Thursday, January 13, 2011

Virile snowmobilers

Yesterday I rode my Pugsley into town to the bike shop. And it came to pass that we all stood around and gazed at it's huge tires kinda like a 5 year old watching booming, sparkly fireworks. It had snowed Tuesday and the trails were soft so I had my tires down low and we got out the tire gauge and marveled that I had them down to 3 psi. Males being into limpness? Interesting.

But then again males are into some strange things (such as Arrowhead, the majority of the racers are male) – both human and otherwise:



And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that this was a male formed idea. And I thought regular engines (snowmobile, dirtbike or pretty much any other two cycle whiny thing) were obnoxious.


Another weird thing that males tend to do is compare injuries. Somehow this puffs us up. One summer night when I was living by myself it started to rain and so I jumped up and went charging around the house to shut windows. I didn't bother to turn the light on and some idiot had left his sandals out in the middle of the floor. I tripped on them and this happened (and I felt the need to document it too for later puffing):



Speaking of feet, today as I was riding home from the ogling session at the bike shop I got passed by maybe a dozen snowmobiles. One of them stopped and we actually chatted for a bit about snowbikes and seemed interested and said that he wants a Pugsley and not a Mukluk. At one point I heard a snowmobile sound from behind me so I got to the extreme right on the trail to give them plenty of passing space. As it turns out there were three of them. After the first one passed he jammed on the throttle and did a ski-ie (like a wheelie but obviously wasn't because snowmobiles don't have wheels). I was so impressed by this display of virility (even more impressive than the picture above) that I wasn't really paying attention as the second passed. But if I thought the first snowmobiler was cool he had nothing on the third. Number Three revved his engine as he passed and that would have been awesome enough except he stuck his boot out as if to hit me with it as he passed very close to me at maybe 40 mph. Pure coolness. So cool in fact that if I were to run into this guy in street clothes he would have shades on kinda like this:

or this:

And a shirt like this

And had a big pickup truck with mud on it from boggin' and had truck nuts:

At first I was pretty much stunned, followed almost immediately by anger. I'm still pretty pissed about it all but now it's almost funny to think about what would have happened if he had actually hit me with his boot. Yeah it would have ruined my day (or week or month or year. And that, most decidedly, would have been terribly un-funny) but think about what would have happened to him – wrapped his leg around behind him. It is really the same but this video is similar enough to what would have happened to the awesome snowmobiler that I'm reminded of it


If Snowmobiler #3 had stopped he would have seen me giving him a look kinda like this one:



Injuring limbs kinda reminds me of this picture since I had the sword in my teeth because both my arms had been cut off:



Which naturally reminds me of this

Which in turn reminds me of this picture which I took of while a friend of mine and I were out riding and didn't want to turn back even when we came across a road sign clearly stating that 4 miles ahead a bridge was out:


Getting back to the intense display of virility put forth by Snowmobiler #1 I was, of course, being sarcastic when I said that. Real men display virility like this:

I make a habit of reading the blog Bike Snob NYC who is much funnier than I and who also has thousands of readers - some of whom forward pictures like this one to him:

I tried to think of a funny caption for it...but then - probably because I am a slacker - decided that it is good enough by itself.


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