Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to
get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are
common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're
changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right
next to your sex and weight as if "motorcycle" was just another of your
physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition. But when warm weather
finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in
full because a summer is worth any price.

A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a
car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and
actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes, and cars
are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us from home-box to work-box to
store-box and back, the whole time, entombed in stale air, temperature
regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems
strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it
and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of
air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sun that fall through them.
I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider
than Pana-Vision and IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.
Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the
shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking
signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on
a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's
voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed. At 30 miles per hour
and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and
flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant
symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as
though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most
casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it. A ride on a summer afternoon
can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like
a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems
check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour,
depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy
smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a
decompressing plane.

Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine.
It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light
and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's
a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy. I
still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful
of bikes over half a dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I
wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning
to ride one of the best things I've done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The
air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep."
Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and
probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy
every minute of the ride.

Author unknown. "

I snatched this off another website thought it was worth reading.