Why do you love motorcycles?

Lostride

Supercharged
Joined
Apr 1, 2015
Messages
311
Location
Torrence, California, USA
Ride
2007 Tourer
I came across this question on www.quora.com and here is the (very poetic) answer (not mine), worth a read and a bit different from the usual "I can beat some punks ass on a lesser bike" answer from the mouth-breathers:

The other night I was sitting on my bike under an overpass on the highway. Even though I was wearing good rain gear, the rain coming down buckets, made riding literally impossible, and unsafe. With spray form passing cars coming at me from all directions I felt as if I was inside a car wash. It was time. When I saw the overpass up ahead I pulled off beside the highway and found a relatively dry spot pout of the rain under the bridge. Sitting there, on the bike, rivulets of water dripping down inside of my rain jacket and inside the visor of my helmet I probably looked as miserable as I felt. I asked myself the question that I have been asked by so many others, Why am I riding a motorcycle?

When you let a motorcycle into your life you’re changed forever. The letters “MC” are stamped on your driver’s license right next to your sex and weight as if “motorcycle” was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes’ and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.
On a motorcycle I know I’m alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sun that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It’s like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind’s roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock ‘n roll, dark orchestras, women’s voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree- smells and flower- smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it’s as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.
Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It’s a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It’s light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it’s a conduit of grace, it’s a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. It’s flying three feet off the ground.


Any poets among us to add some thoughts?
 
I came across this question on www.quora.com and here is the (very poetic) answer (not mine), worth a read and a bit different from the usual "I can beat some punks ass on a lesser bike" answer from the mouth-breathers:

The other night I was sitting on my bike under an overpass on the highway. Even though I was wearing good rain gear, the rain coming down buckets, made riding literally impossible, and unsafe. With spray form passing cars coming at me from all directions I felt as if I was inside a car wash. It was time. When I saw the overpass up ahead I pulled off beside the highway and found a relatively dry spot pout of the rain under the bridge. Sitting there, on the bike, rivulets of water dripping down inside of my rain jacket and inside the visor of my helmet I probably looked as miserable as I felt. I asked myself the question that I have been asked by so many others, Why am I riding a motorcycle?

When you let a motorcycle into your life you’re changed forever. The letters “MC” are stamped on your driver’s license right next to your sex and weight as if “motorcycle” was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes’ and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.
On a motorcycle I know I’m alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sun that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than Pana-Vision and IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard. Sometimes I even hear music. It’s like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind’s roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock ‘n roll, dark orchestras, women’s voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree- smells and flower- smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it’s as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane.
Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It’s a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It’s light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it’s a conduit of grace, it’s a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. It’s flying three feet off the ground.


Any poets among us to add some thoughts?
With the exception of your introduction to this reading. And I clearly know who that is directed to. This is indeed eloquent. Could I have your permission to copy this so as to share it. Thanks, Rick
 
With the exception of your introduction to this reading. And I clearly know who that is directed to. This is indeed eloquent. Could I have your permission to copy this so as to share it. Thanks, Rick
I didn't write this, so copy as you see fit, I did (I referenced the source). As for my introduction, a bit paranoid mate? I just wanted to draw a comparison between the low-brow reasons and the more poetic reasons for loving our bikes.. I like kicking punk-ass now and then. if you think my introduction is directed at you then you clearly have an inflated sense of self-importance. If you are, indeed, a mouth-breather then I apologise to you and all the other mouth-breathing motorcyclists I may have offended.
 
I didn't write this, so copy as you see fit, I did (I referenced the source). As for my introduction, a bit paranoid mate? I just wanted to draw a comparison between the low-brow reasons and the more poetic reasons for loving our bikes.. I like kicking punk-ass now and then. if you think my introduction is directed at you then you clearly have an inflated sense of self-importance. If you are, indeed, a mouth-breather then I apologise to you and all the other mouth-breathing motorcyclists I may have offended.
You are a super nice guy.
 
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Very well put. Motorcycle riding is truly the "Zen of the Highway". I like "...a highway with no one on it, a treasure to look upon it." Motorcyclist are the few, of the few and far between.
 
What I like is that ALL my senses are involved.
To see all that is around me - ride to exotic places with twisty roads and other riders . . .
To hear the purr of the engine turn into a roar at high speed, the whistling of the wind . . .
To feel the vibrations from the engine and weight of the air rushing past, the power that makes your arms taut . . .
To smell the forrests, the crops, the flowers, to escape the smog . . .
And to taste the occasional variety of misguided BUG!
:p
 
Once you have been bitten by the motorcycle bug you are hooked for life.Here in the UK we have BAMBIS aka Born Again Middle Aged Bikers who return back to bikes after years of not having them.I rest my case.

''We don't stop playing because we grow old;we grow old because we stop playing''
 
Why do I ride? because I CAN. To explain it is like trying to convince someone of a basic fundamental truth. It doesn't matter if you are on a scooter or a dirt bike or a touring bike pulling a trailer. There is nothing like twisting the throttle. My friend , who had cancer and was going through chemo, said riding his bike was the closet he could feel to being normal. When I was getting off the drug Perkacets and my body was going through withdrawals, riding was my only relief. I can understand someone who has never ridden why they have miss givings about motorcycles and the inherent dangers. I can see societies reservations about motorcyclists (however inaccurate ). I guess the hardest thing for me to understand is the person who buys a bike and leaves it in the garage. If every person on our roads had to ride a motorcycle to learn traffic safety maybe , just maybe
 
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