Society seems to have traded its soul for a passive, sanitary, robotic existence. We exist in an age that is digital, virtual, 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? 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, 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 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 Honda out my street.