[Shop-talk] changing times...

[Mark Bradakis]

I wish I knew where this came from.  Have no idea who the author might 
be, sad to say.

mjb.

============

As I watch the Japanese crotch-rockets blasting the circuits,
I am suffused with a distilled sense of wonder, and I marvel;
these men and women are so skilled, perfect machines riding on
perfect machines.  Their bikes are precision instruments built by
precision instruments, sold in their multitude to the techno-dazed.

About ten years ago, I was out earholing on a norton-racer-road in
coastal Marin county (north of San Francisco) on my '75 Commando.
Rolled up to a stop sign.  A guy on an old 500cc BSA thumper came
around the corner facing me, leaned through the corner, dialed up
the wick, and thumped on up the hill.  I shut nort down to listen
to the sound of that long-stroke single haul that hill.  I was
thrilled; I could feel the sound through the soles of my boots.
All these years later, when I remember that sound, that fine sound,
I choke, and tears fill my eyes.  As that quiet thump, thump,
thump, faded up the hill, me and nort sat and thought of dinosaurs.
It was a good day to think about dinosaurs, one of those crisp,
perfect Marin autumn days.  Back then, me and my dinosaur could
still swat the Japanese flies buzzing around the hills, those
primordial crotch-rockets, awesome machines that have come to be
so strong, strong enough to eat me and nort for breakfast.

These ten years gone, I'm now flogging that British oil-bath around
the Rockies.  But the king is dead (long live the king!), and
I'm the dinosaur now, breathing the last breath of extinction;
fading quietly, thump, thump, thump up that hill.  But I wonder,
where went the soul, where went the art, where went the heart?