I have really enjoyed my time in the dark, away from the internet as anything but a utility. It’s been pleasant being able to give sincere eye rolls whenever any social media platform is mentioned. Oh I have no idea, I get to say with such pretension. It’s all so beneath me. I saw it in the beginning, I’m over it. It was an easy burden to bear, spending time in that darkness. These early glimpses into the light have been blinding. Like a trip to the bathroom after an intense dream in the middle of the night, my eyes need to adjust. I’m not pleased with this experience, but it’s this or shit the bed.

I’ll often say that I’ve been riding since I was big enough to lift a 50cc Honda off the ground. That was my grandfather’s rule, never ride a bike that you can’t pick up after dropping it. This rule was born of his understanding that “once you get on one, you’re going to come off it,” which was his advice to me when I bought my first motorcycle. For many years he kept a couple dirt bikes in his garage and whenever we’d go down to Florida to visit them riding was always top of my mind. This is my mother’s father I’m talking about, a wildly different man than my father’s father. When my mother was a teenager, the two of them would ride from New Jersey to Daytona for the bike rally there. I remember him telling me that she’d whisper into his ear, “faster, daddy, faster.” The combination of wanting to get in on the action, a growing friendship with an avid rider that he knew through church, and the early onset of a midlife crisis (though in hindsight it was precisely the middle point of his life) led my father to begin riding in his mid-thirties. He got himself an old Kawasaki, and rides with him on the weekends were a thrill. On Mother’s Day 1992, he and I were out for a ride down a two lane county road in Delran, NJ when someone turned left in front of us to pull into their driveway. I remember the trees whizzing past. I remember Born to Be Wild playing inside my head. I remember a brief panic, and then I remember coming to while laying on the ground. Years later, perhaps decades, my mother told me that for a very long while I would have flashbacks and panic attacks when someone would turn in front of us, but I have no conscious memory of the accident itself. I was told that my father made the right choice, that in that moment the best thing to do was to lay the bike on its side and slide into the car. In fact he walked away from that accident with just a sprained ankle. I was not as fortunate, as when we hit her, to everyone’s best guess, my left foot was caught in the free spinning back wheel. I remember a bit after that, including sitting up, looking at my foot, and passing out from the sight of it. It took nearly fifty stitches to put my foot back together and a couple months of recovery time. It has been a source of pain for me ever since, and it was the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage. As brutal as it was, that wreck did nothing to dampen either of ours fascination with motorcycles. My father continued to ride, just no longer with his children on the back, and it was fourteen years later when I bought my first motorcycle. With my grandfather’s advice in mind I bought a bike that I wouldn’t be afraid of dumping, an old Honda that I got for a few hundred bucks off of Craigslist. I rode it for a season, mostly without my license, and since I didn’t drop it I felt I was ready to upgrade the following year. I lucked out and found a great deal on a one year old Triumph Bonneville. Some middle aged doctor had bought the high end model. He gave his wife one ride on it and she was hooked. They then decided to buy something larger to accommodate the two of them, and I was the beneficiary of this. It was British, it was black, and the price left me with enough to spare to make it loud and fast. It was perfect. That bike rode like nothing else I’ve ever been on. Night after night I would push it to its limits through the streets of Philadelphia, often after drinking and almost never with a helmet on. This combination of speed, agility and recklessness couldn’t last long. On Father’s Day 2007, I got back into the city after an afternoon barbeque with family and decided to take a quick ride from my south Philly apartment up to the Lukoil at Spring Garden and Delaware Ave. As I pulled onto Delaware to head back south, two women on Harleys pulled up next to me at the red light. They teased me a bit for my “little trumpy,” which I took in good nature, and we cruised with each other from red light to red light along the river. Halfway down the city, a handful of crotch rockets weaved through traffic and stopped beside us at a light. This time the trash talking from the girls was not good natured. Everyone was too engaged in the yapping, and so when the light turned green I was the first to take off. I had third gear wound all the way out when a car in the right shoulder decided to make a quick U-turn across three lanes of traffic. There was space in the median for them to clear out of the way, but by the time I realized they weren’t going to it was too late to do anything but lock up the brakes and jerk the bike to the left. I smashed into the car, at a pretty high speed, and bounced off it landing on my back. My first instinct, as is usually the case, was to stand up as quickly as possible. The crotch rockets speed off, but the Harley girls stopped. They were arguing with the people in the car while I went through a quick self-diagnosis. Everything felt pretty okay, except something felt tight in my right arm. I looked down and saw that it was shaped like an S. The adrenaline started to settle into my stomach, and by the time the ambulance got there I had to lay myself back on the ground to cope with the dizziness. I was taken to hospital where they resecured my arm with a plate and screws. Once again, this was not enough to stop me from riding. I almost immediately began searching for another bike, as the wreck had ripped the forks off the neck of the Triumph. This time I wanted something that wouldn’t tempt me to push my limits. I found a ’79 Sportster that had been bobbed out and painted primer grey. It was loud, it was heavy, and it did very well going in straight lines. There’d be no weaving in and out of traffic on this bike, it was much more form over function. This was the last model year before Harley started putting a rubber mat in between the engine and the frame, so after every ride something had rattled loose and needed retightening before being able to be ridden again. This was fine for the three months that I was out of work healing from the wreck. However, once I was back to work, I didn’t have the time to keep putting it back together and it sat in my mother’s garage for months. That winter I began looking around for something that was more reliable but still unlikely to encourage me to push the needle. I eventually came across a guy who had this shop in Bordentown, NJ. He subletted the front portion of his store to a few antiques dealers and in the back sold vintage motorcycles. In addition to the vintage bikes, he was also one of the few licensed dealers at the time for Royal Enfield in the US. He offered to sell the Harley on commission, use that as the down payment, and let me pay off the rest of the balance over the winter so that come spring I had a brand new bike. It was light and agile, had the style I wanted, and with a 500cc single cylinder engine it did not have the capacity to get me in trouble. I owned that bike for close to ten years. A lot of that time was spent riding it regularly, but a lot of that time was spent with the bike in storage. I moved here to Illinois, later brought the bike over, and eventually sold it for the down payment on a house in Minnesota. That was the spring of ’18, and I was without a motorcycle until this year. Shortly after buying both the CB and the Goldwing, my daughter and I flew out to California to visit my mother. She had just moved back to the foothills of Mount Shasta after spending a few years in Alaska. Her husband has this small displacement Kawasaki street bike. After a couple days of learning the bike and learning the local roads, I gave my daughter her first ride. It was a quick trip through the neighborhood and around the lake there. The next day she wanted to ride again, this time

My father was raised by a rather severe man, who himself was raised by an even more severe man. My grandfather was only half a generation removed from living in a dirt floored shack. His older siblings had it far more rough than he did, those that survived. The grandfather I experienced as a child was not the father my father experienced as a child. He had softened in his old age, but I’ve heard plenty of stories and I never did want to cross him. There was a lot about my grandfather that my father rejected, as is usually the case from one generation to the next, but there was plenty that remained, a lot of which was probably subconscious. And that’s how it goes, we pass these behaviors down, often unintentionally. I wouldn’t dream of telling my daughter anything other than that she has the capacity to excel at any skill she dedicates herself to. In truth, I received a lot of that overt messaging from my father. When he had to think about it, he made the right choice. He said what you should say to a child. But I also watched him, watched him closely while looking upwards. I saw how he reacted to his mistakes as much as I watched him react to my own. There were so many ideas I came to him with, with so much youthful enthusiasm, only to have them shrugged off or picked apart. In fairness, he was probably right about a lot of those ideas. Not all of them, though. Maybe I would have been better off finding failure on my own terms rather than finding discouragement before I had the chance to start. We can’t rewrite history though, we only have this one reality. His immediate reactions to these things spoke just as loudly as his pre-reasoned paternal messaging. For a long while, I had a nice rotation of podcasts to listen to on my dog walks. Morning walks were for thinking, evening walks for laughing. One of my morning favorites was the Secular Buddhism podcast. I remember one episode in particular where the host talked about how much harsher we are the closer we get to ourselves. Like, I would never turn to a total stranger and tell them they’ll never be able to do what they’ve always dreamt of doing, but I’ve said it to myself plenty. I don’t think a lot of people got to see the critical side of my father. I don’t think they really understood how harsh he was on himself, maybe precisely because he was so kind and generous outwardly. He kept that part very close to the chest, perhaps because on an intellectual level he knew that voice was whispering falsehoods. What we know in our minds isn’t always the same as what we feel in our core. So here I sit now, equal parts confident I can build this and terrified that I’m wrong. Failure here would not be devastating, so there’s nothing real for me to fear. Again, what we know isn’t always what we feel. It come in waves, the terror. When those waves hit, at their peak, they consume me, but they pass just as quickly as they hit. I don’t have to live with that feeling every time I ponder things, but I think my father did. I’m grateful that the last words I spoke to him were praise for a job well done. It is both what I know in my mind and what I feel in my heart.

It’s wild how the timing can work out sometimes. This idea, this whole ambition, it’s been months in the making. As my ideas around it refined themselves, it became clear how prominent a role fatherhood would play in it all. Its very inception was born of the question, how do I provide the best possible life for my daughter?Here we are now, as I’ve opened the Instagram account to a few of my closest friends, as the website’s first iteration is complete, as the garage is starting to come together, as launching is I guess upon me, and my father passes away. While he lay unconscious in the ICU, after his third surgery in as many days, my mother kept pushing me to make sure I talked to him as soon as he was able. She didn’t even ask, she told me that I wanted to connect with him. Ma, I said, I’m connected to him with every step that I take in this world. Then, shortly after he passed, I was asked to recount and share memories of him. They weren’t what was floating around inside me though. What was on my mind instead was how much of who I am is owed to him. When I reflect back on my adventures in this world, the bravery to face the unknown in such a way comes from him. When I take an extra second to make sure a job is done correctly, when I offer a stranger as much as I’d offer the closest friend, when I prioritize tithing, when I speak with sincerity, when I approach each day as though it’s all I have, that’s all from him. When I choose to live a life in defiant opposition to the dominant culture, that comes from him. To live life this way is exhausting, it exacts a toll on the psyche. There are few places of rest and comfort on that path. There are few connections that reach deeply beneath the surface, or at least do so for extended periods. There’s always breadth or depth, rarely both. There’s a sense of endlessness to it all that if you’re not careful can wear you down. He did great at it, no one could have done better with what he was given. If I have done better it’s only because I was given more. The greatest joy is the anticipation of watching what the next generation does with what they were given, and it is the largest source of sadness in all of this that he will not get to see that. A wise man once told me, “There are two sides to every coin, and I’m not a double-header.” Few people could embody that statement quite as well as my father. He possessed so many seemingly contradictory traits, and often in extremes. He always cautioned me against falling into the trap of dualistic thinking, a perspective that became most helpful when viewing him. It’s too easy to only look at one half, especially in death when the impulse is strongest to slip into either reverence or resentment. For as great as he was, he could not put the bottle down and he could not leave women alone. One kept driving him to the other, and he could not break out of that feedback loop. The hope that he may recover, find renewal in life and have a peaceful last act recently, finally faded for me. We went to visit him over the summer and it felt like little was there, barely a trace of his greatness. He had dug himself in, was set where he was, and that was how it was all going to end. While our last actual interaction left me feeling a little empty towards him, in his final days I was able to whisper into his ear how grateful I am. That remains the dominant feeling for me, gratitude. Sure, there’s sadness, but the gratitude is stronger. Thank you for visiting, I’ll talk to you soon.