Some phrases stick to our writing ribs. Each time we sit down at the keyboard to pen a sliver of news, craft a review, or churn out a moto-related yarn, we dig through our mental junk drawers to make keyboard clacking happen a bit faster. It doesn’t matter if you mash calculator buttons for a living, or flick a tape measure out on a job site—we’ve all collected tricks of our respective trades that we carry with us.

“The bike is the bike” is a rare instance where circular reasoning can make sense, if you give it a chance. Get past the flash of immediate confusion and mull it over: the bike is indeed the bike.

Wonderful! It was a bike before we were sent slick marketing language about it, detailed specifications sheets, and long before we get our First Ride jollies off. It’ll be a bike long after that, too, years down the line, when someone is picking it up on the used market and having fun with it. Sheesh, motorcycles can even stand upright and at attention on their kickstands all by themselves. They certainly don’t need us to look cool, as it is usually intended to work the other way around.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. We can walk the idea further and aim the mirrors not over our shoulders (or directly at them, as is the case on so many sportbikes), but directly at our helmets. The “we” in this instance is anyone who writes about two-wheeled topics. We ride, research, take notes, and eventually spit out something that could help someone decide on a significant purchase. Let’s face it, motorcycles aren’t cheap, and neither is gear. We can boil it down to motorcycling ain’t cheap, eh?

More often than not, the keyboard warrior who happens to write about bikes is a variable, too. Our personal panniers are loaded to the brim with knowledge, experiences, or what some might be able to effectively argue as biases, and a dash of specialized skill that allows us to do all this.

The most glaring problem with any monkey slapped behind the bars of a shiny new bike is that those experiences drive the conversation. What we think should be, isn’t. Our individual gripes can only be vindicated within the broader marketplace, where we can compare and contrast to help readers understand the product as a whole—no normal enthusiast has time for that level of nerdiness. For the record, it can work the other way when the machine does all the things a writer could hope for, leaving gripes by the wayside.

The trick, at least mine, is knowing when to apply these collective thoughts, experiences, and, of course, biases in an even-handed manner. That’s the goal anyway. Yet, there needs to be a grounding principle or what’s morphed into this moto-journo’s repetitive prayer: the bike is the bike.

There are times when a manufacturer nails it in the eyes of this 5-foot-10 Southern California-based male, who happens to be partial to sport-aligned machines in the upper-middleweight and liter-bike classes. All thoughts of negativity are pushed into the recesses of my mind, whilst a furrowed brow expression takes over a spicy canyon run. Ah, friends, that’s when things are clicking.

Well, that’s all well and good, but now imagine all of the people who don’t fit within the precise description you just read. I’d wager that’s probably a good percentage of our readers here at Ultimate Motorcycling. So, what helps when things get prickly, or perhaps too good, is this simple mantra: the bike is the bike.