Read the next sentence channeling “the Most Interesting Man in The World” from the old TV commercials for Dos Equis beer: “I don’t always read in the bathroom, but when I do, I read from a book, not a screen.” No idea if that guy ever sold much beer, but what a loveable old narcissist. (“Stay healthy my friends...” is what he’d say if he’d been talking about reading in the bathroom.) For most people there’s only a minute or two (?) available for such reading, but this still is a predictable enough time span to benefit from keeping something to read there. I like having just a single bookmarked book. Not a library or a pile of magazines or catalogs. And my smartphone only goes with me into the bathroom if it was forgotten inside a pant or shirt pocket. I don’t want any kind interruption. The reason one is in there is already a bit stressful, at least subliminally, so more potential stress is the last thing anyone needs while taking care of themselves in a bathroom. Magazines or catalogs are popular in bathrooms because those types of stories and descriptions are generally brief and there's never a plot to remember, but I still prefer a bookmarked book. Books take many months to read this way, which is why choosing the right book and using a bookmark is important. The last book I read this way was ’Stalking the Wild Asparagus’ by Euell Gibbons. It probably took me over a year, though I didn’t actually keep track. It’s an old-fashioned guide to foraging and preparing natural and wild-found foods like Dandelions and Mushrooms, so there’s no plot to remember from one day to the next. Again, you just need a bookmark. Bookmarks are the key to reading books in the bathroom. A pen or pencil clipped to the cover can also be useful for marking a passage or making marginal notations if you are so inclined. My current bathroom read is a book called ‘Across America By Motor-cycle’ which is a nice memoir by some British guy about his solo unsupported and unsponsored 1918 coast-to-coast ride. We sell it. He’s traveling westward and has just reached Flagstaff Arizona, which means it will still be a while before I finish. I doubt I could have read either of these books normally, a chapter or two before bed or whatever. But taken in very small sections of only a few paragraphs or pages these books read just fine. And like all the printed books ever made, they are guaranteed to never ring, chime or buzz unexpectedly. -- Mr. Subjective, 1/2021

This is a short essay about what the Apple company might be planning for their Next Big Thing. First, please note I am not an Apple 'fan-boy’ and have not spent even one second doing any actual research on this, so what follows is mostly made-up storytelling. I was recently daydreaming (thanks pandemic!) when a bunch of ideas came into my imagination sort of all-at-once and suddenly I thought I might somehow be able to guess what this new Apple car might be like, why it would be good for motorcycling and about when it might be introduced. Maybe sometime in 2022. The background for this fantasy starts with how it is semi-generally known that for the second time in the last decade Apple is working on creating a car. Based on their history it would need to be revolutionary. Projecting forward from that, here are five background pieces: Apple historically likes to mashup existing technologies to create entirely new kinds of consumer products. Co-founder Steve Jobs was an intuitive genius at this, and his goal was to create spectacular new things. This still is a core part of the company culture, and at the moment Apple has huge money available for developing complex new things. Creating an all-new kind of car would certainly be that. A few years ago (five?), Apple spent a lot of time and money researching and developing an Apple car then suddenly shut the entire program down. The impulse to make cars has been within the company for some time. The first time around maybe they didn’t quite fathom the kind of mashup needed, or they felt the timing was wrong, but for a bunch of reasons maybe now they believe they do know. It feels to me like this might be the right time. Timing is everything. The incredible success of Tesla has completely and unequivocally validated consumer acceptance of, and interest in, revolutionary kinds of electric cars. Three wheeled road vehicles have never been widely popular and thus have never been as intensely regulated as four wheeled vehicles (safety, emissions, everything), but Polaris and a few others have taken advantage of this quasi-loophole by successfully producing a variety of recreational road-legal three wheelers. Apple has long enjoyed strong IP, industrial, political and manufacturing trade relationships in China, and China has a great political and economic interest in dominating the world’s technological future. The result of the above (and other items not listed) is that Apple may fairly soon enter American and world car markets with a very advanced electric powered three-wheeled car mostly made in China. This all-new vehicle should be just as sophisticated, fast, comfortable, fully self-driving and ‘cool' as a Tesla but in some intentional ways it should also be even more revolutionary. It could be slightly less costly, though not a lot, because its content, innovation and feature levels would be substantial. It should probably seat four, have about a 200-mile range and a top speed of around 100 miles per hour. The CEO of Apple today is one of the world’s best logistics people. Co-ordinating the near-instant roll-out of an all-new type of car would be a perfect make-a-dent-in-the-universe assignment for such a logistical genius. Right now through some shell company having no obvious association with Apple they may already be quietly buying and leasing locations for a bunch of wholly Apple-owned car stores, and also to support all the recharging infrastructure which would be needed. Apple’s three-wheel cars would need to look and work a lot better than all prior three-wheel cars. The full Apple-Bauhaus design ethos would be applied, so much so the first examples appearing in teaser marketing would be odds-on favorites to be painted (and molded) in white. And even though crash-testing is not required for three wheelers, these cars should be fully air bagged. Some impressive videos of how well the vehicle performs in crashes should be available, for anyone curious enough dig a little. What does any of this have to do with Aerostich and motorcycles? Only one thing, but it’s a ginormously huge thing: Any three wheeled Apple car probably would be engineered to lean into corners. It would ride on three regular profile car tires which would always stay more-or-less perpendicular to the road, but it would also contain a Segway-like balance chip connected to an instantly adjustable suspension which would automatically tilt the body and its ‘skateboard’ chassis far enough during cornering so everyone riding inside would feel safe and comfortable. Maybe as much as fifteen or twenty degrees if one was really hurrying. Imagine witnessing an Apple car weaving through traffic and taking corners by leaning just like a slaloming skier or motorcycle rider. That’s the key. Almost everyone seeing this from their conventional vehicle should want to experience the feel of that ride. Thus, it’s easy to project Apple’s pioneering corner-leaners instantly becoming a cult-curiosity and then fairly quickly transitioning into an “I want one of those” thing. Mainstreaming should soon follow. These fully autonomous-driving electric three wheeled leaners would inferentially and by example teach almost everyone to accept (and possibly enjoy) a fundamental reason why we love our inherently unstable motorcycles and bicycles. Apple’s revolutionary leaning three wheeled cars, if they happen, and if they’re as successful as many other recent Apple products, would help normalize leaning into turns, and this (normalization, finally!) should lead to even more motorcycle and bicycle riders. I wonder if Jay Leno will have the opportunity to purchase the first one. Ok, now I’m done. Thoughts welcome. PS – Important analogy: 3.2 beer is very nice, but most beer drinkers prefer the full-strength stuff. I’d probably be among those who would want to own a snazzy Apple self-driving electric ‘leaner’, but no matter how cool that ride (and everything else about it) might be, I know I’ll continue to prefer leaning into corners full-strength. By riding there. PPS – This was typed on an Apple MacBook Air. Mr. Subjective, 1-15-21

All is well here. Nothing unusual or good or bad to report. Mostly staying home awaiting the vaccine. Aerostich open and generally solvent. We are making good incremental progress on past debts and correcting past mistakes. Yesterday our bank let us know our PPP loan was forgiven, which is a pretty big deal for us. Next is applying for a second round PPP loan which we qualify for. Wife is fine. Family members all fine. Co-workers all fine. New Years and Xmas stuff fine. Have ridden my old 75 XL250 on the bay twice so far. Its 25-year-old studded Trellborg tires and tubes are ancient, but they still hold air. Have not had these winter wheels back on this bike for many years but it’s been a goal to get it going on them again ever since moving to this location three years ago. Now waiting for a blizzard so I can go out and play around in traffic a little. Note: During blizzards there actually is zero traffic, which is why it’s fun to hoon around on the street during them. Probably will never put the summer tire wheels back on it again. The bay ice is now between 8” and 11” thick in most places, and is covered with 2”-5” of crusty snow. About 14” minimum is needed to be considered safe for cars and trucks. Lots of ice fisherman out there now anyway. Maybe 50 every day. A couple have ATV’s to help them drag their tents and gear out, but most just walk a block or two pulling the plastic sled-tubs behind. They strike their tents every night, come in, and do it all again the following day. Fishing is mostly walleye moving into the bay from the lake, heading upriver so they are pre-positioned for spring spawning. Keepers by law must be 15” or longer and the catching is pretty good, I guess. Walleye are a tasty eating species. A few Sturgeons and Northern are biting too, but they are not sought after. Not planning to invest in the equipment even though this place is perfectly located for convenient ice fishing. My wife does not like eating fish or even the smell of fish cooking, otherwise I would be tempted. But I probably wouldn’t invest in the pop-up ice tent, just a hole auger (electric) and some tip ups. Simply walk out there in the morning and put a few lines down and then come back in and watch for the flags through a binocular from the comfort of our living room. It would be perfect. And so easy. Also just put studded tires on my old fat bike about two weeks ago for the first time ever and have had that out on the ice too. Works OK but not nearly as much fun as riding the old Honda. Not even close. Very slow huffing and puffing pedaling it through the crunchy snow layer. (Wife took photos of me riding the old XL and put them up on the Aerostich Instagram a few days ago if you want to see.) Last night coming back from Aerostich I got a flat on my studded-tire electric bicycle, which is now on its third winter with just over 2,000 miles of use. It’s starting to develop a nice worn-beater patina. This wasn’t a fancy high-end model to begin with so no regrets. Only 36v with an older Bfang electric motor in the frame but still good for 23mph across level ground with light effort. It’s crappy rechargeable battery pack now much diminished from when new. Range on a cold day is down to less than ten miles, so it will soon need to be rebuilt or replaced. My one-way commute is about 4.5 miles, so we’re getting close. The battery pack is made like all of them -- a bunch of individual cells tack-welded together then encased. The cost and quality of these sub-cells varies greatly, up to 90%, depending partly on country of cell origin and brand. Not a do-it-yourself job to fix this. Haven’t decided what to do yet. Walked the bike home the last mile and a half at around 8PM and 22 degrees, which is warm for this time of year here. This morning I took the tire off and found the leak was caused by a ½” sliver of steel which maybe was a snowplow shaving. That’s what it looked like. Also discovered this will be the fourth patch on this inner tube. It’s probably been a year and a half since the last one, which is so long I don’t remember exactly when or any other details. I knew I’d previously patched it, but not how long ago or how many times. So, there’s nothing spectacular going on here, just day-to-day life, which, in the broader stressful societal/economic/political/governmental/climactic context is pretty darn good right now, I think. So much to be grateful for. Sick of wearing a mask when going out for work, groceries and everything else, but other than that I could get used to winter pandemic-living pretty easily. Plenty of time for reading, household and workshop projects, etc, and also riding (and pedaling) around on studded tires. -- Mr. Subjective, January 8, 2021

Here’s an excerpt from an emotional essay about the recent ending of some good special interest outdoor magazines. Not the print motorcycle titles we all knew and have recently lost, but almost the exact same scenario: “...And what’s left is too often shit. I don’t mean Bike, Powder, Snowboarder, or Surfer, I mean junk shows like Men’s Journal. Is this really what you want from your outdoor media—a firehose of pandering, listicles, lowest-common denominator pap, and nakedly commercial gear roundups designed to get you to click on affiliate links? Magazines like Men’s Journal exist only to enrich their CEOs and shareholders; rather than enrich the culture they purport to serve; they treat it as a commodity from which to scrape their profits.” He’s a better writer than I. Here’s the entire wonderful essay. My sadness is not only for the decline of specialty magazines as viable businesses, including most of the popular motorcycle titles which I grew up enjoying*, but with the broader decline of print in all its forms: daily newspapers, monthly magazines and books. The main reason I am concerned about this has to do with the disappearance of useful contexts, which for me has always been of value. Search algorithms provide a lot of information incredibly conveniently, but almost no useful context. This narrow perfection is precisely what makes them so great, though at the same time something is lost. When you hold a physical magazine, newspaper or book, even a so-so one, the words you are directly reading moment-by-moment are surrounded by other elements which have little to do with whatever is being conveyed by the words your attention is directed at decoding. The physical proximity of all the other stories and advertisements in that newspaper or magazine, and of all the other pages of any book, are inseparable. This makes it obvious that whatever you are focusing directly on is only a small part of something larger and broader. Search algorithms give you (for example) fantastic information about every kind of pencil eraser in .2 seconds, but usually provide little else. In contrast, any printed office or school supply catalog (even a lousy one) probably presented their range of pencil erasers within a broader context. This inferentially taught the reader something important about pencil erasers: How they fit within the world of schools or offices. The very best online webzines and media websites do this, but imperfectly. The search algorithms we use countless times a week (everyday) do it barely at all. When I was a kid hiding motorcycle magazines between the pages of oversize social studies and civics textbooks during 7th grade study hall periods I learned a lot more about motorcycling than just the focus of my immediate interest at that time: small displacement street-legal dirt bikes. By providing inescapable tangential context, print motorcycle magazines did a lot more for me -- and for tens of thousands of other young riders -- than any search algorithm today ever can. Those print magazines helped me begin to identify myself as a motorcyclist, as someone apart from the mainstream. I was becoming something more than another kid wanting to move from a bicycle to a street legal dirt bike. This same is effect is at work in realms covered by the newspapers, non-motorcycle magazines and all the printed books I grew up reading. Until recently almost everything one read came with physical context, and even if I wasn’t paying conscious attention to it, I always absorbed something important from its presence. You cannot watch a pretty sunset and be in awe of it without the inescapable context provided by an unmoving horizon. Physical context is important. Context is difficult to achieve on a screen when scrolling and searching. It’s more like looking at whatever the specific subject is through a telescope, but backwards. You get a kind of tunnel-vision view of everything. The philosopher Marshall McLuhan once (famously) wrote: “The medium is the message.” and I sure believe this is true. Communications technology itself can be as impactful on meaning as whatever information is objectively presented. Digital is not categorically better or worse than print though. They are essentially complementary. This essay would be incomplete if I didn’t mention two other (maybe obvious?) things about physical print: 1.) Print can be durable and energy-efficient if the ink and paper are engineered to be long-term stable. Acid-free parchment, etc. One can easily read five-hundred-year-old bound bibles, and many of those recovered scrolls which are ten times as ancient. There are text files in my computer which are completely unreadable by any kind of easily obtainable software after only twenty-five years. 2.) Anyone who asserts that using physical trees and inks places a heavier overall environmental load on our planet than does the ultra-precise processing and management of elements and electrons is full of baloney. We humans are generally comfort-seekers who don’t (or won’t) change our thinking or behavior unless there is a gun directly at our heads. But when this does happen, we are also extremely good at thinking clearly and working together. So maybe at some future time print may come back. In my view this would probably benefit the planet and our still-evolving human social contract. Regardless, we should not throw our search algorithms under the bus in some kind of either-or formulation. Search algorithms and print are, at the end of the day (and again) complementary. *Two personal stories about print magazines: Once on jury duty I was selected to be a juror. The attorneys involved asked each potential juror questions to discern any hidden bias which would be unfavorable to their trial goal. I was asked what magazines I read regularly and started reciting the titles. After I was finished, I was rejected as a juror possibly because I’d admitted to reading too many magazines. Once, during a big snowstorm that occurred here years before the internet existed, I was driving around late at night and it seemed like there was a chance everyone could be snowed in the following day so I stopped at a C store to pick up some magazines just in case. (This was also before cable TV…) After browsing the rack, I laid a thick stack on the counter and as the clerk started totaling them, he started talking: “Oh, Road & Track. I read that.” And then “Oh, Dirt Bike. I read that.” He continued this way, magazine after magazine, and seemed rather smug about it. A few moments later they were all bagged and paid for and there wasn’t anything to say so I thanked him, picked up the bag and headed for my car. The little store was empty except for the two of us. Halfway out the door and standing there with snow blowing in, I looked back over my shoulder and said with a smile: “I think I read more magazines than anyone I know, but I don’t know very many people because I read so many magazines.”. Then the I stepped outside smiling from ear to ear as I got into my car. That moment was: A) the most perfect spontaneous circumlocution I’d spoken, ever, and B) 100% True. Print magazines are great. Especially motorcycle magazines. – Mr. Subjective, 10-2020

(Wish You Were Here) By Guest Blogger Rand Rasmussen It is perfectly okay to not love the prairie. But anyone who thinks there is nothing to see there, simply does not know how (or where) to look. This is a minute-by-minute recounting of an evening’s ride I took in 2015 on my 250,000-mile, 1983 R-65. I ride west on I-94 into a blinding late-summer evening sun. Even with my sun visor down the sun bores mercilessly into my eyes--dimming the road ahead. I ride along, shading my eyes with my left hand as my right hand manages the throttle. It is cool for August in North Dakota–perhaps 65 or so degrees. But then, there are always one or two of these early, cool days each August as though autumn feels compelled to remind me that its time is soon coming. I have on my electric jacket liner and my gloves. Neither are heating at this point, but both will be before I get home. Only minutes ago, I was in the Fargo/Moorhead/Dilworth/West Fargo 'metroplex'. With a population of 250,000, it is the biggest metro area in or near North Dakota, but the FM area, as it is commonly known, is too small to have the seemingly endless suburbs which ring larger cities. Thus, getting out of town–in any direction–takes minutes alone. I hop off the freeway at the first rural exit which is fewer than 10 miles out from downtown Fargo then take the bridge back over the freeway and turn right onto the paved frontage road which parallels the south side of eastbound I-94, poking along at 55 to 60. Frontage roads are made for slower speeds, not for blazing along like fighter jet. Just an hour ago I was in a psychologist's office taking a psychological exam required by a position to which I was applying. Now, out here, the toughest decision I have to make is whether or not to turn on my heated jacket-liner and gloves. I come to an intersection and turn south toward Durbin; now a literal ghost town, but years ago it was the hometown of my next-door neighbor Lee. South is a welcome direction to be riding at 7:30 on a sunny evening. This is an old, rough, county road with patched pavement and deep grooves worn into the lanes–and I love it for exactly those things. My shadow is projected on the front rows of a very healthy-looking cornfield. Except for some severe weather, this has been an ideal growing season in North Dakota with virtually every crop projected to bump. I can see Durbin, or what's left of it anyway, from more than five miles out. Distance on the prairie is a different commodity than it is elsewhere. (I remember once driving a visitor, who was from Upstate New York, from Fargo to Crookston, Minnesota. On one stretch I pointed out a small white church in the distance ahead. I asked how far away he thought it was. "Oh, man," he said, studying the distance. "That's gotta be two or three miles." "Six," I told him. He just shook his head and chuckled. "I can't get used to these distances.") I turn left and swing through Durbin and do not see another person nor anything to suggest that a single soul remains here, save for a homemade sign in a yard that reads, "No Trespassing: If you can read this you are in range!" I briefly contemplate whether they would ever find my body out here. Of the four directions out of Durbin, three are gravel. The only exception is north–the direction from which I came. I am not inclined to retrace my steps just to avoid a little gravel, so I head west on an unidentified gravel road. In dry weather, most gravel roads in North Dakota are a rider's dream, even on a road bike. There are almost always two hard-packed tracks which allow a rider to travel at pretty much whatever speed he or she chooses. Good thing, too, because riding into the blinding sun again would be a risky thing indeed in deep gravel or sand. Right at a nice, neat farmstead with a traditional white farmhouse and a barn with a new red metal roof, and the road eases to the south then back to the west again. On a small wood-plank bridge, I cross over an unmarked creek about eight feet wide and maybe two feet deep. Along its banks are thick stands of cattails and rushes. In a wet year, like this one, the prairie is veined with little creeks just like this one. I approach State Highway 18 with mixed emotions. The pavement will be easier on which to ride, certainly, and I will again be riding perpendicular to the sun which is a relief of sorts. Unfortunately, the likelihood of making a new discovery, of seeing something I have never seen before drops significantly on more traveled roads. I turn south on 18 and wind my way back up through the gears. I raise the internal sun visor in my helmet and relish the optical sensation of looking through one less layer of plastic. The fields alternate between cropland and pastureland covered with herds of healthy-looking cattle of all colors and breeds, grazing contentedly. Lots of corn and lots of alfalfa. Many of the farms still have traditional windmills, some still working and some not. I love the way they look against the evening sky. Out here, the world has a scent of its own. It smells of earth and newly mown green things and of nothing human-made. It looks different too. The sky dominates the entire view. In his classic work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig compares the prairie sky to a giant, inverted bowl; it is a commonly used simile. I understand the comparison, but personally it has never worked for me. Something about the bowl analogy suggests limits to me, while the deep blue sky out here is beyond limitation. Put any kind of a frame around it, metaphoric or actual, and it disappears completely. The sun has begun its slow, diagonal fall toward the western horizon. Riding south, it is hitting me from the right rear. The deep, deep blue color of the day is changing to the blue-green sky of the coming dusk. Wispy clouds are lighted orange to complete the sky. When I ride on North Dakota prairie evenings I know why the Miami Dolphins chose the colors they did for their uniforms. My motor hums quietly between my feet. The ever-cooling breeze seeps into my helmet. The dashed yellow centerline flickers rhythmically beneath my left elbow. All of my senses seem to be heightened and relaxation is complete. I feel as though I want this ride to go on forever. At Highway 46, 18 jags east for five miles before returning to its southern trajectory. A small, white country church sits at this corner. Ahead, I can see hills and lots of green breaking-up the vanishing-point horizon. On the prairie that means water. I slow down to read a road sign indicating that the Barrie Congregational Church lies just a half-mile down a gravel road to my left. A 100-year-old church is plenty reason for a detour, so I turn left toward a thick copse of trees. The gravel is in good shape–dry and hard-packed. The road hooks sharply right past a little secluded farmstead replete with horses grazing peaceably on a small, tree-enclosed pasture. In only another second or two, I come across the smallish white church on the right side of the road. I can't tell if it is still active or not. On the one hand, there is no sign out front indicating a pastor's name or scheduled events. On the other hand, the building does not look abandoned; it is in far too good shape for that. Just across the gravel road, on my immediate left, I can see the Sheyenne River down through the trees; altogether a quite pleasant setting. I continue south on the remote gravel road for a hundred meters or so as the sky ahead appears to lighten. The road turns sharply left again…and suddenly, unexpectedly, there is open sky. I find myself at a rusty girder bridge, perhaps 15 meters long and maybe 5 meters wide, over the Sheyenne River. I stop for a moment and sit there on the quietly idling machine and take it all in. Given the style and the materials used, the bridge is clearly decades and decades old; maybe a WPA (Works Progress Administration) project from the 30s--perhaps even older than that. Maybe it was constructed at the same time as was the church--a hundred or more years ago. I ease out the clutch and move quietly out onto the bridge deck, feeling the ancient, gnarled and split 3 x 12s moving and creaking beneath me. I shut off my engine and am immediately rewarded by the symphony of tings and ticks and dings a BMW air-cooled motor makes when it is shut off in cool air. There are no other sounds save for the barely audible lapping sound of the north-flowing Sheyenne moving past the bridge pilings which I can see through the spaces between the deck boards. I dismount and walk the bike in a left-bearing half-circle so it will be correctly oriented for when I leave, and I deploy the sidestand. I walk over to the rail. The river is maybe ten meters down, plodding northward on its ponderous journey at three or four mph. The Sheyenne River in eastern North Dakota, is not one of your "Coors, clear flowing mountain streams." Like most rivers in this part of the state, it is a silty brown color; but at least the color derives from suspended solids and not from industrial pollution. Still, there is a certain beauty in any river or creek wandering peacefully alone through the woods, the color of the water notwithstanding. I can see in the mud banks near the water the tracks of many different animals from birds to raccoon to deer. Just off to my right I can see what is clearly a beaver, muskrat, or otter slide, going down the steep bank and ending in the water. As I lean on the rusted, dented angle-iron rail, I begin to study the bridge itself. I love girder bridges in general and this one is especially interesting. It is constructed mainly of angle-iron, held together with hot-hammered rivets and square-head bolts and nuts. I suppose those features would allow a bridge historian to narrow down its date of construction. It does no more for me than to confirm its obviously advanced age; indeed, it need do no more. I imagine its builders, decades ago, suspended over this very river in harnesses and bosun's slings driving and flattening those rivets–the very same rivets which I now touch with my fingers–and tightening those old square-head bolts. Touching the bridge connects me viscerally to the past in the pleasantest way. The folk singer, John McCutcheon, calls it "Water from Another Time." I look back at my beloved R-65, leaning over slightly, its side-stand braced against the uneven wood of the bridge deck. It looks particularly at home on this old bridge in this natural setting, as though it were intended by its design engineers to take me to places just like this. Maybe it was. The dark is slowly engulfing the land. It is darker here in these woods than it will be back out on the prairie, but it is still time to move on. Reluctantly, I reapply my ear plugs and helmet. The last thing I do before I fire the motor is to plug back into my heat. I have a feeling I will need it soon. I throw a leg over the saddle, take one final look around, and regretfully turn the key and hit the starter. I trail slowly off the bridge using only the idle of the motor for power. I hang a hard right then a hard left and I leave behind the trees attending the Sheyenne. As I get back to 18, I stop for a moment to memorize the setting. This is a place to which I will want to return–perhaps with my banjo–and I want to make sure I do not lose it. I judge from the remaining light that I will have enough time to turn southward once more until the next east-west blacktop road appears. At that point I will turn left and make for I-29 and the fast burn home. I turn left into Highway 18 south. The trees last for another couple of miles before I climb out of the shallow river valley and back up onto the plains. It feels good to once again be in the open country. Some of the fields are crowded with large, golden, round straw bales made from bailing wheat and oat stems, while others are crowded with large, light-green, round bales of alfalfa for winter cattle feed. I stop at the juncture of County Road 4 and turn on my jacket and gloves for the first time. I turn left on 4 toward Colfax. My attention is immediately drawn to a beautiful giant cottonwood tree in the middle of a field, dark green against the wheat stubble and the skyline. In woodier country, such a tree would probably go unnoticed against a background of other trees, but out here single trees draw one's attention like a beacon. On familiar rides, there are individual trees which have become like friends to me, so familiar have they become. I once asked a family farmer why farmers would leave a tree, which must be plowed around and which takes up valuable crop space, in the middle of a field. "Oh," he said, "I've heard a lot of reasons offered from 'It's a good place to pile rocks' to 'It helps break the wind.' But I think most of us leave the trees just because we like trees and don't want to cut down a healthy one." I sure liked that answer. I get to Colfax and continue-on through town for two more miles to the entrance ramp of I-29. I burn down the acceleration ramp at full throttle, taking each gear almost up to soft redline before I shift and begin my race with the night to see which of us will get to Fargo first. The sun is down now, but there is still light lingering in the western sky. The wispy clouds of earlier have gone from a soft, back-lit orange to blurred watercolor brush strokes of dark grey as I bear due north at 85mph. I turn my electrics up a little bit. In deep dusk, I come to 52nd Avenue, which sort of demarks the southern end of the FM metro. I drop my speed to 60. A couple of miles later, I pass 32nd Avenue which used to demark the southern end of the metro. Next up is the I-94/I-29 interchange known as "the tri-level." In another three miles, I exit right on 19th Avenue. As I pass Hector International Airport, I am rewarded with a jet passing a few dozen meters directly over my head on its final landing approach. Ten seconds later I see the puff of smoke as the tires spool up to speed on the runway. A couple of traffic lights and stop signs later I pull into my own yard. I have traveled 112 miles tonight. It has been an evening of peacemaking with myself; of releasing tensions, discovering new places, and wringing one more bit of pleasure out of my riding season. How was your evening?

This is such a common back-to-school English-class homework assignment it became a cliché. So here is my little pandemic-summer story. This past weekend I replaced the ignition sensor in my 1994 Honda XR650L and now it runs again. I’ve ridden this bike since new. Over the first three years I gradually converted it from dual-sport configuration to something set up for urban street riding, though after the conversion was done I also rode it to Los Angeles once (in 2001), camping out most of the way because I’d wanted to experience ‘traveling light’, which at the time was more uncommon than it is today. No saddlebags, just two size ‘M’ Ortlieb waterproof duffels strapped across the back: one with a tent and sleeping bag and the other with clothing, miscellaneous items and a basic food bag: Canned Tuna, canned beans for a campfire, etc. No stove or cooking pot. Vagabonding. The modifications included a lowered suspension at both ends, wide 17” wheels with stickier tires, a larger gas tank, a throttle lock and a bunch of other lesser personalizations. I’d stopped riding it four or five years ago when one day it mysteriously had no spark and I was too lazy and distracted to diagnose and fix this fault. It just sat over in the corner of the garage with the right handlebar end leaning against the wall. Waiting. I decided to bring it back to life last fall: Carb and brake rebuilds, an oil change, a bright modern LED headlight, and a new fuel petcock and battery. All done by an independent motorcycle repair shop. Over the winter I did a bunch of additional smaller, easier things myself: Cleaning its sticky turn signal switch and throttle, etc. That strange no-spark thing had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come. Everything was working well for a twenty-six-year-old bike. In the spring when I began to ride it again the no-spark thing came back. Fortunately, this time there was a pandemic handy, so I wasn’t distracted by other temptations and immediately put it up on a milk crate and started following the Honda shop manual’s “no-spark troubleshooting” instructions – a sequenced fault diagnosis plan: Bad spark plug, cap and wire? Nope. Bad CDI? Nope. Bad coil? No. Next on their list was the ignition trigger thing which is inconveniently located beneath the right-side engine cover where the clutch lives. It tested bad (via the external wiring to it) on a little VOM so I ordered a new one. Last Saturday morning my ultra-slow amateur-mechanic skills meant three hours for disassembling and carefully cleaning everything and then about the same amount of time on Sunday replacing the failed component and reassembling everything. It had been around ten years since the last time I’d done anything inside an engine. Tune-ups, tire changes, farkeling and general maintenance doesn’t count. After putting everything back together there were no extra parts left over and the bike started right up, so I was happy. This job had involved the mess of an oil pan beneath the engine and a long time spent tediously scraping away the old hardened gasket material, which came off in little flakes and scraps. As I worked around the sealing edge of the case with several scraping tools, I imagined a dental hygienist removing stubborn calculus from all of the little spaces between a non-flossing person’s teeth. This task seemed about that fiddly. Except one’s bi-annual tooth cleaning goes quickly – you’re done in less than half an hour. After electric cars and bikes eventually become common, those who grew up with electrics will find it difficult to believe people not only put up with, but actually enjoyed dealing with the dirty, messy and burdensome complexities of normal combustion engine repair and maintenance. It will seem to them like we suffered the crudest rinky-dink, unreliable, antediluvian, primitive engines to serve our necessary automobility needs. When you use any newer car or ride some of the recent luxe touring bikes now, the fundamental Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang nonsense is almost entirely camouflaged beneath multiple layers of NVH-eliminating (Noise Vibration Harshness) engineering -- but it’s all still there, all the filth, fire, drama and precision-managed explosions so many motorcyclists love. Including me, at least most of the time. Future riders will say you are “Doin' it old school” as they smile, admire and slightly condescendingly regard your surviving ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) machine. In summary, the pandemic has meant almost no longer-distance motorcycle traveling anywhere and lots of house, yard, domestic and garage projects, plus electric and regular bicycle transportation-pedaling for the majority of my riding. For the first time in thirty years I didn’t ‘go’ anywhere. I guess it’s nice to be more caught up on all the previously procrastinated projects, but it is even nicer to be moving along an empty road somewhere, listening to the wind and feeling the vibrations of riding. So please come soon, summer of 2021. How did you spend your summer this year? Took far longer than anticipated to get this old XR650L running right again: 2019, Sept 20, bike given to independent MC service technician for oil change, carb and brake rebuilds, no-spark issue, etc. 2019, Oct 17, 18, bike serviced and running again, rode to work two or three times before it got too cold for it to start reliably. (Not a good cold-starter below about 35ºf.) 2020, January-April did a bunch of fiddly ‘winter’ maintenance, turn signal and throttle clean and lube, etc. 2020, May-June rode bike to work two or three times before no spark problem occurs again. 2020, July, ordered replacement CDI, Coil, Trigger. 2020, Aug 29-30, tested and replaced all three items, but it was the trigger that was bad. 2020, Sept 3rd, finally started motorcycle (not bicycle) riding to work again. Fun.

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.

By Guest Blogger Margie Siegal It's blazingly hot on the road. I pull into a rest stop, enter the ladies room, strip down to my sport bra and rinse my cotton T shirt out in the sink. The other women in the room either smile at me or are involved in their own pursuits. The T shirt goes back on over the sport bra and the Aerostich goes over the T shirt, with all the vents opened. One woman starts asking me how I stay cool on such a hot day with all the protective gear on. I explain that air goes through the vents and evaporates the water in the T-shirt producing a form of air conditioning. She comments, “I knew you were an OK person because you were so into safety.” Girls have pounded into them very early on that it is vitally important to look good, no matter what the occasion. When the girl grows up and decides to ride a motorcycle, this training can get in the way of picking appropriate gear. “Looking good” has very little to do with comfort or safety. Designers of women-specific motorcycle gear go through contortions trying to make bike wear both fashion forwards and appropriate for the rigors of motorcycle riding. Most of the time, the perceived requirement to have the gear be fashionable trumps waterproofness, appropriate padding, storage capacity and abrasion resistance. Then there is the Aerostich – which doesn't even try to be fashionable or trendy. The sheer utilitarian -ness of the garment bothers some people. You might even call it anti-fashion. Once I let go of the need to look good in the fashion of the moment, I found an Aerostich to be very useful in many different ways. I do a lot of traveling by myself and the Aerostich serves multiple roles. On the bike, it keeps me warm, dry, and protected from the wind. The reflective tape and bright colors help me be seen by distracted car drivers. Off the bike, it keeps me warm on cold nights. It also serves as an ambassador to non-riders. Suited up, I look like an alien- silver full face helmet, sunglasses, Aerostich, boots. I often play this up. “Take me to your leader.” Non-riders see the alien act as either as cute or amusing. I feel that both reactions are positive: the last thing I need is being seen as a threat. The locals tend to react badly to threats, and there are more of them than me. Like many women, I am concerned about personal safety. Unlike many women, I go out on the road anyway. However, I feel safer looking androgynous and somewhat nerdy in my Aerostich. Other non-riders – like the woman at the rest stop – see the Aerostich as a sign that I am into safety and therefore a person that she can relate to – maybe eccentric, but a human like herself. Many non-riders do not feel that a motorcyclist is someone “normal” people can relate to. To many of these folks, “motorcyclist” equals “Hells Angel.” This is not a good perception if you want to get along, even if only for an evening, in a small town. If you don't think that a significant minority of non-riders think this way, I respectfully disagree with you. A while back, I walked into a small town motel and asked for a room for the night. The clerk (female) asked several times if I was by myself. I thought this was odd, but I was tired and this was the only decent motel in several miles. About a half hour later, I was outside my room checking the oil level and lubing the chain when the clerk turned up, very apologetic. She had thought I was the advance guard for a thundering herd of greasy outlaws!

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.