First, I must apologize for the long interval between posts. I have been out, as the kids these days say, “generating content”. I do this, much as you would gather from reading this tripe, by placing myself in unfamiliar situations and seeing what happens. More and more, the answer is “nothing”. That is one of the penalties of age that is unmentioned in all the geriatric self-help/coping/aging gracefully garbage that competes for attention in the still-largest consumer block on the planet: The Baby Boomers. I mean, by a certain point, you have either done everything you have wanted to or been able to, or find yourself incapable of doing anything further because of diminished physical or mental abilities. You end up stuck watching reruns of what TV you can still remember from your youth and waiting to die.
Assuming you can figure out how to work the TV.
Not that this is a bad thing, it’s just that modern medicine has done all it can to make that last clause in the first paragraph go on as long as possible to extract as much revenue as possible before they drag you out the door wrapped in the sheet you were sleeping on.
There are two additional unmentioned items in the Guide to Aging Gracefully misinformation campaign: pain and, even more painfully, statistics.
The first is one of those facts of life left out of health class until you figure it out on your own while sitting in the waiting room at the Honda Service Center waiting for a new set of U-joints to be put on your car. Machines wear out. And, being biological machines, we wear out too. Evolution, or the Many-Headed Serpent King, depending on your particular worldview and creation mythology, has endowed us with the ability to self-repair (much bemoaned by the Medical-Industrial Complex) which extends the time we get between visits to the shop. But eventually we all suffer from muscle atrophy, degraded connective tissue, metabolic disfunction, neurological breakdown or one of a host of other niceties that intersect during your last few decades. And it hurts. Even the littler machines that are responsible for fixing the bigger machine – us – start breaking down and just don’t work as well as they should. Eventually, enough of these small insults pile up and *snap*, time for a trip to the shop.
Sometimes, those snaps are sudden and violent, as with my broken arm. My strength, balance, and ability to adjust were just not what I thought they were and then, gravity. Sometimes, it’s just camel straw. One at a time, over months or years, those tiny degradations pile, one atop another, until *snap*. I know someone who rolled over in her sleep and blew out her knee. It can get rough out there.
We can do everything to maintain ourselves to minimize the statistical likelihood that the pain will come today. All those things our doctors want us to do help. We can eat right, drink less, exercise regularly, blah, blah, blah. Regardless of all of that, eventually our number comes up. Statistics strike and down we go.
That should not be depressing. It’s just the way things work.
Luckily, Evolution, or the Hairy Thunderer sitting on his cloud, has provided a compensation mechanism that allows us to suffer through the pain and our statistically certain demise: Our view never changes from the inside. We are blessed, if you lean in that direction, with the ability to see the world at 70 with the same metaphorical eyes that we did in our 20s. We’re grumpier about what we see because now it’s still the people in their 20s that are having all the fun but, where the rubber meets the road, the same glorious options and wide-open world of possibilities is still there for us. Only better.
Which brings us back – sadly for you, no doubt – to statistics. On one side, we, in our dotage, are burdened with declining abilities, diminished performance, and the host of other things that all those books tell you ignore as you can still have a “rewarding” life for what little time you have remaining. On the other side, we have a lifetime of experience that allows us to compensate for those decreasing abilities and to realize, with the clock running down – if I may be pardoned a sports metaphor – that it’s time to get on your pony and ride.
Look at it this way, you’re in your 20s and based on your genetics, etc. you will make it to 84. A stupid decision made at this tender age will cut out a full 75% of your potential life. No career. No kids. No growth. All of it gone. Because of one fateful decision. Bypass that particularly bad life-choice, and you are now in your 70s. Suddenly, that exact same stupid decision costs significantly less. You’re risking losing a mere 10% or so of your lifespan with 1) all of the career-kids-personal-growth good stuff well in the past, and 2) potentially eliminating any of the really horrible things that are floating just over the horizon like painful, wasting disease and being stuck in a long-term care facility doing balloon aerobics as your seconds slip away.
Doing stupid shit when you’re old simply costs less in terms of the kind of life you envisioned while at the same time virtually guarantees that someone will say “Well, at least they died doing something they enjoyed” at your memorial.
If you’re going down, go down in flames.
Does somebody have a lighter I can borrow?
It begins.
My biggest concern was the rain. But, before I needed to worry about the rain, I had to get out of Bangkok. No mean feat, that, especially when my Map insisted I drive from the east side of the city to the west. After about an hour and a half of splitting lanes and clipping mirrors through Bangkok’s infamous rush hour, I cleared the city limits and sped north under the clear blue skies that remained unmentioned in the forecast. Sped, that is, until I had to drive through the flood.
Perhaps I might be getting ahead of my story a bit. The attentive reader will have picked up on the fact that a mere four months ago I had embarked on my transcontinental diagonal transect of the USA before it went totally to shit – the country, not the trip. Now, you may ask, am I about to do something stupid again?
Yup.
But this time I’m going all in.
Your little lightbulb just clicked on and you put two and two together what with the featured image and all and your (well, mine actually) rhetorical question from three paragraphs up has answered itself.
I needed to up my game.
This time will be different than last in one major way: I’ll be on two wheels.
Now, I have owned motorcycles before, and I have the physical and psychological scars to prove it. But I’ve never owned a scooter before, and I have I only taken one two-wheeled road trip, also on a scooter.
I decided, following that previous trip on a rental scooter in southern Thailand, that I gotta get me one of these. The one I had rented was a bit, ummmm… rough. The shocks were shot. It handled kind of squirrelly. It was green. So, I started my research and ended up settling on a Honda ADV160. The 160 is the engine size. The ADV is bike-speak for adventure.
ADV bikes are all the rage right now and all the major manufacturers offer some variety of them. Most are giant bikes. Equipped with light arrays, luggage carriers, special seats, and a price tag that would easily buy you a pretty nice EV. But only a few, Honda included, offer an ADV scooter.
Now, before you go all “oooohhhh!” over the ADV part you should remember that the 160 is cubic centimeters not inches. This massive powerplant can put out 15 horsepower (or whatever the fuck the metric equivalent is) only when you beat it soundly with a stick. To put it in context, that horsepower rating is five less than the riding lawn mower I had back in the US.
Which is why, in the song referenced in this post’s title, the statements in the lyrics all become questions when applied to my ride.
I bought the scooter back in August and spent a couple of months adding some minor necessities to make it Road Trip ready – a robust luggage rack, crash bars to prevent damage when I drop it, lights for better night vision, a bottle cage for refreshment underway, and an appropriately edited Hello Kitty! sticker for good luck.
I was ready to go and I went. And now, 2,626.1 kilometers (1,631.8 miles) later, having dodged the statistical probability of my demise, I can tell you the whole story.
Stay tuned.
