I never think too much about aging. It is what it is. You age, things fall apart, you die. Circle of life and all that rot. One of the shitty things about aging though is losing the good feelings that certain small things gave you as a youngster. Whether it was the great feeling of bombing a hill on your skateboard sans safety gear, just you and a 27″ G&S Fiberflex, wind through your hair, etc. to riding your motorcycle at 15 years of age along curvy country roads in rural Kentucky.
That good “riding my motorcycle feeling” was something that I hadn’t experienced in years. Just the great feeling of sunshine on your face, speed — you and the bike flowing down the road. When I was 15 I had a little Honda 125 on/off road bike. It didn’t have much power and wasn’t too stylish, but riding it on those country roads in the summer was so much fun. Since that time I’ve had several motorcycles, all of them bigger, faster, nicer, yet I hadn’t achieved that same feeling since. Until today.
I was riding my Triumph back from a lunch hour errand and the situations aligned perfectly for a flashback of youthful joy. The sun was shining, it was around 83f, the roads weren’t too crowded and the bike seemed to be a great piece of machinery engineered for fun and speed. I rode down Martin Luther King Blvd. (greatly exceeding the speed limit) with a big dopey smile plastered on my face, enjoying the fuck out of the simple act of driving a motorcycle. Fun.