Can I Get By With Only a Motorcycle?

Grapefruit have become a favorite breakfast item for me lately, and the best grapefruit I've found thus far in my local area is the Pala-Rey fruitstand in Pala, CA.

So I put the trunk on my ST and rode down there yesterday.

As I placed the grapefruit in the trunk I wondered if I could do all my shopping this way. Could I just fit everything into my trunk and saddlebags and get everything I need?

No. The day before I bought a 12 foot long pruning saw; I have queen palms in the backyard that have grown quite tall. No way I could carry that on my ST. That's why I have a pickup truck.

Which raises a question...

"Why do I have queen palms?"

Well because they look nice in my backyard.

"Why do I need a nice looking backyard?"

And if you were to continue that line of questioning down, you get to the question of why we have so many things in our lives. The more stuff we have, the more stuff we have to maintain, which eventually requires having to buy a pickup truck, or SUV, or whatever floats your boat.

And then I have to maintain insurance on the pickup truck, registration, and then the costs for maintaining the truck. The madness just compounds itself.

If I simply rented an apartment, how much more simpler would my life be? At that point, could I just get by with a motorcycle? Well, probably.


In college a motorcycle was all I had, and I got by for three years. I actually didn't buy groceries, I always did fast food or an occasional restaurant, and then of course weekends visiting my mom for dinner.

But what happened is that I got tired of getting rained on and tired of the bitter cold morning commutes. That's why I bought my first pickup truck. And once I bought the pickup truck, I just stopped riding the motorcycle altogether. And then the path towards luxuries and buying junk ballooned from there.

Before too long, I needed a bigger place to house all my stuff. And now that I have this bigger house, I have to spend more time and money maintaining it.

The more stuff you own, the more it anchors you down.

I like being able to hop on my motorcycle and ride for very long distances at anytime I feel like it. I want to migrate myself towards that position.

I look around my home office and I see so much stuff, 90% of which I hardly ever touch. Why did I buy all this shit? I can't help but wonder had I not bought all the things I hardly ever use, I could have had the second-mortgage paid off by now.

And if I had the second-mortgage paid off, my income requirements would be lower, thus putting me in better position to ride away.

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Are We Safer With More Rules?

One man's chaos is simply another man's grace. The rules of the road were written to ensure that we can travel along the highways in an orderly fashion.

Some of these rules we just take for granted. I mean, whoever actually thinks about driving along the right hand side of the road (or left hand if you're in Britain)? It's just something that you do without thinking.

If a pedestrian is walking across the street, do you actually take the time to think if you or he has the right of way? At least in the USA, you always give the pedestrian plenty of space and just stop until he's passed by. You don't really think about it.

So, watch this video of traffic in Vietnam...



Vietnam is obviously a different society, one that seems to have fewer rules along the roadways, despite what we see as a hardline totalitarian regime. What appears to be a very chaotic intersection is probably something graceful to them.

Vietnamese riders obviously have to have a wide field of vision, and a deep field of vision as well, in order to navigate through that. It shows that when humans are faced with chaos, they learn to become more vigilant, and diligent.

In the United States, we expect drivers to stay on their side of the road. We expect drivers to stop at a stop light. We expect drivers to yield to pedestrians. Our system demands that we place a lot of trust in each other, in order for things to work smoothly.

I'm sure traffic accidents still happen in Vietnam, just as they still happen here in the USA. But considering Vietnam has so many more motorcyclists, I'm betting the number of accidents per miles traveled is far fewer than in the USA.

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The Real Freedom in Riding a Motorcycle

Freedom is a big word. We express it everyday, and here specifically in the United States, we mention the word a lot.

Motorcyclists use the word "freedom" to describe the feeling they get when they ride, associating it with the open road, the wind in their hair, escaping into the grandeur of the mountains and canyons.

Freedom is of course relative to another man's freedom. Where I might consider myself free, another man claims I'm limited and bound. It's dependent on natural conditions like stopping a ride to answer the call of Nature. There are social conditions as well; if my thoughts and opinions were influenced by the society I grew up in, am I truly making choices all my own?

As I sit here this morning trying to decide on where I plan to ride my motorcycle, I can choose from a wide variety of roads to take. But as banal as it seems, I can only choose the roads I know about. The roads I know about are those I've ridden before, or that which I can see on a map.

And that bring us to the ultimate expression of freedom: motivation.

If I wasn't motivated to investigate all the roads around Southern California, and if I wasn't motivated to study a map, then I would have limited myself to just the handful of roads I know of in my immediate area. That limits my freedom.

When we elect presidents, we start out feeling hopeful that we made the right choice, and then a year later feel disappointed. How many of us were motivated to learn enough about a candidate to know the consequences of electing that person?

Not knowing the consequences of our actions and inactions is perhaps the opposite of freedom. Apathy is when you're satisfied to remain bound.

Here in California, I can choose to ride a motorcycle without a helmet even though there is a law requiring me to wear one. I can ride well above the speed limit, and make my exhaust pipes as loud as I want. But all of that comes at the risk of punishment. Yet within the confines of the law, it is still within my abilities to do them if I feel so motivated.

Dissidents in China are perhaps some of the freest people on Earth, choosing to stand up to their government despite the risk of imprisonment or death, doing and saying what they please to the point of mockery.

True freedom is not just being without constraints, but being motivated to shed those constraints despite the risks.

You might feel free riding your motorcycle, but what is more free, riding a motorcycle when your wife said it was OK, or riding a motorcycle when she said it was not OK?

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