Thursday, June 26, 2008

Riding around





I had been walking up and down the hills of campus for a while. Campus does sit on the side of a mountain after all. It is nice at times. For instance, if I want to walk out my back door and start hiking in under 45 minutes I can have a view that lasts for miles. But when I don’t want to go on a hike, when I just want to walk to class and back, those hills seem to lose their beauty and more kind of just seem to be in the way.

So one day after being fed up with walking around in the cold day after day, I got a call from my buddy. “Do you want to go motorcycle shopping today?” he asked. And of course I was in. That night I was driving an old beat up motorcycle back home. I was told it was an old police motorcycle bought in a police auction and checked to makes sure the engine was still intact and good. It was and has been so far. But unfortunately for me, it still looked like a police motorcycle. I mean to me, it just looked like a normal old white motorcycle with a blue stripe on it. But to everyone else it was easily spotted for a cop bike a 100 yards away. I soon noticed people noticing me. Then soon got a barrage of cop jokes like, “Did you get the siren with that?” or “Oh no! Watch out. Here comes the copper.”….

At first I thought that maybe it was possible that people thought I was cool. Well, I still like to think that a bit, but the reality of the fact is that when people said, “Nice bike,” more times than not, it was sadly sarcastic. “Oh well,” I thought, “two old wheels were better than two feet,” and kept on riding. But soon, even when girls were pointing and laughing to my shame, I decided I had to do something about it.

A talk with my buddy and we decided that four or five cans of spray paint should do it. Maybe three white and one red we figured. Actually, nine cans of white and 4 cans of red later, it was painted. :-) I guess that is the way things go. At this point the painting was finished but I wasn’t. Now, I was going to put on some yellow tape and stickers. A long search around town and then via internet and I find my line tape. Only problem is that when it came, they sent me two different colors of yellow. I put the tape back in the mail, waited a week and then I was in business. This kind of thing seems to always follow me around in life, but for the most part I seem to get through. Finally, the tape came, well, most of it anyway. My bike is still missing a stripe and probably always will, but in the end, it doesn’t look like a cop bike. It looks like a little ole clunker, but I love it and ride it away.

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