Privacy From a Motorcyclist's Perspective

Privacy, for me, has not so much been a need to be left alone, but a need to maintain control of who I am. I don't mind society judging me as long as I can still be respected and have the freedom do as I please.

If anything, as a motorcycle rider, I find my privacy on the road.  At 80 MPH, I can still be in full view of everyone without anyone being able to see me.

The thing is that no one ever actually wants privacy. Privacy in and of itself, is a means to a solution. It's a tool we use towards achieving some other goal.

If you want to maintain a certain persona, you emphasize desired characteristics and hide the others. If you want to get a well-paying job, you delete all the negative posts from your blog and Facebook. If you don't want the government to track you, you get a prepaid phone.

But if you don't have any such goals, then privacy isn't important to you.

Otherwise, it's a burden to hide stuff, maintain facades, and suppress behaviors.

Myself personally, I've detailed my life on this blog and others. I maintain a Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.  I've uploaded so many photos and made them public.  If the government wanted me in Gitmo, they would've done it by now.

But the other thing is that I don't really give a fuck anymore.  I've put all my eggs into being self-employed.  I don't even care about my credit rating, though Sash and I have fought over this.  And now that we've announced going back on the road indefinitely, I look at what possessions I have left and wonder why I still have them.

It's like me bearing my chest to the world and shouting, "Yeah, this is me, what are you going to do about it!"

So what if each of us wore Google Glasses and could see the full details of anyone we looked at? We could see their history, their current status, their illnesses and physical features. We could see their financial worth, all their photos, and know of their fetishes.

If full transparency took all value away from lying, would that be a bad thing? If we didn't have to maintain facades, could we trust each other more? If we had no ability to create illusions, would we be forced to accept accountability?

Would you still have to run and hide if there was no retribution for your actions and beliefs?

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Motorcycle Gypsies: The Road Pickle Continues

Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway. We're the best of friends. And I can't wait to get on the road again.

I suppose there's a little Willie Nelson in each of us.

Now that Sash has made the announcement, I suppose there's no turning back now. What's the announcement? We're giving up on trying to stay put in San Diego, and going back out on the road.

The only reason why we've been in San Diego since last October is because we weren't able to make enough money on the road last year. So we figured we needed to stay in San Diego, where we already had something of a marketing base to build on, and try to add more clients to our marketing business. And we did build on it. We got referrals from other clients and built a name for ourselves.

But after spending time at the Steel Horse Sisterhood Summit, Sash was able to make some solid connections in the motorcycling industry. We actually picked up a couple of paying clients and started relationships with a couple more. But these clients didn't come from our marketing efforts in San Diego. They came from Sash's social media efforts, her face to face relations, and more client referrals. On top of that, she met with vendors at the Summit who travel the motorcycle event circuit and build income on the road. All the above was enough to point us in a new direction and give it another go.

For one thing, it was always our intent to make San Diego a temporary hiatus from Road Pickle. We were just giving ourselves a full year before trying Road Pickle Part 2, though looks like we're cutting it short by about 4 months.

In mid-June, we'll take off again.

The first stop?

Bakersfield, CA.

"Bakersfield?" you ask.

Well, it turns out Sash's daughter is expecting her first child around that time, and she lives in Bakersfield. We're looking to spent about a month there while Sash cuddles and coddles with her new grandson. Honestly, I don't feel like a grandfather. Technically, I'll be a step-grandfather, though the relationship I have with Sash's daughter is hardly paternal. It's really more like friends. But the truth is that I have this thing in me that rejects old age, and the thought of being an ancestor leaves me wincing and scratching my head. I can't stand the idea that I'm getting closer to the big 5-0.

So why not vacate this condo in San Diego, and really try to live like motorcycle gypsies, except this time indefinitely?

Why not just eliminate the rest of our stuff and really throw ourselves to the wind, to fate, and hope that we'll die riding our motorcycles?

Why not just get naked?

But there's another dynamic to this we haven't touched on yet. It's not just about uprooting ourselves and living from town to town. We're also testing our trust in each other. Despite how romantic and wonderful we appear to be on our blogs and our social media channels, Sash and I are still learning how to live with each other. We have more than our fair share of arguments and fights, and when our emotions boil over, it often seems like we can't take anymore and have to call it quits. But by the next day, we've come back together, feeling sorry, no matter how ugly the fights might be.

We've been through enough of them, yet still feel so strongly about each other, that I think we've convinced ourselves that nothing can break the bonds we've built. We've tested them pretty thoroughly.

Going back on the road indefinitely, will be the ultimate expression of trust.

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Running Out Of Fuel On a Motorcycle, Day 20

For a moment there, Sash and I thought we would lose one of our clients after a nerve-racking 30 minutes of riding down the Interstate.

We were coming home from a long motorcycle road trip (20 days total), making our last stop in Yuma, AZ. In fact, we hadn't originally planned to stop in Yuma. The day before, we were actually trying to ride from Phoenix to San Diego in one shot, but the heat of the desert caused us to stop in Yuma.

That night in Yuma, I had set our alarm clock to 4:00 AM, so that we could get an early start and make it to San Diego. We had a client meeting that day at 11:00 AM, and needed to get home around 9:30 AM at the latest, to shower, change clothes, and make the drive north in time to see our clients.

The alarm clock rang, and after resisting getting out of bed for 45 minutes, and after a couple of hours of packing our stuff while beating each other with our emotional outbursts, we managed to mount our motorcycles and speed off across the Colorado River into California.

Except, we forgot to refuel.

Sash's motorcycle, a Yamaha V-Star 650 for those of you who might not be familiar, only seems to travel about 130 miles tops at sea level, with no head wind and fully loaded with gear, which was the case in this situation. She only had about 60 miles left on the tank, which was last filled in Dateland, AZ.

Waking up early and bickering over relationship stuff caused us to forget to get more gas.


It wasn't after I passed by the last gas station at Felicity that I realized the situation we were in. I suppose I could've exited the next off-ramp and turned around to hit the gas station, except the I-8 through the California desert doesn't have many off-ramps. I opted to keep our speed relatively modest, at 75-80 MPH,  conserving fuel while still keeping us on schedule, and try our luck.

Sash, however, seemed concerned about our time. She pulled ahead and moved at a faster speed. When I caught up to her and looked at my speedometer, we were going between 85 MPH and 90 MPH. I made a hand gesture, pointing at my fuel tank, and making the international symbol for "slow down", which I figured was probably was flattening my hand and making a downward motion.

But she didn't seem to understand.

About 10 miles later, her bike began to stall. That's when she turned the petcock to "reserve" and pointed to her gas tank.

I slowed us down to between 55 MPH and 60 MPH, and tried to nurse what reserve she had left to make it another 25 miles or so to the next gas.  The entire time, we thought about what it meant to be stranded in the middle of the desert with no gas.

At one point, we actually pulled over and bickered about who's fault it was. We were both panicked about not making our 11:00 AM appointment, on top of that, tired of having to wake up at 4:00 AM.

But we managed to stretch the last gulps of fuel in the V-Star's gas tank to make it to the next station in El Centro. We were relieved. We bickered and argued some more, and then mounted up and rode the rest of the way back home.

At home, we showered and changed clothes and jumped into our pickup truck to drive north another 60 miles, and managed to make it to our client meeting, albeit 30 minutes late. But they were really nice and understanding and we all had a great time.

Altogether, our 20-day motorcycle road trip traveled nearly 2,500 miles round trip, although my Honda ST1300 recorded 3,039 miles due to the riding back and forth between hotels, restaurants, friends, family, and other venues.

If we learned anything about this trip, it's that we really belong on the road. We're meant to travel on our motorcycles, meet people and see the country. I think we already knew this, but felt that we needed to spend time in San Diego to build our client base. But on this trip, Sash discovered there are already a lot of motorcycle-focused businesses that earn a living on the road.

So now, that's on our mind.

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