For some unknown reason, despite thoroughly cleaning out my ears daily, every morning my right ear appears to have been used as Madame Tussaud’s scrap bucket overnight. There’s a fresh new batch of wax in my right ear large enough to open up one of those quaint New England candle shops with names like Ye Olde Miller’s Candle Emporium and Lobster Roll Hut.
As one might expect, this is why it took me so long to learn how to ride a motorcycle. I’ve been worried that a large gob of earwax might dislodge itself in my helmet and get smeared all over my visor while I’m hurtling down the highway at 80 miles per hour.
Nevertheless, in these rough economic times when the price of gasoline is getting so high that I’m alarmingly close to running out of valuable personal organs to sell just to top off my tank, I’ve decided to start riding a motorcycle.
Since motorcycles require so little gas, riding one is not only an affordable way to get wherever I’m going, it’s also a way to do it while absolutely terrified. I definitely won’t be dying in a fatal earwax related crash at 80 miles per hour because I can barely get up to 30 miles per hour without my butt cheeks clenching together so tightly that the atoms in my motorcycle seat are in danger of setting off a nuclear chain reaction.
If the eggheads at CERN really want to ramp up their atom smashing projects they should just shove two atoms in my butt and force me to ride a motorcycle at 40 miles per hour.
Prior to now, my only experience riding a motorcycle is when my little brother received a mini bike for Christmas of ’89* and I promptly drove it into a fence. Sure, this bike was only about the size of a Singer sewing machine, but it packed all the raw, unbridled power of an electric toothbrush. I jumped on, revved the engine (it sounded like a sick bumblebee) and shot off at upwards of 1 mile per hour. I had mere minutes to change course before hitting the fence, which was plenty of time to think, “Nah, I’m not going to hit that fence.”
As I lay there on my back looking up at the sky I swore I would never, ever consider riding a motorcycle again unless a mid-life crisis left me with no other options but to either ride a motorcycle or convert my entire living room into a home brewery. I could not foresee then that I would eventually be married to a close-minded woman who — and I can’t stress enough how selfish this is — would never allow me to sell off all of the furniture in our living room so that I could set up a 400 square foot industrial grade beer brewing operation in our house! And so, now I have a motorcycle instead. Or as I prefer to call it: a mobile atom smashing apparatus.

Writer, reader, musician, dad, SEO dude and mediocre photographer from Texas. Sometimes I eat pizza with a fork, but usually not.