October 2017 – Page 3 – ☆ STARSAILOR ☆

Over the weekend, young Jackson and I took a motorcycle class in (on?) Alameda, which is an island near Oakland Airport. We had two extremely long classes (in an actual classroom!!) at Alameda College, and then two days on the range. The range was next to a naval shipyard / museum. It looked like this:

. . . across the way was San Francisco. That’s Sutro Tower on top of that hill.

The classroom part was real easy. A nice guy in a California Motorcyclist Safety Program jersey stood before us and talked about helmets and cornering and countersteering and all that shit. He gave us a little booklet where we were ENCOURAGED TO TAKE NOTES. I did so. My notes looked like this:

We were on the range for five or six hours on Saturday and Sunday. This is what it looked like:

We were even allowed to pick our own bikes. I ended up with a Kawasaki Eliminator and young Jackson got a Honda Nighthawk. The instructor wrote our names on the headlights. We were the afternoon class so our names were on the bottom. The names on the top belonged to the poor suckers who had to show up at 6:30 a.m. This is what our bikes looked like:

They made us take breaks a lot. It was sort of hot so we had to drink a whole bunch of water. At one point young Jackson and I went to Safeway and got coffee and li’l lunches:

(Yikes!!)

The second day was pretty bad and grueling and so on. It was very long and the instructor had been awake since 4 a.m. so he was exhausted and definitely really wanted to go home. We really wanted to go home too. About two hours into the class he noticed my front tire was going flat, so he put me on another bike. He said: “Man, that’s a good bike for you.” I thought, whoa man, cuz lookit this:

Notice my goofy distorted bubblehead reflection, and how I am holding my phone like your aunt would hold a phone. That bike sucked. I liked the Eliminator a whole lot more.

Well: There was an evaluation. It was weird and uncomfortable. This guy is shouting at you to do stuff and he’s holding a stopwatch and a clipboard and you suddenly start riding badly because everyone is watching and you’re being graded. At any rate, I passed the thing. They’re going to send me my certification in the mail.

I guess that’s that~~!!