madbikeboy

Stuck in Hell again: Craving experiences

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Read my post Stuck in Hell before you read this one. It’ll make more sense.

I’ve grown up on two wheels. Most kids learn to walk, and then to run, and then after some bruises, they learn to ride. I kind of skipped some of the steps, I got put on a two wheeler really young, and instead of falling off, I just sorta rode. Bikes mean something different to kids – they offer propulsion, time away from parental control, and freedom to explore. I remember getting in so much trouble once – my older brother (who was the cause of most of my bad learning experiences) talked me into exploring the big overflow drains that live under Morningside. Can you imagine half a dozen 10 year olds (and a mislead 8 year old), cheap flashlights taped to our BMX’s (anyone under the age of 25 won’t know what they are) riding through a drainpipe. Nowadays, there would be an official investigation into how this happened, and someone would be called to account. In the days before political correctness, we just did shit and had fun doing it.

Well, it was fun until we got a little lost, and ended up spending a little longer than we first intended in the drains – but just to be clear, no one needed to search for us or anything, it was just more of an adventure than we thought. Which made us late for dinner. Which got us both in trouble. Not as much trouble as setting the bach on fire by accident when I was seven, but more trouble than I’d be in for that entire year of being eight.

This kind of has a point. The experiences that I had growing up meant that I have a certain amount of resilience and confidence when I’m a little lost or mis-directed. And it’s also the reason why I yearn for adventure. Pointless adventure that makes little sense to anyone under the age of 20, or over 45, or anyone who has to sit down to pee. An example. I bought my last car partly because it gave me an excuse to drive it home afterwards. From Queenstown. And I live in Auckland. It was a great roadtrip; the road sections were navigated much faster than PC rules allow, I got to explore roads that looked like spaghetti (think about it) – and common sense got thrown out the window for a couple of days. Or riding a bicycle around downtown San Francisco after a July 4th in the wee small hours, dodging drunks and hookers and gun carrying pimps, and laughing until our bellies hurt.

Okay, I will arrive at the point sooner or later. So, confidence and experience. I ride partly because it’s an experience. Cars are like self steered buses, they follow nice little lanes, and they sit in tidy rows for an hour in each direction crossing the Auckland Harbour bottleneck. They are separated from the air, with nice little airconditioning units and radio stations that place the occasional song between adverts. Bikes are an experience, we ride with more of a connection to the world around us, with more freedom, and with more involvement.

I once had a Lexus for a week, it was like sensory depravation. Polite elevator music as a soundtrack, sitting in a leather clad sterile environment. Riding my bike is like Metallica at full noise, standing between 50,000 screaming fans in the mosh pit.

Normal people don’t get it. They spend their lives in the tidy lanes, listening to ads explaining why they need to buy stuff they don’t need while they age without notice or care. They have blood pumping around their bodies, but the blood doesn’t contain adrenaline or oxygen.

So here’s the point.

Cesare Parve once wrote that “we don’t remember days, we remember moments”. Life for me is about moments, indelibly etched in my mind. Rides with my friends – Lance, Ben and Phil, riding the Clevedon loop in the heat; and sometimes the cold and the rain. The rush of the wind over my lid. The feeling of power, the sensation of speed. The nights of the northern motorway in the Cannonball lane. And the lights of the eagle chopper in the distance. For me, riding is a metaphor for life, about the extremes that define the middle, the flow of blood charged with adrenaline and adventure, and the distinct linkage between mistake and game over.

Rides down to Paeroa, the long way. Breakfast at the log cabin, listening to the scoot ticking as it cools. Sitting at the track – the shock waves felt physically as the fast bikes tear through the air at high velocity past where I stand dreaming of my next lap doing the same. The first time my speedo stayed static at 299, with 1,500 rpm to go. Going 1,500 RPM further and hitting the rev-limiter in top and keeping it there. It’s diametrically opposed to the sanitised existence of the Lemmings around me in the Dilbert Cartoon hell I live in; it’s life at full volume, perfect colour with high resolution and 10,000 watts of amplification. We had t-shirts made up once “absolute overkill is barely adequate”. Seems somehow appropriate for the level of experience I crave.