The Risk Continuum

It is de rigeur on the web these days to read about the appalling risk we take when we go out on the highways on only two wheels. To read these comments is to be forced to the conclusion that appearing on the highway on as little as two wheels is a death wish. Particularly if one is not wearing ATTGAT . Even more so if one is so foolish as to ride on small wheels like these: ATTGAT sounds ugly, but it simply means all the gear all the time. As with any abbreviation its does not specify what "all" is in either case. Nevertheless this subject is focused upon so intently that it doesn't take long to figure out what it really means. It means risk reduction from the outside. Its advocates mean well but as advocates frequently do, they see only a small picture while they preach so hard. Watch someone die in bed of a lingering disease and decapitation has its good side.

People who ride with all the gear all the time note that they are the objects of derision but such derision leads them to adopt a preachy tione that can be desperately annoying and to a contrarian such as myself leads me to think harder about wearing sandals while riding. I read on one blog the notion that because a motorcyclist is riding not-ATTGAT at 70 mph he just wants to die. As though the author has some divine dispensation from death thanks to a kevlar-lined jacket.

It has been pointed out that one would do well to wear a helmet while driving a car where head injuries are as fatal as those suffered by motorcyclists, but it doesn't look as dangerous inside a car and it definitely would look sillier. So no apostle of ATTGAT suggests a helmet in a car. Except race car drivers who also wear flame proof suits

I wear a modest open faced helmet which is a bad risk factor for my jaw, I wear gloves, and I try to carry a great deal of concentration. I don't ride on ice but I do ride on smaller wheels than the average motorcycle; mine are 12 inches at the front and 13 inches at the back and a lot of people with no knowledge will tell you I am taking my life into my own hands. What a nice place to put one's life!

So why not ATTGAT myself? I could spend a thousand dollars on the gear, but its not the expense. Its hot in South Florida, but they do sell vented gear. People think all the gear looks odd all the time, but I don't care what others think. No the reason I don't ATTGAT comes from somewhere else. Buggered if I know exactly where though. Force of habit perhaps, or the proverbial old dog and new tricks, something like that. Perhaps partly it comes from the discomfort and the complexity of a life bound in kevlar.

One of the amazing things about modern automobiles is their convenience. Not only are they climate controlled and sound deadened, they offer a stable platform to travel in, to make phone calls from and to eat lunch. Having said all that why bother with two wheels? Why bother to sit out in the rain and sun and not be able to take a phone call? Technically i suppose I could take a call with hands-off equipment but the point is that more than ever a motorcycle or scooter offers a respite from all this.

And the ability to just jump on and take off heightens the liberation that a scooter provides. And a death wish I suppose though I don't see it that way.

Speed kills, cell phones render drivers of cages irresponsible, its only a matter of time until you fall and so on.

I have seen the needle pegged at 96 on the turnpike (possibly 87 "real" miles per hour) but I'm usually trundling along between 50 and 70 on my daily rounds. Dangerous? I suppose it could be. Yesterday I was riding in Big Pine and a car stopped in front of me to turn left. It was an older model Cadillac with faint brake lights and it gave me a fright- but I slowed, and swerved round it, in control and focused once again on the road. Had I been tailgating....As it is I have 37 years experience riding in all sorts of conditions and making all kinds of mistakes. Experience counts for more than even I realise. Its by exposing myself to the inexperienced on the web that I learn how much I already do know. I have yet to exhibit a death wish.


I have sailed a great many miles and have answered numerous fears about pirates and storms and getting lost and drowning and on and on. Not many people ever asked about the most joyous moment afloat, or the most beautiful sight or the deepest satisfaction. They make it a point to reassure themselves that by failing to act on their "dreams" they are being sensible.


Of course when one chooses to live in the Florida Keys one opens oneself up to that other charge of recklessness and foolhardiness. When I was a California resident it was earthquakes that kept my interlocutors engaged. Now its hurricanes, and all I can say is that i do my best to be prepared, and isn't it nice that the rest of the time the weather down here is so delightful?

I could be living in Missouri and facing the New Madrid fault, or drowning in monsoon flood waters in Bangladesh or Britain. Instead I live in paradise, they say.


I write these words in hopes that they may inspire me when and if I lose everything to a storm or mobility to a wreck. Its not a challenge to Fate its an acknowledgement that life itself is a risk and there is no way out but Death. I reinforce my belief that the only way to cope is to do one's best. I am luckier than some, their taste for adventure is such that they can only cross the boredom threshold by actually putting their lives at risk. They are the true risk takers, mountaineers, parachutists, record setters of an extreme type. I just ride a scooter for fun, until the end of the road, wherever that may be.

Mr Hitchens and the Woman of Religion

Christopher Hitchens' column in the latest edition of Vanity Fair celebrates the ascension of his latest tome to the heights of the bestseller lists. I dare say this is the first time in my reading life I have bought a book, a hardbound book no less, at the time of its attaining stardom. My usual style is to stumble across a bestseller long after it is forgotten. In this case I bought the book before I took off for Europe in June.

I bought The Great Deluge to read on the trip, and think about the submersion of New Orleans, which vies with Austin in my pantheon of Best Places to Live. Vied. While I was at Voltaire books in Key West I stumbled across a yellow covered book with the Satanist's name splashed across it. I have been familiar with Hitchens since the long lost era when he wrote for the Nation magazine. Eventually he fell out with the Nation owing to a perceived slide to the right. I, however, viewed his slide more as an acknowledgement of his new found curmudgeonliness, which allowed him to slide into apostasy ( support for the invasion of Iraq was his downfall).

One can only empathize with a man, born and raised in Britain who comes to the US and takes on the plain spoken, boring orthodoxy of a multi-cultural melting pot where humor is, at its mildest, risque, and at its best, "enraging." Hitchens values thinking for oneself and thus it is inevitable that he should end up plowing a path all on his lonesome. But not, apparently as lonesome as he must have first thought.

Indeed in the article he notes that at least half the audience in his book tour's varied stops seemed to think they alone were atheists in their communities. And Hitchens' sense of wonderment at his book's success implies the same about himself in America at large. I suppose he might be Satan but he writes like a man possessed not of the desire to talk down to his audience but of a man convinced that erudition is at large in America. Good for him, and in this picture by William Anthony in this month's Vanity Fair, he seems like your average, common-or-garden, rumpled English intellectual, now proudly waving the banner of US citizenship. Not at all satanic.

Upon diving into God Is Not Great I found a text that articulated for me, more precisely, more eruditely and more completely my own reasons for loss of faith.


I work with a two women who fit into this debate almost perfectly. One, the Mother, is a young mother of four married to a man of Christian puritanism that would it seems puts him high in the Boer orthodoxy of 19th century South Africa. He it is who lays down the law in the family and she it is who is subservient. I have endeavored to keep my feelings on the subject quiet, going so far as to remove the cover from my hardback when it has accompanied me to the workplace. I don't know the Mother that well as she only works with me occasionally, on her overtime shifts.

My other female co-worker is my regular companion on Bravo night shift. She grew up in a harsh uncompromising, but surprisingly variable series of religious edicts from her mother. She fled home and sought refuge in a world of disorder and unconventional living. From that she followed her older, and more passive sister, to Key West and fell into the lap of a good, hidebound job. This daughter repudiates religion in all its forms and coercions.

The daughter worships at the altar of modern living, television, and lives a restrained life such as monastic orders would approve, moderation in all things, faithfulness in matters intimate, and a work ethic that would gain the approval of the slacker Benjamin Franklin. Yet the mention of religion and all its ethical codes gets her out of her chair.

One night we stumbled across a magazine carried to work by the Mother, for her edification. It contained the Christian rendition of one of those banal magazine quizzes, which usually ask something ridiculous like how hard do you please men, and in this case qualified "men" as the Son of Man. With predictable results when the daughter got ahold of the quiz.

The Christian mother took it well, as I spluttered and tried to shut the Atheist up. On the other hand the mother says "fuck" more freely at work than I would expect her to be able to do at home. Perhaps working gives her not only money (to take the children to that den of homoeroticism, Disneyland) but also an outlet from the strictures of the Church.

Its odd to me to find confirmation of Hitchen's intellectual stance in my own workplace, the stark confrontation of abused religious victim and abused religious codependant. Even in my own family, my formerly staunchly anti-clerical brother-in-law, now a grandfather, takes his family meekly to Mass each Sunday, finding time to marvel at the preaching power of the parish's new African priest. Such is the shortage of priests that even in the seat of Catholicism, the former Papal States, they import priests from Africa.

When I was a child I believed God was an old white man with a long white beard and he peered at us through pinholes in a cardboard box, and in that box the earth and the sky were suspended. It seems odd to me that people, as educated as me, still hold this fundamental belief, and worse yet spend time and treasure seeking to prove the unprovable. I think its true that no matter how little we believe, those among us that do express a belief in a god, any god, are expressing a fear of death.

I have often imagined my own death, my departure on that journey to a borne from which no traveler returns, as the saying goes. It seems more satisfactory and productive to spend less time imagining and more time enjoying. Is this what they mean by God's Bounty?