"This" being, of course, this:

It's the question I've been getting in one form or another ever since I announced my intention to learn, from my dad's incredulous "You've got a car!" to the bursar's amazed "Are you crazy?" to the instructor's simple "Why are you doing this?"

It's a question I've always known the answer to, but have been quietly doing the mental percolating necessary to put such an abstract concept into words. I think I can finally answer that question.

To begin with, "this" is something I've always wanted to know and experience. That is not something I can explain, nor can anyone else; I've felt the pull to motorcycling for as far back as I can remember; even as a three-year old in the back seat of my dad's car, I would sit in the backseat astride the driveshaft hump in the centre of the car, grab hold of the two front seats, and call that my "motorcycle."

That pull became finally irresistable this year. It started last year when my good friend Jack Daring decided to get into restoration, and was a final decision by this spring. But that isn't the only reason.

No, this is, as it is supposed to be, an act of rebellion. Not, however, in the traditional outlaw sense; this is a rebellion against what I call systematic dumbization. A rebellion against being a passenger in my own vehicle, and, by extension, my own life. Learning to drive a manual transmission car was the first step; this is the natural culmination of vehicular enlightenment.

Yuo see, many people blame cell phones and other distractions for automobile accidents. I blame the automatic transmission. Before this diabolical invention, people actually had to be able to coordinate their movements, to have some sort of skill, in order to drive. Now, any chowderhead can simply get in, turn the key, and just point the car in whatever direction. The skill set required to achieve the life milestone of driving has been drastically reduced, and reducing an overall skill set is never a good thing for an individual or a species.

And I use the word "systematic" because we as a people are deliberately encouraged to remove ourselves from the process, to dull our skills and in fact separate ourselves from the very world we travel in: there's the radio/CD/mp3/satellite/DVD/entertainment complex that is becoming more and more prevalent, the wireless telephone technology built right in, the endless hours of technological advances made just to keep the sounds and wind and road feel out and as far away from your senses as possible, right down to the shock absorbers and the insulation around the windows that you don't even need to open with the canned A/C so conveniently available.

Now there's even serious efforts to build a car that drives itself. That's right...instead of people with limited skill behind the wheel of a car, we'll have people with no skill at all. And no wheel, either. This is not a good thing.

It is my belief that everyone should at least learn how to ride a motorcycle, regardless of whether or not they ever choose to make it a personal mode of transportation.

It is, as one might expect from the title of a possibly famous book, a Zen experience. You literally cannot think of anything but what you are doing, otherwise you will fail at what you are doing; when all that stands between yourself and the pavement at 60 MPH are two wheels and your own skill, failure is, to cop a clichè, not an option. It is also inherently timeless: no clock on the dashboard, no music out of speakers to let you know that time is passing, no conversation, nothing but the act of the moment that is a beginningless, endless NOW. Such a removal from time on this, the Planet of the Clocks, is so cathartic as to be miraculous.

It is an intensely visceral experience: from the open air, and the rest of the elements, Nature wrapping herself around you in all her Pagan glory, to the fact that you must move, and move properly, to manoeuvre the bike, no wasted motion (Zen Again), you have to feel what you're doing in every sense of the word...right down to something as superficially simple as shifting gears, a vital element to maintaining speed, engine health, and fuel economy, all in your own two hands...

Hell, in a car with an automatic transmission and power steering, all you have to do is sit back in your big comfy chair and twitch your thumb on the wheel every now and then. Everything else is pretty much done for you, and you're free to let your mind wander. That is not good enough for me.

It shouldn't be good enough for anyone. Our highest duty to ourselves is to develop, and to develop we must learn, and what we must learn are skills and feeling.

The sensation of being in charge, almost completely in charge of one's destiny is ridiculously energising. And a part of that energy does come from the fact that you're never completely in charge..not as long as there's anything, or anyone, else on the road. A motorcycle is not to be feared, as many do, but must be respected, because of the inherent danger, which one must acknowledge, can never entirely eliminate, but can mitigate to great degree by not being an idiot. You can't let the risk stop you, because there is something you can do about it, if you use your head.

It's a perfect metaphor for a life.

It requires harmony--you must be one with the machine.
It requires confidence--you can't be frozen in fear and keep the two wheels in between yourself and the pavement.
It requires skill--you can't just guess what you're doing.
It requires awareness--you absolutely must be conscious not only of yourself, but of everything around you.
It requires a certain disconnection--you can't be overly concerned about any/everyone else, because you'll just clutter up your mind and screw something up.
It requires sense.
It requires coordination.
It requires a clear mind.

It is one serious hell of a lot of fun. If you do it right.

Frankly, it's one of the many things in this world that are better than sex. No emotional mopping-up to do afterwards. No hang-ups, no ambiguity, no "does she or doesn't she?"...you know she does. And that you do too.

I intend to milk the riding season until I start seeing my breath and my fingers start to stiffen in the gloves.

Just do me a favour and let me have some room.

It is an unsung fact of education, that simple ingestion is inadequate for the successful tuning of the mind that must be achieved if one is to reach one's full potential as a person. On must also be able to assimilate, connect, and profess anew, the results of this cogitation.

Enter the essay question. The much-maligned hero of academia. Simple regurgitation is simply not enough to develop the mind--the mind needing exercise as much, if not more, than any physical apparatus that comprises the body. The essay question, and, by logical extension, the term paper, are the perfect tools for determining comprehension and capability.

I could go on, but that point is made. However...

What happens after graduation? We as adults have a distressing and unconscious habit of neglecting the output phase of our cognitive abilities. We may read, we may watch TV (which is not necessarily a detriment to the mind, as some pundits and doomsayers would have us believe...); but we rarely cognate and share our thoughts, and if we do, it is rarely to the extent that we do during our education.

The inevitable result is a loss of cognitive ability, just as a loss of strength is the inevitable result of neglecting exercise.

I cannot advocate strongly enough the regular practice of taking notes. Don't stop purchasing notebooks just because you don't need them for class any longer--the deceptively minor act of putting one's thoughts to paper (or LCD screen--blogging can be good for you) is crucial to the maintenance and further development of one's ability to think.

Write, and keep writing--at the very least, attempting to order one's thoughts in a manner that is sensible to other people will result in a greater understanding of one's own thoughts, which is not as ridiculous as it may at first sound: ask someone why they have the opinions that they do, and most will be unable to give a satisfactory answer.

Being able to give that satisfactory answer is the mark of a well-structured, strong mind. Not as easy to flex as a bicep, but every bit as important.

In fairly typical fashion, after laying my head to rest the previous night in a bed-and-breakfast in mid 19th-century Pennsylvania, I awoke in a football stadium in Sardinia.

A.C. Milan having a game that day, I proceeded to order breakfast in their VIP suite: my usual weekend repast of scrambled eggs, waffles, a peyote button, a glass of pomegranite wine and two marijuana brownies.

However, I wound up missing the end of the match, since, atypically, I apparently hadn't rested enough and my breakfast caused me to doze off; shortly thereafter I awakened on a park bench in lower Boston. The rather burly policeman who was staring at me didn't seem too thrilled with my residence, however temporary, upon this particular section of municipal real estate. As I was unkempt, unwashed, unshaven, and clad solely in flaming Superman™ logo pajama bottoms and a tattered black bathrobe, I suppose I can understand his perturbed state, if I try very hard.

Fortunately, the year was 1967, so I wasn't completely out of place. Also fortunately, I've been to this era frequently, and so still had a line of credit, and a room in the Fairmont-Copely awaiting my arrival. I hung around with the Irish Mob for the next 30 years, and spent another ten as a technology consultant, just for something to do, before dressing to the nines and setting off to a banquet that I'd been invited to in rural Norway.

I was late arriving, naturally, in spite of having 40 years' advance notice. The feast was quite sumptuous, and surprisingly Italian (bringing my Saturday full-circle, by yet another in a string of meaningless coincidences), with a full Neo-pop orchestra and vocal soloist providing accompaniment.

Awakening the following day in metropolitan Sudan, I arranged for a private jet to return me to Norway, so I could drop off the orchestra's clarinetist so she could change her clothes, and from there a helicopter sufficed to bring me to western England, for breakfast.

But that's another day.

When I decide to make some changes, I don't fool around. It has taken a few days, but I've finally updated my blog software. In the process I've deleted all the pre-existing blogs, but most of them were rubbish anyway.

This new software (which is only new to me) is infinitely more powerful and versatile than my old software--I can subcategorise and photoblog like never before. There are even multiple blogs on this one link, something I hadn't even considered before. And yes, this all means that I will be blogging more than once every three months.

The only pang I feel is for the loss of my online dream journal--there was no way to download the contents before all this mess happened, but hell, I'll be sleeping again at some point. At the very least this should make the thought sink into even my thick skull that I really shouldn't store things in a purely web-based manner.

Other changes will be in the works; some I've already started on, and I'm not just referring to my website, which nobody looks at anyway. Right now I've got to get started on a few of them.