The New Club Rules

by Melissa
(Vancouver, BC Canada)

Our bike club is going through some changes. First, we need to have elections for new officers. Second, we need to start working on new club rules. Some of the old ones are hideously outdated at best and annoying at worst. After all, the original rules were written before women really were a part of this club at all, and now we are the majority. The rules that annoy and offend us are going to be wiped clean.

The first part of order is going to be to remove the words “gal, chick and broad” from the rules. Many of us are capable of not only fixing our own bikes, but buy and sell our own, but we are stuck with outdated terms. By the way, those are not the only ones that are going to go, just the ones that can be mentioned in polite company. There are worse. Like I said, the club rules were originally written by men who did not envision that women would ever ride a bike of their own or that they would ever be part of the club as more than just a guest of the man they were riding behind at the time.

Technically, this meeting has been a really long time coming. At last count, the female to male ratio in our club was 4 to 1. The older men have started to stay at home parked on the couch. The older women are sick of being in the house, so we have them here, talking about the feeling of the wind in their elegant coifs while they knit or show pictures of their grandbabies to one another. Before anyone thinks that the bike club has gone old lady, you must be reminded the gals have duked it out a time or two, tossing down their knitting needles and tussling like children as they called each other names that would make a sailor’s hair curl.

Rules are going to be discussed so that our meetings can flow in a reasonably paced way and then we can socialize. After all, that is why we gather together here in the first place. We do not come here for rules or for meetings. We come here to be with other people who ride motorcycles and enjoy it. We come here to be with people who do not care what we do for a living, or how much our homes cost or that we had to move to a smaller apartment because of the economy. All we care about is the camaraderie of bikes and the way that riding makes us feel. It would be great if we could do so without rules, but that is not realistic either. Society needs rules, even a social club for bikers needs rules too!