“Sick bike, man.” This was a much younger fellow, parking his red Honda next to me earlier today. Because I am forty-five years old my first thought was to listen carefully to the big Kawasaki’s idle, to figure out what I’d missed, to uncover the audible diagnosis that my fellow rider’s stethoscope had picked up as sick. But he meant sick bike, that’s all. Sick means good.
His bike was very healthy. An NC700X, the sensible adventure-ish bike with an engine made by cutting the Honda Fit’s inline-four neatly in half. It has a trunk where the fuel tank should be. Same bike my ex-wife’s husband rode until he moved up to a red 2014 Interceptor in October. I like the reasonable utility of it. When I was this fellow’s age, I rode a Ninja 600R. But that was back when you could buy a fast used sportbike for under two grand and actually insure the thing before turning twenty-five.
Society has cucked these twentysomething men, and I’m not just talking about the process by which they have to get written consent in triplicate and enter a Facebook-official relationship just so they can use the requisite dental dam to go down on some pink-dyed-hair 250-pound Women’s Studies major with garbage tattoos and a pitbull attitude. Even if they could afford a real sportbike, they couldn’t insure it. The same is true for ponycars and hot hatches and whatnot. We Gen-Xers like to bitch about the kids but we forget that we were the last generation to be permitted any sort of entry into adult jobs, responsibilities, identities. And that’s why the guy who buys a Ninja or a Mustang GT now in 2016 isn’t the same kind of person who bought one in 1996 — he’s the same fucking guy, actually. Yet we still resent the Boomers, and rightly so, for being the last generation to have access to wealth, retirement, respectable society, and blameless drunk driving.
