White Knight

So, I haven't posted lately. I've been busy. Sue me.

One of the problems was a confluence of events that pretty much required me to armor up and go do the White Knight routine. For those of you who don't do that sort of thing, it involves rescuing fair maidens, people with chronic HUA [Head Up Ass, or "Asshats" as UV calls them], and the occasional swish fagboy from the Evil Dragons of Real Life, and taking the heads of enemies as trophies which, incidentally, is a lot sloppier than the old stories would have you believe.

And, no, if you think I'm talking about you, you're wrong -- these are people you don't know. Hell, I didn't know most of them two weeks ago...

(I've also been sporadically arguing with Eurotwits over on The Brit's comments pages, but that was actually pretty amusing, so doesn't officially count against my workload.

And, no, I didn't do it much -- that's not what blogs are for -- but who can resist tweaking someone who thinks the Fucking French aren't scumbags? "Fish in a barrel" comes to mind.

When I told them we 'Merkins were mostly annoyed at them for their failure to recognize the One True Path, several, in all seriousness, wanted me to explain The Path to them.

Wow.

No wonder they admire the negotiating skills of the French.)

Anyhow, when I'm not doing that, I'm riding. I find that no matter how much shit I've had to deal with in a given day, climbing on large, dangerous machinery and letting it sing to me for a couple of hundred miles as I blast across the landscape wide open cleans it up and puts it all where it belongs. Along about 1/2 hour in, I get into an almost Zen-like state of hyper-awareness and everything else drops away. An hour later, when I stop for fuel at some backwater little town I've never been to before, I stretch and, for the life of me, cannot remember why I was so aggravated earlier.

A couple of weekends ago, for example, was perfect riding weather --about 75 degrees, dead calm, bright sunshine.

What a spectacular day. I came roaring down out of the hills on the little two-lane asphalt that goes to the river crossing between Texas and Oklahoma that not all that many people know about, hair and leathers ripping in the wind as I cranked it down nearly horizontal coming out of the last turn at 80+ (about 130kph for the Euros here...) As I straightened out, I spotted the group of bikes stopped in the dead middle of the bridge ahead of me on the shoulder.

They were a crew of outlaw bikers (1%ers) out cruising from the Dallas/Ft Worth area, taking a break, stretching, looking at the river, and drinking beer.

It was time for a break, in fact, so I pulled over across the road from them so as to not intrude on their space, shut down my bike, and waited for them to acknowledge me, if they were going to. I would have been neither offended nor surprised if they didn't bother to notice me at all. Outlaws have their own rules and approaches to things, and violating them can result in a quick ass-beating or, in the present case, being chucked into the river from a great height, or both.

Suddenly one of them reached into his saddlebags, produced a can of Miller and threw it across the road to me. "We wondered if you were gonna stop and have a beer," he said.

Yeah, buddy. Riding hard for hours, finding a solid crew out in the boonies to swap bullshit and beer with while sitting on a bridgerail dangling your feet 50' above the muddy Red River and watching the sun go down...damn, how serious can you take the rest of life after that?

I'd be out riding right now instead of doing this, except The Beneficiary is here. Y'see, it's a grey, cold day today, and it's going to rain shortly and I've got a screaming headcold which involves a fairly high temp, sandpapered throat, and nasty stuff dribbling from every oriface. When I grabbed my leathers out of the closet and told her I was going riding, she took my keys away from me FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

Freakin' women. No sense of humor.

In Our Next Episode: I will discuss whether or not this cold actually manages to kill me.