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Harley Screamin’ Eagle Horsepower

I wheelied my bagger once, but not on purpose.   It scared the shit out of me to be honest.   This guy tho, is seriously cool.

Route 66 Trip again

I’ve had the flu all week.   I’ve felt like shit.    Was originally planning to go with my brother Pat through Nevada to test our our tents and do some riding, but it wasn’t meant to be.  I’m still not anywhere near 100% and it was raining in Salt Lake we blew that off and made big plans to hit route 66 up next week.

4th of july weekend.   Pat will come down thursday night to St George,  then friday morning the 4th we’ll blitz to kingman and show him some of my favorite places on route 66 toward Albuqerque.    I’m pretty stoked.   Pat is my brother, he’s blood, and he’s a damn good friend.   We get each other, and we ride like banshees.
More to come….

Rocky Balboa

Rocky. Greatest movie ever made.

Ever since I first saw the movie Rocky with my parents in 1975, its been my favorite movie.   Not the rocky sequels, and the jokes that its become, but the movie Rocky.   I remember driving home with my mother and father from salt lake at 8 years old and basking in the emotion that this movie made me feel.  To this day,  I still remember the feeling, sitting in back of our station wagon on the way home and how I felt.   I felt determined.   I got in the fight on the playground the very next day… haha, its funny thinking back on that now.

Sylvester Stallone in my eyes has earned his knocks.   He was a starving actor with an idea for a movie back in 1974 and wrote a script for a movie while living out of his car and wondering where he’d eat next.     He was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars for the script if he walked away and didn’t act in it.   Think of that:  You’re starving, and offered six figures in a world you’re not sure you can make it in.   He didn’t take it.  He stuck by his guns, and took less to act in his own creation.    The movie was rocky.   To me, the movie is a testament to the underdogs of the world and their dreams.  He didn’t want to win, he just wanted to go the distance, and he did.     You might laugh, but the original rocky brings a tear to my eye every time I watch it.  It’s a man making his way through the world.   A man with a whole world of fears and doubts and naysayers, yet he gets in the ring and powers it out.   Powerful.

So I’m watching Rocky Balboa tonight on Cable.   You may think the movie was a joke by a guy trying to cash in on his franchise, but you can’t say Stallone, who is not the brightest bulb in the package doesn’t understand EXACTLY what he’s saying here:

“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. Nobody’s gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
– Rocky Balboa

No matter where you are in the world: Take your punch.   Take all of them.  Then, move foward.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance…

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.