Forecast

photo by joeball

There are lots of good reasons to miss a ride—illnesses, wedding anniversaries, band practices—but in my experience, the weather is almost always a poor excuse.

Which means that deciding to stay home based on merely the forecast of inclement conditions is surely a road to regret.  Moreover, it’s remorse of the worst kind: the type that emanates from something you didn’t do rather than something you did. 

After all, it’s one thing to feel bad the morning after for carrying on the Nutpunch Park tradition of nutsacking a relative stranger in the balls, but it’s another experience altogether to be kicking yourself (in the nuts, no doubt) for missing the opportunity to be there enjoying lightning strikes and bulletballs just because you looked at colored maps on the internet earlier in the day.

Apparently, pretty much everyone knows that the bark of the Douglas Fir tree is resistant to fire, but it seems there are some folks who forget that human beings are not made of sugar and while—as any Angry Hippy will attest—rust may never sleep, it moves slowly enough that even a sustained drenching is unlikely to result in the immediate destruction of a steel bike much less one constructed of aluminum or carbon fiber.

Elsewhere, thunderbolts skipped off the helmets of motorcyclists, but on the favored platform suspended above the Superfund site not a single one of Zeus’ throws hit its mark, which I realize has nothing to do with rubber-soled shoes but I like to believe so, anyway.

And should you think you’ve seen it all, here’s a surprise: a locked gate and the unprecedented teamwork of two-wheelers, including burly touring rigs, being passed over barbed-wire fences, so no one, not even drunken nutpunchers are left behind.

Sure, the final spin home is drenching, but at this point, you’re feeling very little pain (and only a modicum of regret, just as you might have predicted had predictions been predicted.