Having Played The Odds For A While

I'm here today by a series of events that were set in motion at about 8:15pm on Friday 11/14. (Guess that skips "First, the earth cooled...") I was riding Her Darkness next to a prospect; we were leaving one meeting to attend another across town. When I'm out with the crew we run in "pack" formation; that is, two-by-two, side by side. This enables us to keep the group close together, with the longer-term benefit of increasing good riding skills.You have to keep your shit together, know where your wingman is, all the time, because, quite literally, his life or yours could depend on it...
It's partly about odds. When you ride anything with less than 4 wheels, in most cases, you put some odds up against your life. You bet against larger, heavier objects that will either squash or smash apart pretty much any body part you currently own. You have to take your awareness of things around you to higher levels, and be ready to act at any time to avoid troubles. You can nudge the odds favorably a great deal by the way you ride.
From time to time, somebody will comment (or ask) about the helmet thing, or the whole motorcycle thing. "Why do you take your life in your hands?" "Why don't you wear a helmet?" All I can say to that is, if you've never done it, or you've never done it without a helmet, I can't explain it beyond this: it reminds me that I am, indeed, alive. I'm ab-so-fakkin-lutely in love with the wind. If I couldn't do it on a bike then I'd buy or rent a bigass horse. And I wouldn't wear a helmet then, either. Besides, has anybody ever seen Ol' Tex ridin' Ol' Paint with a even a skid lid on?
Nope. No lid for this Kowboy (excepting, of course, the places where the badges can pull you over and make you pay, if you are lidless). Even in the unfortunate event that I make unexpected and unpleasant contact with the pavement.
Which I proceeded to do, at a little after 8:15pm on Friday the 14th.
Without going into too much detail, either. Essentially I laid the bike down to avoid an impact on a car that would likely have dealt me far more serious injury than what I got from the pavement - given that I didn't thump my coconut on the asphalt as opposed to part of the car. Bad choice to have to make, but with less than 40 feet to go and moving at 25+ mph - plenty enough to crack the hardest of coconutz, even mine - I had to grab the binders, slew the front to the right, and boom.
SON-uva... Fragged the left elbow on first contact. Prospect heard me scream one of my well-worn vulgarities, and as he dodged to the right of our unexpected roadblock saw me tumblin' and cussin' down the road as I went alongside the bike. It hit the car and bounced off, landing on my feet even as I came to rest next to the car. All I can say is that I was in sensory overload, and only dimly aware of pain in my dogs through the pain-wall that my arm had become.
My odds worked out pretty damn good.
I've lost more than a few Bros and acquaintances to the asphalt. That's the way of it. While I'm sure none of them preferred to die like that - Gods, when somebody says, "He would have wanted to go like that" do they actually know what that going was like? - they are beyond giving an opinion. As for me, the idea of dying on the bike is somewhat desirable versus rotting away, but, having gotten a pass twice now - at least in bike wrecks - oh, MAN, this shit hurts. And the truly fatal ones, that I've knowledge of at least, are ugly and horribly painful for those left behind. The pain of knowing that someone you love and/or respect has been snuffed out like candle - by a sledgehammer. That the urn or closed casket is all that everybody has, now, because right now it's damn hard to think of the joys of having that person in their life. Joys overshadowed by a violent, and more often than not, unnecessary, end.
I'm not going to make this a rant, I'm not, I'm not...
As I wrote a little ways back - my odds worked out. A fractured elbow, bruised lung and feet, and a teeny slash o' the rash on my knees and right forearm. The coconut never touched the asphalt until I actually laid it gently down - something nobody in the rescue or medical professions quite believed until much later, Saturday morn or so. I had surgery for the elbow on Thursday, a little less than a week later. I now have an steel-plated elbow!
Her Darkness did better, mostly by virtue of being made of replacable parts. Looks like a new front end, minimum. Hopefully the frame isn't twisted; time, and an inspection, will tell.