makes sense. but i never thought of trying to stop the bike or prevent the fall. i thought of getting clear of it - as in 'abandon ship!' if i'm going to fall over, i'd rather not do it with any parts of me mixed up with heavy machinery that's suddenly got a different trajectory and different momentum from mine. now i'm trying to figure out the physics of it to see if that's sensible.

the first time i fell, i just braked hard enough to put myself over the handlebars. where's that blush icon? i'm still glad the bike didn't come with me. i let go as soon as i felt it happen, and put out my hands to save my face/head. i went at a kind of 2 o'clock angle and hit the road on both hands and one knee, and the bike just dropped over sideways behind me in the other direction. mind you, there was a car two or three feet away, and i think i was also trying to avoid going into/under it, so maybe i pushed off with my feet and caused the direction of the bike's fall. in any case, i was damned glad not to have had my feet mixed up with the bike. i got some impressive bruises and a heck of a kneecap for a while, but nothing got sprained or torn. i'd rather break things.

the other one was such a weird mess i'm still not sure what my mental movie tells me. where is that blush icon? basically, i ditched it because i'd already lost control of it, which is probably one of the factors in whatever my mind decided to do. i can't tell if i'm stupid or not, but basically if i'm not sure anymore what my bike's doing, i don't want to be anywhere near it when it does whatever it is.

ah, see. in my murky little poor-bloody-infantry section of it, the purpose of risk mitigation planning is a little different. it's basically laying the groundwork for the day on which we can all break out the t-shirts that say 'don't say we didn't warn you (and now don't try to blame it on us)'. i should go get those printed some day.