Whether you're 18 years old and have wanted one since watching your dad's Evel Knievel videos, or you're 45 and always wanted to be Ponch on CHIPS, a motorcycle is something that ravages the imagination of many, and beguiles the rationed intellects of the careful. Why would someone get on a machine that hurtles one along a road at over 100 mph without a roof over the head or a safety-sealed shell to protect one's body? What paralysis of rationality would facilitate one to propel one's body along a road full of stones or an oily slick grease-path that could, at a heartbeat, turn to a blackened grave? What is it?
Indeed ... but no sound this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
1. Independence: You're a lone-wolf, a hunter of self; you take no prisoners. You ride because you can--simple as that. You and your bike are one and the same. You identify with its identifiers. It defines your style, your attitude, your carefree nature, your courage in the face of death. You may have another person riding on the back, but you ultimately ride alone.
2. Style: A bike is an American icon of the rebel without a cause. It indeed has style, whether you're sporting a Ducati like Tom Cruise, or a Hog like Schwarzenegger. Your bike and your style are univocal. And bike style, like a Prada runway, has rules. Think I'm overstating this? Try wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt at a biker's conference--while climbing out of your Prius...
“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
--Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
3. Speed: You're a bit of a speed junky--or at least you like to feel speed. Your car just won't cut it, even gunning it down the Gardiner at 150+ with the windows down. No--the feel is all wrong. Too much gets in the way between your pleasure and the medium through which you feel it.
4. Identity with others: You notice how motorcycles'll pass each other, and the riders will give a wave? That speaks to the camaraderie of the rider. Try doing that to the dude next to you at the light in a Toyota Matrix... Get the difference?
5. Simplicity: There's little hassle with this medium of transport: simply get on it, fire it up, and ride (though I have witnessed people spend at least 20 minutes prepping to mount their Harleys).
You come to a point in your life when you really don't care what people think about you, you just care what you think about yourself.
--Evel Knievel
6. Low impact: No, I'm not talking about the feeling of your body hitting pavement at 120 kms/hr, but the environmental impact, whether or not you care about that: a motorcycle will double the fuel economy of a car, while releasing less carbon emissions.
7. Adventure: This ties in #1 with all the rest: you want to get out there, and like Pirsig opines, feel the road, feel nature, feel the wind, feel the speed, and not just from behind the glass.
Now why wouldn't you get a bike?...
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