with monochrome monitor and dot-matrix printer. It was a space I loathed and avoided.
But I was angry—angry enough to finally do something. Having grown sick and tired of reading the dozen motorcycle magazines I got each month, envying the journalists who got paid to ride all the latest and greatest bikes; cover races, exotic destinations, and extravagant new model launches; interview big names; and drone on about the eternal bliss of SoCal weather, roads, and scenery, I decided to forcibly join their ranks, at least in my imagination.
Stuck inside (I had only a street bike at the time), my options were limited. I had no fresh product review or bike test to compose. The old adage “write what you know” came to mind, so I set about crafting a fantasy guest editorial wherein some enlightened enthusiast publication had asked for my take on motorcycling as a psychologist. I counted the words of a random column in the nearest magazine, made that my target, and watched as strings of characters on my screen arranged themselves into a coherent theme with surprising ease and speed.
That first effort—entitled “Is Motorcycling a Disease?”—ended up being a rebuttal to the cliché critiques that all riders have heard from the non-riding majority: we must be foolish, be insane, or have a death wish to take such unnecessary risks; we must need to compensate for some penile insecurity with a giant motor between our legs; and so on. After checking their submission requirements, I sent that retort off with a cover letter to several of my favorite mags, not really expecting any response. To me, the exercise was over, and it had been a success. I’d converted my frustration into pleasure by pretending to be a motojournalist for a few hours. Case closed.
So I was shocked and thrilled to hear back from Sport Rider editor (at the time) Nick Ienatsch, who printed the piece and even sent me a check. Emboldened, I pitched another idea to him. I was headed to my first track day, a regional club-sponsored weekend at (little) Talladega Gran Prix Raceway in Munford, Alabama. I could write it up from the perspective of a total track newbie, with attention to preparations and educational details that seasoned veterans might take for granted. Nick approved the project! It was called “The Late Apex Learning Curve: Getting Up to Speed When You’re Already Up in Years.”
Although that second article was seemingly well received, I never got another gig with Sport Rider. But I’d gotten a taste of the motojournalist life, and I was hooked. I sent in photos from races I attended and got a couple published in Roadracing World & Motorcycle Technology, and (now-defunct) American Roadracing. I wrote another essay and shopped it to every American motorcycle magazine I could find. Lee Parks, then-editor of Motorcycle Consumer News, responded. He liked my writing enough to publish that piece, “The Joy of Maintenance,” in the October 1996 issue, and he offered me more work—small jobs to see what I could do.
I performed the most minor of editing to get a few of Keith Code’s articles to fit the monthly space allotted to “Mental Motorcycling,” and I reviewed several trivial accessories. Occasionally, the “Mental Motorcycling” spot would be vacant, and Lee would let me fill it. That column was usually supplied by a small number of contributors and was devoted primarily to cognitive skills involved in riding. I expanded its scope to include a broader range of psychological and social phenomena and wrote for it more and more frequently until it eventually became a regular deal. I’ve never considered it my space, but it has been almost exclusively my responsibility since Y2K. You hold in your hands a sampling of my “Mental Motorcycling” columns from 1996 to 2017.
Lee also sent me products of increasing complexity and importance to test and started having me write up gear and accessories that I acquired on my own. Although I was deeply immersed in my day job as a clinical psychologist, I was also starting to thrive in this sideline venture as a motojournalist. I felt in some small way like I’d become “one of them,” one of those writers I had envied, especially when I was invited to MCN’s Irvine headquarters several times to be part of multiple bike tests, which included touring those storied California roads up to the races at Laguna Seca and buzzing around Willow Springs and Buttonwillow racetracks. Some dreams really do come true!
When Dave Searle took over as editor-in-chief in 2000, I got to do much more involved technical articles, both in-depth product comparisons and extensive how-to pieces. In 2004, he let me survey the readership of MCN and share the results in a seven-part series called “Why We Ride” (long before the 2013 movie of the same name); I’ve consolidated that series for this book. Other mammoth projects included an eight-part exploration of the experience of “flow” in motorcycling (2001), also consolidated here, and a total of twenty pages (!) in four installments on reprogramming electronic fuel injections (2012). Each time I got permission for a new major undertaking, I felt the same exhilaration as when I landed that first spot in Sport Rider.
Editor Searle took big risks in publishing my contributions, not only the sprawling pieces just mentioned but also unconventional features, such as teaching kids how to ride and using yoga, meditation, neurofeedback, and other methods outside our culture’s mainstream to enhance motorcycling safety and enjoyment. He also let me push further into the world of off-road riding and equipment than what had previously appeared in MCN’s traditionally street-focused pages. Just keeping a clinical psychologist as a monthly columnist was a pretty weird—actually, utterly unique—thing for a motorcycle magazine to do.
I’m extremely grateful for the way I’ve been able to “live the dream.” The amount of time I’ve spent on my second job as a motojournalist has varied widely, but it has been a constant element of my identity. And it all started as a whim on that snowy afternoon. Sure, my schooling and clinical work gave me plenty of practice writing, and I have some native aptitude for things mechanical, but I had the unpredictable and uncontrollable good fortune of a few magazine editors taking an interest in my work; there were many more who did not. It has been a thoroughly unexpected journey that I would never have believed possible beforehand.
And journey is the right word. In reviewing all 200 of my columns to date, I was struck by the wide shifts in my writing since 1996. Many pieces made me cringe, either because they were so dry and cerebral or so flamboyantly melodramatic. More than twenty years contain a lot of transitions in anyone’s life; there was certainly copious evidence of this in both my style and topics. I’ve weeded out the columns that now seem too preachy about technique, too grouchy about bad drivers and customer service, or too tightly focused on transient preoccupations. The pieces here may not be my “best” (someone else would have had to make such decisions), but these stood out to me as having been the most fun to write, as conjuring the dearest memories, or as my strongest efforts to articulate what I consider central to the rich, intimately subjective experience of being a motorcyclist.
What follows are the submissions I made to MCN with their original titles, some of which were renamed and/or shortened for publication in the issues noted. I’ve added comments here and there, mainly my reactions to rereading the pieces or bits of context to make them more understandable. Oddly, it feels very different to send out these essays to an audience beyond the familiar readership of MCN. Though I’ve never gotten used to being recognized by subscribers or receiving their responses to my articles (you mean somebody actually read what I wrote?), this book is a new level of exposure.
My self-consciousness is undoubtedly a reflection of just how personal this whole business has been for me from the very beginning. I hope these words will illuminate and resonate with the intensely personal elements that make riding such a passionate endeavor for other motorcyclists, too.
Part 1: Of Rides and Riders
On The Road
When I’d finished selecting the columns for this book and had them sorted into roughly defined categories, I was startled to see how few ended up here. After all, most of the twenty-five motorcycles I’ve owned over the past forty-three
