One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure

I-15 northbound, past Lawrence Welk Resort

Riding the freeways just isn't the big boredom that it used to be for me. As little as a few years ago, I didn't care to ride the slab. I always wanted to take the little highways that ran through mountains and canyons.

But these days are different. Today, my motorcycle is back to being my only means of transportation. It isn't just for recreation anymore. As a result, it changes the way I think about motorcycling. Now, it's my daily vehicle. It's no longer a toy I keep around for the weekends. Freeways are just a fact of life in San Diego, and riding them on my motorcycle is a fact of life.

Instead, you learn to find the fun in riding freeways, just as much as I find the fun in riding through downtown. Motorcycling is no longer a thing I do to get away from domestic life, it's completely engrained into my domestic life.

I remember seeing a rerun of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown", the one where he discovers the restaurants of Korea Town Los Angeles. He hooks up with an ecclectic Korean-American painter named David Choe.

The show depicts Choe in his studio garage surrounded by bikini clad Korean hotties as he feverishly swashes black paint across a canvas in the same fervor as a hip hop rapper spitting saliva into a microphone. Choe talks to Bourdain with a kind of youthful attitude and anger found ad nauseum on MTV.  Bourdain wants to get inside this guy's head to figure out what makes him tick, because only a hometown boy like Choe knows where to find the down to Earth eats that Koreans go to enjoy.

Sizzler in Murrieta, CA

So it comes to no surprise that Choe takes Bourdain to a Sizzler for the salad bar buffet.

Bourdain's facial expression was that of amusement and that of "You're joking, right?" But as it turns out, Korean-Americans are enamored with the corporate American fare. To them, day-old lettuce and frozen chicken wings is exotic Western dining. It's the stuff completely opposite of kim chee and bulgogi beef, and it's stuff romanticized on such American media as Roseanne and The Simpsons.  And the fact that they can eat all they want for one low price, leaves the matter without question.

So there's Bourdain, sitting at a table of formica and naugahyde, being taught how to stuff meatballs into a crispy taco shell topped off with nacho cheese sauce.  Bourdain holds the taco up to his mouth and pauses, the same way he pauses when he's about to eat pig testicles in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He takes a bite and nods his head a few times in approval.

According to Bourdain, it was the first time he had ever been to a Sizzler.

Whether its meatball and cheese sauce tacos at Sizzler or some strange hog entrail stew in an European town, the experience is all the same. It looks gross, it smells sick, and it'll probably make you barf later on. But it's not to say that one is more exotic than the other.

SR-163 southbound, San Diego

Riding the superslab through California might be as uninteresting and dull as eating the salad bar at Sizzler. But there are still people elsewhere in the world who dream of doing so. And when they finally get here and ride the Interstate, it might turn out to be anticlimactic, but it was something they could boast about back home.

Perhaps for Sash and I, riding the freeway this afternoon and having lunch at Sizzler was nothing exciting. But then again, it's just living for us, the same way it is for Czechoslovakians eating pig testicles.  But there are still people who envy us for doing so.

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If J.D. Salinger Rode a Motorcycle

Dumbfounded, I simply answered, "Well how did you know I ride a motorcycle?" The guy answered back, "I don't know, I just thought you did." I came to the conclusion that it must have been my clothing gave me away because I certainly didn't announce it when I came into the bar.

And that has always ate at me.

Somehow, I don't like advertising myself as a motorcycle rider.

It's really about categorization. I hate that people can put me into a box where they can predict my beliefs and behaviors. And just to piss them off, I'll say something that I don't actually believe in just to throw them off.

It's why I don't go to biker bars anymore. There, people have you figured out. You're a biker. But when I go somewhere else, I'm completely anonymous. They don't know if I'm a commie-pinko bastard, or a capitalist pig, or an illegal alien. No one knows where I am on the political spectrum, the social scale, or the evolutionary timeline. At best they know I drink the dark stuff, and therefore I must be some kind of ass wipe, but that's about it.

What I appreciate, however, is recognition from my peers. I like getting comments from other motorcycle bloggers. I like talking to other riders who've ridden to Alaska and back. I like to compare notes on such infamous roads as the Moki Dugway, the Beartooth Pass, the Coronado Trail, or Going to the Sun Road. But I don't like wearing that stuff.

OK, there was a time when I used to wear a leather vest adorned with pins of all the places I had been to. Somehow, that made me feel as if I had earned my place within the biker community. But when I first started riding in 1985, I had been a solitary rider. I was riding to commute to college and work. I never went to rallies, or rode with groups. Back then, I would wear my normal clothes. I didn't even wear a "motorcycle jacket", I had just a plain old jacket.

So over the years, after I bought a pickup truck, motorcycling became relegated to a hobby. When it came time to upgrade that old Kawasaki KZ400 to a new bike, I bought a Yamaha Road Star. From there, I ventured into some local riding clubs and groups and found myself amid other leather-clad riders. I wanted to fit in, so I wore the same shit. The only things I simply refused to wear were chaps and a doo-rag. I mean, I had to draw the line somewhere.

But as the years went by, I found so much fake with all that. The collection of leather vests, the pendleton shirts, the bandanas, the rally pins, the long-sleeves with the flames up the arms. To me, all that stuff is more visual than it is practical.  And when you become all about the visual, then what?

I also found that as the years went by, other riders respected me for the years that I had been riding. My riding buddies, along with other local riders who knew of me, didn't care about how big of geek or dork I was. They already knew about my experiences. So I woke up one day and decided to sell the Harley and buy a Honda ST. That meant getting rid of all my Harley t-shirts and all my "biker" gear.  I remember a few Harley enthusiasts telling me it was an act of regression to go from Harley to Honda. I would disagree. But overall, the people who appreciate me as a rider didn't really care about any of that external stuff.

It's like the more time you spend riding, and the more miles you put on, the more humble you become. Maybe it's just the people who are new to motorcycling that get caught up in the "look at me" thing.

My therapist once told me, "you have to swing all the way to one side to know that you don't belong there."

I feel as if I started out at one extreme, swung all the way to the other, and then swung back to the other extreme again.

There's an element of Catcher in the Rye in just about all walks of life, not just motorcycling. Anything can be either a total rat race of chameleons trying to fit in, or total anonymity and mystery as to what makes you tick. But like with anything, it's all about balancing the extremes than to be one or the other. Sometime's its good to wear a little flair, sometimes it's good to be invisible. I'd rather have the freedom to choose than to be forced to choose sides.

Still, I don't like giving myself away as a motorcycle rider. It almost feels like bragging. For that matter, I don't like giving myself away as a computer geek, or a business owner, or a craft-beer snob. I'd rather be a mystery to some and totally invisible to others than to advertise myself and have people put me into a category.

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Riding Without Gloves

4th & University, San Diego

Much of my motorcycle riding the past several weeks has been relegated to the core of San Diego, mostly the downtown areas and the immediate neighboring communities.

I haven't done any joy riding in a while.

For one, I've spent a lot of time working on our Internet business. But two, I've been fighting off a flu bug the past 10 days.

But overall, my life has really narrowed down to working all day long and then hanging out at the bar at night. I haven't spent much time riding motorcycles with friends, not like the way I used to a few years ago when weekends seemed made for riding with friends.

I don't even pay much attention to the newest motorcycles out now. A fellow rider could talk about the newest sportbike from BMW or Yamaha, and I would nod my head as if I knew what they're talking about, but yet I wouldn't know a thing. I don't really care about the latest in motorcycle technology right now. I just want to talk about the deep philosophical stuff that only makes sense to a motorcycle rider.

Riding through the big city is a challenge enough. The traffic, the potholes, the tight turns, I never seem to get the Honda ST past 3rd gear. You can't think like a joy rider in these parts. You have to be more aggressive. You have to see yourself as having the advantage of two-wheels and then exploiting it. Otherwise, the cagers, the truckers, and cab drivers can sense the fear in you, and if they sense it you're dead.

Cafe Moto at Barrio Logan

I think somehow, that's made me a different rider.

For one, I don't seem to ride with gloves anymore. They're too bulky. I need to feel my fingers on the grips and levers, it gives me better control. I can fine tune the braking and clutching. Even when it rains, I still find it better to go without gloves.

Why I feel the need to have such fine control, I don't exactly know. Somehow, the steep hills and aggressive driving in the city just made me want to be that way.

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