March Break in the UK is a very different proposition to March Break in Ontario, Canada. Here we’re looking at freezing temperatures, snow storms and general misery. Everyone who was able has left. A few minutes outside today in -20° wind chill left me broken.
Back home it’s mid to high teens with sunny spring days and flowers blooming.
Were I home I’d be rolling the Triumph Speed Triple out of the shed and going for a ride along the North Norfolk coast. It’d be cool but clear. Norfolk roads are medieval narrow, especially out in the country. With tall hedge rows and few shoulders you don’t travel at break neck speed, but that’s kind of the point.
Enroute I’d be passing by small fishing villages, medieval priories and castle ruins. Lunch stops could be any one of a dozen centuries old pubs. When not doing that, pulling up a a seaside layby to watch the waves roll in would beat frostbite any day.
Do I ever miss being home sometimes.
Speaking of which, a nice little house on Beeston Hill is going for about £200k. With a shed in the backyard to park up the motorbikes in, I’d have the ideal place to ride out into Norfolk from, and it’s less than a mile from each of the two houses I grew up in.
What would I do on these beautiful spring days? Familiarize myself with the back roads of the country I grew up in for eight years before being emigrated to the land of ice and snow.
Triumph Scrambler might be a better choice for going off piste in deepest, darkest Norfolk where mud is the norm rather than the exception.
I’d be sharing roads that generations of my people have ridden on two wheels. Maybe while out on those roads I’ll meet up with some family ghosts and be able to go riding with them for a while…
My great aunt died on the roads of Norfolk before I was born. It’d be nice to be back sharing that space with her, if not the time.
That old Coventry Eagle disappearing around the hedgerow ahead of me could be Grandad Morris out for a spirited ride.
A modern roadster to tackle twisting Norfolk lanes single handed?
… or the more tractor like Scrambler to occasionally get dirty on the tractor splattered lanes of rural Norfolk?
We’re minutes away from collapsing from heat exhaustion on our rally ride the other week when I start to hear voices. We’re riding through Elora on our way to Fergus and a flock of cruisers have just pulled out in front of us. The large man on a Harley ahead of me creates concussive sound waves that knock birds out of the sky whenever he cracks the throttle, which he has to keep doing because his Milwaukee iron doesn’t idle very well.
Between hundred and forty decibel POTATO POTATO, a voice, as clear as a bell was talking directly into my ear. It was telling me about carpets, I should buy them, but they’re all out of off white Persian.
From this far back you can’t hear yourself think. I wonder if he’s in his happy place. I’m not.
Am I losing my mind? It took me several moments to realize that the three hundred pounder in beanie helmet, t-shirt and shorts on his baaiiiike in front of me had the radio so loud it was like I was in the front row of a concert, if it was a concert about carpet advertising. That we were at the end of a marathon ride and I was exhausted didn’t put me in the greatest of moods, but genuinely, other than making me think I’d lost my mind, what was the point of this man?
Mushin: literally means no mind, but he’s doing it wrong.
I’ve had Lee Park’s Total Control on Kindle for a while. I got lost in Park’s OCD maze of suspension minutia, but the latest chapters are much more accessible and are about your mindset when riding. Lee describes the perfect motorcyclist in Zen terms: completely in the moment, aware of everything with no specific focus drawing attention away from that whole. You should be using all of your senses to do this. He’s quite serious about how you should approach the zone of peak performance while riding (and make no mistake, you should treat riding like a competitive sport – one you don’t want to lose). None of it involves pipes so loud they cause small children to cry, a radio turned up so loud someone a hundred yards back can hear it clearly or wearing a beanie helmet and next to no clothes.
There is much I really dig about motorcycle culture, but it all has to do with excellence. Watching a thirty-eight year old, six foot tall Valentino Rossi win a race again at the pinnacle of motorcycle racing last weekend was an example. Watching Dakar riders survive the marathon they run (if marathons were run over two weeks) is another. Watching a skilled road rider showing how it’s done on a high mileage bike with a kind of effortless ease, that’s impressive. I’ve got a lot of words for what I saw last Sunday, but impressive isn’t one of them.
At one point I’d closed up on him while he was adjusting his radio. I revved the bike to let him know I was there and he practically jumped out of his skin. As far as awareness and respect for the act of riding goes, I’m just not seeing it.
They puttered down the road ahead of us when we pulled over in Fergus. A steady stream of traffic followed them down the road at their leisurely but loud pace.
I got replacement rubber bits for the now fifteen year old Triumph Tiger 955i in before Christmas, but the weather has been so diabolically cold that even with a propane heater in the garage, the floor is still radiating negative thirty degrees and working in there is a misery. We finally had a break in temperature this weekend so I got a chance to fit new rubber on the Tiger…
It’s only -1°C out there, so it’s garage door open time!
My targeted bits were the rubber covers on the mirror stalks, which aren’t that important but you see a lot of them while you’re riding and they bothered me. The shift leaver rubber has been held together with Gorilla Tape for the better part of a year (that’s some tough tape) and one of the rubber bits that go between the seat and the frame had disappeared, so I was aiming to replace that too so the seat would sit evenly and there would be no metal on metal rubbing.
The shift leaver was a simple thing. I cut off the tape and the old rubber which was half torn. With the new rubber warmed up and some WD40, the new bit slid on fairly easily. The mirror arm rubbers were equally straight forward. The mirror is on a threaded end. Undoing that and the nut under it that holds it tight meant I could slide the mirror rubbers off. The old ones were cracked in multiple places and barely hanging on. I cleaned up the threads and metal under which was a bit rusty, put some rust paint on there to make sure none comes back and slid the new rubber covers on. Another quick fix.
The problems arose when I tried to fit the seat rubbers. I suspect the dealer sent me the wrong bits. The rubbers that sit between the adjustable seat height bracket under the seat and the frame are circular with a flexible back that holds them to the frame. What I got were some pieces of rubber with sticky backing that aren’t even the same thickness as the circular rubber grommets.
I’d shrug it off but at $3.30 plus tax and shipping for each of these sticky rubber bits, I’m out fifteen odd bucks in parts that seem to have nothing to do with what I was trying to fix. I did send photos of the parts required and I thought we were clear on what was needed. Rather than flush more money on parts I didn’t ask for, I found a rubber grommet that was a bit too big and cut it down to fit the hole. It’s a snug fit and compresses to about the same thickness as the other grommets. I might eventually get four matching rubber grommets just to make things even down there, but for now the seat isn’t uneven and the frame isn’t metal rubbing on metal.
The winter maintenance on the Triumph has been pretty straightforward this year. Last year I did the fork oil, spark plugs, air filter and coolant and upgraded the dodgy plastic fuel line connectors, so this year the only maintenance was my usual end of season oil change. I run the bike on the Triumph suggested Mobil1 10w40 motorcycle specific oil and I change it once at the end of the season.
The perished rubbers thing was as much an aesthetic choice as it was a performance fix. Little details like rubber pieces on an older bike bring it back into focus. Regularly watching Car SOS buying full sets of rubbers for older cars they are restoring probably intensified the urge.
Since I purchased the Tiger almost two years ago I’ve done all the fluids and changed the tires which produced a much more road capable bike (the old ones were well past due). I’ve also replaced the chain, but other than these rubber bits and the fuel fittings last winter I haven’t replaced anything that wasn’t a regular service item. The old Tiger has been a trustworthy steed.
I’m usually able to steal a ride toward the end of winter as the sunlight returns and we get the odd warm day with dry roads. With any luck I’m only a few weeks away from stealing another one. The Tiger’s ready for it.
One of the ways I differentiate my courses in order to cater to students who will become digital engineers and technicians is to find opportunities to compete in skills based competitions. Not only does this offer them advanced study in specific areas of computer technology, but it also provides curriculum material that often trickles down into my regular course work.
In the fall we took our first run at the CyberPatriot/CyberTitan IT security competition. Cyber-security is a high demand field we don’t produce enough of in Canada. With a very strong team of seniors we made big steps forward in each round figuring out how the competition works and what we needed to focus on to get better at it. Once we knew how to focus on Windows and Linux operating systems and Cisco networking, we got a lot better. By the final round we’d fought our way up to the sharp end of the competition and ended up finishing in the top 10 out of 90 odd Canadian teams. We’re off to Fredericton in May to see how we fare in the national finals.
I’ve been looking at ways to bring cyber-security into my curriculum and this ICTC run competition has provided me with a pile of material on all levels of IT security from the desktop all the way up to networking. In the meantime, I’ve got four students who are national finalists, which looks mighty fine on both a job and post-secondary program applications. The team isn’t a mono-culture either. One student is aiming at software engineering, another at information technology, another at teaching and the last isn’t ICT focused but is a strong, multi-talented student who can solve esoteric problems well. They also work well as a team, so we’re looking forward to seeing how we fare in the finals in New Brunswick.
Meanwhile, we’ve got four students aiming for Skills Ontario provincial finals in Toronto in May. Unlike last year when we tried to commute into the GTA for the event (utter misery), we are lining up hotel rooms and staying overnight, so everyone will arrive early and well rested – no seven hour school bus commutes for us this time. We’ve got last year’s bronze medalist at IT and Networking who is angling for a higher finish, last year’s 7th place electronics student in the hunt for a medal and last year’s 10th place web developer looking for a top five finish. I’ve also got a ringer for the first ever coding competition at Skills Ontario provincials. Like the CyberTitan competition, I’ve been able to lift a lot of useful course focuses out of Skills scopes. Our electronics have diversified and become much more complex thanks to our competitor’s work in skills (and I love that she’s beating the boys in a predominantly male competition). The web development we started last year is going to provide much of the coding focus for our new grade ten computer class that starts next year.
I get a real charge out of competition. I used to coach soccer at school but now I spend my time focused on supporting technology curriculum. The differences are many. Instead of only catering to students who are wealthy enough to not work and have the free time to play games at school all week, I find myself supporting a wide socio-economic range of students, which I find more gratifying. In the process I’ve been able to show many of them opportunities and post secondary pathways that they hadn’t considered before. I didn’t manage to produce a single professional soccer player in years of coaching, but I’ve managed to help engineers, technicians and digital artists begin their careers. Of course, I don’t get paid to do any of this, but finding students and helping them develop into competitive provincial and national challengers is one of the favourite aspects of my job, even though it isn’t actually my job. The hardest part is convincing them that it’s possible; doubt is the hardest thing to overcome.
Meanwhile, in the classroom this semester I’m running yet another round of capped at 31 students software engineering (it’s tricky to stuff 31 student computers into a classroom, but I manage it). I started this course three years ago as a bit of a joke, but I couldn’t run it like one, the opportunities it provides are too real. Our school started offering courses in hockey and camping and I jokingly suggested I make a video game course if we’re giving credits out for recreational activities. I spent much of my youth playing hockey, camping and video gaming, so why not? Of course, I didn’t get high school credits in those things, but I digress.
Our software engineering class has become an applied coding course that focuses on engineering process rather than the mathematical minutia of coding, which I leave to computer science. We start with IEEE’s Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) to get a handle on best practices in real-world software building, then we learn 3d modelling in Blender and scripting in C# in Unity in order to prepare everyone for some game development.
This class has produced published software since the first year it ran and has allowed students to produce digital portfolio work that has gotten many graduates into some of the most challenging post secondary programs in the province. Like the competition opportunities described above, software engineering has turned into an intense but demanding real world opportunity that allows senior students to step up and demonstrate some leading edge digital skills.
We’ve just finished the training portion of the course where the grade twelves introduce the grade elevens to SWEBOK, the basics of 3d modelling and the Unity game development platform. With these basic skills in place everyone then reorganizes into startups and proceeds to develop software titles for the rest of the semester. This time around we’ve got a mini putt VR simulator, a VR based survival game called Grave Dug, a nostalgia arcade title called Devil’s Hollow, a two player cooperative asymmetrical puzzle game called Shield and Staff, an atmospheric stealth title called Instinct and for the first time we’re also developing a non-interactive title focused on 3d animation that should offer our 3d artists a less restricted and more experimental approach to modelling without the complexities of interactivity. We hope to use VR (Tiltbrush, Oculus Medium) and our Structure Sensor 3d scanner to produce less Blenderized looking models and experiment with our design process.
My senior computer technology (TEJ) courses also focus on real world problem solving. We cover CompTIA industry testing for A+ technician in 3M and NETWORK+ administration in 4M, and both courses also do in-school tech support. We’re also building VR ready systems for our board SHSM program to distribute to other schools. Working in real world situations with live problem solving and deadlines is something my students find invaluable, whether it’s in class or in competition. It gives them strong portfolio work (check out our ever expanding collection of 3d models, in 3d!) and prepares them for the intensity of life outside of the rubber walled, failure-not-an-option world of high school. It’s a lot of extra work, but I didn’t get into teaching computer technology in order to be able to spin the same lessons out year after year; the constantly changing nature of the subject area is one of the reasons I chose to do it. The real world challenges and intensity of competition keeps things interesting for me too.
I stand on the cusp of another year teaching computer technology and I have to say I’m looking forward to it in spite of the various nonsense surrounding Ontario education these days. I have a particularly strong crop of seniors and I’m hoping to exceed the lofty heights we’ve previously reached. @CWcomptech continues to grow and seek out new opportunities.
I’m also hoping this strong senior group will uncover new opportunities for us to explore, but then they already have. The Cybersmart Project, a student run training course for other schools interested in getting onto CyberTitan started over the summer and has already picked up a number of schools they are going to help.
We had Gord Alexander from IBM Canada come in last year and show our grade 10s how to code IBMcloud’s Watson AI. The pickup on that was amazing with students of all skill levels returning to it in their culminating projects. Gord followed up by applying to present at this year’s ECOO Conference#BIT19 on how students can access this free and very accessible artificial intelligence learning environment. I’m looking forward to helping out with that at the conference.
One of the nicest things about teaching computer technology is that it’s never the same year to year, but sometimes those emerging technologies can be difficult to access. Not so with Watson. If you’ve got students who can code in Scratch, you can get them going with Watson and have scripted, AI supported projects very quickly. I suspect students from grades four onward could manage the coding involved and I’m looking forward to sharing this exciting possibility with Ontario teachers in November.
Over the summer I took two Cisco courses (thanks Philippe!) that will improve our practice. The IT Essentials course was something I’d been looking to complete in order to give my students access to current materials. Up until now I’ve been cobbling things together from books and various online sites. It was a lot of work and constantly falling out of date. The Cisco Net Academy course is current and covers much of what we were doing anyway, but in a concentrated and curated format that should lighten my preparation for teaching IT in junior high school classes.
Having been a certified computer technician since 2002, the IT Essentials course was review, but the other course I took was a bit more ferocious. The CCNA Cyber Operations course is designed for cybersecurity specialists who want to get a handle on the current state of play as they begin working in cybersec. It’s a no-holds barred review of advanced networking analysis tools followed by detailed explanations of how cybersecurity has been implemented in the very networked world of 2019. I’ve really enjoyed taking the course and should be wrapping it up over the next couple of weeks. Having an understanding of best management practices in cybersec should help me coach our school teams more efficiently and effectively. It has also handed me a plethora of current network assessment and management tools that will find their way into my senior ICT curriculum immediately!
2019-20 feels like it could be a banner year. Competition is always fickle and you never know what Goliaths you’ll face, but we’ve never had better access to the tools we need to succeed as we do now. As long as the education system isn’t thrown into an artificial crisis, we should be ready to produce an exceptional year of graduates with rich extracurricular experiences who are ready to tackle the challenging, digitally empowered 21st Century workplace.
The in-law’s cottage happens to be about 20 kms away from the bottom of the 507. I like the 507. It twists and turns through the Canadian Shield offering you bend after bend without the usual tedium of Southern Ontario roads. I lost myself riding down it the other day. Last week I was pondering how fear can creep in to your riding in extreme circumstances, like trying to ride through a GTA rush hour commute. This week I’m struggling with how the Canada Moto-Guide and Cycle Canada are portraying deaths on the 507, which is evidently a magnet for sportbike riders who have confused public roads with private race tracks. On the motorcyclists spectrum I tend toward the sportier end of things. I’ve owned Ninjas, sports-tourers, adventure and off-road bikes. The only thing that chased me away from sportbikes early in my riding career were the insane insurance rates and the fact that any modern motorcycle is already light years beyond most sports cars in terms of performance. My old Tiger goes 0-60 in under four seconds, or about as fast as many current top-end muscle and sports cars. To spend thousands more on insurance for a bike designed for a race-track just doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially when you factor in the condition of Ontario roads.
If you missed the British MotoGP race at Silverstone last
weekend, do yourself a favour and look it up. From start
to finish it was spectacular.
Having said that, I’ve been a diehard MotoGP fan for the past six years. Watching riders develop and express their genius at the pinnacle of motorcycle racing is not only glorious to watch, but it has taught me a lot about riding dynamics, and I think it has improved my bike-craft. I totally get speed. Riding a bike always feels like a bit of a tight-rope walk, and being able to do it quickly and smoothly is a skill-set I highly value. Like so many things in motorcycling, balance seems to be key. Last week, among the idiotic commuters of the GTA, a frustrating number of whom were texting in their laps and half paying attention, I was unable to manage that danger and it led to a great deal of anxiety. Rather than give in to that fear or throw a blanket of bravado over it, I looked right at it and found a way to overcome it. Honesty with yourself is vital if you’re actually interested in mastering your bikecraft. I came to the conclusion that you need to approach two wheels with a touch of swagger and arrogance when that fear rises up. This is done to moderate fear and give you back some rational control, especially when circumstances conspire against you. The problem with swagger and arrogance… and fear for that matter, is that it’s easy to go too far, and so many people seem to. Emotionality seems to dictate so many aspects of motorcycling culture. From the arrogance of the ding-dongs in shorts and flip flops who tend to the extremes of the motorcycling spectrum (cruisers and sportbikes), to the ex-motorcyclists and haters who can only speak from fear, it’s these extremes who seem to speak for the sport. I struggle with those emotionally driven extremes, but recently CMG seems intent on writing odes to them.
The CMG editorial news-letter this week makes much of not knowing why this rider died: “He knew the dangers, and he admitted to going fast,” says his partner, Lisa Downer. “He knew when, where, how – it was just one of those things. A lot of people think the way the curve was, there was a car (approaching him) that was just a little too far over the line and David had to compensate. By the time that car went around the bend, they wouldn’t even have known that David went off, because the sightline’s gone. Or it could have been an animal, or a bit of gravel. You just don’t know.”
There were no skid marks on the road. Like so many of our lost, no one will ever know why. Our lost? Here’s a video by that same rider from the year before:
“…the helmet cam shows his speedometer. “A decent pace on the 507 in central Ontario, Canada,” he wrote in the description. “Typical Ontario roads, bumpy, keeping me in check.” His average speed on the near-deserted road was above 160 km/h, more than double the speed limit, and at one point it shows an indicated 199, where the digital display tops out. At such speeds on a public road, there’s little room for error.” – little room for error?
With that on the internet, one wonders how he had his license the following year. You can come at this from ‘it might have been an animal, or a car, or gravel’, but I think I’m going to come at it from here:
“David was an experienced rider who’d got back into motorcycling just three years ago; he was 52, but had put bikes on hold since his 30s when he went out west…”
That’ll be over 170 kms/hr on rough pavement around blind corners next to a massive provincial park full of large mammals…
An ‘experienced rider’ who had been riding for three years, after a twenty year gap? And his first bike in twenty years was a World Super-bike winning Honda super sport? Whatever he was riding in the mid-eighties and early nineties certainly wasn’t anything like that RC51. What his actual riding experience was is in question here, but rather than assign any responsibility to an inexperienced rider, we are speculating about animals, cars and gravel?
I generally disagree with the speed kills angle that law enforcement likes to push. If that were the case all our astronauts would be dead. So would everyone who has ever ridden the Isle of Man TT. Speed doesn’t kill, but how you manage it is vital. There is a time and a place. If you’re intent on riding so beyond the realm of common sense on a public road, then I think you should take the next step and sort yourself out for track days, and then find an opportunity to race. In Ontario you have all sorts of options from Racer5’s track day training to the Vintage Road Racing Association, where you can ride it hard and put it away wet in a place where you’re not putting people’s children playing in their front yard in mortal peril. If you’ve actually got some talent, you could find yourself considering CSBK. Surely there is a moral imperative involved in how and where you choose to ride? Surely we are ultimately responsible for our riding?
Strangely, Mark’s article, The Quick and the Dead, from 2017 has a much clearer idea of time and place when it comes to riding at these kinds of speeds. In this most recent news-letter we’re at “it would be easy to dismiss David Rusk as just another speed freak, killed by his own excess“. In 2017 he was quite reasonably stating: “If you’re going to speed, don’t ride faster than you can see and dress properly. And if you’re going to speed, do it on a track“. I guess the new blameless recklessness sells better?
There is a romantic fatalism implicit in how both CMG and Cycle Canada have framed these deaths that willfully ignores much of what caused this misery in the first place. Motorcycling is a dangerous activity. Doing it recklessly is neither brave, nor noble. Trying to dress it up in sainthood, or imaging blame when the cause if repeatedly slapping you in the face is neither productive nor beneficial to our sport. Up both ends of the motorcycling spectrum are riders who are all about the swagger. For those dick swingers this kind of it’s-never-your-fault writing is like going to church. I get it. Writing for your audience is the key to enlarging it.
Last Sunday I did a few hundred kilometres picking up bodies of water for the Water is Life GT rally, with the 507 being the final run south to the cottage. The roads weren’t exceptionally busy and I was able to fall into a rhythm on the 507 that reminded me of what a great road it is. As it unfolds in front of you, you can’t guess where it’s going to go next. Surrounded by the trees, rocks and lakes of the Shield, it’s a gloriously Canadian landscape.
I’m not dawdling when I ride. I prefer to not have traffic creeping up on me, I’m usually the one doing the passing (easy on a bike). The big Tiger fits me and the long suspension can handle the rough pavement, but I’m never over riding the limits of the bike where gravel on the road, an animal or other drivers dictate how my ride is going to end. The agility and size of a bike offer me opportunities that driving a car doesn’t, but it doesn’t mean I open the taps just because I can. Balance is key.
There are times when a rider (or any road user) can be in the wrong place at the wrong time and no amount of skill will save you. For the riders (and anyone) who perishes like that, I have nothing but sympathy. They are the ones we should be reserving sainthood for. Not doing the things that you love, like being out in the wind on a bike, because of that possibility will neuter your quality of life. That doesn’t mean you have a free pass to be reckless though. Do dangerous things as well as you’re able.
I’m well aware of the dangers of riding, but I’m not going to throw a blanket of arrogance over them, and I’m certainly not going to describe recklessness as a virtue while hiding in delusions of blame. Doing a dangerous thing well has been a repeated theme on TMD, as has media’s portrayal of riding. Having our own media trying to dress up poor decision making as victimization isn’t flattering to motorcycling. If you can’t be honest about your responsibilities when riding perhaps it’s time to hang up your boots. If you don’t, reality might do it for you.
The other day I did a ride that isn’t typical of my time on two wheels – I aimed for the middle of a city, during rush hour. The siren call for this insanity was strong. The Toronto Motorcycle Film Festival was having a best-of showing at the beautifully restored Playhouse Theatre in Hamilton.
From TMD you’ll know I’m a big fan of motorcycle media and the TMFF’s push to encourage Canadian films is something I’d like to both support and participate in. Riding down to Hamilton on a beautiful summer’s day was the perfect entry point and has me thinking of ways to get to their main show in Toronto in early October. I’m secretly hoping I can find a project that needs a drone pilot aerial camera operator and likes weird camera angles.
But first, the peril. Driving in rush hour isn’t like driving at other times. The people doing it are miserable, embroiled in the last part of their forced servitude for the day, the part where they get to spend a sizable portion of their time and income in a vehicle that has become an expensive appliance whose only function is to move them to and from the job it demands. The aimless frustration and misery oozes out of them at every turn, sometimes expressing itself in sudden bursts of anger and aggression before settling back into a miasmic death stare of indifference.
So that was making me anxious. Looking at Google Maps red roads of the GTA at rush hour on a warm, sunny day wasn’t thrilling either. Sitting in traffic on a motorcycle in moribund no-filtering Ontario sucks. It sucks on the fumes of the massive SUVs all around you, their contents breathing filtered, air conditioned air while you choke on their output. Edging toward a green light inches at a time on hot tarmac surrounded by this excess and misery is about as much fun as a deep periodontal cleaning, without the benefits, and with the destruction of nature as the result of this pointlessness.
I haven’t had much time on the bike this summer. My wife’s surprise cancer diagnosis and surgery has meant other priorities take hold. Finally back from weeks in a car, I was facing my first long ride in over two months, and it wasn’t for the ride, it was for the destination. Alanna wanted to ride pillion down, though she’s still recovering. I was worried about her, feeling very over protective and also dealing with my son’s anxiety in us going after being away at camp for the first time this summer (don’t worry, we’re coming back!).
That’s a lot of emotional luggage to take on a ride. Even leaving our subdivision I was second guessing traffic and riding awkwardly, and getting frustrated with myself for it. I’m usually loose and light on the controls. I’m usually not stuck in a conscious state while riding and I’m usually smooth and fluid as a result. We worked our way down to the dreaded Hanlon bypass in Guelph (which isn’t because it’s covered in traffic lights) and sat in row after row of the damned things every few hundred metres. I was constantly placing us on the road where I could squirt out of the way of someone not paying attention. We passed two collisions, rear enders caused by the epidemic around us. Sitting up high on the bike has its disadvantages, like seeing down into the vehicles around us and watching over half of the drivers working their phones on their laps. I guess that’s the new normal in a 2019 commute.
Down by Stone Road the guy behind us didn’t stop (he has a nice iPhoneX on his lap), but I squirted out onto the shoulder and took the next exit where we worked down country side roads instead, but not before being choked to death by a diesel black smoke belching dump truck that jumped out right in front of us causing me to brake so hard we bumped into each other. I finally got past him after riding in his bleching, black haze for several kilometres, but by this point I was fried, and we’d only ridden through Guelph, the small city before the big one.
I was going to pull off at the lovely old church in Kirkwall and have a stretch and get my head on straight, but the F150 dualie behind me was about six inches off my rear tire even though I was going 20 over the limit and I was afraid to hit the brake, so pressed on. He blew past us coming out of Kirkwall only to pull up behind the car 150 metres ahead of us and stay there until he eventually pulled off some time later. You gotta make time on your commute I guess.
Doubt isn’t something that creeps into my riding, but it was starting to here. The lack of control and extremely defensive mindset was exhausting me. Alanna was suffering hot flashes on the back mainly due to Guelph’s atrocious traffic and lights and was feeling wobbly, and I was starting to question everything I was doing. We are coming home Max. This isn’t going to end badly!
We were both on the lookout for a place to stop when the Rockton Berry Farm appeared as if an oasis in the desert. I pulled in and we both pulled our sweaty, tense bodies off the Tiger. Alanna went in and found some sustenance and I did some yoga. After stretching and some Gatorade and trail mix I felt human again. Talking to Alanna I mentioned how I was battling some demons on this ride and reminded myself that the best kind of rider is the Zen rider. Matt Crawford describes motorcycling as a beautiful war, but this one was more like a pitched battle. It’s amazing what a stop can do for your mental state though.
After a fifteen minute break we saddled up again ready to face the horror of Hamilton’s rush hour, but something had changed. Instead of holding on too tight, I was letting go. My riding was more fluid, we flowed with the chaos and when we got down to the mean streets of downtown Hamilton, they were a delight. Unlike Guelph, who seem determined to stop you at every intersection, Hamilton actually times its lights so you can cut through the heart of the city with barely a stop. Past the beautiful old houses and industrial buildings we flew, down to the up and coming area where that beautifully restored Playhouse Theatre sat.
As we pulled into the parking lot that was already filling with all manner of motorcycles, I thought over that ride down. I’d actually suggested that maybe we should take the car, but that would have sucked just as much and had no sense of adventure and accomplishment in it, though it would have been easier and safer – the motto of modern day life.
If you’re in a situation where you’re riding and finding it overwhelming, take a break and give yourself a chance to get your head back on straight. You’d be amazed what a ten minute stretch and reset can do for your mindset, and that mindset is your greatest tool when riding. In spite of her cancer recovery, Alanna had pushed to ride because she wanted us to ‘immerse ourselves in that biking culture’ in going to this event. Standing in the parking lot chatting with other riders, we were doing just that.
I’ll cover the film night in another post, but the ride down was a reflective opportunity I couldn’t pass up. In Bull Durham, Crash Davis talks about how you go about the difficult job of being a professional athlete. You’ve gotta have swagger, even when things are going against you, and that’s equally true in motorbiking. After this ride, I can see why many people who otherwise enjoyed it gave it up. That fear, once it worms its way inside you, will talk you out of risk no matter what the reward.
Of course, the point isn’t to not feel fear, but to feel it and work through it anyway. That’s bravery. Not feeling fear at all is psychosis. Baz Luhrman has a good take on this with his motto: a life lived in fear is a life lived. Letting fear dictate your life is no way to live. We are already dead when we always play safe and stop taking risks.
What made it especially challenging this time was that I couldn’t moderate many of those risks by riding away from the faceless hordes of commuters. Spending a day with them in their pointless battle to destroy the planet was exhausting and terrifying, no wonder they box themselves up in the largest container they can.
The motorcycle films shown by the TMFF were great and completely new to me (and I’m a guy with Austin Vince’s entire DVD collection – I know moto-films). One of my favourite parts of this kind of documentary film making is showing what is possible, and I was briming over with it when we left. I couldn’t have been in a better mood to ride.
We exited into the dark for the long ride home. It was cool and the streets were flowing and half empty as we worked our way back to the highway and shot up into the dark of the Niagara Escarpment. Even the guy driving 10 under the limit who suddenly stood on the brakes for no reason (he had evidently received an exciting text message – he was two handing a response as we passed him on the inside lane of Highway 6) didn’t phase me. I was back on my game, staring into the dark out of my third eye. When that eye gazes into the abyss, the abyss is the one that gets nervous.
We got all the way up to Guelph, sane now that traffic had died down and all the sad people were in their row houses waiting for tomorrow to do it again. If we’re so smart, you’d have to think we could find a better way.
Shakespeare Arms by the university we met at over twenty years ago provided us with a late night dinner before we pressed on home, passing a skunk (the Canadian night is filled with them) galloping across the road into the graveyard ahead of us. The last light (of course) caught us, then we were away into the night, the Milky Way glittering above us and the night smells all around. We were home seemingly seconds later, our creaking, cold joints groaning as we finally seperated ourselves from our trusty Tiger.
***
We rode right into south central Hamilton at rush hour and out after 9pm, about 12 kilometres of dense, urban riding with more traffic lights than I could count, but we got stopped at three of them both coming and going. I commented to Alanna about how Hamilton has its shit together in a way that Guelph seems oblivious to.
Passing back through Guelph past 10pm at night and covering about a kilometre less in a city with less than a quarter the population, we got stopped at nine traffic lights. On our way south earlier in the day during rush hour, Guelph was a traffic light bonanza (even on the ‘bypass’) getting stopped at no less than six lights before we could escape the madness. Guelph should rename itself the city of lights, just not in a Parisian sense.
Perhaps the moral of this story is really just don’t go anywhere near Guelph if you can help it. It’s time they started urban planning like the city they have quickly grown into. It’d make the chaos that much less overwhelming (not to mention, ya know, stopping the iminent demise of the human race). There’s this thing called IoT and smart cities? Guelph should look into it – I’d be happy to help.
A cool, foggy morning greets me as I put on my helmet and stare into a fog shrouded rising sun. The Tiger starts with a willing snarl, burbling in its strange triple way, eager for the off.
Condensation immediately coats my visor as we leap down the road into the morning’s ground clouds. The roads are dry but beads of condensation constantly reappear to be wiped away by a quick hand.
A cold, morning ride is a glorious thing.
Full of oxygen and surrounded by the smells of the world waking up to the first touch of the sun, I’m just another empty thing being filled. Cold wind presses around and my heat bleeds away making me even more a part of the scenery.
It’s all especially sharp because I know that this can’t last for long. Soon enough the roads will be covered in ice and salt and I’ll be trapped in a shiny metal box, trundling to work, removed from the world, wrapped in metal and glass.
I pass through empty countryside soaking up the rising sun and wiping away the never ending dew.
The camera struggles to capture this moment hidden as it is in the clouds. Moisture streams from the lens as the camera tries to blink away its tears, but even blurry images of this ride resonate.
Don’t fight the lack of clarity, embrace it, let it be.
I’m dripping with morning mist when I slowly dismount with icy joints at work, but my eyes have filled me with delights. I leave the Tiger steaming in the glorious, golden haze and walk inside.
One of the dangerous things about watching the shows my son likes to watch is that many of them aren’t what they appear to be. He likes complexity, and there are few things on TV these days as complex as Rick & Morty (if it is ever on TV again…). Like a lot of other modern cartoons, Rick & Morty hides surprisingly complex narrative behind simplistic animation.
Rick is a scientist who has discovered interdimensional travel and so can exist in any timeline. As this ‘infinite Rick‘ he has almost god like power and is constantly criticizing everyone else for not realizing how pointless and narcissistic their reality is – any ethical value they place anywhere is a result of their lack of perspective. This show goes to great lengths to force its viewers to question morality and how embedded it is in our personal circumstances. If you’re looking for a show that makes you feel better about your circumstances, Rick & Morty is the opposite. It shows you a multiverse in which even your unique self isn’t unique let alone special. This pan-dimensional multiverse is so vast and so overwhelmingly indifferent to your circumstances that it continually screams a central premise of the show: nothing matters. Yet even in this chaotic and indifferent multiverse, Rick and the other characters in the show stand out as prime movers; people who make their own meaning in spite of the alienating size and indifference of reality.
In one of the most popular episodes from the last season of the show, Rick turns himself into a pickle so that he doesn’t have to go to family therapy:
He, of course, ends up in it anyway after he fights his way (as a pickle) through an impromptu action movie. The therapist (voiced by Susan Sarandon!) finally gets to judge this character who goes to great lengths to avoid judgement. Her monologue (which Rick immediately bashes as they’re driving away from it) is another of those moments where Rick & Morty gets startlingly real:
I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it’s not an adventure. There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people well, some people would rather die.
Each of us gets to choose.
This is idea of death by maintenance has stayed with me. I turn fifty next year and I’m on my way to two decades in a career I’d never have guessed I’d be doing. Unlike many teachers, I’ve never been struck by the divine ‘calling’ of teaching. My early life of rolling over into a new career every few years as emerging technology caught my attention and encouraged me into learning something new is a distant memory while pensions, mortgages and stability drive most of my decisions these days. I imagine this is how most people age until they end up the typically habitual old person who is scared of everything and avoids risk at all costs until they are in a nursing home. It’s a long battle to get to that point of declining mediocrity, and the win condition kinda sucks.
In my younger years, with very little guidance or support from home, I struggled through high school, college, apprenticeships and university, trying to find my way towards a life that made best use of my abilities. I walked away from stability and income many times in favour of those opportunities as a young man, and it’s why I’m where I am now, but I’m not inclined to follow that trajectory and maintain myself into mediocrity. If I can’t find satisfaction in teaching, I’ll go elsewhere, but I’m hoping that teaching is one of those careers that can evolve with me.
The first ever blog post I did on Dusty World way back in 2010 was on Caution, Fear and Risk Aversion in students. Those students are long gone but the learning risks we took paid off for many of them. Taking risks and pushing learning has become my default setting in the classroom. If we can’t reach for the potentially undoable then we’re just maintaining ourselves into mediocrity. Whether it’s dangling students out in competition or creating difficult courses that push them to deal with real world consequences, including failure, I’ve got to find my way past the learning as maintenance approach or teaching is going to get dangerously stale and abstract.
Speaking of real, with the return of school this year I’ve realized I’ve only got a decade left in teaching. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to approach that in a way that will let me finish with alacrity, but whatever it is, it’ll need to be something other than status quo maintenance teaching. I know a number of my colleagues find this approach tiresome, but it’s the only way I’ll be able to stick with the job. Some people love maintaining the status quo and ensuring continuity and conformity, they thrive on it! I’m not one of those people.
Some find Rick’s lack of boundaries or context upsetting, but it’s that kind of existential freedom that we all enjoy, we just hide it behind socially constructed barriers. Rick isn’t special, he just realizes that his future is his to author and doesn’t have to be determined by overly restrictive social norms. In that freedom he prizes adventure and risk as the only real way to live and grow. Testing boundaries and pushing limits is where we find ourselves. When I eventually retire I hope I can dedicate my remaining years to those same goals and not spend my time and energy hiding from life. If there is a better working definition of lifelong learning, I’ve yet to hear it.
If you’ve never watched Rick & Morty, give it a go. Many of your students are.
March Break in the UK is a very different proposition to March Break in Ontario, Canada. Here we’re looking at freezing
