“Riding the Honda was like death. Every time you flicked it into a corner, you never knew if you would make it out.” —Eddie Lawson, 1991

I’ll tell you how I learned broken toes mend themselves: I got older. This was after I’d developed shoulder scar tissue because I tripped on a curb not looking in Miami and later, briefly and bemusedly, tried to pass it off as a jet ski accident. It was also after I’d acquired a scar on my calf jumping a barbed wire fence at a friend’s apartment complex parking lot in the middle of the night. And it was long after I tripped and gashed my kneecap running backward up an escalator to fetch a birthday card at a Borders that, like the relationship it served, no longer exists.

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There’s this world that exists, I bet you know it. It looks like lush vegetation and smells like fresh air. Birds sing, flowers bloom, the sun shines and the ozone can handle it the way it has for centuries, eons, maybe forever – no one can put a number to it, exactly. We don’t bicker over it, really. It’s splitting hairs to guess when the origin of the universe was, and who can say what was back there, where we came from, why we’re here; all we know is that we’re here now, in this world that exists, and we have to make the best of it with each other because we aren’t solitary animals. We’re not spiders or foxes or praying mantises or ocelots or owls; we need each other, and we’re smart enough to know it. We may die alone, but we don’t fail that way.

We’re smart enough to know all of this because we’re taught that, because education is a pillar of society, as much as it was during the Enlightenment, and to survive effectively in this world, smarts are essential. Diplomas are valued. Schools get funded. Kids get brains. Parents get pride. Everyone gets paid. Scholarships, stable employment straight out of school, a place in the world to call our own. It’s all there for us, collectively.

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