Happiness is a Warm Guzzi

The most hack­neyed blog­ger line in all of his­to­ry: sor­ry I haven’t been writ­ing much recent­ly. I would have thought that being injured and keep­ing my foot up would have giv­en me more rea­son to write. In fact while I may have had more time to write in the last two months, I haven’t had a lot to write about. Not real­ly proud of all the tele­vi­sion I’ve watched in the last two months. I’ve done some oth­er things, but yeah, just not been as active as I could be.

One thing I’ve missed for cer­tain has been motor­cy­cling. The Tri­umph was declared a total loss but I still have the Guzzi, which except for a short stint in a friend’s garage, has been parked on the street taunt­ing me every day. My father told me when I was very small that machines need to be start­ed up reg­u­lar­ly even if they are not being used, and the San Fran­cis­co Depart­ment of Pub­lic Works has been help­ing me out with that by send­ing streetsweep­ers along with meter­maids to moti­vate me to make sure that the Guzzi would not be in the path of a $35 park­ing tick­et on the West side of the street on Wednes­day morn­ings or the East side on Mondays.

At first I had friends move the bike for me, but as my foot has been get­ting stronger I’ve been doing it myself. My ortho doc­tor tells me I can put as much weight on the foot as I like; the bones are not total­ly healed, but they’re knit­ted togeth­er well enough for most duty. At this point, my biggest prob­lems walk­ing come from the com­bi­na­tion of the crush dam­age done to the soft tis­sue in the foot (lig­a­ments, ten­dons, mus­cle etc) and the foot hav­ing been stuck in one posi­tion for a month and a half with­out using it at all. I’m amazed at how quick­ly mus­cle will atro­phy when it’s not used, but it does: my right calf mea­sures a full two inch­es around more than the left calf!

This morn­ing is Wednes­day and the street­clean­ers come by some­time between nine and eleven in the morn­ing. I’m walk­ing with­out the cane now and today is one of the days I’m sched­uled to be on-site with a client, so I decid­ed that today was the First Day of Motor­cy­cling for me.

The Guzzi gave me a lit­tle scare when I pushed the igni­tion but­ton. The motor turned over very hes­i­tant­ly, but then again and again faster and then caught. I hit the fast-idle for a few min­utes while I checked out the mir­rors and made sure that every­thing was secure and func­tion­ing, and then hit the road. It’s a short ride to the clien­t’s office, but I made it a lit­tle more inter­est­ing by tak­ing a detour on the free­way so that I could get the bike up to speed, even if just for a minute. And I real­ly have noth­ing to report. It was an unevent­ful ride, with­out the uncer­tain­ty or fear that I was hop­ing would­n’t creep in after get­ting hit by a car. This much is true: I paid a lot less atten­tion to the jog­gers on the Embar­cadero than ever before. The only prob­lem I ran into is a lit­tle slop­pi­ness in the rear of the bike, but I’m pret­ty sure that will be cor­rect­ed as soon as I get to a gas sta­tion to get the tire up to full pres­sure. It should­n’t sur­prise me that the tires might be low after the bike has sat most­ly idle for two months. I’m not sure I can even tell you when the last time I inflat­ed the tires was pri­or to the accident. There was no great thrill to rid­ing a few miles to the office, but there’s noth­ing like the feel­ing of mobil­i­ty and inde­pen­dence that comes from just being able to get myself from place to place. Nev­er mind the «freedom of the road», I’m just glad not to rely on friends and taxis just to get from point A to point B.