The Bear

On October 27, 2025, I was hit by a car while riding my motorcycle on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe.

If you read my blog or know me personally, then you already know this story. You’ve watched the little moments of recovery unfold in real time. You sat with me while I learned to walk correctly again. You watched me stare through tears at my broken face in the mirror. You watched me wrestle with a medical bureaucracy that often seemed more interested in protecting itself than helping the people trapped inside it.

And slowly, like some bizarre reconstruction project ordered by the king himself, I put myself back together again despite the common lore.

No, come on, get it? “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men?” Humpty fucking Dumpty?

Never mind.

I don’t really watch the news anymore. I stopped after my cardiac arrests because I needed peace in my life. That doesn’t mean I’m uninformed. I still skim headlines. I still keep track of the broader world. But I no longer obsess over things I can’t control.

These days I mostly obsess over two things: riding and writing.

That’s it.

Because when the universe shows you how quickly the clock is ticking, when Death himself stands impatiently in the corner tapping his fucking watch, you start paying attention to what actually matters. And idiot politicians doing idiot politician things is not something I particularly want to carry with me to the grave.

But sometimes I speak up politically anyway.

Usually carefully.

Because I still believe in loving thy neighbor. I still believe in trying to leave people feeling better after interacting with me than they felt before. I want the world to be slightly better because I passed through it, not worse.

But sometimes? Sometimes you have to say something.

This is one of those times.

While I was recovering from my accident, while the woman who hit me still hadn’t received so much as a fucking citation, while the system quietly shrugged at the destruction of my motorcycle and six months of my life, the Santa Fe City Council was apparently hard at work “solving problems.”

And what emergency required their urgent attention?

Loud motorcycles.

Of course.

Because a handful of retirees moved here from California or New York in search of adobe serenity and discovered that cities occasionally make noise.

So the city council acted.

They passed a noise ordinance. Attached a $500 fine to it. And approved taxpayer-funded sound sensors across the city to automatically identify and fine vehicles.

Think about that for a second.

Automated enforcement. Robotic monitoring. Sensors issuing punishment.

And why did the council feel empowered to do this?

Because almost nobody showed up to oppose it.

But that right there is the failure of modern government: most working people can’t fucking participate. They’re at work. They’re trying to survive inflation. Trying to pay rent. Trying to pay mortgages on wildly overpriced homes. Trying to keep their heads above water.

Governments love to pretend silence equals consent.

It does not.

Sometimes silence just means people are exhausted.

And here’s the part that infuriates me personally: The city effectively told me two things simultaneously. First: it’s apparently acceptable for a distracted driver to nearly kill a motorcyclist without meaningful consequence. Second: the motorcyclist is the actual public nuisance.

Let’s be honest about something: Drivers do not see motorcycles.

And here’s what non-riders don’t understand about surviving on one: motorcycles survive through maneuverability. That means space. That means visibility. That means not getting trapped inside clusters of distracted drivers piloting two-ton steel boxes while staring at TikTok videos and navigation screens.

The safest place for a motorcycle is often slightly ahead of traffic flow, where the rider controls their spacing and escape routes. If you ride slower than surrounding traffic, you become an obstacle. If you ride exactly with traffic, you get boxed in. And once you’re boxed in, your options disappear fast.

A couple years ago, I allowed myself to get trapped in traffic at highway speeds. A chunk of metal broke loose from a vehicle beside me at roughly eighty-five miles per hour. It slammed into my front fork, ricocheted around the bike, and smashed into my leg. Had it hit the pavement in front of me, I probably would have gone down. Had it struck my leg directly, it likely would have broken it.

That’s motorcycle reality.

So imagine my reaction today when I opened my mailbox and found a photo-enforcement speeding ticket from Albuquerque. There, neatly printed in government ink, was a photograph of the back of my motorcycle with me riding it like some sort of robotic hunting trophy.

Because apparently the city sees me as the danger.

Not the distracted drivers. Not the people drifting through traffic while staring at phones. Not the idiots smoking weed behind the wheel at stoplights.

The motorcycle.

So riders adapt.

We use loud pipes partly for performance and partly because being noticed matters when inattentive drivers are constantly drifting toward your lane like zombies searching for flesh.

And even then we still get hit. I didn’t have loud pipes on Lilith.

Now imagine the timing from my perspective: I’m recovering from being hit by a car while the city quietly decides motorcycles themselves are the real problem.

That’s hard not to take personally.

And before somebody says: “Well cities need noise regulations.”

Sure. Maybe. Reasonable ones. But I would counter that not every motherfucking thing needs to be regulated by government. There’s already “disturbing the peace”, but once again, this fucking toddler nation conflates lack of enforcement with the need for more regulation.

This obsession with automated enforcement and surveillance culture should bother every single person regardless of politics. We’re really outsourcing law enforcement to microphones and algorithms now? Where exactly does due process exist in that system?

Or are we just slowly surrendering liberty piece by piece because comfort has become America’s highest virtue?

Because here’s something else I know about bikers: A huge percentage of them are veterans. People who volunteered to defend the very freedoms this country supposedly values. People who stood watch while the rest of society slept beneath the safety blanket they helped provide.

And now those same people are increasingly treated like undesirable noise pollution because some affluent transplant wants a quieter brunch experience.

Fuck that.

This is exactly the kind of thing the founders warned about when discussing majority rule and individual liberty. They understood that freedom dies when temporary coalitions decide minorities are inconvenient.

And today? Motorcyclists are inconvenient. Working-class people are inconvenient. Noise is inconvenient. Freedom itself is becoming inconvenient.

Well too fucking bad.

Cities are alive. Freedom is noisy. Motorcycles are noisy. America is noisy.

If you want absolute silence, move to the mountains and hug a fucking pine tree.

But don’t move into a city and start demanding that every rough edge of human existence be sanded smooth for your personal comfort.

So to the Santa Fe City Council and mayor’s office: Fuck you. You have not heard the last of me on this issue. In fact, tomorrow you’ll probably hear my pipes echoing through the streets. Because congratulations: You managed to piss off the bear.