So tonight my friend took me out on his bike. Motorcycle bike, you know. I have my own bike, thank you, but it is not the same. Not the same, at all. It’s weird, you know, to have a possibly life changing experience. This evening was a possibly life changing experience. SPOILER ALERT I am going to make some observations that are fueled by someone you know, but it is not about him specifically, do not be alarmed.

So I went on the bike with my friend. He is someone else’s boyfriend. That has never been okay, at all, whatsoever, with me. I run screaming from other peoples’ boyfriends and husbands and sometimes, usually, former boyfriends and husbands. I don’t know if this is completely silly. I get crap about it sometimes, how serious I am about it. Cause, I don’t know. It is not that I think something awful is going to happen. It’s more, I don’t know, the appearance of evil. The possibility that she is not as okay with it as she seems to be. The idea that I could unknowingly be the cause of something huge for someone else, another girl. It is not okay. So I had wondered, because I have never met her, if it would be okay. And then it occurred to me, something my friend said to me once. And it’s funny, cause it was some time ago but curiously a very, very similar situation. Anyway he was getting on me about how I take responsibility for things that are none of my business, that I cannot insert myself into other peoples’ lives, even in the form of trying to protect them from things that they do not yet know. And then I felt bad, because I saw that I was doing just that. I do not know this girl, she did not ask me to involve myself in any way in her relationship or life, and here I am doing it anyway. So when he offered the ride again, I hopped around like a ninny and totally took him up on it. Which, for me, was a big deal. Like maybe, I don’t know. That’s a whole other discussion, which I may or may not have with myself. So there was that.

Then there was my friend, who was not always my friend, and was sometimes not a very good friend to very many people. And I have historically not been a very patient, understanding person. Okay that isn’t true. People get a bahillion chances. But, really, deep down, there is only one. Cause it colors my perception of them, and then I can take them or leave them but am always polite. So anyway, I was really happy with myself for not being like that, this judgmental, brooding, hatchet digger. That was a big deal for me, also. Cause, really, I have done a lot of things that a lot of people could be really, really angry with me for, for a really long time. And who am I to hold grudges? That’s just, I don’t know, it seems arrogant. So I really try not to do it, and have had great success lately. So I was proud of myself for not being at all uncool about spending time with this person. It was good.

So anyway, he took me on his bike. I have not been on a motorcycle in at least twenty years, maybe longer. But I remembered that my uncle had taken me when I was young and I loved it, which is how he came to offer. So he picked me up and we went for a ride. I have, I don’t know. I am super keenly in touch with nature and my senses and the world around me, it is my concession to humanity that I can be moved so strongly by a tree or a plant or the curve of a leaf or a slant of light. Nothing does it to me like that, except maybe music, sometimes. Yes, music. But the world and everything in it, I am an addict. So we had discussed this book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is an excellent book, probably more so if you are a bike rider. In completely unjust summation, it concerns the narrator’s thoughts and experiences while on a cross country motorcycle trip with his son and a few friends. It’s very, very good. So I was talking to him about it, specifically this one time in the book where he observes that riding in a car is like watching television and being on a bike is real life. The hum of the road, the asphalt so close you could touch it. And my friend said that for him, it is the fact that you can smell everything. I had not thought of that.

So he picked me up and it was about 6:45. The sun was not yet down but would be by the time we reached our destination. So he is driving, and I am hanging on, and it was a whole different world than that which you see from inside a car. And I ride my bicycle, a lot, and this was different. It was like, like, it was kind of like surfing as opposed to looking at a fish tank. All the same elements are there, but the experience is something much, much different. And he was right, the smell. On the way back it was very dark and it was just, barely, starting to rain, and the trees are blooming, and oh man. When he picked me up the sun was going down and we drove over the river and there were the lights and the boats and the sky and the water and I could hear everything and there was the wind and I don’t know, but I do not think that I am ever going to be happy in my car again. And I don’t get enthusiastic about many things. Not really. But this, this bike, this thing of moving so fast while being so close to everything, it has sunk itself into my brain, and changed it a little, made everything look different. The city, the road, the people around us, the people sitting right in front of me. Cause he was there too, you know, and it occurred to me that it would be very, very nice to be to be out there with someone I was more, I don't know, concerned with. It’s a recurring theme. Of course I could also get my own, but I don’t know that I would be comfortable driving one. My aunt is a total biker chick and she is smaller, shorter than I am. But I don’t know. But I was giddy. I was retarded with happiness. It was the best, the very best. I could not do it justice, and it seems like a lame topic to get so frothy over, but I had no idea. No idea, and now, well, this may affect my prospects for a while. It’s a good thing I don’t have any.