Mr Smith: Reality Bites
So what do you reckon, class? Is life like, as Kurt Vonnegut suggests in Slaughterhouse Five, the flickering light of a projector that appears randomly behind the cinefilm-framed images of our Life As A Movie? Or is it a whirling kaleidoscope of biochemical chaos in the headspace of a slowly decaying microbe metropolis? Or are we merely a fart in God’s underpants?
Personally, I lean toward the omnipresent pong.
There are some that reckon that life is all a dream. All of it is a fantasy conjured up by our imagination while we are off somewhere lying on the floor of a boozer on Epsilon Five after being belted over the back of the scone with a bottle of Old Muleskinner. Or some such.
Well, it bloody well isn’t a dream. My leg hurts, and that’s no dream. It hurts because I fell off my Triumph, and that wasn’t a dream. If it was all a dream I’d be forever standing nude in front of the Women’s International Motorcycle Association’s annual convention after riding 500 miles through what must have been very cold rain indeed.
But I’m not. I’m sitting before my Trusty Typewriter whilst I attempt to explain to you all about how we came to be stuck in this sorry mess. And what reality is.
And by “we”, I mean me and maybe you. And by “this sorry mess”, I mean the roads and the exhaustion and the elation and the sore bum and the laughter and the loneliness and the companionship that is motorbicycling.
And by “reality”, well… I don’t know what I mean, really, if I can use the word here without some pathetic little pedant like myself writing in to explain that the Purvis Reality was only manufactured for 18 years and I’d forgotten the Pussycat Funbag 500/600/650 which went on for years longer as exactly the same model despite four engine configuration changes, five gearbox changes, three different types of rear suspension, four different types of front suspension, six wheel size changes and so many electrical modifications that it’s a wonder the sparks didn’t give up and stay home.
The entire concept of reality has me a bit bothered. In the past, whenever I saw or talked to or listened to or hung around anyone whose grasp of the fabric of the Universe was a bit tenuous, I’d refer to said chap or chappette as residing on another planet, usually Zorg.
“There he is, recently returned from Planet Zorg,” I’d say. Or, “Been sunning herself beneath the moons of Zorg.” Or, “By the seven-headed back-stabbing politicohen of the Canberroids, Zorg must be fine this time of the old solar cycle judging by the look of that bunch of constables.”
Not, of course, referring for a minute to any two-wheeled device fitted with photo-voltaic cells and a price-tag up in the phone-number-with-a-dollar-sign department. Or the pleeces, for that matter. “Bunch of constables” is a way of saying something naughty without saying the actual naughty word. It’s called “bowdlerising”, but it’s got nothing to do with our Esteemed Editor. Maybe.
I reckon reality is intertwined with stuff called “karma”. You may have heard of it. Very popular in the 1960s. Karma is sort of like the essence of Fate, distilled down into a nice, gooey paste. You find it mixed in with your Vegemite on a good day and stuck to the sole of your shoe on a bad day.
Sometimes it comes in a much more oily form which appears spontaneously right on your line through a lonely, blind left-hander in the bush when there’s a very big wheat truck coming the other way. Occasionally it appears as a very sticky substance that attaches your raffle ticket to the drawer’s fingers when the first prize is a spankin’ new Ducati M900.
The thing with karma is that it is in a perpetual state of cosmic balance. The crook, oily, messy, bad forms of karma and the nice, sticky, taramasalata, good types of karma never outweigh each other.
When I was punting cabs around Steak-‘n’-kidney, a fellow driver of Middle Eastern origin once explained it to me thus: In order to have a fair bit of good luck, one must also have a fair bit of bad luck. The more good luck, the more bad luck. That’s karma, he reckoned.
Looking back, I’ve had some tremendous luck.
In another magazine recently there was a list of the 20 or 25 bikes that you have to ride before you die. There are some beauties in the list. Well, I’ve been there.
I’ve won the lottery, met Ivan Mauger, seen S.M.B. Hailwood race, done naughty things with a plethora of wonderful partners, played The Blues in a famous Chicago blues bar, shaken hands with Saint Gough Whitlam, seen the sun come up from Mount Panorama with a bellyful of booze and drugs that would have killed King Kong (not that I either do or recommend that stuff any more … it probably accounts for my present physically ruined condition), seen the Lindisfarne Gospels, drank grog with Homesick James … Strutharama, what more could a man want?
As for the bad karma bits of my existence, I’ve had a constable of a life.
Cop you later.
By Peter Smith. Two Wheels, February 1998
Peter Smith was a motorcyclist extraordinaire, a towering intellect, a bluesman of note, a lover of the grape and a wonderful raconteur, whose Mr Smith column, published in Two Wheels magazine from 1985 until his death in 2009, made him a much-loved and admired writer in the Australian motorcycling community.
Now, his early Two Wheels columns have been collected into a limited edition book: Mr Smith, A Sharp Mind in a Blunt Body. Featuring the complete collection of his Two Wheels columns from 1985-1988, plus some of his best feature stories and personal recollections from John Rooth, Geoff Seddon, Grant Roff and Guy “Guido” Allen, it’s a must for Mr Smith fans and a unique tribute to Australia’s greatest motorcycle writer.
Only 1000 copies have been printed and they are nearly all gone. Priced at $29.95, including postage, you can order a copy here. All profits go to the Black Dog Institute.
