Like all the best prog bands, I feel that the sometimes there's no avoiding a voyage up one's own arse, no matter how ill-advised said voyage may be. Today's topic came to mind whilst I was surveying an all too familiar sight: my bike sans its bodywork (and as an added bonus, its rear suspension). I started wondering why riding is such an important thing for me. Why I invest so much time and effort into my bike; why, when the vast majority did the driving route and got a boring little hatchback shitbox, I felt the need to learn to ride and have the joys of freezing my nads off in the winter and getting wet when it rains. As well as never having to wait in a traffic jam or be expected to give people lifts places. It's all good.
I can't imagine not being a biker, but I don't know where the impetus came from. Yes, my Dad had bikes and was heavy into them, but it was 8 years after he sold his last one when I bought my first. The bikes he had in my lifetime were very much a comedown from his biking heyday too. He had a CBX550 when I was very young, which I can remember precisely two things about: him replacing the starter motor in the sun on the drive outside the house we lived in then, and being told to "get away from that fucking exhaust!" when I was about to touch said fucking exhaust... for some reason, after he'd just come home and it was still massively hot. The last bike he had I remember even less about: only that the switchgear was fascinating to me, and that the clocks and idiot lights (from the far off future of the 80s) had some sort of sci-fi quality in the mind of my younger self. For reference, the bike was a CX500EC, also known as the 'plastic maggot', owing to the fact that though it was reliable and hardy, it was also "dull and lifeless". The father's words, not mine.
So here I am a bit nonplussed. One of the biggest parts of my life, my hobby, my passion, my transport, a huge sink of my time and money; something that often informs how I dress, act and how I look at the world; a huge part of the rich tapestry that is Jon ( XD ) and I have no idea what made me do it. But maybe, I'm over-complicating this by trying to look for a key underlying cause. Maybe its what's left of the historian in me trying to trace the events backwards in order to divine a chain of causality which led me from there to here. It could just be that I wanted to. Yeah, that seems about right. I became a biker because I wanted to.
So I became I biker because I wanted to, and if I want to do something then (within reason) I do it. So that answers that, but the question remains, why is it so important to me? Well, I think I may have answered that on the way here. Bikes and riding things that massively inform many aspects of my life. I also owe almost all of my practical knowledge to my bikes. Working on them, more than anything has given me not only the knowledge needed to embark on mechanical and electronic tasks, but also the practical mindset which colours how I approach not only tasks, but the world as a whole. How can something that has added so much to my life be anything other than important? That's not to say that its taken over, the sheer amount of stuff I've written about games and models and films is testament to that. Nevertheless, biking's importance in my life is a direct consequence of the huge part it plays in it.
Moreover... bikes are fun and go fast and make a lot of noise and I love them!
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