Jun 17, 2006

Distant memories

Yesterday, I had some free time and decided to return to my favourite Internet pub, Google. I asked for my usual poison, 'Motorcycle Safety Tips.' The bartender slapped it down with a smile in 0.00000263557 seconds having browsed a list of 4,888,997,654,3321 cocktail recipes.

My first sip took me to sportrider.com's safety pages. Which is a pretty comprehensive site, in terms of the amount of safety related articles on it. It confirmed some of the rules I commute by. See this article. You will read the article, of course, so I won't rehash/regurgitate/return to the same old stuff they've already said.

However, I did notice one thing. While I was doing most of the things the article points out already, I saw yesterday that I was riding close to cars. And I haven't always. I find that from a given point in time, my safety margins aren't constant. Often they grow smaller and smaller until suddenly, I have a moment. Thank god, they're never big ones , but it will something like a car turning into my lane while I'm in it, or a surprised honk from a car driver who obviously didn't see me. This results in a 'oh shit' and a consequent rise in safety margins. And the sinusoidal curve of sorts repeats.

Which means no matter how hard I try, I can't really make it a constant. If I could, I'd actually be riding like a god. So far, I'm still human. There's always hope, I guess...

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