Full Tank, Empty Tank, Stream the Gasoline, Stream of Consciousness

Ever since I left for the Long Road, my right hand's been pinning a throttle back (a few different throttles, as you'll see) and my left hand has been holding a camera to my eye. I actually have a bruise on my eye brow where my camera presses up against my face, sort of awesome. The speed at which i've traveled is borderline insane-- 110mph on the freeway at times and 500 mph in the sky across the continent. Moving and shooting choppers and people and stopping at gas stations, so many gas stations, and eating strange foods and shitting strange shits and sleeping on the ground under the stars in RV parks where the down and out live trying to sleep for free, because spending 80$ for a few hours that you're not even awake is such a fucking rip off, and feeling freezing cold at 3 a.m. and waking up a few hours later boiling hot with every piece of clothing you brought with you on and loving every second of it.
There is this most excellent and eye opening moment that comes to you on every road trip. Its a realization that you somehow manage to forget you had before, but it always returns to you like a whaling baby wrapped up in a wet cold blanket. It is a moment you usually experience before you even know what it is, before you recognize that you've been there before. Somewhere along the second or third day, something goes off schedule of not according to plan, or you loose something or someone falls through or your bike breaks or you're sitting in traffic in pouring rain and hungry and feel like sleeping and your map is soaking wet and everyone in a cage is being a huge dick and you realize everything in your life sucks right now. Right there, right then everything is pure shit. You've reached the lowest of low on a trip that is supposed to be a "fun vacation" and you start wondering why you chose the path you did in the first place. An all inclusive cruise would be nice right about now. But that feeling subsides, the sun comes out again, the steam rises from your soaking wet jeans, you stumble upon a phenomenal greasy spoon that fills the void in your stomach that only eggs and potatoes can do, and your back on the road carving the canyon black top smiling from ear to ear because everything at that moment is fucking perfect, and then it hits you: you're feeling the best you've felt in months, and you realize just hours ago you were feeling the worst you've felt in months. One big roller coaster, going up up up and going down down down, and when you're down you've got to have faith it will rise again and when you're up, well fuck the rest of it, you're up!
The range of emotions one will feel in any given 24 hour period while on the road is unparalleled in every day life. All of the predictability of your familiar surroundings is way way back there in your rear view mirror, and everything that lies ahead is out of your control. You're not taking the trip, the trip is taking YOU. And when you reach the point where you turn over your own will and ego and anything else that you think you have a grip on to the thing that is this trip, you realize it'll all go much more smoothly. Who wants to stay at baseline anyways? We go day to day thinking "ah, that was a pretty good day" sitting in your air conditioning eating your microwave meal watching the same shit TV and sleeping in the same old bed, but really it was pretty much the same day as the one before it, and it won't be much different from the one coming up either. The guy wearing the "same shit different day" comes to mind here. However, hit the road for any number of days and you'll remind yourself quite quickly what it is to feel a REAL high high and how low the lows can really get. But of course the lows and highs aren't like the highs and lows of every day life, because the ones you feel on the road are much less permanent, and they are much like the road itself; they only matter for about as far as you can see out ahead of you. The road rises above the mountain top and rolls into the west, and thats sometimes as long as that high or low will last. Living in the moment and with only the things you NEED is about as simple and sweet as this life can get, and doing it on a motorcycle has to be the best way to go about it.
Spending the past month on the road covering the Long Road and the Smoke Out and Born Free has been a whirlwind of people and bikes and places and highs and lows of course. Its one month out of a 12 month year, but I gather enough footage and photos to keep this here blog updated for the next 11 months. Maybe you didn't know that, but shit, most everything I put up here is just samples of what I gather in the month of June. I wish I could do it year round, go out into the field and do nothing but shoot and ride, and maybe I will one day, but for now, the magazine still needs me here to put it all together and make sure it hits the printers on time, and reaches your mailboxes and your local store's magazine racks when its supposed to.
But it feels good to be home. Feels good to see a familiar face and eat food you made yourself and not feel like you're watching cash just fly freely (against your will!) out of your bank account at every gas stop and restaurant and shitty motel and all the other countless places that want your money out there on the road. Being home now feels great, really fucking great, riding my own motorcycles, riding all my motorcycles, and reminding myself that life is really good here. All the things that really bugged me before I left are all the things that I take comfort in now. Coming home to the same spot every night, pulling in the same garage, seeing the same people, doing the same thing, somehow seemed to bug the shit out of me just before the trip, but I guess thats just the trip doing the bugging. I'm pretty sure the highs and lows of the road I speak of can not be sustained by many man, if any, for a truly long period of time. Maybe thats what makes the trips so sweet. Getting sucked into this routine and then busting the fuck out of it makes it all that much sweeter. But for now, i'll welcome the routine with open arms, so that soon here the busting out will feel good again.
I took all three of my bikes for a ride yesterday, and it made me feel like the worlds luckiest man. The construction that was pounding away and causing such a headache just down the road is now complete, so now my springer doesn't even have to pogo once on the way to the art supplies store. Smooth as glass roads and familiar turns, hole in the wall beer joints where you could buy two huge pitchers of Busch beer for the price of one can of Bud Light out in L.A. (they don't even have Busch out there, and I'm not talkin' about Busch Light, I'm talking Busch HEAVY...) California, for all its glory and sunshine and palm trees and mountains and curvy roads and beautiful women and righteous choppers, has burnt me out once again. Too many damn people. Takes you two hours to go 35 miles and risk your life more times that you should in one day. But i digress...
Being home feels good, and being back is refreshing. Issue 122 just wrapped yesterday, so things have finally slowed down to a calmer and more comfortable pace, which is the main reason for this nice long ramble. Anyways, i'm back for some time now and look forward to catching you all up with what's been going on. In the mean time, I feel like sharing these photos with you, because 99% of the time I post almost exclusively my own photos on this here blog, and hardly ever post pictures of myself, so fuck it, here's a few I took from the past few days. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.