The quilted polyester was stifling in the unseasonably warm September sun.  The road was radiating black tar smell and flies hovered in the tree shadows.  I've been getting a bit "over" motorcycling lately; I've been doing it too much.  WAY, way too much hollow-eyed, jaw-rattling freeway, too much stoplight clutch-hand cramping, there is a rattle noise from the engine I've been told not to worry about that's become REALLY irritating, and, well, just all the damn running around for practical purposes is getting old.  Even my geeky old refuge of playing space invaders with holes in traffic and squeezing 3 more mpg by short shifting 500 rpm, has gone.

In short, I really had to debate with myself whether to go for a fun ride on a clear-as-a-bell fall day.  Had to debate whether to nap, read or ride.  I napped while deciding.

Two hours later there I was, hell-bent sideways on a 65mph sweeper on my favorite backyard road: Hwy 33.  This is where I come to remind myself that the V-Strom is a sport-bike, too; that I needn't convince myself beyond hope of doubt that it's just a gas-saving econo-truck.

I set about reminding myself while not revving things through the roof of my mouth.  The scenery along this road is perfect, it really is, for doing speed and road-test stuff.  The picture changes from sage-brush covered cliffs and creekbed and tunnels at the bottom, to twisted, gaunt northern trees and naked rock at the top.  It begins to look like Iceland or something that ought to be driven by with Sigur Ros in the earbuds.  Great valley sweeps swing into view, mountain ranges on either hand trailing to infinity with a thin thread of asphalt snaking along between them, a tiny speck of motorcycle buzzing along that like an insignificant insect.

I practiced emergency braking in curves.  Funny how good brakes on motorcycles are.  A quick grasp of two fingers on my right hand promptly dislocates my eyeballs (no, I kid not: a front wheel on verge of lockup produces serious facial pain).  If there was a rabbit THERE snap squeeze owwwww bounce chirp HERE.  The rabbit is safe.

I was able to cure the unwanted neutral problem between first and second gear by readjusting the shift lever; but the false neutral between fifth and sixth gear is a mechanical problem that can't be cured by an adjustment.  It only happens occasionally, and less than it used to; and it's more an embarassment than a problem; one is occasionally suprised by a zing to 8000 rpm when it should have been 6th gear, and reacts by re-slamming the lever which bangs everything back into place.

Curve after curve, swing after swing, picking out the perfect line like a searchlight in fog.  This thing truly is balanced nicely, all I have to do is get a new front tire.  Got some headshake.  The handlebars oscillate when I let off the throttle and that's because the front tire is worn out.  I grind lower and lower to the ground, feeling the sides of my boots scrape along the flying asphalt.  I really miss sledding as a kid, having the ice and snow skitter past my chin four inches away.  I don't miss getting road-rash on my face from the snow, though, the times when it went wrong. Nor do I fancy getting road-rash on my face from actual road.  One must never ride as fast as one can, on public roads.  There are too many hazards; gravel, birds, pedestrians, gravel, oncoming traffic, gravel, fallen rock, gravel, sand....I wonder if that fork-brace will really improve the handling noticeably? I can't say as that I notice a lot of float and the shaking bars aren't helping, nor is the numb front tire.  I suppose I'd have to go with new springs and heaver fork oil to really make a phenomenal, outlook-changing experience.  But if I redo the suspension then it would be a street-bike, not a go-anywhere anypurpose thing anymore. Not that I really go anywhere except street.  There isn't anything public BUT street around here.

On the way back, at the top of the Grade, I pull over to check my cell-phone messages and noticed that I'd ground some more rubber off the sides of the tires.  Now I'm down to 1/8 inch from the edge of the sidewall.  Maybe I WAS pushing things a bit.

"And who is my neighbor?"

Someone once warned me that if I became mired in the science of religion I would defeat its purpose. It's very frustrating. Whether one lives with respect to the whole or with respect to the parts...it's a no-win scenario, for the whole lives in the parts without giving up its fundamental unity. This is an impossible task for deduction, analysis, the picking apart of a thing into its component parts.

The Church has no component parts. It has "members". An analogy cannot even be made to the body and its limbs because those may be broken apart and identified without destroying the whole. The Church may not be named without naming the whole, nor may the whole be named without naming the part for it is One and without division or separation.

The abstract consideration of, and action toward, the whole as such seems to undermine its life force. Consideration of the whole-without-part leads to a mindless slavery to Law at the expense of the Spirit.

The concrete consideration of the part, of the "neighbor" and daily duty would seem to contribute to the life of the whole, and a contribution to life is certainly commanded by Christ. Consideration of the part without whole, however, leads to a spirit of obedience such that results in misplaced trust and consequent blindness to the good of the whole. What man, focusing on his corner of the universe, his circle of needy, can possibly look beyond it? What responsibility does he bear to the rest of the Church? In short, what is his place among his neighbors?

What then is the meaning of duty for the Member? How must he live his life that he excludes blindness yet does not overstep obedience; that he lives by Spirit yet remains loyal to Law?

Loyalty and obedience; turned from virtue to scourge by modernism, which wields them with vast casualty against an unwitting Church to this day. There is an intense atmosphere of loyalty that I've struggled through for years that runs deeper than any other collective virtue I've known (if one may speak of collective virtue); yet I do not know whether to call it virtue or foolishness. All I know is that I cringe whenever I hear mention of loyalty in newsletter or speech. I cringe because I know what it means and where it leads and I begin to understand the weeping of Christ over Jerusalem....

"Shepherd once tol' me, if you can't do somethin' smart, do somethin' right."

 - Jayne, Serenity

In an age where there are no right answers, the questions take a back seat to action.  Seventy-five miles of bumpy freeway couldn''t jiggle the bubbles in any other way.  I have to return to where I started, throw the knife into the ground, and realign the crosshairs.  Training talks, you see. Aristotle was right. A man is what he was made to be.  We do not choose the age we live in.  Nor do we choose the character we play.  We stand there in costume with stage weapons and....then....the lights go purple and no one knows what happens after that until someone comes along with a pen and paper and a title for a history book.

I wonder whether doing the motorcycling club-style is really the thing.  It's a social undertaking in which one must worry about the one in front of you and the one behind you and bisecting the distance so one looks Respectable and Professional in the eyes of the unseeing world; but it really is so much better when the wheels stop turning, the bike is motionless, and one does not have to gulp apple juice amidst a roaring silence.  One has someone to talk to, perhaps share an experience with, and that's pretty fun.

And lunches are so much better with other motorcyclists than they are by oneself.  One is not off at the corner table under the palm tree with one's cigarette and coffee cup with a 10' radius carefully kept by all passersby lest they be knifed in the back.  One is not looked at askance by normal people as a freebooter from the outer planets and a threat to society.  One is simply having fun with one's friends.  Of course, the 10' radius is still kept by strangers, but it's less....embarrassing....somehow.....

And that is nice.

I am single and free.  Yet how often do I take advantage of this fact to blow off the world for a couple of days and Do What I Want?

Noli recently alluded to a recurring necessity I seem to have, to "go find a big sky and find myself under it" and while big skies do not exist in California (too many mountains), perhaps a long road will do, similarly.

And I am so sick of work and my neighborhood.  Why don't I just go away?

Why not indeed.  In about three seconds I had it all mapped out: get on the bike and ride.  Don't care where, don't care how, don't care what it costs.  Just haul ass till ass hauls me.

I have only one style of cross-country travel: decide whether or not I need to get somewhere today; if in the affirmative, find a freeway and pin it, if in the negative, find a deserted, twisty country road where there are speed limits, and creatively pin it.  I stop to take pictures when I see pictures.  And for gas.  And maybe for lunch.  But for the most part I don't take a lot of joy in contemplating local treasures, since I am alone and it would seem strange for a helmeted alien to be standing in front of an antique shop talking to himself.  I don't take pictures of people, they might get offended and their faces are none of my business anyway.  I take pictures of things.

It isn't about the places, after all - it's about passing through the places, feeling their feel and smelling their airs and seeing their church steeples and moving on, always moving on to the next place. It's about experiencing nature's own special effects studio.  But mostly it's about moving. Places move, they move past me, because motion is relative and MY place happens to be moving. And a happy place it is indeed.  The uttermost limit of what is contained is a now-broken-in-finally piece of foam, a windshield and too-wide handlebars with too-narrow grips.  Could be better, in other words, but hey I'm not complaining.  Except when I knocked in that lady's mirror, lanesplitting in San Francisco; but that was just a reminder that I shouldn't lanesplit with such a pig of a motorcycle. ("pig" being a technical not derogatory term applied to dual-sports that are too heavy to be really maneuverable)  Anyway, not to ramble.

Any travel story is useless without pics, so here we go.

Weekend stats:

Approx 1200 miles

20 hours, of which 17 were spent in one riding day

40 mpg average on the freeway (doh!)

New speed record set from Livermore to Santa Paula: 6.5 hours

2 Monsters

1 cigarette

5 Advil

I have no motorcycle.  It is in the shop til Friday. (twas tipped in parking lot. again.)

I hate my life; it is not worth living.

fresh young faces, invigorated conversation, and "where are the hedge shears"

sigh.

I hope they all work out, for my own sake. I don't want to go around breaking knees at the same rate I had to last year. And I hope they all work out for their own sake because no one ever realizes how much easier life is made by consistency and responsibility on the job...esp. when one does not have a lot of time to play with.

Well I’ve drunk to drown, on every ocean I’ve been 
Lake Tanganyika, where the crocodiles swim 
Halifax, Nova Scotia to Van Diemen’s land 
Well I drank with the Sultan, down the Suez Canal

Cause Every Dog Has Its Day 
Like every woman, she gets her own way 
And if there’s a ship that sails tonight 
I’ll captain that too, just to be there with you

- Flogging Molly

The road is a deceptive beast, it is.

I thought of the imagination-trips I made when I was a little kid, riding my gray stallion through the hills of Apache country.   I was heavily armed with a Winchester rifle and two Colt .45's, (appropriately shaped birch branches) herding cattle through the gullies to Yuma through the most dangerous country in the West. Now, packaged in a cheap Korean car listening to Latin trance to keep myself awake, I was on the blazing white rails of Highway 10, completely unarmed, just trying to get through without notice.

The slash canyons and tumbleweed rises of Geronimo's country unrolled itself to the foot of the mountains, dusky far from either side of the high freeway.  The trailers and dusty cars of Geronimo's people lay scattered amongst the hills where once brush huts and twists of smoke used to arise.  It was a sad sight, it was...the sagging Oldsmobile creeping along the road, loaded down with humanity and mattresses.  The clotheslines run from the rotting trailer roof to the scrub oak, framing a huge graffiti tag on the wall of the decrepit dwelling.  The stoic glare on the weatherbeaten face of the young man leaning against the streetsign, backpack in hand.  They know what they had and what they lost and how it was taken from them, oh they remember.  And I, the white man, leaned on the accelerator to escape the accusing stares of the broken storefronts and gaping windows.  Sounds like a war zone, you say.  Isn't it a war zone, I say.  They will never forgive us, and we have forgotten them.  We give them their casino permits and welfare, but they are irrelevant to us.  We have their land; if they don't want to partake of our culture, well that's their own foolishness, eh?

The Abbot's voice was low, but the stone of the abbey chapel resonated and trembled beneath its weight.  The deep tones were taken up by rows of grey-clad monks, chanting, chanting in unison, the growl of a million spiritual horsepower sending a stream of prayer to heaven like a river, crumbling barriers impenetrable to ordinary folk. The sheer brute force of charity present in this prayer is tangible, you can practically smell it and taste it....A daily routine for them, yet never routine.  

Say the rosary at home, that's one thing; listen to an old man who has spent his life in prayer say it, and it's another thing entirely.

"You need to make it back safely, because we need you" the man in the wheelchair said.  "God bless you, have a safe trip."

"God bless you."  I hung up the phone.  Perhaps it is good to be needed by a man in a wheelchair and a tall woman in a large straw hat.  It is definitely painful to stand on the edge of their patio outside their mansion and contemplate the wispy, brown trees and scorched abtiniya, the dusty sand where lawn should be, the generally burnt patch of land with the very beautiful house in the middle of it.  Sad, it is.  So I have been successfully guilted into this, and it sort of happened without my knowledge, the hypodermic needle slipped into the clothing.

Dammit, I need a truck and a rake and a shovel and glue and PVC, and fittings.  Especially a truck.  With a truck, I can do things.  Without a truck, I am useless.  Worse than useless in fact since I am reliant then on the mobility of the client to do their job, which is wrong, just wrong.  

But I don't have time to think about trucks and shovels and money because I'm going on vacation, I'm trying to finish 3, 4 or 5 tv shows and rebuild a motorcycle and do my job and my boss's job both at once so my dear landscaping does not wilt beyond repair.  I am an insane man living an insane life, so I ought to be happy.  I'm pretty sure that if I ever get randomly shot walking out of my apartment my last thought won't be about how I ended up here but about how I forgot to empty my digital camera yesterday again.

Also, on an unrelated note, I have to resign myself to the fact that I'm a racist. I do not, and never will, understand extroverted cultures, like the one I'm in the middle of.  They irritate me.  They have no abstract sense of responsibility or morality, substituting for this a sort of tribal familial code.  I don't understand family. I don't understand a mentality based on the sufficiency of the family unit as opposed to the sufficiency of the individual.  I was raised to kill my own snakes and take personal responsibility for the ones that got away.  I was not raised to help kill our snake and then look about in vague confusion after it escapes our hands.  If I don't have enough to eat, then that's a problem that I do something about, not a problem the government does something about.

I can deal with extroverted individuals, on a case by case basis.  They're individuals.  They're people.  But I can't deal with extroversion in the abstract.  Too friggin' much drama.  I get angry just thinking about it.

So this place hates me, and I hate it.  I guess that makes us about even.

Of course, I can't stand individualistic people either, but at least they leave me the hell alone.

Don't look at me!  It's your fault for being stupid enough not to plan your exits.  Now you have to wait till this cavalcade passes, well sucks to be you.  Take your rightful place at the back of the line, missy.

The BMW slices deftly between the fluttering California flags on the back of Bunny's burgundy Harley Road King and the glaring triangles of my headlights.  Idiot.  Asshole.  Etc. 

It's elementary.  When you're dealing with a squadron of seventeen cruisers, it's common courtesy NOT to break up the group to make a stupid lane change.  All right, so you really were blond and lost, eh?  Make the next exit and go around the block!

Idiot.

Dust rose from the trail.  Five specks in a staggered formation crawled along the sinuous wash track along the foot of the mountain.  The first speck was a white horse bearing a well dressed man, saddlebags and tack black and newly polished.  The second horse, black and bearing a woman equally well dressed in new jeans and a white stetson.  Third horse, whinnying and coughing in the dust, an older woman in well worn shirt, sleeves torn at the shoulders, leather chaps.  The town of Fillmore lay ahead far ahead, a tiny cluster in the distance, a sawn-board cluster of storefronts. Steam rose from the cluster, billowing above the railroad tracks.  The horses pranced from side to side in their walk, impatient to be home to their oats and silent stables.  The sun beat down, dust coating the noses and throats of the riders.  It was hot.

The foremost rider motioned high to the right, and a gigantic crane became visible behind a shoulder of mountain.  It read Fillmore Pipeline.  The man was the manager of this pipeline company, the horsewoman pulling up next to him was his daughter.  The light turned green and the horses plodded on, one step after the next, their impatience subsided into lethargy.  The lead horse whinnied, rattling the adjacent rock wall.  The California Highway Patrol flew by, quietly, like a hawk on the pavement, a vigilant hawk checking speeds and tags and pickup loads I glanced back then ahead, the wisp of dust covering the riders had been swept into the patrol car's wake.  Fringe rattled in the 55mph breeze alongside Daughter's white Dynaglide,  pottering along its wheeltrack, her thin torso erect and proud as she grasped its handlebars.  The lead horse had become a low swept assembly of black fleetside bags and glistening chrome, the rider clad in leather vest, half helmet and goggles; my own reins were a twist grip, my knees clamping some very shiny blue metal.  We were a fleet rolling along the hot melted asphalt, headed toward a shimmering mirage.  The cowboys.  The last cowboys.  They say there is gold up in these hills.... an eager young man looks about for a response from the weatherbeaten faces around him.  They get a faraway glint in their eyes before breaking into conversation about veins found i the cuts made for the 5 freeway...about some ancient closed gold mines, still producing when their corporations and owners passed away....National Landmarks, fenced from the public with tommy guns and razor wire....

The last cowboys.  Maybe not chasing bounties or herding cattle, but alone against the elements: hot dust and hot sun, dehydration and slippery pavement.  Alone against the enemy, the hypnotic truck driver, the laser beams of the CHP.  Alone against the world that cannot know their freedom, with only each other for recourse against mishap.  Chrome glitters in the sun, open pipes rumble the ground, leather fringe flutters by.  The weary riders shift in their seats and breathe the dust, peering ahead through the flow of traffic....

All manner of humanity lies tucked and smothered into narrow valleys between five perfectly spaced ridges.  Moms and tennis instructors and drug dealers and old men mowing their lawns and young men flipping their skateboards live and breathe and eat in the squalid air bottled down there.  Glimmering lights begin to wink on, one after another.  Streets begin to ignite slowly with headlamps, perfectly spaced thin grids of headlamps.

The five ridges stand ragged and stark against the soft blanket of incoming ocean fog.  A low breeze rustles the plastic ribbon against the stake at my side.  Click, click clic-k.  Silence reigns.

The valley sweeps away below my feet, a valley of scrub oak and sage and wasteland.  Here and there, if I peer carefully, I can make out a house.  But it is all wild.  Completely empty and wild all the way down the hill till the brown air of the valley begins.  The fence in front of my chest has a yellow tag on it that says "ELECTRIC FENCE".  I want to touch it with something metal and make it spark, but no, there is too much dry sagebrush about and last year the worst fires were all arson.

There is so much room in the world I am surprised that we insist on cramming ourselves into such narrow corners and then complaining that there is not enough room or food for everyone.  I have seen open spaces that have nothing in them, and then tried to ride to the end of the spaces and there is no end, really.  I eventually just find a road that takes me away in another direction and steers me back to another crowded corner of population.

Here there is a quiet crag on a silent mountaintop, an island of silence and sanity in an ocean of crawling, panting humans whoring after happiness according to the laws of technology, economy and sociology.  Anyone who wants to take a minute from all that can come up here and park their car at the gate and walk out into the silence as far as they want.   Answers are tied to noise and solutions and frustration; only in the quiet may one ask questions.  Brown air can't reach up here, the smells of barbecue and cigarettes and the sound of hip-hop can't reach. One may be still and think whether the laws of technology, economy and sociology must rule life, and where those laws might come from.  The quiet is friendly to inquiry within and the beauty keeps curiosity occupied in the meantime.

Beauty also reminds me, and I stuff my hands in my pockets and glare at the sun and wish she were here, and all reflection about sociology and economy becomes irrelevant.  Gravel crunches under my feet as I drag along back toward where I came from.  It is a gorgeous view, to be sure; all these multitude of mini-valleys but here I am all alone like a fool or a homeless person with my hands in my pockets crunching gravel and kicking stones along ahead.

The chair is comfortable, the ceiling filled with demons, and the feeling of peace remains like a buffer between me and them, the peace that covers a multitude of sins. Peace, like a down blanket over the room, is receding slowly out the window. It's following her, I'm sure it's following her back home. I've been graced with this comfort for one day, unasked, uninvited, like a wraith. And now that comfort is gone again, as if it never existed - but it has left me settled, happy again and I smile at the demons. Kill me now, please, while I'm happy.

I could never figure this out: the times in my life when I have been really alone, but unwilling to recognize the fact, there is one person who shows up from nowhere to take the sting away like a healing salve. This is the second time this has happened. I've always been angry with this person. I don't want to be healed. Pain is weakness leaving the soul, so don't heal me. But she comes with sudden comfort and I become soft and pain is not useful anymore but something that is ugly and hurts. She can't make it go away, but she makes it not hurt.

And then I can't get away from her, everywhere I go I keep running into her, like a guardian angel. She lives in the hallways of my daily life. This is the really weird part. I never seek her out but I can't get away from her as long as she chooses to stay. Perhaps she IS my guardian angel. Poor guardian angel. I'm so sorry you have me for a job.

And this guardian angel is of such caliber that when she does leave, she leaves comfort behind for hours. And I am happy until enough time passes and things happen that I forget and assume again the accustomed cold burden and weakness and the demons come back to take up their posts and life is the same as always.

posting about posting

My posts are too long.  I can't seem to fix this.  Whenever I try to recount a serial experience from beginning to end, well, I recount it serially; and motorcycling is of is nature such a firestorm of sense experience that every sensation is labeled clearly in my memory; everything from the nasty butterfly that decorates my windshield five minutes from home, to the Old Dominion freight truck with the words "flash me" scrawled in the diesel crud on the trailer doors.  The slowly rotating boat propeller glistening ahead in the 2-second following distance; the young dentist hanging a pressed white broadcloth arm out the window of the nameless black SUV.

the world isn't big enough to hold it all....

Rim of the World

"Ok, for god's sake, youre going to get up at 5:45 AM in the morning and try to make early Mass in Pasadena so you can be that much further along on this gas-wasting, timewasting entirely unnecessary diversion of yours?  It's just another twisty scenic road, ok, you know the type.  Mountains.  Rocks.  Sagebrush.  Trash, lots of trash.  Graffiti. What exactly again are you looking for here?  What's different about this one?"

Difference? What difference? There isn't any, if your asking me to quantify it in color or temperature or solitude or lack thereof.  But it's a road I haven't seen yet.  Okay I admit, those roads are getting further and further from my radius of operations.  But California Highway 18 is another legend of motorbikers, tourists and (firemen) that I haven't seen yet.

So do I really need to think twice?  It means I nix whatever I'd be doing to Suzi's guts over the weekend, but I've given up the idea of getting her back together by August.  And I only live once and I only have gas money once, so is there really a contest here?

Not really.  And I can get away with early Mass at TAC if I hurry afterwards.

The next morning was cool and foggy.  A bit of surreality that always makes the (hurried) cruise down the 126 a trip through fantasyland.  The breath of the leftover irrigation mists cloud the celery fields; mixing with the upper airs to cloak the mountain shoulders hither and yon.  I glide on along the empty ribbon of asphalt, v-twin in its happy-zone, humming to itself in its peaceful refrigerator hmm.  All manner of smells flow by along my face: the everpresent citrus, blended to the everpresent sage and tumbleweed (yes, tumbleweed smells) and the occasional whiff of plowed dust, ash and diesel smoke.  Nutshells, onions and porta-potties, palm oil and lavender oil, adobe tile and citrus again, citrus and more citrus....

I swear half the scenery is smells.  You, dear reader, unless you ride a motorcycle, have no frickin' clue what I'm talking about.  But trust me, it's good.  (Has a tendency to crowd out all those gremlins that find a clench-hold, you see, in the consciousness over a stressful week.  They can't stand up to the deluge of sensations)

Uahum, freeway.  Out of the zone.  It was nice while it lasted but the onramp levers me gently into the teeth-rattling, turbulent reality of battling for my position in the left lane.  People, people everywhere encased in steel and plastic boxes - Toyota Camrys, Ford F150's, Dodge Cummins Turbodiesels, BMW 750iLs.

Two hours ensue.

I almost miss the offramp.  Then I do miss the offramp, chiding myself for falling asleep at the handlebars.  But the mistake was easy to correct, and underpass and an invigorating merge later I am headed back in the right direction.  The I-15 looms ahead and I arc off, northbound.

Wow.  Boats.  Boats everywhere.  I feel like I'm on the river.  Jeweled dashboards and salty hulls in every direction.....offramp, offramp to the 138, anyone?  Could you move away so I can see the roadsigns?

"It's been a long time."

"You're telling me." The vats of beer look shapely through the swirled bottom of the glass.  Vats of beer.  Vats.

Something settled on the surface of the bar that wasn't paper and wasn't glass.  I tried to focus and missed the paper napkin.

"Well?"

"Hell, I'm not talking.  I'm drinking."  The foam along the sides of the glass shuddered as the bottom hit the wooden board, then slowly began to evaporate.

"Your glass is empty."

"Your hand is empty."

"And?"

"You've got eyes like..."

"Like what?"

"Like the Minnethota sunset."

"Thought you didn't like Minnesota."

"I didn't.  Or I hadn't.  Tho sinth when does it mather. But I do like sunthseth."

"Spare me the bullshit."

"I ain't teasin' ya, dammith!"

The glass slid almost of its own accord toward the bartender.  I like beer, dark beer, light beer, and the wine that's saved for the last....

The tobacco shop huddled darkly next to the glaring red stoplight set off the bright white t-shirt of the teenager pedaling a very familiar bicycle.  It still has those $70 saddlebags I bought four years ago.  With sudden recognition I averted my face as the light changed green and the whole intersection got an immediate earful of angry v-twin.  It's been half a year and it still pisses me off.  I don't have information to prove the machine is mine, so even if I WERE to go all ape and confrontational and shit there would be no way to follow through.  I should have filed a police report.  I should have cared.  This is how I protect my stuff, this is how I defend myself....by convincing myself that at the time that it didn't matter, it's only a 400-dollar bicycle and I'm way to busy to worry about something I hardly ever used....

...only a 400-dollar bicycle....

....so what will it be next, coward? what will it be next? Your mailbox? Your wallet? Your motorcycle? Your girlfriend?