Crazy Collector Stories

This blog entry is nothing more than a statement of inquiry. I’m trying to write a story about the mental state (habits, motivations, attitudes, and rationalizations) of folks who “collect” motorcycles. A collector, in my mind, is everything from:

• someone who inherits/buys a bike and keeps it, unused, in the back of the garage for decades
• to the packrat who buys and stores as many rat bikes as his garage can hold
• to the Leno-style loony who builds an ostentatious storage facility and employs professional mechanics to clean and maintain his motorcycles in case he gets the urge for a short ride to the local Hard Rock or just wants to straddle a clean seat and make “vooroooom” noises.

For my money, each of these characters is exhibiting a form of eccentricity that is worth examining, simply for the entertainment value. When we’re being honest, I imagine all of us “hoard” something: family pictures or letters, ceramic dolls, musical instruments, ballpoint pens stolen from the office, and items that symbolize precious memories. Motorcycles are on the mild extreme of the crazy side of this addiction. After all, you can stuff a dozen bikes into a normal two-car garage which is slightly less nutty than buying a barn or airport hangar for a “collection.” Of course, that means the garage can’t be used for anything else. Even a collector has to admit filling a garage with unused machinery is an obsession; especially a collector who lives where severe winters make owning a garage a near necessity.

What I’m hoping to gather in this space (http://geezerwithagrudge.blogspot.com/) is any kind of story that describes the motorcycles in one of these collections or a description of the collector himself. Please, feel free to pass this along to anyone you know who can add something to this highly academic “analysis.”