Song of the Sausage Creature

They say, and they would be right, that every time you ride a motorcycle you are taking your life into your hands. A more accurate statement, perhaps, would be to say "Every time you ride a motorcycle on roads where people also drive cars or trucks you are taking your life into your hands". In other words, motorcycles don't kill people, people in cars kill people on motorcycles.

And deer. Deer kill people on motorcycles as well.

I bring this up today only because earlier this evening I came within a cunt hair of being t-boned by an older woman driving a Ford Explorer.

Side note: does "cunt hair" even have meaning anymore now that everyone shaves their pubes? I don't know. I just wanted to see how many times I could legitimately use the word "cunt" in my post and not piss anyone off. Perhaps I've already failed.

Here's how it all went down. I was riding along one of the many country back roads we have here in lovely Virginia, inhaling the sweet smell of a beautiful and sunny Spring evening and ruminating on how happy I am to be living in this part of the country. I approached a road onto which I had to make a left turn to get home. I applied my turn signal, downshifted, and started to execute said turn. The aforementioned old bag broad lady woman was pulling out from that side road into the main road I was on. We were both taking left turns. I had the right of way, as I was on a main thoroughfare and she was at a stop sign. I watched her (as if in slow motion) look left, look right, and look left again, and I immediately and intuitively knew that she didn't even know I was there. It was as if she looked right through me.

As a side note, when I bought my Harley I knew there were two add-ons I was going to be purchasing as soon as I could afford them. One is a custom paint job, to replace the traditional black and classic logo paint with something more befitting my personal taste, like neon blue skulls in a black vortex or an exploding Harley logo. The other is straight exhaust pipes, the sole purpose of which is to lessen the muffling effect that exhaust pipes have on the engine noise. Which is another way of saying "they make motorcycles obscenely loud".

I bring this up now not to build suspense (you already know she didn't hit me because otherwise I'd be in traction and unable to write this now), but to explain why it is that motorcyclists spend their hard-earned money to make their beloved machines obnoxiously loud. It's not because we are attention whores. Ok, it's not JUST because we are attention whores. It's because people who drive cars and trucks just don't seem to be able to SEE motorcycles on the road. So it's not a bad idea to give them something to HEAR, so they don't run us over.

Like I said, I don't have straight pipes yet. So my motorcycle is "stock Harley" loud, which is to say it sounds great, but you won't hear it unless you are standing next to it or driving behind me.

This lady didn't hear me and she didn't see me, and so she started to pull out into my lane, with me directly in her path, as I was in the middle of my turn.

If you've never driven a motorcycle, the way you turn is you execute a controlled "falling down" maneuver. You lean the bike in the direction you want to turn, and the acceleration of the engine (contributing to centrifugal force) keeps man and machine from lying on their side. Slowing or stopping when in this state means that vertical no longer can be a word used to describe you. "Road Pancake" might become more accurate.

So having to react to someone slamming into you from any direction when you are in the middle of a 90 degree turn is a bad thing.

Fortunately she saw me when she was about a foot away from my highway peg and slammed on the brake. Fortunately there was nobody else driving in either direction on the main road. Fortunately I've been through this before, and straightened out the bike, slammed on my own brakes, and prepared to launch myself off of the machine away from the car - preferring to sacrifice my beloved machine than get pancaked between it and the front bumper of her piece of shit SUV.

We both stopped - inches away from each other. I closed my eyes, breathed a deep sigh of relief, and revved my engine and finished my turn and kept on my path.

As I rode past her I looked up to see her reaction. I half-expected her to be pissed, or flipping me off, which would have been what would happen back in Massachusetts, New York, or Connecticut. Instead, she looked horrified, hands over her mouth, eyes wide open.

Which was the right reaction to have, and I would have had it too, if I didn't have another 15 miles to ride before I could pull my bike off into the relative safety of my apartment complex parking lot. I didn't have time or the luxury of flipping out, I needed to concentrate on driving.

Because nobody else seems to be...

P.S. - For those who don't know, the title of this post is a reference to Hunter S. Thompson's epic "Song of the Sausage Creature" article about riding speed bikes (when they were called "cafe racers").