How to live out your childhood knight fantasies, without coming off as a nerdlinger.

Cruising down the Astoria Blvd service road to the Grand Central Parkway tonight on my way back home from Long Island, it struck me how the accoutrements of the contemporary biker are very similar to those of the medieval knight. We wear helmets with visors, heavy leather jackets, gloves and boots as armor, we participate in an activity considered extremely dangerous by the vast majority of the populace, we have specialized games to demonstrate our machismo and virility, and of course, our method of transportation is the modern equivalent of a horse. Once in a while, we can get into fights. But that's not the primary purpose of this activity.
As I'm riding down the street I looked around, and I noticed my jacket was black leather (albeit with an orange and white stripe across the chest), my helmet was black, and a good percentage of my bike is black. That's when I was reminded of the black knight, a minor character in Arthurian legend, but one that resonated with me when I first heard the story of King Arthur as a kid (watch Disney's The Sword in the Stone, he makes a very small appearance, trying to yank Excalibur out).
So, then I went and looked up Black Knight on the repository of all human knowledge, Wikipedia. And here's what it says:

A black knight is a soldier or knight who either is not bound to a specific liege or does not want his liege, or himself, to be identified and so does not bear any heraldic standards or has blackened them out.

How appropriate, and surely more then just a passing coincidence that the figure with whom I most identified as a kid in King Arthur is an independent, free agent.

I think most boys dream about being a cowboy, or a knight at one point growing up. Unless you're in the Southwest, living out that Cowboy one is a bit tricky. It hasn't been fashionable to wear cowboy boots in public for about 30 years now. And unless you want to get labeled as one of those medieval festival freakshows, you best be leaving that suit of armor at home.

Get yourself a bike though, and you can actually live it, as opposed to playing dress up.