No? Too bad. I’m gonna tell you anyway. My right shin is throbbing like teenage erection, and I need to rest it by sitting in front of my keyboard until the swelling goes down a touch.
I know you’re all thinking: What’s the fucker moaning about now? He gets to ride all the latest bikes, the lucky fuck, and here he is bitching about some scars. Bet you he’s crashed again and is having a whine.
It’s not that. I have not crashed again. I rarely crash. I am not, as such yutzs are called in our industry by the long-suffering motorcycle importers, a “frequent flyer”. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve troweled a test bike in 30 years of doing these reviews.
My scars are for other reasons altogether, and they are both physical and emotional. And no, I do not need a hug. Go fuck yourself.
The scars I bear are all from being unfamiliar with whatever bike I may have in the shed at any given time. Unlike normal people who own a bike or two, ride them a lot, and are familiar with how the mounting, riding, and dismounting happens, I get something new and unfamiliar every few weeks.
And my learning curve is, perforce, steep and cruel. As it should be. I am not, as they say in the think-tanks, here to fuck spiders. Nor am I to be pitied like some limbless street beggar. Hence the scars I bear. So heroically, I might add.
My most recent scarring was thanks to a lovely sissy bar Harley fitted to its 2024 Road Glide. Great things, sissy bars. Bitches love them because they minimise the chances of sliding off the back when you kick it in the guts. The bike, of course, not her. And I love sissy bars because I can strap shit to them, and also because I hate having to go back for the outraged traffic-disrupting bitch, now all scarred up and heaps less hot, and in a foul mood as well.
None of that happened this time. What happened instead was I rammed my shin into the sissy bar as I went to get on the bike. I did this because the last Road Glide I had did not have a sissy bar. And in my brain, this was the one I was getting on. Never mind the last one was orange and black, and this one was white. What mattered was me falling to the ground and keening like a gutted gibbon until my dignity kicked in and I got up to check if any bastard had witnessed this, and if so, how quickly I could kill him or her.
Now my throbbing swollen shin is full of old, stale pain-blood which will eventually disperse and I will move on with my life, albeit scarred some more.
Harley has certainly given my right leg a battering over the years, hearkening back to when I stupidly fitted a kickstarter to my Shovel. That dumbness did actually leave scars on my leg, as well as a savage infection because I ignored the gouged flesh and carried on thanks to the excellent Class A drugs I was full of at the time.
In more recent times, Harley’s tendency to fit that bullhorn-shaped air-intake on the right-hand side of its engine has brutalised my right leg quite a bit. This mostly happens when my usual leopard-like grace evades me, and I dunder-clump my leg into it each time I take off from a set of lights. Yes, that’s why I’m not smiling in pictures. No bull-horn-equipped Harley rider is.
But it’s not just Harleys that have taken their toll on my body. Lots of bikes have bitten me, ripped at my flesh, and caused all sorts of bruising and swelling – and all because I was, at the time, unfamiliar with them. Owners of these bike will only damage themselves like this once, or maybe twice if they’re really dumb, and then they remember and don’t smash their ankle into the footpeg trying to access the side-stand. Their brain has built a new synaptic link. But no sooner has my brain created this link, than I am given a new bike which renders those links redundant. And the battering begins anew.
However, the emotional scars I bear are much worse. But I am stronger for them – because the hate they generate is a source of strength. Take the whole luggage concept. On your bike, you have already worked out how to strap shit onto it. You may even have bought bespoke gear that suits your bike and your travels. Good for you, fucker. That is not how it works for me.
Each time I get a new bike to review and I decide I am going away for a few days, I have to work out how to strap my belongings to the bastard. This gets harder and harder each year, as fewer and fewer bikes provide the rider with places to anchor straps.
And I have a lot of straps. Both Andy Strapz and ocky straps, and some strange-looking hooked things I found in the Bunnings bargain trolley a while back. And my skill-level in applying them is, quite frankly, fucking awesome. I am rarely defeated. But those defeats are getting more frequent, and they mount up, and there are nights when I cannot sleep for the shame and hatred that eats at me.
The first bike that ravaged my psyche in this way was MV Agusta’s stunning F4. Yes, I did manage to strap a Gearsack to the back of the cunt, but it didn’t really work and the Gearsack proceeded to relentlessly crush me and my beloved cock-and-balls package into the tank all the way to Phillip Island and back. Anything you strap to your bike needs to not move. And for it not to move, it needs four separate anchor points. The F4, and a whole bunch of bikes after it (Panigale, R1, M1000XR, Aprilia RSVR and Tuono, Moto Guzzi Mandello…and the list goes on), just don’t provide the anchor points.
I have created entire rat’s nests of straps, anchored on the rear-footpeg mounts, looped under the tailpiece (not recommended), and even hooked into spare numberplate holes (yes, I maybe made them with a drill, sorry not sorry), and then, when my efforts didn’t really work, kicked all my shit all over the garage or the side of the road in a childish temper tantrum.
You have no idea how emotionally damaged all that has made me. Which is why I am telling you how emotionally damaged all that has made me. Too bad if you don’t care, you heartless monster. You should.
Put aside the fact my shins and ankles have been Catholic Church-level abused. If they were altar boys, the papist rapists would be paying me damages. My very fucking soul is scarred. My psyche is a gibbering, straitjacketed hate-clown. Money will not change that.
I have found myself having to wear a backpack. A fucking backpack! Like some dumb and broken beast of burden, I am forced to cram whatever shit I might need for a few days away into a rucksack and ride on. I hate the fucken things. I hate that so many riders think they are a good thing. Clearly, these mongs have not crashed with a rucksack on their backs – a rucksack they have stupidly filled with hard things like cameras, water bottles, penis-pumps, and anal hog-dildos for their Sunday arvo ride up their local cock-road.
My evil side actually wishes them harm when it sees them. It wishes them to ponder their backpack-filled-with-hard-things idiocy as they lie in a hospital bed with their powdered spines and now useless arms, legs, and dicks.
You can clearly see how emotionally unstable I am. Very little humanity remains. But that is the price, I guess. And I pay it each time the invoice comes in.
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