Death by Misadventure

My name is Jim Abraham, and I’ll be chronicling on this site a 5000+ mile solo motorcycle ride from San Diego to the Panama Canal.  I’ll be riding my 2000 Triumph Legend TT – a 900cc bike built by Triumph as an “entry level” sport cruiser – a “starter” bike. 

I’ve ridden it over 30,000 miles past being a “starter” rider and learned a few years ago on a cross-country ride that it is by no means a cross-country bike.   I’ll be taking it across 6 countries.

I’m currently in San Diego at a youth hostel where I’m making some final and much needed preparations and wondering how it is that I’ve been so unprepared up to this point.  I can’t even say that I’m ill-prepared; that would at least be something, but I’ve done so little in advance of this trip.  I’m questioning how smart it is to even be setting out.   Not that I won’t, of course - just questioning how smart it is.

The youth hostel sits at the corner of Market Str. and Fifth Ave. in the Gaslamp Quarter.  It rises just three stories but seems to encompass the entire block.  The rooms hide themselves in curious hallways that follow no discernible or predictable pattern.  I’ve been here for two days now and seem to arrive at room #214 a new way each time I return.  A crazy array of paints cover the walls in bright sections without any thought to theme or cohesion.  It’s as if the painter took whatever was available and brushed until his can ran dry then opened a fresh gallon and began a new color. I love it.

Nearly 1:00 am here on the Left coast.  Time for a Guinness.

Regards,

Jim

Death by Misadventure is getting a guest author! He’s got some great writing, and I’m really excited to welcome Jim A. to the site.

I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so I’ll let Jim introduce himself. I will say however, that he’s got some misadventures planned that you’ll want to stay tuned for!

A few weeks ago, I witnessed my buddy Chad attempt to take on two “Triple Atomic Challenges,” back to back, at a Quaker Steak and Lube. These wings are so hot that you have to sign a waiver just to order them, and eating an entire order of 5 gets your name on the wall. We bet Chad $50 that he couldn’t eat 10, with nothing to drink but Bud Light.

For some background, these wings are made with ghost chilis and measure 500,000 Scoville units [wikipedia] of heat. For comparison, A jalapeño pepper measures 2,000-8,000 Scovilles. Triple Atomic wings are seriously hot.

Rather than spoil the whole thing, an edited video of his attempt can be seen here. Trust me, it’s well worth the 11 minutes to watch the whole thing.

There’s a fun little trick that you can do with beer bottles that will give your grandmother a veritable heart attack.

Take an empty beer bottle, and drop a penny into it. Grab it by the neck, covering the top with your thumb. Shake vigorously for 5 minutes (that’s what he said!) and Voila! You now have a breakable bottle. When you smash the bottle against something (your head, your friend’s head, your friend’s mom’s head) the bottle will disintegrate like safety glass due to micro-cracks that you put in the glass.

Enjoy, and post stories if you try it!

As usual, I am totally not responsible for anything that happens as a result of trying a “Misadventure of the week.”

Like most kids, I’m sure that you grew up wanting to conduct weddings. As the years passed, you hit maturity, and your religious faith went the way of Sonny Bono. That childhood dream took a permanent vacation with your Legos and teddybears.

With the advent of new-fangled internet technology, those dreams can be resurrected. The Universal Life Church Monastery has ordained over 20 million ministers to date. With just an internet connection and 5 minutes of your time, you too can become an ordained minister for life.

The best part is…
Your ordination is legally upstanding in every state in the USA! No level of government can make judgements regarding the “quality” of your ordination, provided that your church is legally recognized (the ULC is).You may have to register with your county clerk before you conduct the wedding, so check first. Finally, to make that special day even more memorable, the ULC even sells wedding guides and paraphernalia.

So, there you have it, now go conduct a wedding. Even if you don’t have any upcoming weddings that need your help, get ordained anyways. When your boat is sinking in the middle of the ocean, the young couple on starboard is sobbing about how they never got to see their wedding day, and somebody calls out “Is anybody here a minister?” you can boldly step up and officiate the most heart-gripping wedding the world has ever seen. How’s that for an “I hope I get into heaven” hail-mary?

Last week I ran across a link about a group of old school adventure bikers from the 50′s that put anything I’ve ever done on a motorcycle to shame. And they were doing it on old Harley hardtails.

Check out some of the absolutely wild pictures and stories over at http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29723

Go down to your nearest laundromat with a friend. Put a fistful of coins in a dryer and turn it on. Stare intently at the dryer until people start giving you confused looks.

I am a shark.
If I stop moving, I can’t breathe. It’s like a bad case of the fidgets, but on a much grander scale.

It’s that feeling you get when you are told to stop tapping your toes. You try, and as long as you keep your mind on being still, it’s doable, but it’s also forced. It feels empty, and the longer you try to hold it, the more awkward it feels. Eventually you get so antsy that you just need to move. At that point, you want to tap your foot, but shifting around or moving your arms will do. Anything that lets you keep moving.

Instead of fidgeting my foot, my life fidgets. My life needs to keep moving forward, or I drown. It’s nothing chaotic, and I’m not running away from anything. In fact, I rather feel that I am running towards something. Something new, exciting, challenging, and untapped.

Stillness is stagnation. There is too much to take in, given just one lifetime. How can anybody be complacent experiencing the exact same thing every day? I actually know why: complacency is easy. To be complacent, all you have to do is to do nothing. If nothing is what you’re already doing, then you don’t have to change a thing. Human beings work on momentum. The longer you sit still, the harder it is to get moving again. That is, until the fidgets return.

My fidgets are wind in the sails of the S.S. Misadventure. My fidgets untie the anchor rope from the dock, letting the current beckon me down the river. My fidgets see a place on a map that I haven’t been and tell me that I NEED to go there, if only to assuage my curiosity. Wanderlust feels natural to me. Staying within my comfort zone is uncomfortable.

Wanderlust burns deep within me. It is a part of who I am, and I want to take you with me.

I got my cruiser last year because I love the look, and it’s a really nice ride. On the other hand, I found myself spending lots of time and money on performance upgrades to a bike that will never be a firecracker. I was also riding my cruiser much harder than a cruiser was ever meant to be ridden, and such behavior is just asking for trouble.

So I decided to finally start acting my age. Rather than spending more effort and cash to get tiny gains out of the C50, I realized that the most cost-effective upgrade I could do to my bike is to just get another one.

Say hello to my 1995 Honda Fireblade CBR900

I’d like to follow this announcement up by saying that there’s no way I’m giving up my C50 just yet. I’ve just gotten her modified to suit me perfectly. I love riding her to work, taking long relaxing rides, and sharing the experience with passengers. What this does mean, however, is that when that devil finds it’s way up onto my shoulder, I now have a proper machine to handle the extremes that I like to push. I’ve already bottomed out the frame on the C50 a few too many times, so sparing it the really rough scraping runs will probably be the best for its (and my) health in the long run.

Without further ado, a little about my new (to me) bike.

I’d been casually looking at crotch rockets for the last few months, getting a feel for what was out there, and what they were going for. I was tentatively planning on purchasing one this fall once they got cheap and I had the money to spare. For some reason, I was particularly motivated a few Sundays ago, and spent about an hour on Craigslist, narrowing things down and making a few calls.

I scheduled a few showings later in the afternoon, and rode out to them on my C50. I figured that showing up on a bike lent me a much better chance of being granted a test ride if I saw something I liked. The first bike I saw, a 1997 GSX-R750 was a bust. It didn’t look to be in really good shape, and it wasn’t really screaming my name.

The second bike I saw was my CBR900. As soon as I saw it, it made me happy. It’s got a bunch of scrapes, dings and cracks in the plastic, but from about 10 feet away, it looks fine. The biggest clincher for the bike is the performance upgrades. I don’t have a TON of info about this bike’s history, but I can infer a lot.

It’s obviously got a steering damper on it, along with a Two Brothers carbon fiber slip-on exhaust. The rear tire is oversized by 1cm, and the clutch is shortened. The seller let me know that the owner before him had the headers ported and installed a high-performance intake filter. The whole setup was jetted and dynoed to run on 93 octane. I really wouldn’t be surprised if there was significantly more work done to the bike than I know about.

The seller (who said he weighed 220 lbs.) claimed that he once got the bike going 170mph, uphill. I weigh 150 lbs., so I don’t think speed will be an issue for me. A stock ’95 CBR900 is supposed to have ~124hp. With all of the modifications done to it, putting an estimate of its current power at 130hp is probably a gross understatement. Add this to the fact that the bike weighs 400 lbs, and I feel that this bike easily has a 5 times faster pickup than my C50. No joke. I could probably do 0-100 in like 6 seconds. I’m not sure if I want to try timing that…

Because of the expensive modifications (several thousand dollars worth, at least), the entire lack of a passenger seat (or passenger pegs), low mileage (11,000mi @ 15 years old) and the custom paint job (with promotional logos), I’m inclined to believe that this bike has history as a track bike. I doubt I’ll ever know for sure, but for what I’m looking for it is perfect.

After taking the bike for a test drive and thinking “Holy shit! This thing is unreal!!” I decided that this bike would be mine. $4,200 later, and I’m now it’s proud owner. I’m quite sure the bike is worth more than that, especially given how much work has been done to it. For now, it fits the bill of “performance machine, not show-room looks.”

At the very least its making me think a lot less about the performance limitations of my C50 (except when riding two up, then I just feel bad for it struggling in first gear.)

In legal terms, ‘death by misadventure’ is the result of a lawful act executed carelessly or recklessly. [1]

The majority of people out there will read that sentence and think “Idiots. They should have been more careful and maybe they wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”
A small minority see the words ‘misadventure’ and ‘recklessly’ and our minds immediately begin to imagine what sort of fantastic feat would qualify for this accolade.

The saner of humans are content to manage their risk and arrive at their deathbed surrounded by their friends and family as they quietly pass on. The slim rest of us imagine laying in that same deathbed regaling our friends and families with near-death stories, brave heroics and impossible odds. We crave that chemical addiction of adrenaline and long for the next high.

We do things that others blanch at. They call it ‘reckless’ with disdain, but the word rings sweet in our ears. When they say ‘reckless’, what we hear is ‘fantastic’, ‘odds-defying’, and ‘eye-widening’. This evolutionary need for misadventure is at the core of our nature, and must be preserved against the sterility of modern living. Adrenaline addiction is what made our ancestors keep going on the hunt, day in and day out, irregardless of the physical trauma it wreaked on their bodies. If they had chosen the safe route of self-preservation, their tribe would have been lost to hunger.

In modern times, there is no longer a need to put our safety on the line to provide for those around us. In fact, ‘misadventure’ at this point in human history is generally detrimental to those we care about. We are told by society on whole that danger is bad, self-preservation is good. The hard truth is that misadventure is bad for you, your family, your friends, and everyone around you. So, then, why do we do it?

Pure selfishness is at the core of misadventure, and I will not apologize for it. There are countless ways to help those around us, but I generally would not put riding motorcycles, bungee-jumping, and leaps of faith in these categories. Sure, we may come up with fantasies in our head about how all of our experience doing reckless things will rise boldly to save the day, but even that is just fanning those flames of addiction. We conjure stories in our minds combining these misadventures, jam packed with action, all for some altruistic goal, but we know it’s just a story. I’ve never read in a newspaper of somebody riding a motorcycle off of a cliff, deploying his parachute, base-jumping into a hostile guerrilla camp, and freeing a damsel in distress. Those stories never pause to think “hrmm, there must be a safer way” because that doesn’t quench our addiction.

Underneath that sanitized, logical layer of thinking, man is an animal. On a grand scale, man is driven by instincts and emotion. Everything that people desire is driven by a instinctual need. Sex, family, power, wealth, camaraderie, knowledge. These are all things that as humans we crave. When we say that we want to be the CEO of a big company, we are really saying that we want to have the power and the respect that comes with it. “CEO” is not an emotion that your mind craves. Influence is. Why then, must we pick and chose what desires we chase, based upon what others deem “necessary”?

In my mind, misadventure is synonymous with freedom. It’s that feeling where the world seems to slow down all around you and you can feel your heart beating in your chest. The background noise fades away and your ears pick out what’s important like a radar. You truly feel everything that you touch, yet pain doesn’t exist. The world is rough and physical and intense and all it wants to do is play, and you intend to play back. Your mind clears and you understand all that happens around you like you’ve done it a thousand times before. You are on the edge of losing control, but through will, skill, and a little bit of luck, you know that you can steer the ship through the storm.

I get that feeling when I’m riding a motorcycle. I get that feeling when I explore an abandoned subway. I get it when my world enters ‘Crisis Mode’ and saving the day falls on me. That feeling of adrenaline overtaking my body is unmatched by anything in the world. I long for higher highs, and the lows seem to drag on for an eternity at a time. Leaning over a cliff “to get a better view” is a thin excuse for getting that next fix. Like a moth, drawn to the flame, I’ll keep taking that chance and flirting with disaster because away from the fire, I can’t weather the cold.