Mastery and simplicity.

This posting on the sportbikes.net forum caught my attention for its incredible brilliance and maturity. The poster, if his Internet identify is correctly portrayed, is 22 years old.

IMHO, three months on a small bike can enough to be very helpful. It certainly was for me; I stopped dropping the bike after a month and started being comfortable taking corners 5-10 mph faster than I do in a car after two.The reason I would want to stay on a bike longer than that is that I'm a total show-off. I want to make sure that whatever I do, I do extremely well.A good example was my dance partner a few nights ago.

Recently, my firm had a concert at the Hard Rock with a Latino Blues performer who's pretty well-known in Latino music circles, and this girl decides that she wants to dance with me. The music has a lot of energy in it, and everyone's having a lot of fun. We're salsa dancing, and all of a sudden, she just starts tearing up the dance floor. (I later find out that she was a professional dancer in College.) Everyone makes way for us (well, really for her) and gets their cellphone cameras out and starts snapping pictures of her. She's definitely a dancing queen, and she's beautiful, to boot.Everyone there was wearing $500 suits (OK, mine was way cheaper because I'm just a programmer), but at that moment I would have changed into a tattered T-shirt and mud-covered jeans if it would have made me half as good of a dancer as she was.

Just like with dancing, I have a strong desire to be very good at whatever I'm doing without being that self-conscious about my accessories. In other words, while two or three months *might* be adequate on a smaller bike, do you really want to stop there? I took two group lessons in Salsa dancing back in college which was enough for me not embarrass myself last night, but at this point, I don't think I want to stop there, either.If you go the two or three years on the 250 and maybe two more years on a 600, you'll be amazing. And with everything that involves motor skills, there's a nice continuum between being adequate and being totally amazing. Pick out what you think is best, and go with it.

In case you are wondering why a 54-year-old publisher is surfing sportbike.net and is interested in this posting:

1. In 1998, after a long hiatus from motorcycling, I went out and purchased a 600cc Kawasaki ZX-6R sportbike. I sold it five years later, admittedly one of the most over aged and worst riders around (but I still enjoyed it, and when I can justify a totally 'wasteful' toy again, I will purchase something similar.) I purchased my first motorcycle, a 500 cc Suzuki, in my last year of University -- it was an act of defiance against my parents; but a critical stage in moving out of home. I owned my second bike -- a 350 cc Yamaha -- in 1979 in Rhodesia turning Zimbabwe, proving to myself that I should never consider a career as a motorcycle mechanic, and briefly owned a 'chopper' in my early 30s just before leaving a secure government job to embark on my career as a self-employed publisher. Motorcycling is in my heart and soul, but I'm not particularly talented at the sport. I'm still alive, however.


2. If GoIllini is the same user ID as someone I've seen on some scam-fighting forums, we share a common interest in overcoming Internet crime; but he is way ahead of me in some important areas of insight and understanding. We of course probably would not know of each other's existence without Google.