Photo: Florin Tibu
I don't want to start this piece in a negative way, but I must confess that I really dislike "overly-motorcyclistic" photos on the internet. You know, the dumb cliches with straight roads stretching for tens of miles in the desert, riding into the sunset, or idiots kneeling in front of their bikes, offering them flowers or oil bottles in the spring and all this crap.
Even though some might feel slightly offended, I'd go even further and say that many of these are not at all funny, but downright stupid, excessively and unnecessarily cheesy and promoting a wrong image of what riding should be.
Explanations abound, and they all have one thing in common, that of utterly mistaking motorcycling for almost everything it, in fact, isn't. Those who rode on straight roads tens or hundreds of miles know how boring everything becomes quickly, and how their eyes start seeing things that aren't there. In the absence of turns to make you move in the saddle, joints start to ache and so on, definitely not that much fun all in all.
Likewise, the cheesy photos with bikes riding in the autumn sunset... I too was dreaming about this before I started riding, but the first time I did this was not exactly cool. In the absence of VERY GOOD polarized sunglasses, riding into the autumn sunset was a real ordeal. Even now, when I can afford top-notch sunglasses, riding with the low sun in my face is still far from idyllic.
As for the bikes in beds, flower offerings and the cheesiest quotes one stumbles upon on almost every Facebook group, I guess there is a certain audience of people who enjoy such low-level so-called humor.
As opposed to the cliches, the meme that prompted me to do this write-up seems a bit wittier and by all means, funnier. Probably because it harks back to the sober type of humor TV series such as Black Adder. Anyway, this meme illustrates quite well how ideas that are conveyed in an insufficiently unequivocal manner may yield unexpected results.
And if the significant other is a guy that's not afraid to get his hands dirty working on improving the bike, things can go down the drain even more quickly. Can't help thinking about stability versus balance, though; relationship stability versus bank account balance, that is, knowing how expensive these Ohlins goodies are...
Explanations abound, and they all have one thing in common, that of utterly mistaking motorcycling for almost everything it, in fact, isn't. Those who rode on straight roads tens or hundreds of miles know how boring everything becomes quickly, and how their eyes start seeing things that aren't there. In the absence of turns to make you move in the saddle, joints start to ache and so on, definitely not that much fun all in all.
Likewise, the cheesy photos with bikes riding in the autumn sunset... I too was dreaming about this before I started riding, but the first time I did this was not exactly cool. In the absence of VERY GOOD polarized sunglasses, riding into the autumn sunset was a real ordeal. Even now, when I can afford top-notch sunglasses, riding with the low sun in my face is still far from idyllic.
As for the bikes in beds, flower offerings and the cheesiest quotes one stumbles upon on almost every Facebook group, I guess there is a certain audience of people who enjoy such low-level so-called humor.
As opposed to the cliches, the meme that prompted me to do this write-up seems a bit wittier and by all means, funnier. Probably because it harks back to the sober type of humor TV series such as Black Adder. Anyway, this meme illustrates quite well how ideas that are conveyed in an insufficiently unequivocal manner may yield unexpected results.
And if the significant other is a guy that's not afraid to get his hands dirty working on improving the bike, things can go down the drain even more quickly. Can't help thinking about stability versus balance, though; relationship stability versus bank account balance, that is, knowing how expensive these Ohlins goodies are...
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