Boom.

I picked up a rain suit to keep me dry in the always exciting thunderstorms of Tampa Bay. I purchased some fine ear plugs to save my hearing against all the wind noise while riding a two wheeled machine (in my case, a scooter). I worked a swift 5 hour shift. All day long the lightning sparked, the thunder boomed and the rain just poured and poured. Departing work, I fashioned the earplugs; the ambient noise went silent. I got my sweatshirt out, and wrapped up in my rain suit. The heat stayed in, the cold, the wind, and the rain stayed out. Between my earplugged ears and my helmet there thinned a fine, warm hat. My senses, now dulled by the earplugs and the rain suit, found a new awareness. Kick starting my ride home and relishing the bikes roar to life in the face of such rain, I hop on and begin the ride home. Soon, I'm slicing through the winding, sloping roads before reaching State Road 41 and gunning it home.

The brooding night sky was lit ablaze with an epileptic fit of lightning. The thunder boomed in the sky as it boomed in my bones. The rain poured and poured and poured. And halfway home there suddenly encroached another rider, his machine double (no triple!) mine. From his lane to mine came a friendly gesture of disbelief as he through his arm high and back. He caught up not with another verteran Harley rider, but with a college kid on scooter. Yet he stayed just a few yards ahead of me, and we rode through periods of the light and the dark, the crashes and the quiet, the rain and the rain and the rain. It soon came time for me to turn off SR41. I turned left and he went straight on.

Not a mile from home now, the lightning lit furiously in the black sky, turning it purple with streaks of white, the accompanying rattle of thunder heading my way and finally cracking overhead. And the rain, the rain, the rain. Here it was, life upon life upon life, with senses dulled, and strangely heightened, where in a singular snap of the senses, through a curious crack in creation, there unfurled a fleeting freedom.