tires, tune ups, fluid changes, repairs, adjustments and modifications. Seeing them now on their center stands near the washer and dryer sure makes me smile. I always wanted a bike inside my home, and now I have two, and both carry lots of memories. When I was young, I remember fantasizing about someday possibly owning something exotic to display next to an umbrella stand in the foyer of a fantasy McMansion. Well that never happened but this little private two bike museum down in the corner of the basement of our small home feels just as good. When I was sixteen my first street-ridden legal motorcycle was a 90cc Honda and my bedroom was located on one end of the basement in my parents 1,800 sq. ft home. At the other end was a built-in garage. For the first week I owned that bike, after everyone else was asleep, I’d quietly sneak out to the garage and carefully push the bike from there into my bedroom, then softly close the door. I still remember falling asleep with my hand on its gas tank. A few days later my mother caught on and no motorcycles were ever allowed inside her home again. No matter how wonderful and special. Today with those two old BMW’s safely inside my own home things have come full circle and I’m as happy with this arrangement as can be. My current ‘long distance bike’ is a 07 R1200R with about 50K on its odometer. I’ve never taken care of this one myself except to do some easy stuff like changing and balancing a front tire once and replacing a brake rotor another time. Plus a few very minor modifications. The rest has all been done hooked up to an O.B.D. (On Board Diagnostic) computer at an excellent multi-line BMW dealer called Moon Motors. I know it’s a cop-out to say it’s “too modern for me to learn to work on” but that is the truth. My priorities have changed. A month ago, this one got it’s 48K service, plus some little repair items and two new tires, at a cost of just under $1,000 (which is one reason why I used to do this sort of thing myself). But at least it’s now ready to go for next season and maybe beyond. My old XR650L commute-bike (the world’s slowest and least powerful motard-converted Honda) was also recently oil/brakes/battery serviced so it’s already set for next year, too, though I’m still riding it for probably another month depending on the weather. When winter comes road salt ends that and I’ll switch to a rusty-from-the-past-two-winters electric pedal bike with studded tires. After all of these years the biggest question about riding remains, “why don’t more people do this?” It is a stunning, flummoxing question. Riding for me is such a happiness-generator that every time I ride to work, or anywhere else, it easily is he best part of the day. Every F’n time, regardless of weather. Bicycle or motorcycle. I just cannot believe more people are not doing this. It’s absolutely pure joy. One possible reason, which I don’t like to think about, is maybe my neurology is a little different than the average persons(?). Everyone is unique. We all exist on numerous spectrums. Height, hair color, weight, introversion/gregariousness, etc. It seems that maybe there is also a spectrum of human affinity for kinesthetic experiences. I guess I don’t mind admitting I might be a bit to one side of the median in this area, since I have two motorcycles in my basement. – Mr. Subjective, October 2019

As far as this company goes it literally was mis-spelling the name "Aerostich" when making the master artwork for the first printing of letterhead stationery and business cards, and when opening the business's checking account and applying for the Minnesota corporate registration. You probably thought I was going to write something facetious, funny or philosophic here. Nope. I’m an idiot when it comes to many things, and spelling is near the top of that subset.The correct spelling, as I learned later, is "stitch", not "stich". I wanted a generic name to avoid being embarrassed if the business failed, so I didn’t use my own name like Leon "L.L.Bean", Hirotake "Arai" or Louis Comfort "Tiffany". Whatever. The word "Aero" seemed appropriately generic because motorcycle riders are always in the wind, and "stich" was added because we were planning to sew a completely new kind of rider’s armored coverall. Commercial printing and advertising artwork were made a lot differently back in 1983. Personal computers and desktop publishing did not yet exist. To make letterheads you could use a razor blade and a product called Chartpack, which was an adhesive graphic and lettering system that any local printer could use to produce and print something. It took me a couple of hours with an X-Acto knife to create the Aerostich logo artwork. Our first print order came to 1000 cards and 500 stationary sets at a total cost of maybe $35. I proudly showed the results to my mother a few days later and she immediately told me I'd mis-spelled stitch. "Thanks mom…" was all I could say. After worrying about that for a couple of days I went to a library and looked up the meanings of the word "stich" in an unabridged dictionary, and in the end decided to save the money needed to reprint everything. A "stich" is what you call a single line in a poem. Riding and great sewing are both sometimes a bit sublime and beautiful, just like a good line in a poem. That's the story I told myself to save us the $35, so Aerostich kept its mis-spelled name. Our generic made-up name really didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t now, either.  Riding more is what matters. – Mr. Subjective 5-2020 Addendum: Regarding ‘desktop publishing’, I should have written “for me”, as in: “back in 1983 desktop publishing did not yet exist for me.” The first-ever Macintosh computer went on sale in 1984. This was the one with the mouse and the GUI (graphical user interface). I probably saw my first one in 1985. For our first catalog we did the layouts on stiff paper with faint blue grids, carefully hand waxing in place hand cut out laser-printed text paragraphs and artwork. To generate that text we used a 1984 Macintosh a friend had just purchased. But he did not have a laser printer. The least expensive models of those were in the $3-4,000 range, which was well beyond our means, so we took a floppy disc (?) from the Mac to a computer retail store and gave the sales person $20 to let us print out the text on some regular copy paper. It printed dark and perfect letters. I think it was an Apple branded laser printer…I only remember walking upstairs to this little store located above a mainstreet clothing store and seeing the laser printer sitting there dramatically on a pedestal in the center of the space under a spotlight. Along one wall were shelves with various kinds of personal computers. After we got back to the Aerostich shop with our crisp laser-printed text we started cutting up the printed copy paper and making catalog page layouts with the waxing tool. After those were all done they went to a printer.

My first bicycle was a 20” Huffy. Deep candy red with white pinstripes on its triangle-shaped fenders. I remember it so perfectly because this was the bike I first learned how to balance without training wheels. I can take you to the exact spot where this miracle occurred. My mother held the bike up by the back of its saddle and then released me. The thrill of that moment was like nothing else. It felt like I’d just learned the greatest magic trick ever. Many kids learn to self-balance today using a very small pedal-less 'balance bike’, a type of miniaturized bicycle that did not exist when I was a child. Whenever I see a child using one of these it looks so natural and easy. It’s automatic and happens so early that kids who learned the miracle of balancing this way won’t remember the magic moment when they first could do it because they acquired the ability at such a young age. For me there was much anticipation and for several weeks prior some discussions about removing the training wheels. Was that what I really wanted? Was I sure? Did I feel ready? This was serious, important stuff. What I didn’t know at the time was when my mother had been around my age, her mother had witnessed the horror of a small bicycling child being killed in a collision with an automobile, so she was never allowed to have or ride a bicycle. She never learned how to ride like the millions of people all over the world who somehow never learn how to swim. It’s probably why she took my learning how to ride very seriously. My first self-balancing riding moment was on a regular sidewalk only a hundred feet from the house we were living in at the time. The training wheels had just been removed, but I don’t remember by whom. I don’t remember ever riding my Huffy with training wheels, even once, but I’m sure I must have, and many times. That day was a bright, clear sunny warm spring day. Probably a Saturday as my dad was at work and I wasn’t in school. The street in front of the house ran slightly downhill and there wasn’t the usual grassy boulevard between the sidewalk and the street. Directly to my right was a curb with a drop of several inches to street level. There were no parked cars which meant everyone who had a car had already driven off for work or somewhere else. Not everyone had a car during the late 1950’s. My mother and I walked up to the corner, and I was pushing the bike. I’m sure she wore a simple cotton house dress, as was her custom in those days. Or maybe Bermuda shorts, which were very popular. I don’t remember some details. Only that ‘Mom jeans’ were nonexistent. Still decades in the future. And I was on the sidewalk, not in the street. There was one home between our house and the corner. White. Clapboard siding. Porch. Both the street and the avenue were residential-quiet, and the intersection was uncontrolled from all directions. You were supposed to look both ways before crossing, which probably I wasn’t yet allowed to do. But my limited little world was about to radically change. This neighborhood had been built out thirty years earlier during the mid 1920’s. The street and sidewalk surfaces were all concrete, not asphalt. Up at the corner I turned the bike around, my mother grabbed the underside of the saddle and I climbed on. There were a few brief words of discussion or encouragement, but whatever they were is another forgotten detail. A low hedge bordered the immediate left side of the sidewalk, along the front yard of our neighbor’s house. Maybe two feet high at most. Focus. Concentrate…  GO! She let me free with a light push. I made it about fifty incredible feet and then don’t remember exactly what happened next. For some reason I think maybe I crashed into the hedge and cried (?) but was uninjured and immediately got back to the top of the street and did it again. Successfully. Or maybe I got going ok that first time and came to a safe (Bendix!) coaster-braked stop in front of our house. Whatever it was, all I know for sure was that suddenly I could actually balance, perfectly and easily, and in that one magical instant my life was forever changed. And thanks to a huge dose of adrenaline right at that exact moment I can still remember this as clearly as if it just happened yesterday. I can still go back to the exact moment when I first acquired wings and began to fly. To leave the nest behind. From that day on I could not stop riding. What is your memory of learning to balance? Share below!

Year after year this is co-promoted by both the AMA and the Motorcycle Industry Council, and almost nobody cares. The AMA is the American Motorcyclist Association and is the largest membership motorcycle rider political group (PAC) in the country. Sort of like the NRA (National Rifle Association) but for motorcyclists. They also provide racing sanctions and rule books and oversee a large amateur racing program. The MIC is a small but important (important = well financed) group supported by the large motorcycle companies like Honda, Triumph, Yamaha, etc., and via a related-yet-independent foundation they also finance and organize most of the rider-training materials and curriculums used by state-organized rider training programs. My cynical side never quite knows what to do with ‘motorcycle awareness month’. I think it’s mostly pretty silly but maybe it helps prevent a few crashes, injuries or deaths, so it’s not entirely without basis or benefit. I doubt it helps sell many more motorcycles, though. It’s just the kind of thing special interest trade associations such as the MIC like to do. How we might present this to our Aerostich audiences of (on average) experienced higher-mile riders without seeming to be jerks is a little tricky. On one hand I’d like to acknowledge this promotion seems a little trite, but on the other hand if it saves even one rider’s life it’s an immeasurably great thing. What informs my cynicism is the idea that when one decides to ride one is forced accept how if one ever is in an accident when riding, the entire legal system in most crash scenarios biased against the rider. This is simply because almost every legislator, judge, jury member -- and every attorney on all sides – all most likely drive a car to their jobs. Thus, it’s almost impossible to get a fair trial with any kind of significant punishment for the guilty, or fair compensation for the injured. With bicycle riders it is exactly the same. See these stories from Outside Online: What to Do if You're Hit by a Car and Cycling Deaths. Somewhere buried in the embedded links within this story* was a statistic that more than 85% of car drivers who kill a bicycle rider are never charged with any kind of crime. This travesty is not so different for motorcyclists and pedestrians. I’ve always been in favor of laws with increased penalties to force a bias against some kinds of misbehavior. Similar to what MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) accomplished thirty years ago. Similar to how in some states there are laws explicitly providing very strong penalties for any driver who kills a highway construction worker. In Michigan the law requires a minimum $10,000 fine or a year in jail. I don’t think Minnesota or Wisconsin has such a law. These kinds of laws have real teeth that strongly discourage irresponsible driving. They forcefully say: “Don’t text and drive!” and “Pay attention, slow down!” and “Don’t drive impaired!” If the MIC and the AMA wanted to do something meaningful for increasing awareness of motorcycling and motorcyclists, instead of promoting ‘motorcycle awareness month’ they could work together to try and get strong ‘vulnerable road user’ laws passed in every state. An even grander and far more effective coalition would include all of the state and national motorcycle rights groups (like ABATE, Ride to Work, others), all of the bicycle clubs (like the Adventure Cycling Association, National Bicycle Dealers Association, League of American Bicyclists, others) and all of the all of the hiking and walking clubs (like the America Walks, Partnership for a Walkable America, others). There are a few dozen ‘umbrella’ organizations in these areas, though some have hundreds of affiliated sub-groups and chapters. Co-ordinating such an effort would be a tremendous challenge and cost real money. And any even mildly biased ‘vulnerable-road-user’ protecting laws would probably be fiercely resisted by well-organized and well-financed opponents. Enactment would also depend on fickle political circumstances, just as the enactment of the civil rights and school integration laws of the 1960’s did. Those laws were also biased in favor of the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Regardless of any kind of possible opposition, today’s riders and walkers have already got something far more powerful: more dead martyrs to a longstanding pattern of civil injustice than anyone would ever want. A “Hit, injure or kill a bicyclist, pedestrian or motorcyclist and get a mandatory XXX fine or XXX in jail.” type-law would discourage and reduce bad driving. This message would look great on roadside markers, billboards, and in driver training manuals, too. These types of laws work. They are constitutional. And they would make riding safer. The result would be more people choosing to ride -- And more people choosing to ride would lead to a better, cleaner, healthier, nicer world. ‘Motorcycle Awareness Month’? Meh. - Mr. Subjective, March 2020 (Mr. Subjective is Andy Goldfine, the founder of the Aerostich rider’s equipment company and organizer of the annual ‘Ride to Work Day’.) *According to data collected by cycling advocate David Cranor for the nonprofit Greater Greater Washington, between 1971 and 2019, there were 132 cyclists killed by drivers in the Washington, D.C., area. 87% were not charged with a crime, 13% were charge and 8% served time.

If you own, wear and enjoy your Aerostich gear, please tell your friends about it. Our ability to continue as a solvent, successful business depends on your positive recommendations, stories and referrals. We all came back to work during this past week. Now we are busy making gear for the back-ordered sizes and colors which were not in stock when the orders were received when we were closed because of Minnesota’s pandemic quarantine. Everyone working here is now wearing masks, using sanitizers, sitting farther apart and taking a bunch of extra precautions. We each must take our forehead temperature every day when we arrive and make a written record of it. Lots of little changes but we sure are grateful to be back. We are now refilling our stock, making Aerostich gear, and catching up on back orders. All Aerostich suits, jackets and pants were literally the world’s first embodiments of an entirely new kind of rider’s gear, made using new kinds of materials combined in an entirely new recipe for durable and comfortable protective riders gear. Everything in riders gear today, made using modern synthetic fabrics with modern plastic zippers, using modern impact-absorbing foams and incorporating modern reflective materials, venting and pocketing, is a copy or riff on Aerostich gear. No matter how others promote their latest products every year as being ‘new and improved’. We continue refining and making Aerostich armored textile riders’ jackets, pants and suits here in America, and they are not marketed like most other consumer items which are constantly being ’New and Improved!’ for mostly either fashion or marketing reasons. We’ve been doing it this way for thirty-seven years. With some kinds of things, the original is best. Share your Aerostich gear stories with your friends. And with us. Thank you, and good riding. - Mr. Subjective, May 9, 2020   Learn More »  

For motorcycle accessory businesses like ours the good sales quarters are Q2 and Q4 and the slow quarters are Q’s 1 and 3. Most annual profit is made during Q4. This entire year will be an economic write-off, but hopefully Q4 will still be at least semi-ok. Much will depend on clinical/medical/science stuff. Many different kinds of medical things are coming on fast. For example, blood tests which will be quick and free for everybody so one can learn if one has had the virus or not seem right around the corner. And related to this will be figuring out if the plasma from those who’ve had it can provide useful immunity to those who have not. This and much more should be here very soon. On the political-economic side this pandemic is giving both sides (Conservative and Progressive) the leverage/scapegoat they need to advance their agendas and priorities much faster and more aggressively than usual. It’s going to be interesting to see which side’s agenda mostly prevails. Right now, the Conservatives seem to have the edge because of the generally more Conservative underlying biases of our current court system, and because they are (for the most part) in power across both the executive and legislative branches. But they may have overplayed their hand. Regardless of which side prevails, it’s certain that the other side will put up a very strong protest/fight. There will be lots of ‘gaslighting’ for sure. Maybe some violence, too. This would be exactly how the FDR presidency went when they were putting together their radically Progressive agenda during the Great Depression. At the time they were broadly hated by so many but regardless they were successful at setting in place most of the pieces of a style of governance which today is generally considered normal by a majority of Americans. It’s going to be almost exactly the same this time around, except it’s not yet known which side will prevail, or what the particular and specific details will involve. What this means for small businesses like ours is unknown. It feels like everyone from the 1% oligarchs and plutocrats, to the homeless, to the Nobel laureates and Pulitzer prize winners are all improvising. Which is what we are doing here, too. All of my co-workers, wife, extended family and I are going stir-crazy, but because of all the extra downtime my bike has never been this well prepared: New tires, oil and brake fluid, etc...even little things like twist-grip throttle free play re-adjusted. I expect to begin motorcycle commuting soon as usual, and to be able to take a mid-to-late summer trip somewhere. My guess is most of the mid-to-late-summer rallies and events will be well-attended and maybe even more-attended than usual because early summer events did not happen and most riders (if they are like me) still want to ride somewhere. Come visit us this summer. We’d love to see you. - Mr. Subjective, April 14th, 2020 PS – What followed the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 was the ‘Roaring Twenties’. Supposedly a pretty good time for everyone. PPS - ‘ATGATT’ and the Virus. During the months ahead living amongst other people IS going to be riskier than what we all are used to. Riskier compared to the normal we’ve experienced all of our lives. What do we do? How do we each manage the new added risks? With our elective activity of riding a motorcycle we use a bunch of smaller linked tactics: Don’t ride and drink. Use turn signals. Whenever possible avoid riding during atrocious weather at night. Wear helmets and bright armored clothing (ATGATT*). Think paranoid in traffic. Keep the bike well-adjusted. Ride frequently enough to be moderately fluent. Etc. We need to adopt this same sort of tactical approach with the new virus, and hope we don’t still get run over and killed by the dang thing. We are going to probably have to live with some increased level of ‘public health risk’ for at least another six or eight months unless there’s some kind of medical breakthrough. So the only way to approach this is with a quiver full of individual tactical measures. Which are now being presented in detail, ad-infinitum, just about everywhere. We all will get on with our living long before the added risk of this new virus will be back to zero. That’s how we’ve always gotten on with living with tradtional annual flu virus’s. There’s now apparently a brand-new genie and it’s probably not going to get back into its bottle for some time. Tactics. We’ll each get good with a bunch of small discrete tactics, and they will become normal. * ATGATT = All The Gear All The Time

An earlier Mr. Subjective blog post led to a long-ish email exchange between two old friends: Tom, a continuing blogger in ‘Geezer with a Grudge’, and Mr. Subjective. The ‘Sorta Sensible Trade Off’ essay was about the trade-offs between today’s safety-enhancing technologies like anti-lock brake systems, and the other important aspects of the motorcycling experience. Among other things, Tom is a retired MSF instructor. Below is our email exchange, time-sequenced for clarity. On Mar 5, 2020, at 4:35 PM, Tom wrote: Andy, Interesting article. Back in 2012, when I reviewed the R1200GS for MMM (Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly), I noted that BMW’s ABS was a pretty coarse device, especially compared to the Super Tenere that I’d reviewed earlier. I concluded that section of the review with “In fact, I'd be inclined to turn off ABS on a long off-road trip.” As usual, Victor and the editor took a verbal/email beating for allowing that criticism into the review. I’m not surprised that rattling caused downstream stress on the driveline and I wish I’d have suspected that for the review. ? It would make me seem almost smart now. When I was teaching the “Experienced Rider Courses” I was always entertained by the Harley and Polaris riders during the emergency braking exercise. The ABS on those hippobikes was so brutal and the jerking scared the crap out of most of the riders (who had probably never used their brakes before the class). Hope you’re doing well.Tomhttps://geezerwithagrudge.blogspot.com/ From: Andy (Mr Subjective)Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2020 4:58 PMTo: Tom Subject: Re: Modern Technology & Trade-Offs Thanks for writing. Long time. All is well here. On the business side, Aerostich still mostly solvent and staggering along. Not much growth but holding steady now. Still a fun business and still enjoying both the customers and my co-workers most of the time. On the motorcycle side, have two running ridable bikes: 07 R1200R and 94 XR650L. Also a low-end electric bicycle and a regular pedal bike. None of these are fancy. They’re just rideable. Rode to NYC and back last summer. To Nebraska for the eclipse the summer prior. To the BMW RA national rally three summers ago. Not sure where I’ll go this year.Glad you wrote. Hope we’ll see each other in person somewhere this summer. On Mar 6, 2020, at 7:50 PM, Tom wrote: Hey Andy, At least in the US, motorcycling seems to be “staggering along,” too. The number of MSF courses offered by the state seems to be dropping 10-20% every year since 2007, when it peaked. I quit last year. The previous year every class I signed up for cancelled due to low student turnout. Century College went from 3 ranges doing two classes (morning and afternoon) each every weekend from April to September to one range intermittently doing classes; morning only. I don’t think Red Wing is doing any classes this year. Some kind of sea change is going on here that, oddly, doesn’t seem to be happening anywhere else in the world. I keep hearing the tameness of Millennials blamed for motorcycling’s problems, but my experience with that crowd doesn’t back that up much. My grandson, for example, commutes 12 months a year on a mountain bike or eBike (RadMini), he is into rock climbing, wall jumping, marathons, kick boxing, and all kinds of stuff I’ve never heard of and has lots of friends doing the same kinds of things. I’d put riding a bike 7 miles one way in a Minneapolis January over anything I’ve ever seen a hippobike rider do, adventure-wise. He sucks at maintenance, though. His eBike is in my garage waiting for a motor replacement. He beat it to death in 8 months. We did a full service on his mountain bike last weekend and it was pretty hammered, too. ? After last summer’s medical bullshit, I don’t know where I am as a motorcyclist. I didn’t ride a mile last year and missed a lot of the spring the year before. We’ll see this spring. It’s possible that I’m just a bicyclist now. My wife really got into her eBike last year so we do that together often now. A first for that. A good friend of mine from California was in Nebraska, somewhere west on US20 on my recommendation, for the eclipse. I thought about joining him, but copped out. I guess it was really crowded and nutty where he was, Valentine, I think. He crossed the country, west to east, on Highway 20 driving a Citroën 2CV that he’s owned for at least 35 years. Almost a motorcycle. Hope to see you soon,Tom From: Andy (Mr. Subjective)Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 8:11 PMTo: Tom Subject: Re: Modern Technology & Trade-Offs Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the MC biz and the current MC situation in American culture. It’s’ partly the “tameness of millenials” but there’s a lot more going on. A real confluence of factors. Sort of a ‘perfect storm’. We could have a long conversation or several conversations about this but the main thing is that it just ‘is’, and if one wants to ride badly enough one just figures out how. In a way it’s kinda neat that so few people are riding nowadays. I’ve always liked the oddball-ness of riding, without the traditional 1% outlaw part. Riding is going to come back, but it won’t be for a while and when it does it’s not going to look much like the riding we experienced. ADV bikes and HD’s and crotch rockets and luxe touring bikes might eventually look pretty stupid, but each of these branches of motorcycling will continue more in the idiom of nostalgia than mainstream riding. Like the old geezers today with their ‘collectable’ cars. Whatever is in fashion in collectable cars changes across time. All collectable things from artworks to old cars go in and out of fashion. Right now the hottest fashion in motorcycles are the very elemental, minimalistic customs. Bikes stripped to their essence. The younger consumers are looking for purity and not doing miles, not exploring, not going fast, not going far or any of the kinds of riding we did. Take an old airhead, remove everything: Body, saddle, lights, fenders, side panels, center stand, instruments, mirrors and air filters. Add back very small lights, very thin flat saddle, knobby tires and small mufflers and little else and you have the kind of bike that looks like the purified essence of a motorcycle. Unfortunately these bikes are better at looking cool in a garage or entry way of a McMansion than going on any kind of actual ride, be it a day, a commute, or across country. In a sentence, these bikes are reverent homages to the idea of what a motorcycle means. The core meaning. The symbolism. That's what’s cool right now, and to consume motorcycling that way you don’t need to know much about how to ride or much in the way of gear. All the gear we rejected as crap or in some way a pain-in-the-ass is now the height of fashion. Jet style helmets, bubble shields or goggles, jeans and windbreakers and flannel shirts and lace up Red Wing hunting boots. The young are always very self-conscious compared to old people like us. It’s very important to be recognized by ones peers as getting it. This was so for me when I was young, and it’s no different today. The manifestations are different but youth is eternal. This era of the purification of motorcycling will pass. When your brave grandson reaches 45 he’s not going to have the energy to commute on a bicycle or the time to use an e bike for this purpose. He’s going to look for a single track vehicle that is easy to use, safe and practical. Light and affordable and all-weather capable. And the gear to go with it. He will know that motorcycles are simply a bicycle with a motor, and that they are the easiest way to get from A to B with the infrastructure sprawl we’ve spent the last 150 years building. The power system will either be electric or ICE. That’s how motorcycling will look when it comes back.With one small addition. Most bikes made since the 1990’s are going to still be pretty good to ride twenty years from now if they were kept indoors. Crotch rockets, HD’s and everything in between. Lots of people like your grandson will get those running without stripping them down as art projects. They will lightly modify them for increased utility and use them for general purpose riding. It will all come together in 15-20 years. Climate warming will be a full-blown deal beyond what is going on today, and that will be a factor. Maybe the yet-to-happen ‘Great Depression 2’ will be over by then and some kind of ’New Deal 2’ will be developing. Motorcycles will become fashionable again for a bunch of reasons not associated with rebelliousness or luxury recreation or speed. I’m hoping. We won’t be around to see it, probably. PS - I’ve been commuting all winter for the last two years with a more-or-less crappy e-bike. Learning (and re-learning) all kinds of things at 16-22 mph. Last winter I commuted one day at minus 15. This year I think the coolest day was around minus 10. PPS - Still have the studded tire wheels on mine. Very anxious to go to the summer wheels. Probably next Wednesday or Thursday. Studded tires are SO NOISY!. PPPS - Yesterday on my way home from work I jumped a curb a little too hard and had an immediate rim-pinch flat. Two holes in the tube, one on each side. I run the tires pretty soft in the winter. It’s not a fat bike. The tires are 27.5 x 2.8. All patched up this morning. Now the tube has two new patches to go with the one I put on it last year. PPPPS - Tomorrow I’m going to try and bleed the rear brake and disassemble and clean and re-lube the twistgrip on my twenty four year old (16” wheel) lowered XR650L. I’d parked it about five years ago. These are the last two items it needs to be rideable for commuting again. Which is my plan. A bunch of stuff got done last fall. And my R1200R is ready to go. Somewhere. New tires, oil and full service at Moon Motors late October last year at $1000 cost. Only rode it back here and parked it after, hoping I’d survive the winter and be able to do something with it this summer. On March 9, 2020, at 12:04PM Tom wrote: I wish I could see more of the “oddball-ness of riding, without the traditional 1% outlaw part” in Red Wing. We’re the destination for all of the tame Boomers and 1% gangbanger pretenders from the Twin Cities and Wisconsin on their unmuffled Hardlys and trikes. It is enough make a lifetime motorcyclist hate motorcycles. On the odd occasion an actual motorcyclist rides through our neighborhood, I get reminded of how unrepresentative they are of the general population and remember why I like those folks so much. There are few things (most peds and bicycles) that are less obtrusive and attention-demanding than a quiet motorcycle cruising through town or a neighborhood. If motorcycling does become a rare thing, as eBikes and bicycling become more common, that could be a saving grace. If there are fewer riders there will be fewer fatalities that that will be, I think, the thing that catches the public and highway safety bureaucracy’s attention as cars continue to become safer. Motorcycles shouldn’t be anywhere near 2% of highway fatalities, based on miles driven, but we’re always hovering around and above 14%. I think if that number approaches 20% it will be the end of motorcycles on public roads. But even if the crash-per-mile/per-capita numbers stay the same, if the number of riders on the road drops that might even lower the overall statistic enough to keep motorcycles out of public attention. Collectable items are a fashion, but it seems to me that collections in general are fading. We might be the last generation of hoarders. I don’t see that as a bad thing, either. After purging stuff to move from 2600 square feet to 1100, we still have too much crap. I have tried to enforce a ‘1 in/2 out’ rule, but enforcing anything with my life is an exercise in self-delusion. My pile, however, is definitely shrinking. I just gave a load of test equipment (some was homemade gear that I’ve used in electronics since the 70’s) to a friend who runs a music store locally. I unloaded a recording studio and a lifetime’s collection of microphones, tools, truck loads of books, and a lot of audio test equipment when we left Little Canada and I have yet to miss anything from that huge pile. I’m probably too quick to hope for the end of collections/hoarding since one of my life’s goals has always been to be owned by a small enough pile of stuff that I could move in a small van and a few hours work. About 15 years ago, the hipsters I knew through the music college jumped on to that thing that inspired the Ducati Scrambler; with café racer’d 70’s and 80’s Japanese bikes. About a dozen of them regularly bugged me for maintenance and repair tips and some of them really got into stuff like tweaking carbs and pipes and suspension bits along with the cosmetic thing they were going for. Within 5 years, many were through that phase, several were also finished with music, and moving on with the rest of their adult lives. Most of them had some minor scary event on their motorcycles that convinced them it was more dangerous than it was worth, but some just realized motorcycles weren’t even as practical as bicycles for their purposes. At least a half-dozen of them moved on to become part of the Minneapolis bicycle 4-season scene. Several others had kids, started businesses, and became family guys. Some just sort of withered away into the Millennial characters you often hear about either working fast food, coffee shop, convenience store, or other menial labor jobs. “Some are mathematicians, some are carpenter’s wives. Don't know how it all got started, I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.” However, none are doing anything with motorcycles. I doubt that IC motorcycles are going to make much of a comeback in the future. I do a blog I’ve called “The Rat’s Eye View” for a little longer than I’ve done the Geezer-with-a-Grudge thing. One of my Rat’s Rules is “My theory is that as a technology approaches terminal, it gets really good.” Electric vehicles are, I think and hope, on the cusp of becoming a solid replacement for IC and that’s part of why we’re seeing all sorts of amazing innovation in a technology that is on its last gasp. I really don’t see my grandson ever getting interested in old motorcycles, could be wrong but if I am I really suck at knowing people. I absolutely can imagine him on a $5,000 Zero that can do 200 miles on a charge. We have done a lot of things together in his 22 years, but working on cars and motorcycles is not one of them. Weirdly, we’re seeing that shift in music, too. Guitars are definitely an old guy’s instrument. Guitar sales are down and have been going down for 20-some years. Music featuring guitars is less popular. Music stores are struggling, too. It’s not just that the music business is dead (which it is) but that music has become a commodity that people don’t expect to have to pay for. There is a wonderful book about this, Rockonomics: What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics (and Our Future) by Alan Krueger. I learned more about the industry I was involved in for 50-some years from Rockonomics than I had in my career. I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see any sort of revival, though. It just feels too far into the future. TomRed Wing, MN

“Younger rider’s reactions to my suit (Roadcrafter Classic, R-3) are not entirely positive.” - Any number of experienced motorcycle journalists. That’s an understatement. I’ve thought a lot about why this is. First, youth-in-general looks very hard at the micro-granular details of everything but often has a more difficult time seeing the so-called bigger picture. Looking hard at each tree means one usually doesn’t or can’t see the forest so well. When it comes to rider’s gear this means having the ‘right’ kinds of gear and knowing this or that brand is fashionable or cool in-in-the-moment, and almost nothing else matters. I experienced exactly this youthful myopia when I was younger, just as most kids do to one degree or another. Fashion and fitting in matter a lot more to the young (and young-at-heart) than to anyone older. Personal note: When I was a kid, I remember desperately wanting a Schwinn bicycle, Jack Purcell tennis shoes and Gant button down shirts. Got the shoes but not the other two. Today’s younger riders are no different than past generations of young riders. Most hope to ride the exact ‘right’ bike, wear the exact ‘right’ gear and be among the exact ‘right’ peers. This socializing-stuff is as developmentally and neurologically hard-wired in most of us as are our physical features. Aerostich’s geeky one-piece coveralls, which enormously help make it easier, safer and more comfortable to ride a motorcycle more often, in more kinds of conditions and to and from more situations, doesn’t quite compute. For most young riders, this is not why or how they want to consume motorcycling. But after one has ridden for a longer while a few things become clearer: No matter what one rides or wears, street riding itself always makes you the oddball in traffic, and in almost every other situation. Riding can be a vastly better and more satisfying way to get from A-to-B than most people realize, if one doesn’t mind being that oddball-in-traffic. In other words, once one throws looking cool under a bus, one’s life actually gets a lot better in so many areas and ways. This includes riding more. Almost everything in our post-industrial-consumer-culture is sold to us on the basis of making us cooler -- From whiter teeth to better nutrition to you-name-it. The assumption is everyone wants to be a legend and live forever. When I was young, I did too, and to be honest a part of me still does. Bikes were more popular and much more mainstream-cooler back when I was in high school than they are today. My HS class had about six hundred kids and most school days there were maybe twenty-five bikes in the parking lot. All neatly lined up in a row. On a few really nice spring days there were three or four times that many. Back then my moto-interest was dirt bikes. I didn’t know much about riding, more specifically dirt bike riding, but after school and on weekends I’d find some trails to explore and a gravel pit to go practice in. This culminated ten years later in riding local AMA Enduros for a couple of years, but this level of commitment still wasn’t sufficient. I could not get enough riding only on weekends and practicing a night or two after work. During this part of my life I’d occasionally randomly encounter former HS classmates and they would sometimes ask: “Are you still riding those dirt bikes?” The implication being that at some point I would outgrow this phase. I half-believed it myself and unconsciously was waiting for this to happen but by around thirty I realized I was going to want to ride motorcycles for the rest of my life, as often as possible. Riding was simply too much fun. Even sitting at an intersection waiting for the light to turn green was better on a bike than it was in a car. At that point most of my pretenses about riding's coolness and what-to-wear went under the bus. All that mattered was that I could be riding instead of driving and soon afterward the Aerostich coverall was ‘born’. Improvisation being a mother of invention. All these years later now I’ve become sort of an amateur anthropologist-connoisseur of social ostracization. Not that I deliberately seek out being uncool, it’s just the embedded cost of riding all the time and G-d or the universe has a funny way of arranging things to work out like this. So, whenever someone in a grocery store or any destination stares, giggles or asks a really stupid question about what I’m wearing, or if I was riding a motorcycle (after all, it is raining…), all I usually do is silently grin. Inevitably those dumb remarks, stares and comments are later remembered as the best non-riding parts of my day. So if today’s young riders want to be young riders, I say let them. A few will continue riding long enough to realize that it’s riding itself which makes you cool, not the color and model of one’s bike or if you wear the latest helmet, or what jacket or kind of boots one has. In the big wide world, nobody in any of the cars surrounding you in traffic cares even the smallest fraction about any of that. Riding itself is what is cool. - Mr. Subjective, 2020 Blog Survey Results from 3/11/2020: Thanks to everyone who took the survey!

Most riders today agree about the desirable complications of modern motorcycle safety features like ABS and Traction Control. I do, too, though at times still slightly struggle with some these high-tech enhancements. Electronic fuel injection is great and so are most other advanced technologies which improve a motorcycle’s efficiency and reliability, but the specific digital stuff which sometimes comes between me and my bike’s ride dynamics is occasionally more problematic. With ABS and Traction Control sometimes I want it on, and sometimes I want it off. Playing with the frictional limits of tires is, in a few situations, part of the fun of riding, but these days most ABS-equipped bikes don’t give their riders a fast and easy off/on switch option. A few years ago, my R1200R’s driveshaft needed replacement after less than 30,000 miles. This was both puzzling and expensive. Online research revealed it to be a fairly common late-model BMW problem, but this bike’s driveshaft failure occurred extremely early. Driveshaft replacement seemed to be rarely needed on bikes whose riders seldom got into the ABS, which I’d been fighting with since day one. Believe it or not, when riding older non-ABS bikes in certain situations I've always enjoyed being able to nail the rear brake hard and briefly deliberately lock the rear wheel. In dense traffic on asphalt roads this reliably produces a loud tire squeal/chirp which can in sometimes be far more effective than tooting the horn and is always more civil (and in-the-moment more practical) than giving some clueless driver the finger. I can’t help scaring them this way, just a little. But my fancy modern safe ABS-equipped R-1200R will tolerate no such nonsense, depriving me of this occasionally useful and always fun “You idiot!” tire-squeal expression. Instead of the usual short and loud tire chirp, on this bike you get a violent, jarring “knock!-knock!-knock!-knock!”, as its ABS rapidly cycles on and off, hammering away and rudely preventing the rear tire from breaking traction. I quickly became used to this ABS-knocking but out of habit still found myself triggering it fairly often. Yes, of course it was reassuring to have while riding on greasy wet roads or when I was half-asleep, but generally I just wanted to make it go away. The ‘off road’ GS version of this bike comes with an ABS-off button, but my R model is not so equipped. Converting mine to GS-spec looked costly, difficult and impractical. A few R1200R owners whose ABS had failed had chosen not to replace this heavy, expensive and complicated system and I decided I’d probably do that also, if my bike’s anti-lock ever failed. I like saving the weight, (who doesn’t) and especially value being able to deliberately skid the rear tire. I like being able to do that that just enough to accept the resulting diminution in overall safety. Similarly, I would not mind being able to try a few low-level stoppies once in a while -- but don’t get me started on those very efficient and durable Telelever forks. Fun is fun. Well now it is five years later, and this bike has accumulated many more miles and its ABS system is still functioning perfectly. Sometimes I still miss being able to scare rude drivers in traffic with a tire chirp, but I’ve learned applying the rear brake hard enough to trigger the anti-lock system is a no-no because maybe it’s the ABS’s hammering that wrecks expensive driveshafts. I imagine BMW’s bike drivetrain engineers designing them to take the engine’s maximum torque for a couple hundred thousand miles and in the next office the brake system engineers are doing the anti-lock development and the two engineer groups never talk with each other about this. Or maybe they cannot imagine there are any foolish street riders out there who may wish to deliberately lock a rear wheel while in motion? Foolish riders like me. Those BMW engineers worked hard to provide riders with ever-increasing safety while they were simultaneously taking away some of the finding-the-frictional-limit tire fun I’d always enjoyed having with my motorcycle. A sorta sensible trade off, I guess. Most of the time. But I’ll always miss that rear tire chirp trick used to scare the heck out of an unobservant driver. At least that loss provided a hopefully amusing story.    – Mr. Subjective

...Or, A Completely Stupid Situation (As appended to an email reply to ‘Gabe F’, January 4, 2020.) PS - I still have a car. Two in fact. I just don’t want to drive either in the winter. Here’s my car life-story: - 1971.  Datsun PU.  Red. New. Put larger tires and wheels on it (15”x7”, snow tires all around) and four driving lights on bumper. Small fire under dash due to not using a relay for the driving lights. Drove it 100K miles, cost $2000, sold for $1,400. Excellent car. Good dirt bike motorcycle hauler. - 1973. Land Rover Series III 88”.  Bought new at dealer in Minneapolis. Bank loan. Cost $4550 when Toyota Land Cruiser, Scout, Jeep ranged from $3800-$4300.  Self-maintained always — forced me to become a half-assed mechanic. Lousy car, drove 90-100K, wore completely out. Eventually sent to a specialist in these cars to have totally rusted-out frame replaced. Still have it. Did I mention it’s a really lousy car? About 1975 made a paint-matched bike-hauling utility trailer via rebuilding a small $150 (auction price) beat-up EZ Haul rental trailer. - 1990.  Used 85 Audi 4000Q sedan. $5,000. Great car. All wheel drive, five-cylinder engine, 5 spd stick, Porsche designed drive train with dash controlled manually locking center and rear differentials. Very fun to drive in snow. Rusted out badly and brought only $800 when I eventually sold it. Drove about 50K across fifteen years. (I’d begun bicycling, walking and MC-ing a lot more.) - About 2006. Used 01 BMW 325xi wagon. $10,000. 5 spd stick, straight six, AWD system not as good as the Audi’s. Everything else better. Sold 2016 for $3,000 just before rust got really bad. Lovely car. Drove about 50K across ten years. - About 2017. Used 06 BMW 325xi wagon. $14,000. 6 spd stick, straight six, similar AWD system to previous car, but slightly improved. Much more complicated electronic junk. No rust, California one-owner car. Bought online, sight unseen. Arrived as represented, which means ‘good condition’ and no collision damage. $700 delivery by car-hauler. Stored winters. So today I have this nice 06 BMW wagon and the crappy old rebuilt 73 Land Rover. Five cars spread across forty nine years. Plus a few short-term-uses of borrowed or rented cars. So far nothing crash-totaled or even too seriously damaged, and of course very grateful to have such ‘first world’ car-owning experiences in the first place. (Hope writing this story won’t jinx anything.) The LR’s body is unrestored and fairly banged up and weathered due to abusive ‘four wheeling’ activity during the 1970’s, and also to never being parked indoors until about ten years ago. After its frame was replaced it also has never been winter driven. The funny (?) thing about all of this is that for a motorcyclist living here in Minnesota, cars are most useful as winter-seasonal transportation, and now I have two of them which are stored during the winter. During the spring fall and summer seasons, I’ll either walk, motorcycle or bicycle 95% of the time. Rain or shine. Warm or cool. And now I’m bicycling through the winter, too. Half a dozen fair-season mobility options…but in winter I’m now down to only a studded tire electric bicycle and occasionally taking rides or walking. I don’t know what this means except maybe I don’t have too much common sense. Feels like a completely stupid personal transportation situation. Except to my insurance guy. What is your car-life story? -- Mr. Subjective

So far this has been a fairly mild winter, temp-wise, but we've had an above-average amount of snow. Which is fine. I'm quite happy riding my now three-year-old electric bicycle on its studded tires as primary transportation (made up a separate set of 'winter wheels' two years ago) but in hindsight I should have spent more to have one of the many more powerful but illegal models. They are widely available consumer-direct online and easy to final-assemble, just more money. (750w 'legal' vs. 1500w) My e-bike cost $2000. The price range of these things is between about $1000 and $8000. I should have spent about $4000 to have more power, which seemed completely insane at the time. Across level ground the one I have is powerful enough, but for bigger hills, which are an inescapable part of Duluth's geography, it's not. This isn't about more speed even though more of that would always be welcome in some situations. I'm now able to be comfortable riding in temps down to around 10ºF fairly easily, and with a small extra effort can get down to about minus ten without issues. This is my first winter without a backup automobile, other than having occasional access to my wife's car. Last year and the one before I was able to borrow junky old 'winter beater' trucks. This year that option wasn't available, so I am living car-less for the first time in fifty years. And it's not been too bad. There are semi-legal alternate bicycle route options (sidewalks, bike lanes, etc) in places were passing auto traffic is too scary, and the studded tires work really well on ice and packed snow, except right after the occasional larger snowfalls. The Park Department actually clears the bike lanes faster and better than the city's Public Works Department plows the streets. Snowbanks make the lanes everywhere much narrower. Accumulations of 4" or more take a day or two before everything becomes packed down, shoveled out and plow-cleared enough, which means I'm probably averaging one to three days per month when I don't make the effort to e-bicycle myself to work. My commute round trip varies between 6 and 10 miles, which isn't a lot. It takes about 20 minutes to get to work, vs. 12 on a motorcycle and just over an hour if I walk. There are two notably satisfying parts to all this. By far the best is riding something with no license plate. Riding anything is always fun, even at the lowish e-bike speeds of between 18 and 23 mph, and having no license plate easily doubles every ride's wonderfulness. Any path becomes fair game, even if technically illegal. One night forty years ago during college I received a moving-violation ticket on my Schwinn Varsity for running a stop sign. This required going to traffic court and then paying a healthy fine -- same as an auto driver. That ticket went on my driving record which means there is always a real risk to renegade hooligan e-bike misbehavior, but so long as one is observant (for police), and consciously patient and polite whenever encountering the few stoic cold weather pedestrians, the chance of actually receiving a moving violation ticket is very low. Eventually there may be surveillance cameras everywhere tied to monitors at police HQ's, so this kind of outlaw wintertime riding may come to an end. Or maybe not. Que sera sera. The second -- though far less satisfying -- aspect of riding plate-less, is watching other people struggling with their cars as you pass. Brushing off snow, scraping windows, warming them up, finding parking spaces between snowbanks, etc. Everyone simply puts up with all of it for safety and comfort, but when you look at the equation from outside it becomes obvious how much extra work (and cost) is involved. Those people in their cars seeing me pedal past all bundled up probably think it's nuts to spend five minutes putting on so much bulky winter gear each time I want to go somewhere, and then taking it all off when I come back inside at any destination. Much of the required gear IS ridiculous, and arguably useless for just about everything else: A pair of thicker sox. Some insulated lightweight ankle-high boots. A pair of fleece lined pants or 'longhandles' (the old-fashioned word for long underwear, today known as 'base layers', which are an either-or with fleece lined pants). A fleece or wool sweater. A down sweater plus a mountain shell, or a down parka. An 'ear flap' hat whose flaps (when lowered) can come together under your chin. A bicycle helmet with a lengthened chin strap to wear over the 'ear flap' hat. A balaclava and an old loose-fitting 3/4 style motorcycle helmet and ski goggles for the really cold days. Plus, three different pairs of gloves:  Cold, colder and choppers. You don't want to know what choppers are. Almost like summer ATGATT right? A pair of flip-flop sandals lives under my desk year-around for at-work footwear when winter (and summer) riding boots come off. With a little big toe sox adjustment they work fine. During the winter I would not feel as safe riding a licensed motorcycle in the regular traffic lanes as I do on the e-bicycle using my more convoluted (and longer) street/bike lane/sidewalk mixed routes. Three years ago, we did a winter of daily commuting on a stud-tire equipped Zero Motorcycle and it was mostly great, but you still feel more vulnerable moving among traffic along slimy streets covered with a dirty mix of sub-freezing ice crystal slush, snowmelt and chlorides. For several days after any serious snowfall here that is our reality. Roads eventually dry out in more extreme cold leaving a layer of gravel and chalk-white residual salt dust everywhere, but above about 25 degrees everything gets sloppy again. If I was forced to road-only daily-commute here with no excuses all winter, I'd probably want a Ural, which these days means a $15,000 commitment. If I had the budget and a bit more garage space that would be neat. But I don't. Love the winter, and it's been a pretty good one so far. But I am already looking forward to spring. -- Mr. Subjective

A Good One... A customer wrote today and suggested we re-name the Transit suit after Neil Peart.  He was a great fan of the Transit suit and generously let us use photos of him riding wearing his Transit.  We have been selling his very good books about his motorcycling and life experiences for many years. (We ran out of them recently and are not sure when they will be available next. Many books periodically go ‘out of print’ and sometimes they come back in reprinted editions.) Neil was a genuine long-riding motorcyclist and a super bright, incredibly hard working, thoughtful, intellectually curious man. And extremely well-read. I met him once. Rush was playing in Minneapolis and he nearly always rode between tour venues in good weather and bad, usually with his friend and business associate Michael. His tour bus towed a double axle enclosed car trailer which was set up like a motorcycle garage for hauling and servicing the bikes and gear. I think a few weeks prior to that Minneapolis concert he’d reached out to Aerostich customer care (and order processing) for something and then separately via email invited my partner and I to come down and see the show. Which is what we did. Until we met on that night I’d never spoken to him. What follows are my notes about this experience, written the morning after to my co-worker Gail, who’d volunteered at the last minute to deliver some Aerostich heated gear for Neil and Michael to the show venue. This email has been edited for clarity and some background information has been added in italics: Gail, the show was really something.  Last summer we (my then-fiancé and I) saw Lyle Lovett at the Big Top tent over by Bayfield, and we also saw Bob Dylan at Bayfront the previous year, but the last time I was at a stadium concert was maybe ten years ago for Elton John. And I'd never been to a show like this, with the VIP treatment and seeing everything from the backside. We picked up (another Aerostich co-worker) about a block from the Excel center (concert venue) as we arrived. He jumped into the back seat and we went down the same side-street into the underground backstage parking area you did. We met Neil’s friend Michael there. He was inside Neil's Prevost coach, working with maps and a notebook computer transferring a paper-highlighted 330-mile backroad route from St Paul to their next show, which they are probably out riding to right now.  When I write backroad, I mean it. They were going to be heading southeast on the littlest roads they could find. Some were gravel. Neil draws the route on a paper map and Michael puts it into a notebook computer and then into two Garmin GPS's. Behind one of the buses is an enclosed trailer holding three BMW GS motorcycles and a little workshop area. One bike is a spare in case either of the ridden bikes breaks down or needs to be serviced.  After they finish playing a show the two of them get back on their bus and leave the venue while the audience is still applauding. They sleep a regular night as the bus rolls onward and sometime the next morning just after they wake up the bus pulls over somewhere and they unload the bikes and ride the rest of the way to the next Rush concert location. There were three semi-trailers and three other luxury/custom Prevost coaches with a fourth Prevost that could also have been theirs (?) parked at a slightly separate location. There was no opening act. Neil and two other performers did the entire show, with one intermission. Forty years ago, when I saw Elvis on tour there were always at least 15 supporting performers on stage with him. Some dancing, some doing backup harmony, playing instruments, etc. but no techno-show. No fancy lights, videos, electronics. The staging and technology setup here was spectacular. There were continuous projected videos and lighting…hundreds and hundreds of remotely controlled lights. Fans were mostly in their fifties, many wearing very old Rush shirts. The audience was also mostly male. The couple seated next to us in the premium seats (close to the stage but several rows back) follow the show. This was the third of a scheduled 33 date tour, which apparently could go a little longer if more dates were added. The theme was NP 40, 'The Fortieth Anniversary of Rush' tour. There were little plastic dinosaurs arranged atop one of the racks of Marshall amps. All the lights and winches and cables and speakers and electronic controls and stage props traveled with the band, of course, and it looked like it could easily fill the three 40' semi-trailers I saw. How they set it all up in a short period would have made a great time-lapse film. Maybe a crew of 20 persons (?) traveling with the show and a hundred local hires for security type work. A guess. After Michael had finished doing the mapping for the ride in the morning, he asked me if I knew anything about electric gear. "A little." I replied.  He went on to explain how one of their (brand X) electric liners had failed yesterday and they'd spent about half the day riding dry roads with freshly fallen snow on the surrounding landscape. I think Neil had given his still-functioning (brand X) liner to Michael and then toughed it out for the rest of the day. These two have ridden about 200,000 miles together over a couple of decades. Michael functioning as Neil’s riding partner, bodyguard and majordomo…he’d met Neil because he owns a security business used by celebrities and others who need extreme confidentiality. Sort of like the federal witness relocation program, but for people who are not guilty of anything other than being ultra-successful, famous or wealthy. And because he owns this company, he gets to spend a lot of time riding around with Neil. (It was about 5 PM and we were at the show. I thought we'd be able to have someone from Aerostich drive there with a couple of Kanestu Darien liners and electric vests to replace the brand X's, which is what happened.) Hopefully right now those guys are wearing and enjoying our heated gear. (Gail did this long delivery, arriving during the middle of the show. We coordinated by text. I think Neil and Michael had been unaware we produced our own range of heated gear. They had been using the ‘brand X’ which was the more popular heated gear at that time. Our gear is deliberately made slightly lighter, slightly more efficient and slightly lower-powered so it would work better with older and smaller bikes having less electrical output. Most cold weather long-distance riders owned bigger and newer bikes with large electrical systems and wanted as much heat as possible.) Gail, thank you for all the extra work you did for us last night! After you left, I opened and set up one of the liners, made sure it worked, and showed Michael what to do and how use it. Then I went back into the show using a borrowed 'all access' VIP credential hanging from a lanyard around my neck. Our seats were center row 11. I'd never seen a stadium show from such close seats. Felt almost like being in a small theatrical venue, except for the sound level, which was amazing. 130DB? A guess. (After first getting there and following instructions how to get through security and into the underground garages where the coaches were parked, Michael walked with us to the ‘green room’ where the band and some of the traveling staging and sound technicians were relaxing with an excellent catered dinner buffet. Maybe a dozen people? After eating I remember going to another smaller adjacent room and talking motorcycles and motorcycling alone with Neil for maybe five minutes, and then going to sit down in row 11 for the wonderful Rush concert.)

It has always been fashionable to possess and enjoy handmade things. In motorcycling this usually means waxed cotton or leather bags and old-school traditional rider’s gear. It’s all good. Most of our products are crafted by hand. Some are made in two equally authentic versions:  One using the absolute latest high-tech modern synthetic fabrics and components, and the other with old-school materials like waxed cotton. Each has a place, and each offers a unique mix of real +’s and –‘s. A few older motorcycle bums may remember watching the brilliant comedy performer and writer Bob Einstein playing a character he created called 'Super Dave Osborne'.  It was his razor-sharp parody of famous daredevils like Evil Knievel, and of obsessive gear nerds everywhere. Einstein was a Canadian and always got laughs talking about his specialized daredevil equipment which usually included “handmade moose hide mukluks”. That particular well-remembered joke repeated enough to become a core part of his act because everyone always laughed. Today (thirty years later) I own a pair of genuine, artisanal handmade moose hide mukluks, and my wife has them too. It turned out they actually are a lighter, simpler, warmer, easier-to-wear and more comfortable type of outdoor footwear in really cold and snowy situations. Which explains why they became fashionable where there’s lots of snow and cold. The small local Minnesota-based company which made ours has done well. Bob Einstein’s mukluk joke remains funny, though now I better-appreciate why simple handmade gear often works, wears, fits and feels better than more complicated similar items designed by people who don’t actually use an item much, and which for cost reasons are made using assembly line systems located far from where the products are being used. All of the world’s sewn clothing --  from mukluks, to high fashion and business wear, to cheap generic imported T shirts – is mostly handmade. Fabric cutting processes were robotized many years ago, including here at Aerostich, but even the best computerized sewing equipment currently available cannot manage to quickly and efficiently move a mix of soft materials through a sewing machine’s stitching systems as expertly as a talented human. Producing beautifully sewn compound curves and complex shapes when combining multiple fabrics remains an art requiring world-class skill, talent and concentration. There is a difference between mass produced fashion-branded garments made to be highly marketable, and Aerostich gear. Both are handmade, but one is produced on large standardized assembly lines in annually revised variations, while the other looks almost the same decade after decade, incorporating ongoing small detail improvements. One is available in six or eight easy-to-inventory sizes and the other is available in over sixty. When you have access to industrial sewing at a very low cost, it is tempting to focus on cramming as many features as possible into a given product until it ends up being complicated and expensive. Heavier, too because you continue adding more and more until it becomes almost a kind of costume like what ‘Super Dave’ always wore. For bamboozling inexperienced and insecure consumers, and for maximizing profit, that is just what you do. Over the long run usually whatever is simplest, lightest and most functional works best.  Examples include those amusing artisanal moose hide mukluks and the Aerostich armored coveralls. There is a wonderful brief scene making fun of overdone fashion clothing in the very old movie ‘Beverly Hills Cop’. Eddie Murphy plays a regular-guy Detroit cop named Axel Foley and he’s just arrived in LA to investigate the murder of his hometown friend. He’s walking down the sidewalk of a warm sunny west LA shopping street and passes a fashion-conscious couple walking the other direction wearing matching leather designer outfits. After he’s a few steps past them he doubles over in silent laughter. Fashions change.

Snow clean up at Aerostich after a blizzard came through last weekend, dropping over 20 inches of snow in Duluth. It's been a wild week. A couple of nights ago I discovered a slowly deflating rear tire on my electric ‘winter commuter’ bicycle. A little sliver of metal had penetrated the studded tire’s casing and innertube. This puncture was easy to find and fix. Sometimes ultra-slow leaks can be hard to find, even with a tub full of water, but this one made a nice stream of bubbles. After the patch had been applied and was ‘self-vulcanizing’ I looked around the garage for something productive to do start-to-finish which would take only a few minutes, just to be positive the patch would be solidly bonded to the tube before putting everything back together. Patching inner tubes is super easy. I’ve done this job too many times to count and being O.C.D. about these repairs is important. Now what to do for the next few minutes? Sweep the garage floor? Naah. It wasn’t that bad. Finish connecting in the Suzuki’s new electric grips?  No, that would be a longer job. What else?...What else? I was surrounded by half-done and long-procrastinated projects and was hoping something would appear which required only the very short time it would take to be sure this patch would be permanent. This waiting is probably unnecessary, but somehow it adds certainty, so any other small garage job requiring between two and fifteen minutes would be fine. Attempting to fix the sticky turn signal switch on my old (94) XR 650L was the most appealing option so I walked over to that bike with a non-JIS Philips to give it a try. Until then I’d never taken any turn signal switches apart, not even once. The button’s sliding action was terrible, with a pepper-grinder’s gritty feeling, and its on-center push-in-to-cancel function was sticky and slow to pop back up. After parking this bike five or six years ago I’d recently decided to start using it again. This involved taking care of the usual older bike-neglect items: replacing its battery, cleaning out the insides of its carburetor, changing out old oil and rebuilding both brake hydraulics. Until I was sure this bike would still be a pretty good commuter it was easy to not even notice its gritty, sticky turn signal switch. (And slighlty too-dry tires.) Fortunately, the Honda turned out to be a good commuter, except for it’s icky turn signal switch feel. Two unscrewed Philips’s later I was looking at a cad-plated internal switch cover held in place by a third slightly smaller Philips. After lifting that away the quarter-century accumulation of dirt and grit was obvious. The button-lever moving part of the switch was held in place between a spacer and a washer, and all three were mounted by a fourth little Philips. With those three parts removed the button lever simply lifted out. All that was left was a liberal spray bath of electrical contact cleaner, a clean toothbrush scrub, another contact cleaner spray rinse and paper towel wipe up, followed by some strategically applied dielectric grease and the sequenced reassembly.  What a difference! I hesitate to compare this little procedure with how people enjoy bathing, exfoliatingly drying themselves, and then sometimes applying various kinds of healthful skin lotions –- But this wasn’t all that different, and the little switch now felt almost as smooth under my left thumb as if one was stroking somebody’s well-pampered and well-lotioned skin. Don’t ask me how many times I stood there idly enjoying sliding that switch from side to side and turning it on and off. I didn’t count, but it was more than twice and less than fifty. Ten minutes later the studded electric bicycle’s winter tire was back in place, fully inflated, and that machine was also ready to go. After the tire patching kit and tools were put away, and my hands were washed, I left the garage wearing a helluva stupid smile, just as very small children sometimes do. It’s always the little things. -- Mr. Subjective, 12/2019

Yesterday for the first time this fall it got down to twenty degrees, well below historical averages here on this date. I rode to work from a heated garage aboard a recently re-animated -- but still seriously old -- 1994 Honda XR650L (photo, left). It didn’t take very long to dress for this chilly commute, either. Nobody else on my fifteen-minute surface street route was riding, but the road was dry, and the sun was shining. I was comfortable the entire way. Everything was perfect. When I came out the sidewalk after five PM it was already fully dark and still only twenty, and the bike just…barely…started. Lighting its ICE fire involved multiple stabs of the button and more than a full minute of worriedly listening to labored slow cranking, despite temp-stable synthetic oil and a brand-new Lithium battery. I was glad nobody was around to witness me standing there worryingly thinking about how I might have to push it into a warm place and then wait until everything warmed up for at least half an hour…and the engine finally caught. Whew! Exhaust condensation puff-puff-puffing from the end of its muffler did look cool. Once again, I’d partly forgotten how many kinds of motorcycles are simply not good for real cold weather commuting operations. Especially big carbureted singles like this nearly vintage XL, which had not seen a twenty-degree commute in probably ten years. A triumph of rose-colored-goggles hope over reality. And another reason to celebrate the near-universal adoption of electronic fuel injection. Engines like this can be harder to start at any time, much less in cold weather. When this model was created back in 1994 (yes, it is a first-year one, and yes it IS hard to believe how long these have now been continuously produced) it was made to be used as a dirt bike in sunny, warm places -- not for commuting through cloudy, cold, dark Minnesota winters. Thus, its efficient and lightweight electric starting system is far too small for winter commuting around here. Last winter my commute-solution was an electric bicycle on studded tires (photo, left) which worked more or less ok, but because it maxes out at 20-25 mph, the commute became ten minutes longer. A motorcycle’s average surface street speed is 30-40 mph, an electric bicycle’s average speed is 15-25 mph, and a pedal-only bicycle’s average commute speed is 10-15 mph. Wintertime = increased commute time. The scientific name for the average length of time people will tolerate when commuting is called ‘the Marchetti Constant’ and this time-value holds at about thirty minutes throughout all of recorded history, and everywhere in the world. This is what limited the footprint of pre-technological cities, and partly explains how modern suburban sprawl, shopping centers, hospitals and schools fit into discrete neighborhoods and boroughs, and how most neighborhoods and wards fit together within larger cities. It also partly explains how prior to the industrial revolution artisanal agriculture-centered towns and villages were separated from fields by ‘x’ distances, and how each of those little villages were ‘x’ distance apart. Thirty minutes, on average. Whenever I walk to work it’s just over an hour and this is always a great time-luxury. And when I motorcycle it’s usually just under fifteen minutes. Pedaling and electric pedaling splits this difference. Co-workers Randy and Kyle figured out their winter-motorcycle-commute a couple of years ago. They share an electric Zero. No matter how cold it gets this bike starts right up and takes them home -- no muss, no fuss, and no adverse impact on normal summer/spring/fall commute times. Reducing one’s carbon footprint is great but even better is not worrying if, at the end of a workday, one’s correctly tuned ‘old-reliable’ ICE bike will actually start when it’s Winter Time. - Mr. Subjective, Nov 2019

Question... “When you finish a long adventure ride, have you experienced strong emotions that you hadn’t planned on? If so, what were they and why?” -- Michael Boton (from the LinkedIn online forum 'motorcycle journalists') Many years ago, at age 43, I took three months off and rode 17K miles from Minnesota to Mongolia and back, via Siberia, China and Japan. I experienced this ride with another rider and learned a lot about myself, geopolitics and people. (1, 2 and 3…) At a basic level, I gained increased proficiency in many ‘adventure’ riding and camping technical skills, since most of the Asian parts of the trip involved long days of dirt roads, trails and rail line right-of-way’s, plus weeks and weeks of continuous camping. A lot of work but tremendously fun. Meeting daily-encountered-strangers as half of a pair of travelers was also a great self-awareness learning experience. Watching how people responded to each of us was a kind of comparative case-study experience which would never happen if one was a lone rider or were traveling among a larger group. Returning home brought what felt almost like a secret (and maybe childish?) kind of superiority, though not in a condescending way. For a couple of weeks processing all the familiar routines of everyday life was a bit more vivid. Lastly, every additional night I slept in my little tent caused it to become a larger and larger dwelling. By the end of the three-month trip it had grown in size to feel like almost a mansion, with abundant space for my every possession, thought and activity. This still occurs -- even after only a night or two on the road, and also when wilderness camping. Your little tent, and all it contains, becomes almost a palace. --- Mr. Subjective, 2-14

Our first product was the ‘Roadcrafter’, an armored coverall which has been produced, updated and improved continuously for thirty-six years. We’ve never felt the need to restyle it. Depending on how much one rides, and if they sit behind a windshield or fairing, and where they mostly ride, a Roadcrafter can function well for many years. Still, they eventually wear out. Nowadays there are riders on their third or fourth one. Last week one long-time customer emailed to suggest he might have the oldest one still in regular use. I replied: I don’t know if you are the longest continuously wearing Aerostich gear wearer or not, but it’s an interesting question. Maybe this would make a nice online contest? There already is a similar contest at our Very Boring Rally. Held every five years, one of the most fun events is a contest for the most worn-out and disreputable looking Aerostich suit. There is no shortage of entrants. (The next VBR -- number five -- should happen sometime during the summer of 2023, and we hope you’ll come.) Roadcrafters have always been simply ‘Equipment for Riders’ – a more convenient way to protectively dress to ride a motorcycle. They also unexpectedly became the recipe template for literally all of the world’s modern textile rider’s gear. Armored textile coveralls are likely to remain unconventional for a long time ahead compared to the traditional choices of denim and leathers. A favorite story about this difference happened maybe twenty-five years ago just as Aerostich was starting to become known among touring and commuting riders. I’d ridden with a friend to the old road race event held for a few years through-the-streets of Steamboat Springs Colorado. (The second night it was cold enough to leave a little snow on my tent in the morning, but by noon everything had warmed up nicely.) At some point this fellow introduced me to four other riders he knew, but whom I’d never met. The six of us were standing on a sidewalk in front of a row of small-town shops and I was wearing a somewhat grubby several-year-old one-piece Roadcrafter. My friend said: “This is Andy Goldfine, the owner/founder of Aerostich.”  Without missing a beat one of the four looked directly at me and replied: “If you are the owner of Aerostich, how come your suit looks like crap?” All I could do was smile and say it was well broken-in and comfortable, and I liked it better that way. The Roadcrafter coverall was created to help make motorcycle commuting easier, safer and more comfortable. It’s simply a piece of equipment. Wearing one always has been a little ostracizing. Roadcrafter’s don’t label you as a ‘biker’, ‘adventure motorcyclist’, ‘hip experienced moto-person’ or anything. I’m as sensitive as anyone about this, but because I only want to be able to ride more easily, safely and comfortably, I don’t care. This just isn’t a big deal if one’s priority is to ride more. --- Mr. Subjective, 11-19 PS – Earlier today under dark cloudy skies I rode to a scheduled meeting at the aquarium here. It was pretty cold, maybe 34º. I walked in wearing a black R-3 Stealth suit and holding my gloves and helmet. Another person at the meeting, a bright friendly woman who’s worked with me there for many years, said: “Did you motorcycle in a snowmobile suit?” After thirty-six years, all I could do was smile. PPS – Here is a short essay on ‘The Joy of Wearing Out A Piece of Gear’ which was recently published online by Outside Magazine: https://www.outsideonline.com/2283481/joy-wearing-out-piece-gear. And here is another slightly longer and slightly more philosophic essay about ‘The Life Changing Magic of Making Do’ (about the same thing) from the Globe and Mail website: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-life-changing-magic-of-making-do

A few weeks ago, I drained the fuel tanks and float bowls of my two long-ridden old (BMW) airheads, washed and waxed both, aired up their tires, and then put them away inside the basement, not the garage. Also pulled spark plugs and sprayed oil in the upper cylinders. First time I’ve ever formally ‘put a bike away’. Felt like an embalming. Depressing. Had not ridden either bike this year or last, and no plans to use either during the next few years. An admission I won’t be making time to work on or ride them for a while. So, they now rest next to the washer and dryer. They do look sorta cool there. Boxer engine width made both unexpectedly difficult to get through the doorway into the basement – the ‘naked’ R100 took 20 min of wiggling and the ‘naked’ R80 10 min. First snow is predicted this Friday. Goal: Before winter arrives fill the other three currently ridden bikes tanks with 100% no-alcohol gas and a little gas-stabilizer. They are rarely ridden after streets are winter sanded and salted. And I’ll continue to daily ride and commute via a rusty studded-tire winter bicycle. It’s not the cold or the universal winter grime. It’s more the corrosive damage. The two older bikes with petcocks are ridden a short distance with the fuel valves closed until their float bowels are empty. This takes slightly more than a quarter mile. The goal is to run the carburetor totally out of gas, so the engine dies just as you coast up the driveway. Then into the garage with a little fuel stabilizer in the tank and trickle charger for the battery. Last year the beat-up very old XL250 was chained up and left outside all winter beneath only a lightweight cover and about a hundred inches of accumulated snow. Hate leaving any bike outside this way because the range of the daily freeze-thaw cycle is so large. Minus twenty to plus forty. When April finally comes its petcock is re-opened and after giving the stabilized gasoline a few moments to refill the float bowel last spring it started ‘first kick’. Satisfaction (and a little surprised) that day as I sat there in the sunshine happily listening to its familiar engine sound. The other warm-garaged fuel injected modern bike electric-started fine, too. Best fuel stabilizer? Unknown. My friends and I all use one made for (private-labeled?) outboard boat gas tanks, and widely available at big box outdoor sports and marine/marina stores. The last time I kept a motorcycle inside the living area of a house was 1970. I was sixteen. During the first week after my birthday that year I quietly pushed my first street-licensed bike from the garage into my ground-level basement bedroom every night until my mother noticed and put a stop to it. When I asked my wife about the two old BMW’s now stored in our basement, she replied: “they look neat there…”, center-stranded next to the wall just past the clothes washer and dryer. Marry the right person. Always the sweetest MC ride of the year is on that one late-fall day when the streets have not yet been salted and sanded while more-than-a-few light snowflakes are dancing in the air you are riding through. Still mostly dry pavement. This occurs most – but not every -- year. And when you experience this, it’s magic. Especially at night. – Mr. Subjective, 11-1-19

Getting Started: Notes On One’s First Bike Trip Packing your crap... The first few days of travel and dealing with the straps, soft duffels and bags will teach you if your setup is good for you. The idea is to have things secure, semi-easy to get to, and not too much of a problem to remove or re-load. If it takes twenty minutes every morning to load everything when you are wanting to get going, and twenty minutes at night to unload when you are tired and just want to be done, it can be frustrating. At least one pack should be easily opened at gas stations or on a roadside, without untying everything else. Into this should go rain gloves, a sweater, a wind shirt, a hat, and anything that you might need handy for varying weather conditions. And if you buy an extra banana or water bottle at a gas stop, it’s nice to have enough available space for it there, too. Soft bags and duffels are great, but nothing strapped onto the back of your bike is going to be as easy to deal with as hard pannier bags or boxes in terms of speed and convenience. Conversely, no hard bags are as light, simple and compact (and safe if you crash...) as soft bags and duffels. That’s the compromise. Writing journals... There are two ways I've kept daily logs. If I am carrying a laptop or tablet, I try to type a few notes in the evening or morning. Usually not more than the basics: Day, Date, Miles, Location, Weather and anything interesting I experienced or thought about. Some people like to keep exhaustive and detailed expense records, road and turn notations, bike maintenance records and meteorological information. Not me. If something broke on my bike, I’ll note it, and the circumstances involved in fixing it. If I experienced cold, wet or had headwinds, I’ll note those things. Perfect weather, too. Later I can fill in descriptions of briefly noted occurrences and scenes from memory, if I want to. If I am traveling light, I use a little notebook, always bound on the left side (because I write right-handed), and a grease pencil (for lining printed maps and writing on the tank bag window) or space pen (for everything else). Same things recorded as on the laptop or tablet, but longhand. It’s interesting to note the way one’s handwriting changes during the course of a trip. If it is your first-ever on a motorcycle (or on a new-to-you motorcycle), it will be especially good to capture your feelings and ideas. You can only do anything for the first time once. Years from now you may find yourself looking back, and you'll have some idea of the situations you were in, and what you experienced. Some may be embarrassing, but it will bring back the memories and smiles. The kinds of memories any journal brings back are completely different than the kinds of things a photograph captures. A journal holds what you were thinking, on that day. It helps me to write for some imagined reader: anyone you care about is good. Someone to whom you’d want to share with, and who cares about you, is the best. Keeping lists of things to do, post-trip... The other thing to keep in the trip notes is a record of things about your motorcycle and kit to pay attention to later. For example, list little easily forgotten items like: replace lost ear plug bag file off rough edge by seat bar shorten rear view mirror stem buy toothpaste This sort of a list is best kept separately from the daily notes, located above the daily entries in a file on your computer, or on a separate page of a written journal. A personal perspective on this stuff... I'm just trying to figure these things out the best I can, for myself. I always have a list of things needed on my bike, stuff I'd like to fix, upgrade or otherwise address. My personal Aerostich gear seems to work best after it’s a little more worn out and beat up. I go from one day to the next just messing around, and juggling too many things in not enough time. That’s why it always feels so good to finally be rolling away into the horizon...toward somewhere. Time to think, time to wonder, time to ride. (...And if you are heading out into the back country far from everywhere, don’t forget to take along one of these little trowels and some TP.) Share your tips or memories of your first motorcycle trip in our comments below!

If it can happen, it will (usually)... 1. The farther it is to the next gas stop, the larger the bug that will hit your shield exactly on the sight line. These may help... Cycle Wipes Effective, specially formulated wet wipes for cleaning bugs and grime from visors, shields and bikes. Convenient 12-count re-sealable travel pack stores easily in a pocket or tank bag. The ultra soft, lint-free mesh fabric pre-moistened towelettes are a durable, safe and ammonia free way to wipe helmets, visors and windscreens. They are also perfect for cleaning up your bug blasted headlights and turn signals. Pack of 12 wipes. 2. When you dry out after riding through some rain, it will start raining again just when you begin to feel comfortable. These may help... Aerostich Always-Ready Boot Raincovers Practical and lightweight, these ripstop nylon raincovers self-store in a small, flat pocket that secures via hook and loop to the inside shin area of the R-3, R-3 Light, Classic Roadcrafter, AD1 and Darien Suits and pants. The integrated storage makes them super easy to put on and ensures they are always ready when you need them. 7"×6.5" . M (7–9), L (10–12), XL (13–14). 3. The chance that your bike insurer will find out about that big ticket received in a non-reciprocal state is about 100%. This may help... Radar Detector Remote Visual Alert You’ll never miss this bright 3-LED flash when a signal is detected. Adjustable brightness for day or night conditions. Plugs in to 3.5mm headphone jack on most brands of detectors. Water resistant and compact design can be mounted to any convenient visible location with included straps. 1.25"×.6", 8’ cord. 4. If you run out of gas, no matter which way you decide to push, the closest gas station will always be uphill and in the other direction. Corollary: The likelihood of running out increases when all of the nearby gas stations are closed. This may help... E-Fill Siphon A self-priming fuel transfer system. No matter where you are, this ultra compact system won’t leave you stranded for long. Throw away that length of gnarly old hose and safely siphon fuel from any gas-powered device without getting a mouthful of gas. 5. The chance of your helmet dropping hard onto the rough concrete or asphalt surface is proportional to its newness and expense. This may help... Helmet/Jacket Lockstrap Great for strapping helmet, jacket and other gear to your bike and ensuring it stays there. Locking carabiner means no keys to worry about. Full length steel braided cable runs through strap for added security. 2' long. Sold individually. 6. You only realize the bike's keys are in your pants pocket after you've put on all of your riding gear. It's a good thing Aerostich suits have... Flap covered hip-side zippers Access your keys, wallet, chapstick, etc, through one of the hip-side zippers integrated into all our main riding gear. 7. The more riders around, the more likely you will: Forget the kill switch is in the off position while trying to start your bike; Ride off with the sidestand down; Ride off with the petcock closed; Ride along for miles with the turn signal on; Get stung by a bee and do a roadside crazy dance shedding your riding gear. These may help... BeeSting Ampules After doing said crazy dance, apply one of these disposable swabs. They contain enough Benzocaine to immediately relieve the searing pain so you can ride onward enjoying the rest of the day. 8. Your battery will die at the exact same time something else on the bike breaks and you will think they are related. This may help... Compact Digital Voltmeter Know the health of your bikes charging system in real-time with this compact, waterproof, digital voltmeter. Reads tenths of a volt (12.6, 12.7, 12.8, etc) and is easy to install. Compact, easy to read, waterproof, vibration proof and dust proof. 9. Your first successful multi-gear wheelie will be past a heretofore unobserved police officer who dislikes motorcycles. See #3 above... 10. A bad day of riding is better than a good day at work. This may help... You Are Traffic T-Shirt If you are not moving, get a motorcycle and break free. Make your commute better. Make your day better. Make your world better. Make a statement and ride there. Rain. Shine. Hot. Cold. It's all better. Made in USA. 100% Cotton. M-XXL. White. Share your "Murphy's Laws" moments or stories in the comments below!