No Pix

…because it would have been an intrusion, but I climbed aboard Veronica today and rode till my ass wore out. Perfect weather — melt-you-into-your-boots hot every time I stopped for gas, with a light barely-breeze that was exactly right at 80. Veronica sang like she was tuned to the key of the day, not so much as a hiccup.

Rode hours up, up, up, into Oklahoma, looping back down, and finally stopped on that unnamed,  meandering road right off the end of that two-lane asphalt strip across the dike, hidden in the outskirts of a town so small it barely makes a dent on GPS, at the hole-in-the-wall biker bar I hadn't visited in a couple of years which, to my vague surprise, is still there.

I swapped war stories with the owner and a couple of the OGs at the bar while I drank a cold one under the sweat-drying blast of a laboring air-conditioner. Diet Coke, in case you're wondering. As far as I could tell in the half-light of the place, it hadn't changed a lick since my last visit, Confederate and American and Budweiser and race flags billowed from their four-corner mounts on the rolled-tin ceiling, biker memorabilia and brick-a-brak  scattered everywhere (astonishing how much biker-related neon advertising there is in the world, really), a bulletin-board full of scheduled rides and races and gatherings and blowouts and parties thumbtacked all over it, moderately obscene dangerous-biker stickers on the mirrors and doors, and on the surprisingly large but currently unoccupied bandstand, a very large jar which was painted fluorescent orange with black lettering that said "Tip The Bass Player And No One Gets Hurt".

The variety of 1%er outlaw club and puppet club turf stickers hadn't changed, which was good news. As always, they were artfully arranged on the doors so that they looked casually random, but they never overlapped — the owner fiercely guards the bar's status as neutral turf where unlikely colors and patches mix with zero drama permitted, which is one reason it's still here after all these years and why I continue to stop whenever I'm in the neighborhood.

The tattooed bartender (full sleeve exotic bird-of-paradise on her right arm, a well-done black-ink ivy curling up her left side from ankle to shoulder) wearing the bar uniform (ragged-cut levi short-shorts and [I presume] push-up bra under a v-necked half-tshirt} heard me say how old I was when I was bullshitting my way through some unreliable and unlikely story or another, and said "You're SHITTING me!" I told her I certainly was not, and asked her WTF she was talking about. "You CAN'T be that old," she said. "Wow, you look GREAT for your age." I started laughing at her and told her I'd already put the tip in her jar, but thanks anyway, and she shook her head and said, no, that she was serious. (shrug) She looked serious. Who knows. Maybe a day on the bike peels back a couple of layers. Maybe she was trying to sell me another DC. Fuck it, I'll take it, I decided. It made me smile and just kinda matched up with the rest of a good day.

Back out and about, down across that long bridge over the muddy red water, twisting and winding down obscure Texas Farm-To-Market roads, dimming orange strobing between long, zippered shadows cast by the irregular ranks of trees between me and the setting sun, roaring past families of sandy-damp swimsuited kids goggling at me from the backseats of cars loaded with inner-tubes, coming back from their day at the lake.

Finally at long last home, my ass is complaining at me for the lack of preparation for a ride that long. I'm in a terrifically good mood, and so relaxed you could punch a hole through me with a Twinkie, and… well, I decided I'd tell y'all about it.

Even with no pix.

In Our Next Episode:  Probably 100% -- maybe even 200% -- more pix than in this post.