Going Gonzo

Gonzo journalism.

Look that one up in your Funk and Wagnell!

(Or Wikipedia.) 

Gonzo journalism, according to Wik, tends to favor style over accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being covered. Use of quotations, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and profanity are common.

Hmmm, sounds thoroughly modern to me. 

You know how, when you buy a new car - a car you hardly noticed before, like a Honda Element for instance - you suddenly begin to see Honda Elephants everywhere?

I see motorcycles. 

I see motorcycles ever since last Friday when I began reading the 1965 classic, "Hell's Angels" by Hunter S. Thompson. 

Only a couple chapters in, and so far it's the perfect meaty antidote to having so greedily stuffed down that high carb rush, "Eat, Pray, Love", the week before.

So there we are, Tiger and I, on the couch with the "Hell's Angels", reading the opening chapter...

...when I burst out with a laugh so loud, poor elderly Tiger nearly left his stripes behind on the cushions in his haste to get to the cat door.

"Why can't people just leave us alone, anyway?" says one Angel called Tiny.  "All we want to do is get together now and then and have some fun - just like the Masons or any other group." 

Thompson goes gonzo. 

He speculates wildly down the page that the Hell’s Angels might, in twenty years or so, follow the Freemasons into "bougeois senility", becoming the tamest group on the road, while some other group takes over the headlines. 

"What is the trend in Kiwanis?" asks Hunter S. 

"In the drift and flux of these times it is easy enough to foresee a Sunday morning, ten or twenty years hence, when a group of middle aged men wearing dark blazers with Hell's Angels crests on the pockets will be pacing their mortgaged living rooms and muttering sadly at a headline saying: KIWANIS GANG RAPE, FOUR HELD, OTHERS FLEE, RINGLEADER SOUGHT."

I see motorcycles. 

Even on Monday morning TV.

July was National Women's Motorcycle Month.
 Check it out: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/38306782#38306782

(Where on earth would we be if there were no Today Show to alert us to the latest trends?)

 A whole month designated to make women feel they are welcome to ride motorcycles? 

Uh oh - I think I am about... to... go... gonzo!

What is this?  The Sixties? 

Wow.  Gosh.  Golly.  Gee Whiz.

In college, there was this motorcycle...

No books, no classes, no work-study job, no paper due, no WORRIES, could keep up with that little red road bike, swooping the shoreline of Lake Champlain, blazing down mile-long trenches of October red maples.  

Riding fostered ultimate focus.  Every molecule homed in on being very, very alive.  Zen before I ever heard of Zen.  No drugs required, and very little gas. 

(Today, I love ya, but sometimes you're so yesterday.)

Northstar and I rode up to the Firehouse from Charlie and Jake's last Saturday.

It was a pretty fair ride. 

Fairly short; 38 miles. Fairly windy; SE about 20 knots. Fairly hot; perhaps 90.

528 bridge hump, from the river road.

On the south end of our favorite part of the route, the road along the river, a periwinkle blue house pops out among all those sedate beige's.

A Christmas tree, on the front porch of a riverfront wooden palace, wears big bright summer flowers.

A man, clutching a huge coffee mug, inspects his teeny, tiny front yard golf green.

On the north end, above Cocoa Village, a Lemony Snickett-style houseboat, anchored off shore, is complimented by the modern cabin cruiser tied up to the back porch.

I see motorcycles.

Just as we reach the Firehouse, a phalanx of Harleys rumbles onto the Road from US1.

The bikes are huge, intimidating, black and chrome and roaring with power.  Both men and women are aboard.  It sounds for all the world as if the Hell's Angels are coming!

But, to a one, these Harley Dudes and Dudettes are broad in the beam, gray haired, mild mannered, and grinning sweetly as they fly by in the opposite lane.

If not for Hunter S. Thompson, I would never have noticed them, except for maybe the decibel level.

Here they are! To my newly opened eyes, this mass of roaring metal now appears angelic indeed.  On this Saturday morning, I see angels, and their happy makes me happy. 


Of course there may well be some real Hell's Angels out there, but thankfully, so far, even now that I am looking, I have not seen them.

These tamed and friendly looking Harley dudes are surely those foreseen 45 years ago by that gonzo seer of the sixties, Hunter S. Thompson!

Hunter S., by the way, lived until 2005, no doubt plenty long enough to see proof everywhere that he was right.

I can only hope he got to witness it at least once while biking his local forty mile loop on a bright and beautiful Saturday morning.