Filed under: Knobs of Knowledge, Roadside philosophy | Tags: bikes, cages, concrete, life, randomness, timing
Here’s a collection of the random thoughts going through my head on a ride.
Assume that cages don’t know what they are doing. It makes dealing with their unpredictability much easier. They are an illogical species, but we’ve got to live with them.
Concrete slab roads are evil. I figured this out while trying to focus on night driving as I rode home from work last night. It’s hard to keep an eye on what’s in front of you when you’re getting kicked around by a rough road. It’s nearly impossible to get a smooth pour over that much surface area, so there are lots of relatively small ups and downs to the road. That’s ok in a car where there are generally really smooth shocks. Not so cool on my bike with the current shock settings. The solution? For now I ever so slightly put my weight on the footpegs – like a dirt biker, or riding horseback. This allows your legs to help absorb some of the shocks and makes things a mite bit smoother. In the long run the answer is to break into my shop manual and make the shocks softer.
Timing is everything. This becomes obvious when a few minutes delay makes it possible to ride through a gap in the rain with only a few drops crawling across my visor to mar my commute.I think Daniel Levitin put it well in his book “This is your brain on Music”- “Rhythm is a game of expectation. When we tap our feet we are predicting what is going to happen in the music next.” This is equally applicable to the rest of life, which is nothing but a giant game of trying to guess what will happen when and where so as to take the best advantage. It doesn’t matter if that ‘rhythm’ helps you predict exactly when to take a rue off the heat to get a perfect brick rue for Gumbo rather than charcoal, or guess where a gap in traffic will appear to move around a slow-poke it’s all a case of timing, predicting – rhythm.
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