If you are new, welcome to the least-read motorcycle blog on the internet.

Forgive this entry as it doesn’t focus on a motorcycle topic. This post rambles a bit. I promise to refrain from these posts more than twice a year. Please accept my apology in advance.

Except for the first few days when I posted every day to get ensure a modest amount of content was available online for early visitors, I’ve been posting entries each week. Maintaining that cadence has been a challenge. When I started this site, I thought it would be easy. How hard could it be? Mrs. Bald Rider said I should post every day. I don’t know how people post multiple times per week...per day even. Maybe they don't have jobs or posting is their job. Maybe I will become more prolific as time goes.

As is likely blatantly obvious, I don’t know what I’m doing. I am not a writeologist. I didn’t go to school for that. The twenty-seven thousand words I’ve written here are more than my four years of college combined, a slight exaggeration but not far from the truth. You cannot ‘Times New Roman double-spaced 12pt font’ blog entries and hope your professor (or the reader) does not notice.

Six months is the threshold when various websites say blogs begin to gain traction and show up on search results. Other sites say traffic doesn’t pick up until you have 300 blog posts. We’re going to ignore those sites as you are now reading my 34th contribution.

Traffic is great but I created this site for myself. It helps keep the motivation flowing. It is nice to have a website where I can say whatever I want with no moderators or admins restricting my content. I understand internet forums require moderation. People are terrible. Moderators tend to be people who lack authority in real life and have to exert ‘power’ to faceless people on the internet, in my experience. Not everyone is like that. The ones I go to are fine. Please don’t ban me.

As an introvert (INTJ on the MBTI), I don’t mind talking to myself.

I would like Google AdSense's help to keep the lights on with advertising revenue. Running this website is not super expensive but also not free. Google repeatedly rejects me due to lack of ‘traffic’ and ‘content.’ There is little risk of me quitting my day job and becoming a full-time motoblogger. With an adjusted expectation for my standard of living, though, anything is possible.

I don’t know how adults keep adulting all the time. My strategy for avoiding adulthood involved taking jobs across the country with little expectation of staying in the same place. It wasn’t out of character to move 1500 miles and then move another 1500 miles a year or two later. Total state count since graduating from college is 8, including both coasts and a bunch in-between. I’ve been in my current time zone since 2016 and am getting itchy.

As an elder millennial aging deeper into my 40s, opting out of adulthood is an option I’d like to pursue. Each passing day makes it harder and harder to resist the urge to run away and become a scooter tramp living on the road. Bills are dumb. I just want to ride bikes.

But I digress…

I expected having this website would somehow motivate and/or force me to have more motorcycle adventures. Since BALDRIDER went live, I have not had many. More time is spent typing words on a keyboard than riding motorcycles. I attribute the lack of adventuring to spending every waking hour for months working on my deck since July and then Winter arrived.

I did not expect to be targeted with ads for AI to write my blog posts. Do we want to know how many blogs are written by Artificial Intelligence? I am lazy but not that lazy. Besides, I doubt AI could duplicate my impressive level of mediocrity.

If you made it this far, I’ll say it again: welcome. Spring is coming. I'm curious to see where we are in six months. A trip to Florida, maybe?

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