Society seems to have traded its soul for a passive, sanitary, robotic existence. We exist in an age that is digital, virtual, electronic, while contrarily you and I strive to justify our hot oil slathered metal-on-metal internal combustion advocacy.

Has my life always revolved around noisy, fire-breathing machines, I find myself wondering. Such eminently rudimentary, noisy contrivances! Ebikes are making this more noticeable. That's never occured to me before. Of course that's always been my world, my passion. But lately I have thought more about the implications. Things have changed. We lovers of half-century old motorcycles suddenly find ourselves outliers, fringe, more or less cultists dedicated to a backward, anachronistic, mechanical ethos that is disregarded, disdained, and rapidly disappearing.

Faintly apologetic, borderline ashamed, almost furtive, I push these thoughts aside as I wheel out a machine that's nearly as archaic as a civil war cannon. It's slightly odd somehow, out of place. I'm enjoying my old Honda still. Ironically, until very recently I was training mechanics in traction control, ride by wire, laptop diagnostics and event recorders, and thus felt at home on the powersports technological edge. Yet now my main ride is a motorcycle that lacks even a single microprocessor, doesn't have a gas gauge, whose most sophisticated electrical component (it seems ludicrous!) is a turn signal flasher, and whose whole electrical system is protected by a single fuse! One fuse! I almost laugh out loud as I motor my buzzy, badly-suspended but extremely rideable vintage Honda down my street.

Analog