My Riding Partner Is Down...

It’s 3am and I wondering how my pal Dick "Bermuda Triangle" Bregstein is doing in a hospital room some 60 miles away. Dick is my riding partner and he came away from a crash on Sunday morning with four broken ribs, a broken nose, and some lacerations on a leg. Ribs are passive bones. The kind of bones one doesn’t think much about until they are broken. In fact, they are the kind of nondescript bones that team up with equally nondescript muscles to assist in various inglorious functions that get one through the day... Functions like taking a piss and wiping one’s butt. One never realizes how simple things, such as putting on a pair of pants, require consensus from hundreds of hidden components, until that consensus is no longer assured.

I don’t know if Dick will attempt anything with his pants today. But I have a suspicion that he will try to take a piss at some point, and that he will discover the role his ribs play in the urination process. Nearly a year ago, Dick waited patiently outside an emergency room while the experts tried to determine the extent of my injuries. Dick had been in the saddle all day when I crashed (June 9, 2007), and it would be five hours more before he’d get to sleep. Yet he waited until he could talk to me personally, before riding off in the dark, in a strange town, three states away -- to find a hotel room.

I deeply regret that I wasn’t there to return the favor yesterday. Dick was riding with the "big kids" on Sunday.

There has been some speculation on what could have caused Dick to go off the road. The weather was good... The road was dry... And the circumstances were well within his competency. In time, the cause will be chalked up to algebra, physics, and metaphysics. It will be determined that the apex of the curve -- divided by the intensity of solar flare activity -- and multiplied by 22/7ths, aggravated the “Sausage Creature,” forcing Dick to leave the pavement.

Dick "Bermuda Triangle" Bregstein with his F800 BMW,

now totaled in yesterday's accident.

The “Song of the Sausage Creature,” written by the late Hunter S. Thompson focuses on speed. In truth, the song has many verses and the Sausage Creature changes shape from speed to distraction, from distraction to panic, and ultimately from the vertical to the horizontal. Yet the truth is that if you can hear the song, you are compelled to dance. In the opening lines of the “Song of the Sausage Creature,” Thompson writes, “There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.”

No one really needs a blue BMW F800 either. The same way there is no justifiable need for romance, oxygen, sex, literature, or the change of seasons. Life without them though is the chorus of mediocrity. And I’d rather dance to the song of the Sausage Creature, then hum the tune of the walleyed zombie legions, safe in the numbness of their day-to-day lives.

I can hardly wait to see Dick again.

Sincerely,
Jack Riepe