[Fot] To Consider Before you Race

[Phil Gott]

Mark;
I love it!!
Phil Gott

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 22, 2020, at 3:07 PM, Mark J Bradakis via Fot <fot at autox.team.net> wrote:
> 
> As I watch the Japanese crotch-rockets blasting the circuits,
> I am suffused with a distilled sense of wonder, and I marvel;
> these men and women are so skilled, perfect machines riding on
> perfect machines.  Their bikes are precision instruments built by
> precision instruments, sold in their multitude to the techno-dazed.
> 
> About ten years ago, I was out earholing on a norton-racer-road in
> coastal Marin county (north of San Francisco) on my '75 Commando.
> Rolled up to a stop sign.  A guy on an old 500cc BSA thumper came
> around the corner facing me, leaned through the corner, dialed up
> the wick, and thumped on up the hill.  I shut nort down to listen
> to the sound of that long-stroke single haul that hill.  I was
> thrilled; I could feel the sound through the soles of my boots.
> All these years later, when I remember that sound, that fine sound,
> I choke, and tears fill my eyes.  As that quiet thump, thump,
> thump, faded up the hill, me and nort sat and thought of dinosaurs.
> It was a good day to think about dinosaurs, one of those crisp,
> perfect Marin autumn days.  Back then, me and my dinosaur could
> still swat the Japanese flies buzzing around the hills, those
> primordial crotch-rockets, awesome machines that have come to be
> so strong, strong enough to eat me and nort for breakfast.
> 
> These ten years gone, I'm now flogging that British oil-bath around
> the Rockies.  But the king is dead (long live the king!), and
> I'm the dinosaur now, breathing the last breath of extinction;
> fading quietly, thump, thump, thump up that hill.  But I wonder,
> where went the soul, where went the art, where went the heart?
>