P A R T 1:
M E
D O W N
M E
D O W N
POST: 0002
PROSE
10-12-02022
*All characters and events described in this post are fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons or ghosts, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
While I’m riding this motorcycle, I don’t think of dying on this motorcycle. I don’t think of crashes or of what crashes would do to my body. I don’t think of the afterlife. I do sometimes imagine what it would be like to be launched into the air. I mentally place myself in the few floating seconds before the street greets me. Would it be peaceful or terrifying? Would time stretch or shrink? Would it feel very different from the ride?
Would it be worth it?
No, I don’t think much at all on this motorcycle. I’m only thinking now because I’m at this stoplight. I feel things, though. I feel weightlessness and suspension. I will feel this suspension soon when I’m in wind and motion; a motion that feels a lot like a fall. The ground is right there, humming beneath me, and I’m falling over and over it. It’s always close, never quite meeting me. This is what I mean by suspension.
Keep the rubber side down
⥣ ⇈ That’s a shared blessing ⇈ ⥣
It is said between riders. This eucharist shouted from a man wearing old leathers, with a face like a cast-iron skillet. He is gliding through the intersection on a Harley Sportster from a year that predates my birth by a decade. He wants my tires to stay on the road and my body to stay above it. He is gone much faster than his words. I have his blessing.
The light is green now and I’m in motion and I am on my motorcycle and these moments are becoming the ⇝ moment. I’m rolling back the throttle, then rolling it forward, swift. Back again, now in 4th gear. Up the onramp now, slipping into position on the freeway, slipping out of time. I’m in 5th gear now and I’m at 55 mph, then 65, then 70, 75, 80. I am flying through traffic, flying through California, through the instant-by-instant unfolding of my own life. I am on a planet that’s flying through space. I am a Russian nesting doll of flights. What is the best way to approach life moving at 80 miles-per-hour? Do I pretend I’m flying, or falling? Do I ignore the ground, or watch to make sure it doesn’t jump up at me? I think this is the wrong approach. I think the place I need to be is in the land of no-ground. A being-state, grounded in non-ground. Is that very different from flying? I’m thinking too much.
I had a friend. No, not a friend, a guy I followed on social whatever-the-hell. He’s 35, or looks it. My age, or looks it, with a fiancée and two pit bulls, and legs that will never work again. Two years ago, his friend died on a Harley Davidson 2012 V-Twin Street Glide. A crimson Baphomet. An 800lb gargoyle that should take turns wide when the hard saddlebags are attached. The left saddlebag hit the ground, bounced the back end of the bike, and this rider found the bike turning & skidding wider than he’d wanted. There was a cinder block wall rushing toward him in the new arch of his path. Nothing to be done. A week later, I’m tapping the little heart below an image. A repost on his friend’s social whatever-the-feed. It’s of a memorial of flowers and empty Patron bottles and prayer candles and one crushed red helmet, all of it resting against a cinder block wall with a huge dark scuff.
I want the tapping of that little heart to communicate that he died for a good cause. I don’t know what the cause is, but it is my cause too, and I know in my own heart that it is good. I don’t comment; I didn’t know him, but I know that part of him. The rider’s account goes into “remembering” mode. His motorcycle is now parts, and those parts go to riders who still draw breath.