understanding class

I just got reminded that the word class has a straight definition.

When I was in making a payment on my furniture in ultra-Christian, ultra-conservative Lynden the other day I happened to use the term in passing. Extreme 'have you taken all your medications today?' look from the clerk. WHOOSH! Right over the windmills. Gone.

To have class or to show class are bike culture terms.
When I say class I mean something completely different than the traditional American definition of the word.
Martha Stewart pre-prison defines the generally accepted use of the word.
Martha Stewart post-prison defines mine.

Examples:

Our own Pamelas' son, Burning Buffalo Chaos, shows an innate understanding of the term. Not content with chopping enthusiastically at a pumpkin close to his tender regions with a huge knife, he subsequently filled same with gasoline, lit it on fire and lost all the hair on his arm in the resulting mushroom cloud. Then, in a brave attempt to save his home and family he kicked it. It rolled across the patio and into the yard leaving a trail of flaming cucurbitty devastation in it's wake.
As this demonstrates, class is equal parts panache and disaster. And fire.

A martini with an olive in it-traditional class.
A martini with a glass eye in it- true class
A martini with a severed human extemity in it - a Sourtoe cocktail.

The Hells' Angels showing up for a members' trial en masse in full colors THINK they have class.

The president of the Hells'Angels motorcycle club carrying the Olympic torch through the streets of Los Angeles riding his Harley actually WAS class...on the part of the Olympic Committee. Although they didn't realize it. Which actually kind of makes it even more classy.

A wealthy socialite getting stabbed in her own apartment by a burglar is a stupid rich twat who should have locked the damn door.

A wealthy socialite getting stabbed in the lung by a burglar in her own apartment, who PULLS THE KNIFE OUT OF HER OWN CHEST AND JAMS IT THROUGH THE PERICARDIUM OF THE BURGLAR AND THEN CALLS THE POLICE, PUTS ON A NICE ROBE AND WAITS FOR THEM ON THE COUCH WHILE THE BURGLAR WRITHES IN AGONY AT HER FEET is true class. Yea, a camel passes through the eye of a needle more easily, but this broad did it.*

Scale of class:

3. The Magnificent Seven
2. Lee Marvin drinking whiskey out of a dirty glass
1. Fat, hairy, leather-clad German with bleached hair smoking a big cigar and ripping throttle on a pre-AMF Harley rigid running shotgun pipes

Phantom class, with modifiers:
An apparition marching around the Tower of London with her gross messed-up severed head tucked under her arm and blood totally running down her dress and the stump of her neck all sticking out with tendons, and nasty ill gross crap all hanging down it is pretty goddamn classy.

An apparition of the spirit body of John Lee Hooker standing on top of a pile of burning Harleys is very fucking classy. If it hasn't happened it needs to.

A poltergeist manifestation of George Washington appearing to George Bush in the can and giving him a presidential twirlie while sticking a chicken up his ass is probably too classy for this dimension to sustain for more than a nanosecond without tearing a cataclysmic hole through the screen door of reality and letting in a bunch of flies and shit.


See! That wasn't so difficult! In fact, like MJ that was both fun AND easy!

Now that you have mastered this term you can hold your head up high at the next ABATE run. To be absolutely certain, take this quick test:

1. Guy in a brand new Viper doing burnouts in front of the Harley shop crashes into a line of parked bikes is...

2. Fat drunk naked broad doing circle burnouts in the parking lot, catches gravel, crashes into line of parked bikes is....

3. Fat drunk naked broad doing circle burnouts in the parking lot, catches gravel, crashes into a rest home, lands in bed next to an old man who has a heart attack, fat drunk naked broad found humping the corpse is....

4. Fat fully clothed broad crashes bike into side of ditch, bounces three times and leaves three separate craters is...

Answer:
1. classy. And true. I was there.
2. sad and lame but hysterically funny. No it wasn't me.
3. extremely classy but a lie.
4. this one was me.



* True story, too - even though I can't find it anywhere on the www; dammit. She had a fairly well-known name, too. Anyway it happened in the 1970's.