Ok, yeah I know the title makes you wonder, what is he talking about, but I'm borrowing the phrase from Ewan McGregor. In the book "Long Way Round" Ewan describes his lustful reading of bike magazines and parts catalogs as biker porn. I think any biker can relate. Just as anyone who loves a certain hobby can relate.
The other day I started looking through a parts magazine, one of many in my collection, to try to find the saddle bags I wanted for my bike. As I thumbed through the magazine, I soon found myself looking at pipes, windscreens for sport bikes, motorcycle lifts, different polishes and waxes. What should have taken 4-5 minutes to find turned out to take 30 minutes. The same is true of any motorcycle magazine. I look at it first, thumbing through it to look at the advertisements and pictures of the latest greatest bikes. Then I go and read my favorite articles sometimes the commentaries, then usually the product reviews, the articles about some recent ride to who knows where that few bikers have heard of, or if they have they eagerly await to ride to, and then I usually will read about the comparisons between new kinds of bikes.
I do have to admit though, I wasn't always interested in biker porn... although I do wonder if I had a secret yearning for it since youth. My Dad occasionally, or rather rarely would go into the local dealership and look at different bikes, he used to ride before I was around. I remember wearing his old motorcycle helmet on my head while riding my bicycle, pretending I was on a bike. In high school I'd look at cycle world and lust over the sport bikes. I never really read the articles, I'd just look at the pictures. When I got older in college a friend had a motorcycle and I thought it was pretty cool. Then when I was living in Kansas my friends all got bikes, and out there you could ride about yr round and I thought maybe I should look into it. So I started reading magazines and books on how to ride, how to choose a bike, how bikes worked, how to work on bikes, how to build a bike, and the thought just snowballed.
Luckily I am here today and can say thank you to my dad, my friends, and to the contributors to biker porn :) you have given me an affordable hobby in which I can meet others that enjoy the same things I do. You've shown me how similarities can exist in people that can seem very different, and I am appreciative of that fact.
I hope that today, you take the time to think about your hobbies, and remember what got you interested in them in the first place. Then I hope you can go about sharing your love for that hobby to others.
