sniff sniff

"Aren't you glad now that I took that picture?"

"Sort of."

"Because if I hadn't taken those pictures, you wouldn't have any recollections of it except what was in your mind, and we both know what that's like."

"Shut up."

So the miracle of it isn't so much that I actually got on the motorcycle, but that I managed to stay on the bike, which I assure you was as much an astonishment for me as it was for the bike. The chief instructor, a man of deep convictions and a robust mustache, regarded the material he had to work with that first hour with deep chagrin, and even though he made a token effort to hide his dismay, I think even he was somewhat astonished to find that he'd reached the end of the class five hours later and had lost neither motorcycles nor students.

"Lost" being a relative word, that is. One can be present in spirit and still absent in mind. Despite the heat -- which there was in abundance -- I somehow managed to muster the keen, sharp-toothed attention span normally requisitioned for use by members of the bomb squad. This did not earn me any particular accolade from the two instructors, who were rather spectacularly miserly with their compliments. On the other hand, it did mean that I didn't drop the bike or, more embarrassingly, get dropped by the bike.

The picture is deceiving. In the spectrum of documentary value, I'd say it was worth maybe 200 words, or at the most, 213. If it was a picture that had any journalistic pride, it would have shown the wavy lines of heat that were making the helmet absolutely unbearable. It would have shown the rest of the parking lot, where eleven other students were skidding around in a mixture of terror and hysterical glee. It would have shown the fact that I was telling the photographer, "Fuck OFF, you bastard--!" after having told him repeatedly, with emphasis, that he was not invited to come and ogle my very first bout with a motorcycle.

Notwithstanding any alleged affection I might have for the Guy, it is difficult to concentrate on emergency braking on a wobbly, motorized deathtrap when one's spouse is crouched behind the instructor and wielding a camera.

"Your boyfriend?" asked a fellow student during the too-short break, when I squeaked my sweat-soaked head out of the helmet and started stalking towards the offender.

"My husband," I said. "Fuckwit."

"Better watch out. She's mad at you," she called to the Guy, who was already well aware of his sins and was experimenting with a sort of backwards skipping step that would have served him well in the foxholes of Luxembourg, but produced little in the way of actual advantage in a flat asphalt parking lot.

The Guy greeted me with a palliative. "You know I love you, right?"

This did not noticeably appease my foul mood.

The shirt is the Guy's, a massive cotton tent that, besides being formidably ugly, also suffocated all of my fragile feminine pores. The instructors insisted on full-body coverage; lacking any long-sleeved shirts of my own that didn't involve lace or body-hugging in some fashion, I was forced to rely on the Guy's wardrobe. That failure will be corrected before the next and final class this Sunday. It seems worth mentioning that out of the twelve riders in my class, six were women, and the only one who approached being kicked out of the class for sheer asshole-ness was a male.

Of course, it's no good trumpeting the equality of the sexes until we see how many of each gender manage to pass the final riding exam.

This past weekend was the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, a small town due south of us which has somehow built itself up from a middle-of-nowhere outlet central to the vampire hunter's nirvana. You have to admire that kind of marketing. I myself am an occasionally rabid fan of garlic, so this sort of thing doesn't particularly disturb me; still, in terms of sheer gall, it would be right up there with Wisconsin billing itself the birthplace of methane emissions, and managing -- by some feat of marketing genius as yet unimaginable -- to coax hundreds of thousands of visitors to visit, thereby.

I have no pictures. You will have to simply imagine the entire scene in your head. And in your nasal passages, though I regret to admit that after the initial recognition of the garlic odor, I was unable to smell it AT ALL, either because I'd grown accustomed to the smell, or because my nasal passages had preempted an anticipated overload by shutting down and closing up shop. This was a disappointment of no small order. Much of the experience of garlic is the smell, which is an entity all its own complete with ecosystem and legs. In the race of life, garlic is a sprinter; it speeds across hills and rivers and freeways, where it finds the first available garlic-hater and, cat-like, snuggles up to leave garlic hairs over his new khaki pants.

"Sometimes it's the tomatoes," said Sweet Pipes, who was our hostess for the day. She returned from Italy in time for the garlic festival, which I imagine is rather like being treated to sushi on your first day back from Japan. "People link tomatoes with garlic in their heads because of spaghetti, so sometimes they smell tomatoes being processed and think they smell the garlic."

...which tickled me, because it was a connection I had never consciously made before, and was therefore a new thought path I could wander down. I spent the rest of the weekend sniffing tomatoes like they were marijuana plants, a connoisseur -- or, if you will, "junkie" -- hunting potential.

There is no real story here. We went to the garlic festival, then went to Sweet Pipes's house for an entertaining party. The next day, I rode a motorcycle. In the macrocosm of the Yuhri, it was a good weekend. I have a sunburn on the top of my head, right where the hair parts. It makes me squeak when I brush it.

Hm. Think that's it. Scroll up and look at the picture. That should hold you for a few more minutes.