I stopped by to visit my moteybike in the moteybike hospital today. It was one of two bikes sitting on the curb outside the shop. The other was some kind of Kawasaki crusier, also mid-80’s vintage, also black. I was struck by just how incredibly ugly my bike is. It’s not just that it looks weird with the side panels ripped off and the stripes long gone, it’s mostly the fact that it’s covered in a terribly applied coat of gasoline-streaked, patchy, faded, spray-paint matte black. It looks just awful, unloved.

Other times I look at my bike and see how cool it is. It’s for real man. Made incapable of fronting, posturing or other superficiality by it’s sheer cosmetic disability. Crouched in it’s ungainly posture, less panther than wolverine. (Remeber that wolverines are, if you ignore the comic book character and sports teams, really nasty unpleasant looking creatures, not cool at all.) There is something about the existence of a such a complex, functioning artifact, something so very concrete, that is so truley unaesthetic that it appeals deeply. Incapable of moving you, except in the plainest sense. Clearly, with saddlebages and road dirt on it, this bike is up to something other than enhancing somebody’s self esteem. Sometimes I think owning something so beautifully cool must seem ostentatious to others.

Part of me is unappreciative of cars and motorcycles and all the rest of it. They are the product of the military industrial complex. Many of the engineers responsible probably give their lives to making these mechanisms work without consideration for their place in the world, good or bad. They suck up metal, time, labour, rubber, electricty to be made. Almost certainly born on an assembly line, created by a bored line worker with no real challenge or thrill in her/his job. Done over and over. Once made, they take up concrete and gasoline and spit out congestion and NOxs and CO2. They demand road networks that remake working communities into dsyfunctional purgatories. There isn’t much that you could consider good about motorized vehicles.

But there is so much. They’re a repetitive haiku, a moving poem. The fact that the internal combustion engine works at all is a testament to a huge joint effort of humanity (emphasis on manity). That the cylinders dance in their unceasing rythm, within the subtle constraints of their tolerances, again and again. Cushioned and guided by gaskets, rubber, oil. Hard to concieve of the massivley organic trial-and-error process that has taught us how to form the vacuum chambers in the carburetors so that the jet needles are drawn back through their channels – just enough at that speed – to allow the suitable mixture of gas vapour and oxygen into the cylinder heads. Amazing that it works at all. And then you can pull back on the throttle, and feel the whole system work itself up, all the parts adjusting their cycles of motion in proportion. All of it working together so reliably that you can sit on it and manuever it into traffic and flow and dodge through it. When I open that butterfly valve on the other end of the throttle cable wide open, when all that petroleum charges the sytem into heavy high RPMs, how can it not shake and gnash and tear itself apart? I opened the carburetors and poked at the rubber in the vacuum chambers, but carefully because they are a delicate, vegetative looking membrane. After 30 000 miles, they are still soft and supple and ready to rock, still pulling with proper tension on their jet needles. Sit down, engage the starter, open the electron channel across the wet cell battery, the engine will feel it, catch and roll and you can pull off into the road. Lean and you will turn towards your journey. Black tubes channeling gasoline down from a tank pregnant with it, hydrocarbon remains from the bogs of epochs ago, mixing it with the air around you, funneling it into the chryallis chambers of the cylinders, the sparks crossing the just-so electrode gaps in your plugs a million times in their lifetimes, turning that liquid bog into a “controlled burn”, a fast fire that pushes the metal femur under the metal kneecap down it’s pipe. That pipe the only home it knows. Churning the driveshaft in concert with four other bones, driveshaft mediated by the archetypal mesh of cogs you’ve chosen with your left foot. Pulling the chain, spinning the wheel, rubber pushing away and away from old road to new.

It’s a terrible waste in so many ways, a waste of gas, a waste of human effort and also a waste to think of that mechanical symphony being taken for granted so often. I don’t know what to make of it all exactly. Clearly it’s hard for me to articulate. But my beautiful ugly black machine will soon be back on it’s way.