ORP, motorcycles, Mike, trawlers and Texas prom queens - UPDATED with photos

I like Orp.

We've known each other since the days when grocery shopping meant actually having the option of paper or plastic.

She was either the fifth or sixth person to invite me ... but either way Orp was singularly responsible for me showing up that first time at New Spring and seeing my life changed forever. (Never give up on inviting someone just one more time.)

Thank you Orp, I will always owe you.
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Orp told me this afternoon she wasn't quite sure about living on a boat.

About three weeks ago Juju's husband Mike The Original Bagel Man hinted pretty much the same thing.

Boats are much smaller and more cramped than houses, they bob up and down even when tied to the dock ... and let's face it, there's something unsettling at first about trying to fall asleep knowing there's 100 feet of water under your head.
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One year while I was living in Colorado I used my two-week vacation to drive my motorcycle down to Key West.

I followed a narrow two-lane state highway through northwest Texas on the way back, and got an erroneous speeding warning from a Texas State Trooper for doing 90 in a 55.

I know it was his mistake, because I'd been clocking closer to 120 for over an hour .... which put me in the middle of a 4-block-long town in the middle of a desert at dusk on a Saturday night.

Prom night.

The sky was turning purple while I sat at the red light watching girls in formal gowns stumble across the street in heels while the wind kicked up dust and steered cotton bale-sized tumbleweeds, as though hurtling interference, between them and their crew-cut, tuxedoed dates.

In another minute the light turned green, the stars came out and that peculiar vignette was a light-year away ... but the strangeness of that tableaux has never left me.


Piloting small airplanes cross-country is great, but it's awfully introspective.
Motorcyles have a way of placing you inside the scene.

Seems like Bruce Springstein's "Born to Run" and Eddie Money's "Two Tickets to Paradise" were The Playlist back then.
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Last year, incredibly, I saw my Suzuki GS1000E for sale behind a chainlink fence at a used car lot not four blocks from my house. And even thought about buying it.

Three days later it was gone.
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Relationships? What a mind-bending hassle.
Material success? There's never enough ... besides being a waste.
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Could I live onboard a boat? Yeah, I like the changing view through the helm window and feeling the engine pulsing through my shoes.
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I've had some good friends, and I can remember some of their names, but I've never had more important friends than I do now.
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Here's one I got in Utah for doing 65 in a 55 ... I never believed the radar gun picked me out among all the cars and RVs doing 80.

With a court appearance as it turns out, scheduled for yesterday October 6.