Bike Week

Ok sports fans, it’s time to call a resounding BULLSHIT on Bike Week, ok?

The moneyed interests and marketing mavens have successfully coopted what was once a hard core revel, unique in all the world, and it’s not a pretty sight.

At work, they tell me to drive to the panhandle and back in less than a day. Ok, fine. 900 miles in 22 hours. Can do. But on the way back…

Enter I-95 from the I-295 bypass around Jacksonsludge.

WHAM!

Instant gridlock.

It’s Friday morning, on the eve of Bike Week.

Fucking I-95 is an incredible mess of vehicles, outstanding among which was a peculiar plethora of those small U-Haul kinda trailers, pulled by every imaginable type of underpowered motorcar, straining just to keep from getting rear ended by the rest of us.

Hmm…what’s up with that.

Hmm number two…where’s all the bikers?

Finally, somewhere between St. Augustine and Daytona, it struck me like a thunderbolt! There ARE no bikers. No siree. In that near hundred mile stretch of wretched pavement I saw a TOTAL of less than a mere dozen people actually perched atop a motorscooter. And those trailers, AHA! Not all of them were fully enclosed. And, on the open ones, there were the bikes. Of course!

The fucking bikes have become worth more than most people’s condos, and can’t be just PUT OUT THERE ON THE ROAD for heaven’s sake. No way! Might get a love bug splat on your precious front fender. Can’t be having any of that, can we? Of course not.

The real population of bikers has dropped Bike Week like a bad habit, leaving it to the rich asshole posers with the forty-thousand dollar bikes that can’t be allowed out on the fucking road. These jerks are playing dress up and the Halloween costume of choice is black leather.

These idiots spend the last week before the Big Event letting their beards become scruffy, and explaining to their partners in the law firm or fellow physicians in the HMO that they’re gonna take a week off down in Florida and everything will be back to it’s most very Republican state of well manicured form over function just as soon as they return.

And so they go.

By the tens of thousands.

Driving a pick up truck with a hundred grand worth of cycles in a trailer behind, trying desperately to pass one of their poser brethren at a speed differential of a tenth of a mile an hour, clogging I-95 for twenty miles behind with those of us so unfortunate as to have an actual life and perhaps a need to get somewhere before the sun explodes.

My favorite posermobile was a bloated Winnebago, with a pick up truck bolted to the tow bar. Inside the bed, under the cap on the pickup were the bikes! Think of it! No, I can’t drive the bike. Might get it dirty. No, I can’t drive the pickup, it’s too small and the drive’s too long. I know, I’ll bolt the whole wazoo to the Winnebago and drive THAT! What a great idea!

Finally, I reached the I-4 junction and the whole sorry mess was in my rear view mirror, getting smaller with each passing mile. Thank god.

Somebody needs to do something about Bike Week. Perhaps the real bikers oughtta make a surprise return sometime and just start kicking ass and wiping the floor with it. I dunno.

What I do know is that NONE of these dorks are real bikers. Maybe we all just oughtta show up and steal all their expensive toys. It’s for sure that if anybody so much as flicked a switchblade in the direction of these fools that they’d need to be revived with smelling salts after fainting dead away.

Where are the Hell’s Angles when you really need ‘em?