The last Northern Summer of the 20^th Century.

Twenty years ago, guided by an extraordinary vision of excellence tempered and proven in the arena of sport, the sons of fierce warriors and sublime artisans crafted the awesome machine that we now love. These men understood what they had made, and proudly offered it to the world.

The world rode on.

Now that machine is ours. The CBX Motorcycle belongs to us!

Unlike the magnificent Brough of Lawrence, the legendary Vincent of Rollie Free, and the nomadic Indian of Lee Marvin, the maker of the CBX still exists. Yet strangely this maker no longer truly claims his rarest and finest creation, the beautiful and powerful offspring of the Promethean fires tended by Hailwood, Redman, and Bryan. Now we are responsible for the destiny of this truly fine example of the Motorcycle, that exciting chic icon of 20^th Century rebellion and freedom, constructed by Honda at the very pinnacle of what that powerful corporation now proclaims and celebrates as its Classic Era.

We, the CBX owners of the world, have the great good fortune to possess this glorious machine, and the CBX Motorcycle has the great good fortune to possess us.

The eldest models of the CBX are aged one score, the eldest CBX owners approach three and more. The CBX Motorcycle lives in a time-binding realm of owner generations, ridden, renewed, and cherished by its owner, then when and if necessary, passed to a new aficionado who will also ride, renew, and cherish it. We and our CBX inheritors collectively have the mind, the spirit, the will, and the treasure, to guarantee this process well into the New Millennium.

The fathers of those sons, steeped in Bushido, would have called it giri. Our duty.

For us, millennial CBX owners and motorcycle aficionados, it is kokoro. Our heart. It is our passion to preserve the CBX Motorcycle.

Yours in Motorcycling,

Pete Ahrens

Seekers of enlightenment often speak of seeing.

To ride a motorcycle, you must be able to see. And seeing, you must learn.

You must be able to see what each mindless moron intends, to predict which direction the witless will wander, to foretell the trajectory of the bumpkin, to anticipate the deeds of the stupid, to learn the ways of the multi-axle monsters. Beyond the meat caged by metal, there is the road itself, infinite in its possibilities for pleasure and danger in equal measure, open to every chance event of weather and all space, and upon it the debris of a million luckless fools.

Like the Polynesian navigator reading the sea, you must read the road and all it contains.

And there is the motorcycle itself.

We proud and dedicated riders of the CBX motorcycle must grasp at once the whole nature of this thing we do. We must know that forever locked with us in our embrace of our CBX motorcycles is the risk of death. But risk is not certainty, and as our knowledge becomes our actions we live and ride our own free path: a space carved from the realm of potential outcomes. We must always seek to enlarge this space, which is the envelope of our abilities and our CBX motorcycles' performance. We push the edge of the envelope not to increase risk but to expand our knowledge and capability for action. We must go to the mountain.

As men and women who love and are loved, we have a very great responsibility to stay within the envelope, to return from the mountain. However high upon the mountain and however near to the edge we may dare to trespass we must not leap from it into the abyss.

Do we really know this? Does our knowledge live in our actions?

Whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. On a big, fast, elegant motorcycle like the mighty CBX, there is that which can kill you, and so very much more which will make you stronger!

Yours in Motorcycling,

Pete Ahrens

Your Publisher recently received a note from a very dear old friend (dear and old enough to freely give me my scatological ration) which alluded to the nature of motorcycling and motorcyclists:

"As much as I am loathe to encourage your already excessive interest in those dreadful two-wheeled vehicles…that groups of you should so readily confess yourselves to be "Biker-Trash" or "Iron Butts" is most telling …I trust this finds you bearded and leathered and comfortably astride a monster-bike. If not, look to it."

Yes, so ran my reply to my dear old friend, I look to it daily. I ride in serious high-speed interurban realms almost every day.

Ah, the dreaded two-wheeled beast of myth and superslab!

And what gloriously supercharged myth, and what wondrously mythologized superslab!

"Wild One" to "Mad Max" at one hundred miles per hour on the Highway to Hell!

"Fire all of our guns at once and explode into space..."

Riding the motorcycle brings together the most adrenaline-loaded, deeply contemplative, and danger-charged aspects of combat and meditation. Knowledge becomes action at a furious, even relentless, and most certainly remorseless, pace. Man and Motorcycle, Mind and Machine, come together in a way I call intermorphosis. It is pure Zen.

For one kind of man, born Nomad, possessed of the wanderlust of his mounted predecessors, bound to the Quest by nature and to the Journey by inclination, the motorcycle is Pegasus. For other kinds of men, perhaps less thrilled by the vanishing point but still able to perceive this spiritual connection with the road and the horizon, the faithful servant, iron horse, is now fueled by petroleum rather than the savanna itself. The motorcycle is the Key to the Highway, as liberating now to a dentist on a beautiful Sunday morning as the horse was four hundred years ago to the hunter at the edge of the Great Plains contemplating the Spring migration of the bison.

There are those in the motorcycling culture who profoundly enjoy tweaking the noses of those who dwell within the present Norm. If the tweaking becomes a beating it is usually because Norm can't take a freaking joke.

Most motorcyclists simply love motorcycles and want to ride them as often as possible. Some motorcyclists enjoy probing and expanding their personal performance envelopes. Mounted upon your vehicle, you are, after all, flying in two dimensions: there is a very deep relationship between motorcycling and aviation, from the proficiencies each requires to the pleasures each bestows. The proficiencies ward off Death, and the pleasures invite Ecstasy!

The last time I saw you, my very dear Sir, you were on a scooter!

Yours in Motorcycling,

Pete Ahrens

A few weeks ago at the "International Motorcycle Show" at the San Mateo Fairgrounds I wandered the parking lot, as is my custom at such affairs, in search of interesting and unique two- or three-wheeled machines. There are perhaps a thousand motorcycles in row upon row. Here is a pretty cool one-off café racer with a big single and a body lovingly pounded out of aluminum, and there are one or two finely restored right-shifting Nortons. A nice paint job on a Harley-Davidson and a handsome Ducati of a quarter-century's vintage. I favor the Café aesthetic.

Not one CBX is to be found here.

In a highly cross-sectional sample of motorcycles, formed from the enthusiasts who will spend a Saturday at the biggest motorcycle show in these parts, not one CBX appears at the time of my browsing. Mine is not there because I live a block from the site. Somebody told me they saw one later in the day. This sample, as I see it, contains about 65-70% Harley-Davidson, 25-30% Japanese all makes (mostly F3s, F4s, and Ninja's), and 5% European all eras. In other words, a perfectly valid sample of modern motorcycling demographics: a whole lot of bikes with no imagination whatsoever, and a very few really nice specials, and not one CBX.

It is not necessary that the CBX be here, but it would be nice to see one.

Almost every reader of this sentence owns one or more CBX motorcycles. You are the keepers of the CBX. You know the greatness and uniqueness of the motorcycle you possess. You must also know that this strength of character is not common among motorcycles. Among all which exist in the world, only a few possess it. From Europe, the Brough and Vincent, the very best Nortons, a few Ducatis, Guzzis, and MV Augustas, and from America the 1947 Indian Chief and one or another of the roadworthy FLHs, but among the Japanese breeds only the CBX.

These ever more rare CBX motorcycles are the woven gold of an ancient, more glorious era, Oh My Brothers, to be admired, treasured, and well preserved. And to be ridden to the sun, devouring air and fuel and distance and time!

Because I believe this, my Fellow CBXers, I have decided to belay my earlier intention to turn this thing loose, and to stay on as Publisher of the CBXpress. I hope you will join me in this New Century to reaffirm our dedication to the preservation of the CBX motorcycle.

Yours in Motorcycling,

Pete Ahrens