Fool's Holiday
by Robert Beaupre

If it’s true that idleness is the fool’s holiday (as many a fortune cookie has led me to believe,) then this has been my Christmas, Thanksgiving and Vernal Equinox rolled into one.

For the past month, I haven’t set so much as a knobby on a motocross track. And the effects are becoming more apparent by the day. As some of you might know, I was recently awaiting the birth of my daughter, as well as preparing my bike for sale so I could get one of the first ‘06s off the boat from Kumamoto.

But while my daughter has already arrived, my bike has yet to depart. So instead of pounding out practice laps, I’ve been lounging around the house and work, relying on playtime with my new baby girl as my only form of exercise. And at nine days old, she is not ready to do much roadwork.

Odd things begin to occur when I’m deprived of my time on a bike. Monotonous exercises like push-ups actually seem appealing as a means of burning excess energy. My interest in motocross web sites and magazines plummets. I start paying closer attention to conventional news and TV. And, maybe most pointedly, I begin to avoid hearing any news from the races, especially when it involves my class. Occasionally, I will break down and check in on the local race results, though I have no idea why I do so--inexplicable anxiety always follows.

My wife usually notices the change too. It affects her in that she has me lying uselessly around the house on the weekends, interrupting what would probably be a productive Sunday afternoon for her if I were racing. And while she is always a good sport about it, I still feel remorse at the hours spent napping or watching inane TV like those damned VH1 I Love the 80s productions. Why I find obscure comedians making fun of legwarmers so entertaining remains a mystery to me.

My sleep cycle feels the impact as well. Since something of a night owl (I’m writing this at 2 a.m.) and I only work in the afternoons and evenings, I need my alarm to ring at 5:30 a.m. at least one day a week to keep my sleep cycle in check and my rising time from drifting ever-later into the morning. That day used to be Sunday when I was racing each week, but since I have no genuine reason to wake up that early now, it simply isn’t happening. If I’m not going racing, I see no reason why I should ever eat breakfast before 10:30 a.m (or dinner before 10:30 p.m.)

Did I mention that I’m now sporting a scraggly beard and Kleenex boxes on my feet? OK, I’m not really pushing any Howard-Hughes standards of isolation or weirdness yet, but it’s only been a few weeks. If this goes on any longer, there’s no telling what will become of me. So I’m making a pledge to get back to the track before the Carson City race on Sept. 18, even if it means dirtying my pristine, reasonably priced sale bike or sneaking my ’83 CR480 into the 250cc Pro class. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I don’t want to see this experiment go any further.

This fool’s holiday has to end, lest I watch myself turn into a hermetic, nocturnal couch-sitter whose only dream is to build the world’s biggest aircraft--in between episodes of I Love ’87.


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