[lizardywizard]

Originally Posted by ZeroGravity360

OMG!!! I AM SO EXCITED YOU STARTED THIS THREAD! I was just telling my friend how I am becoming attached to my motorcycle, almost like it is a person who I am falling in love with. He told me I was insane! OMG! I am glad other people feel the same way as I do. I was beginning to think I was nuts. But then again, people said the same thing when I told them my dog is my best friend..

I'm glad I could provide some solidarity! I'm so glad to have helped you not feel so alone.

I'm absolutely in love with my bike. I fuss over her, I love cleaning and working on her, and I totally give her hugs. Yep, I hug my bike.

Both me and my housemate seem to feel it's instinctive to give the seat a little pat when we go by too.

@NevadaWolf, I want that quote as my signature!

And @wendyjboss, that's a beautiful story... I can picture it in my head like a scene from a movie, you meeting this bike for the first time in the rain. I want this to be a short film or something.


So here's my take on the topic. I can't post a blog here yet still, but I wrote up some thoughts on this on another journal of mine a few days ago:

I read a few days ago - I can’t remember where, now, or who said it - that we fall in love with motorcycles because they break.

I don’t think that’s strictly true. Hurricane’s never actually broken, thank the gods; she’s been in the shop for ridiculous amounts of time that basically ended in a checkup and a new shifter, and she lost a bolt today likely because the technician who worked on said shifter didn’t replace it properly, but that’s not “broken”. It’s more like “injured”, like “temporarily having a sore foot”.

I think there’s a grain of truth there, though. Part - not all, but part - of why it’s so easy to get attached to bikes is because they require our care.

As today showed, I can’t just ride Hurricane how I want whenever I want. I have to be attentive to my bike’s condition. I check her over before and after most rides - I confess, not before every single ride, and I’m so glad I did today. I checked the oil (good, since it was just replaced, and she runs better than ever on it), tires (rear pressure was perfect; front pressure was off by quite a bit for some reason. Now fixed, but I’ll have to keep an eye on that), brakes (looked good), chain (did my best to clean it up - the chain lube I have is so gunky and leaves white stuff everywhere)… and then as I was idly playing with her shifter I noticed the missing bolt. There’s more to a thorough pre-ride check, but that brought everything to a halt, and I ended up not riding after all.

Despite how it sounds, she’s a resilient machine. I’ve been hard on her; if I hadn’t dropped her so many times the shifter wouldn’t have needed replacing, and the bolts would have still been in factory condition - for want of a bolt the ride was lost, etc., or thankfully just postponed in this case. But I do have to pay attention to her, to listen to her engine, to check her vitals regularly. And having to focus on her, having to care - that does build a bond.

Like I mentioned, I changed her oil for the first time the other day. Though she’s only 490 miles young, she’s nine months old, and it really needed it. The stuff that came out was thick, brown, sludgy; the stuff in there now is yellowish and translucent. It’s shaved about 1000 rpm off what she needs to get up to any given speed - it really is worth doing before the dealership will tell you to do it.

The following is going to sound either borderline pornographic or unacceptably gory, or maybe both, so, you know, cover your ears now if you want. But there was an intimacy to it, something between a release of pressure and the healing of a wound. I had the drain pan ready to catch the oil, and I’d been told to expect gushing, but I didn’t expect hard enough; most of it went in the pan, but it spurted all over my hands, too, warm because you have to warm it before you can drain it. And I felt like she was relieved, but also very vulnerable; as the oil drained out, she became unrideable - turning the engine on would have ruined it. It was like putting someone on life support, rerouting their bodily fluids through a machine. She was on hold, in stasis, unable to be revived lest it kill her. She needed me now if she was to come back around at all.

So I cleaned her off and poured in the fresh oil, which she guzzled more of than I expected; nice fresh mineral oil, good for breaking in new engines. And… I don’t know. Even though she could have stayed in that stasis, that in-between point, without harm, I felt like I was performing open-heart surgery. But on a lover: someone whose trust, whose care, whose daily and mundane needs, were completely in my hands. While she couldn’t have stopped me from doing it, I still felt a kind of awe at how she’d let me see her so vulnerable.

She ran like a dream afterwards. But that moment, where I crouched with her oil all over my hands, with no turning back - I’ve really done it now, I have to follow through because right now I’ve just made her helpless - I don’t know how to describe how powerful and strange it was.

I hold her life in my hands every day in the garage. And out on the road every day, she holds my life in hers. She trusts me not to destroy her; I trust her not to destroy me. It’s fascinating, and frightening, and beautiful beyond compare.

Or as the motorcycle meme goes (apparently this is indeed a popular saying in the community):