Night by Titus Gee At night the pavement seems a little harder, cooled into a new shape after the long hot melt of afternoon. It feels a little stiffer under the Nighthawk’s tires and stretches out from curve to curve, empty of the day’s traffic. At night the world empties out and the broad Los […]
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Family Reunion by Titus Gee My uncle was in Fresno just for the day. I hadn’t seen him in a decade, and the last two times we tried to meet it didn’t work out. So I hit the road about 6:45 on a blustery winter night, headed north from Palmdale over the Tehachapi pass. We […]
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Pain by Titus Gee My feet went numb in Bakersfield. I lost the little toes first, then the others one by one. Then the left foot and the right. Night had fallen before I left the office, headed north for a miniature family reunion (more on that in #13). I took the 14 fwy, because […]
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Maybe it’s the perception of danger. People like to tell me stories about motorcycle crashes. Like maybe I just don’t know any better. (I’m a newspaper reporter. I see the CHP reports.) As I walk away, I imagine them ruefully shaking their heads as if to say, “Gotta love his guts, but someday he’ll know better . . . like me.”
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The driver turned to look at me. Then – so calmly – he smiled, lifted his right hand from the steering wheel, and made a mocking “throttle” gesture.
When he did this a few things crossed my mind . . . they were red, with horns and hooves, and they told me to do a lot of things to this guy that I can’t repeat here. I ignored them, but since there was no white angel to counter their arguments
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But after a little practice, you learn to concentrate your ideas into a kind of intellectual short hand, squeezing the works of great thinkers into bite sized portions. This may seem sacrilegious, unimportant, or pathetic. But to a select few, it’s our only chance to let our inner geeks seep out through our black leather and tinted helmets.
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Maybe its envy. Or some kind of weird inferiority complex, like playground bullies pushing down smaller kids. Maybe they’re compensating. Whatever it is, the ugly little cowards can make riding an exercise in temperance.
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Conversation died as we approached it, stepping into the aura that seems to linger around the base. It’s hard to fathom that something so old and large could have no awareness of the centuries that moved around it, year by year, as it soaked water from the earth and light from the sun and turned them into living wood.
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Getting Wet by Titus Gee Most of my travel companions think I’m kind of a lunatic, I think. Usually they don’t say anything. They just give me this look, whenever we stop to rest. They stare out at the snowstorm, the beating sun or the dark of night; then they look at my grinning mug, […]
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Sunset by Titus Gee I took Sunset Boulevard at 1 a.m. and got an unexpected tutorial on life in L.A. Sunset winds through the part of Hollywood that actually looks like Hollywood, where night life is the only real life there is. The air-brushed billboard models are 40 stories tall, the street is lined with […]
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