Contemplative and reflective, I let my mind slip into neutral even though the motorized conveyance’s gear selector was in the drive position.
I was driving in a cocktail of weather perfection, stirred, not shaken—but just my soul, which incidentally had a BAC of .000, not counting the possibility that my breakfast orange juice was teetering on, but not beyond, its use-by-date.
Seventy-two degrees has settled into a special place in my heart as the perfect temperature. Yes, I like it cooler, but seventy-two is the temperature at which even the most spleeny among us can admit that they don’t need a sweater or want to go home to change into short sleeves if longer had already been selected.
There was a time when I rode motorcycles— good times, long before texting appeared to be the primary focus of fifty percent of the drivers on the road. I won’t get into it, but being run off the road or setting yourself up as a target within most intersections got old for me, taking the joy from cycling.
During those years, I determined that the perfect speed on a motorcycle was forty-two miles per hour. I know Ronnie Racer and Biff Fifthgear will argue that you are not feeling alive if the bike’s tach needle isn’t tickling the redline, but this is my column, and my opinions do take precedence here.
Straddling a Harley-Davidson Evolution engine, the powerplant that saved the Motor Company from an almost inevitable demise, there was a sweet spot in fifth gear when the motor settled into the perfect cadence. Whatever those RPMs were, and there was no tachometer, lulled me into a state of euphoria, feeling like Bob Seger was singing “Roll Me Away” as I motored westbound toward mountains, eagles, and brunettes with very few visible tattoos who accepted a single ride from the faceless driver at a nameless diner, roadside, in middle America.
It was numbing and invigorating all at the same time, and that’s a dangerous and illegal feeling if one were to have ingested a substance to gain that kind of clarity.
Forty-two miles per hour was it. I do miss that. And, yes, I have been looking for a pre-1999 big twin for a very long time, but for some reason, everyone else enjoyed forty-two miles-per-hour as much as I did, and they have priced adequate examples at levels that I find to be prohibitive to trying to get that feeling again—shout out to Manilow.
I digress.
All that deep thought washed over me because I’d been out to care for a cat—not my primary job title but merely an ancillary side hustle.
I’ve noted in Interweb-based scrolling that notifications pop up within every block of stories I read in my phone’s Flipboard feed; these ads beckon me to read more about the four biggest side hustles that will allow me to quit my job sooner.
I don’t have a job, so this is obviously more than a side hustle. Cat care is a calling. I am an unpaid manservant to a cat I have only once seen. He is feral, you see. And when it’s seventy-two degrees, and I am driving at forty-two miles per hour, I wish I was too.
Back to reality, we had slowed to forty-two and far below because the driver of a pristine late-80s LTD found twenty-seven to be his optimum speed. We were all captives within his perfect day.
I just ran with it.
Roll me away.
From the Jagged Edge of America, I remain,
TC
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