There are days when my mind drifts into a greasy, chrome-bright cul-de-sac, and everything becomes motorbikes. Not in a cool collector way. More like I’m making coffee and suddenly remembering the angle of a favorite corner, how the bars felt light that day, how the engine was eager but polite, and I burn the toast because the machine in my head won’t idle down.
Some days it’s completely, embarrassingly motorbikes
When the brain short-circuits to throttle talk
A coworker asks how my weekend went and I say “tight radius, late apex,” before I catch myself and translate it back to human: “Oh, you know, went for a ride.” Their eyes do that polite flicker, trying to find a hook, and I realize I’ve already mapped the torque curve of the conversation. There are whole mornings where I rehearse gear ratios in my head like some people hum pop songs.
I try to talk about normal things—the grocery run, a show I liked—but the words come out braided with engine notes. There’s the perfectly stupid impulse to compare office politics to carb sync, as if two misaligned personalities can be fixed with a vacuum gauge. I wish I could say it’s intentional, but the brain has its own fuel tap, and mine leaks.
On the bus, I watch the river of traffic and imagine lane choices like chess moves. I spot a narrow gap between a van and a taxi and my hands twitch, phantom clutch and throttle. By the time my stop arrives, I’m thinking about tire profiles, not emails, and I walk three blocks the wrong way before admitting it.
Smelling fuel, hearing roads, forgetting errands
Two drops of fuel on my glove linger longer than most perfumes. There’s this faint sweetness to modern gasoline, a ghost of chemistry that somehow says Saturday morning. I tell myself not to like it, but then I catch the scent of warm rubber from a passing bike and I’m sixteen again, full of illegal optimism and not enough armor.
Even the road noises have their own weather. A bridge joint gives a quick metallic pop, and suddenly I’m counting them like breaths. The hiss of a rain-soaked tire has its own rhythm, a brushstroke sound that says: go slower, be gentler, this is the kind of day that forgives but never forgets.
In the middle of all this, errands evaporate. Walk into the hardware store for batteries, leave with threadlocker. My shopping list, crumpled and honest, waits in my pocket while I stare at a rack of O-rings like I’m choosing jewelry. By the time I get home, the tomatoes are still at the market and my hands smell like chain lube.
The awkward joy of explaining why bikes took over
People ask, in that concerned tone saved for cults and hobbies that eat paychecks, what the appeal is. I try for answers that won’t scare them: it’s like hiking at sixty miles an hour, I say, or meditation with moving scenery. None of those are right. The nearest truth is that the world speaks louder from a saddle—wind, heat, the impatience of traffic—and it hushes the useless talk inside my head.
There’s embarrassment baked into it. I’m a grown adult evangelizing throttle response like it’s literature. At family dinners, I clamp down on the urge to explain lean angle the way some folks bring up football stats, and I nod along to safe topics until someone asks about the weather. Then I say I can smell when rain is ten minutes out on hot asphalt and the table goes quiet, a weird kind of impressed.
Still, the joy refuses to be sensible. Watching a friend take their first wobbly laps in a parking lot, I see the exact moment fear unties itself from their shoulders. It’s small—just a corner of a grin behind the visor—but unmistakable. Try summarizing that without sounding like a brochure. Try not caring that you do.
Wrenching till midnight, lost in little victories
There’s a magic hour in the garage when the day forgets you exist. The light goes a soft kind of blue, old songs on a cheap speaker, a crescent of tools migrating steadily away from their drawer. Bolts line up like small faithful soldiers, all different sizes, all pretending they know where they belong.
You learn to celebrate things most people won’t notice. The snap that says the torque wrench got it right. A carb bowl that seals on the first try. The way a throttle cable moves smoother after you re-route it one inch to the left and whisper please. My knuckles are a map of minor negotiations with stubborn metal, and it’s the cleanest kind of tired when the bike finally fires.
Of course there’s the other side: the lost circlip, the gasket that tears because you hurried and thought you wouldn’t, the part that ships “sometime next week.” I have argued with a seized fastener like it could be reasoned with, I have bribed it with penetrating oil and bad language. Midnight arrives and I’m greasy and hungry and oddly peaceful. Not everything is fixed, but the engine coughs in a hopeful way, and that’s enough to sleep on.
Some days I wish I could switch it off, mute the roll of it all—the roads, the smell, the compulsive tinkering. Then a morning slips in as thin and bright as a spoke, and my head fills with warm valve chatter and the soft click of a visor locking down. Embarrassing, sure. But it’s the honest shape of my attention, and on the good days it carries me home.
