Hotter Than the Inferno

"You're never going to know about the world until you get out there and go it alone and see for yourself. What are you, chicken? Bawk bawk bawk bawk bawk."

My Uncle Howie amused himself with this sentiment several times over some spliffs and San Miguels as I planned my trip across Cebu to a marine sanctuary, shooting down my hopes of borrowing an air conditioned vehicle and driver for the next several weeks and traveling in style. I'd be borrowing his beach house though, and just for the snarky attitude I considered hitting him up for house sitting fees and asking him to pay me to go stay there. I didn't want to look the gift horse too closely in the smoking belching mouth, though so I just mentioned that when my mother sent me off to the Philippines, the last thing that she had in mind was letting her youngest daughter wander solo through the country poorly equipped with some laughable language skills, a skateboard and a backpack full of contraband. Back in the day she wouldn't even let me go down the street for a coca cola in a plastic bag without having a nanny and a guard.

When he dropped me off at the bus terminal with my 60 pesos ($1.50) for the six hour bus ride, his look was a little more stricken and way less smart alecky.

"Shit, I feel like a parent now. You'll be ok, right?" her said nervously chainsmoking.

"It's a wild world, and I have an American passport. That's hot property. If you find my finger in the mail could you put it in the freezer until they can reattach it? And try not to be too stingy if they ask for ransom money, sell my paperbacks on ebay if you have to."

"You're an adult, you can handle it."

"Peace out homes!," and I gave him snaps.

I stepped on the bus and enjoyed the rare look of concern on my uncle's face as he put his money where his mouth was. I looked around for somewhere to sit.

The bus was a clanking metal box with torn up vinyl seats. The windows were just open rectangles with wooden boards that could fit into the space to close out the sun. The only problem with this was that if all of the "windows" were closed the bus turned into a rolling oven. But with the windows open the beating strength of the relentless sunlight turned it into an oven anyways. I was wearing pants and a long sleeved tshirt for traveling purposes because all the girls in the Philippines cover themselves up even when its blazing, so I resigned myself to sweating through my clothes.

The crowd on the bus consisted of middle aged men with beer bellies and dirty shirts all chewing on something, and lurkers that had the up to no good vibe all around them. Those were the guys that had intense native look in their eyes, curious and predatory at the same time which makes me know what an animal feels like when its been spotted in a hunt and about to be pounced on. I knew that look, all the men in the red light district a few weeks earlier in Amsterdam wandered the streets with it. And I'd seen it a few times in Chicago. All the window seats were taken, and the only women on the bus besides me sat by themselves up front.

One guy tried to grab my eskrima sticks from off my backback.

"Don't!!" I said sharply and grabbed them back. He let go.

Shit. Where the hell was I supposed to sit?

Thats when I spotted some girls in the back sticking their heads out the window waving goodbye to their friends. Typical cebuana dalagas (young ladies). I could tell by their long glossy hair, lipstick and hoop earrings. They were dressed kind of slutty for Cebu in their tank tops and shorts, but what the hell, thats way better than the creepy seats up front. I headed back there, traded smiles with the girl next to me and dropped my stuff on the floor in front of my feet.

I glanced at the floor next to me and was jolted out of the momentary comfort zone I had just established when I saw her feet. Oh shit! Not only were they quite large, but her toenails were an inch long! Each!And they were bumpy and gnarly and painted in red!

I looked at her face again and noticed the stubble on her chin and around her bright red lipsticked mouth. Definitely much hairier than the typical Cebuana. And all around her eyebrows where it was starting to regrow. Even her sideburns were shaved. Damn girl! At this point she was brushing her hair.

"Whats your name?" she asked and held out her hand, with fingernails of various lengths of long also painted in red. "I'm Nico."

"My name is Brenda Lee."

"Ah, like the singer!"

Tous le monde. Everybody says that when I tell them my name all around the world. I never knew so many people like Nashville country music.

We chatted for a minute, I told her my story and asked where she was going. I wished I had brought some jewelry to give her.

She fanned herself prettily as the sun beat down on us, and her friend in the seat behind us shielded herself with an umbrella inside the bus.

"It's hotter than Dante's Inferno in here!" she exclaimed.

I giggled. What an unlikely reference.

"Yes, we have entered the eighth ring of hell!" I chimed in, then she looked at me quizzically. Oh well, I was very accustomed to not being understood at that point.

She showed off the bikini she was bringing and kept playing with her jewelry. Occasionally she'd go an conference in slang Cebuano with her girls and they'd eye me as they talked. After a moment she looked troubled and wanted to tell me something.

"You know... I'm not really a girl," she stated very delicately.

I started laughing. "Don't worry. I'm not as dumb as I look! You're very pretty though."

Ode to True Love: Skateboarding the Summer Solstice

Ode to True Love: Skateboarding the Summer Solstice

I almost rolled past the skate park as I biked north on the lakefront path on because there were so many things to look at as we approached Wilson and I had a lot on my mind. The air felt like it was melting onto my skin and sweat dripped into my eyes as crews of skateboarders came from every direction. I kept my balance with my board strapped to my backpack and just focused on not crashing. In the middle of this beats started bumping from stacks of speakers very close by and I wondered where the party was at, when I glanced to the right and almost fell off my bike when I saw the thousands of people swarming the park packed into every corner mob deep.


"Are you fucking serious?"


I switched gears and rolled through the grass up to the fence, where we paused to gape before me and Corinne locked our bikes to it and jumped straight into the frenzy.


"Are you for real going to skate this craziness?" I asked Corinne as we dropped our bags to the ground.


"This doesn't bother me. In Paris sometimes the skatepark gets so packed that we have to wait a half hour to skate. I'm used to this. Besides, its a holiday, we gotta skate!"


Yeah, she had a point. Holidays exist for the purpose of celebrating with the people you love. And here, conveniently, was all the elements of a party. In the midst of the massive crowd there was a tent set up with turntables, where our homies just happened to be djing surrounded by speakers taller than me standing on my skateboard. Skaters swarmed all over every inch of concrete and as I looked around the crowd as a whole appeared to be like a faceless hollering streaming blob of pulsing life.


"Have I ever even seen you out in the sunlight before?," I wondered as I hugged and kissed my old friends who just happened to be hanging around the dj tent like it was just another open mike night, and was genuinely happy to see every one of them. I love Chicago. I found the awesome locals skaters I see everyday and bumped knucks and felt just a bit more at ease seeing those familiar faces like this is just what we do for fun and stepped up to the lip of the pool. Normally it might have been hard to skate in front of hundreds of people, but everywhere around me I found people that are close to my heart. I don't think I realized that until I found myself in this situation.


I shouldn't have hustled so hard down the bike path on such a sunny day. I was still out of breath and my face felt like I was emanating waves of fire, my heart was racing with white heat while my blood pounded from the bike ride. My legs felt like jello and my mouth was so dry I couldn't even swallow as I gasped for breath, and the moment I stepped on my board my knees were shaking like battery acid was running through my muscles. I wondered if it had been such a good idea to get so blazed before I jumped on my bike - could this moment have blown my mind any less? Oh well. Do or die, whatcha gonna do. While I was regaining my bearings, I sat in a puddle of iced tea. The park was so packed you couldn't even tic tac around or get any sort of flow and it smelled vaguely like a rotten wet towel.


Between the chaos of the crowd, Alo and I-Ron dropping beats on the decks, Junior squatting up in a tree over his hammock with a cooler of budweisers, and the colors changing shifting in the sky by the moment, it felt like the convergence of my night life meeting my day life in a surreal mashup. It was the summer solstice, when the daylight runs the deepest into the night on the longest day of the year so it was bound to be the strange sort of evening when the line blurs between time. I did not go gently into that good night - I took Dylan Thomas's advice, and burned and raved at the dying of the day, and raged against the dying of the light.


The crowd in the street course roared, there was no way to even get in there. I just couldn't look over to that side, there were so many bodies that I had to block that whole side of the park entirely out of my consciousness. Over by the bowls it was an aggression session, I just started going whenever I could. Skaters were snaking each other left and right and dropping in on each other like frenzied bats as the beats pounded through the air. At one point Corinne and I were skating doubles in the bowl and three other skaters dropped in it with us and we were skating a line of five or six. Radness! No one crashed!


The chaos of the scene was overwhelming and it would have had me weeping on one of my more sensitive days, but the facts remained that:


1. Everywhere I turned I saw a familiar face


2. I didn't think I'd even get to skate at all today but the rain let up


3. We were still fucking ripping the bowls in spite of it all


4. Music!


I saw Christina saunter up to the fence with Bijou and Ozzie's leashes in her hands, so I took a break from the havoc to hang out with them for the only moment of calm and peace that I had the entire day.


There was an exponential amount of the usual people to watch the stupid things that I do when I skate, and as I looked down at my legs and hands for the first time I wondered what I looked like when I am skateboarding. I just decided that this was not the time or place to start contemplating that or be neurotic.


I had the rare bonus of having a various assortment of old-school Chicago thrashers give me tips on my kickflip as I practiced in the only two foot square circle of empty cement uninhabited by human bodies. It was a miracle that no one got hurt.


When the music turned off as the sun relented its hold on the day and finally dipped slowly below the horizon, my body felt wrecked like a class of kindergartners had gleefully bounced around on my back and my spine like a trampoline all afternoon, and I still hadn't found any water. I was covered in a thin coating of sweat mixed with dust, my hands were tore up and sticky and I kept walking into clouds of gnats. Gnarly. I hydrated with a popsicle before contemplating just passing out under a tree in a panic. There was still the bike ride home ahead of me though, so I curled up into a ball at Corinne's feet gasping and clutching my skateboard and rolling around and told her that I thought I was dying.


Later when we were sat down for dinner and had settled down, Corinne named her skateboard and proclaimed her undying love as she gazed at her Tony Trujillo high heeled legs Anti Hero deck and ate her french fries.


"His name is Clement, after my first love."


I flipped the deck under my feet to look at Mark Gonzales sweatpants smiling happily nestled in a bed of red flowers, and I saw her point. I marveled at how fond a person could be of an inanimate object. Our skateboards have always loved us back, unconditionally with no Oedipal issues or any skeletons in the closet. Even when I broke my ankle; I would blame the dunk highs that were a half sized too big for me before I would ever blame the Marc Johnson flying V guitar board I was riding (even though I retired it that day). It's more loyal than anything - no one else ever rides my board, and it would never cheat on me with my friend while I went out of town on a business trip. I spent time with it alone, and in front of hundreds of people. Last year we circumnavigated the globe together and hit the streets in five countries I'd never been in before and I believed that its presence kept me safe, as I wandered with it strapped to my back. It responds to everything, and gives back more than everything that I put into it. Devotion.


I realized that I too was in love.




*************************************************************************************




Then today our pictures are in the newspaper, on the cover of the showcase section of the Sun-Times. Oooh, the Sun times. There's an awesome photo of Corinne, and the one of me makes me cringe. Is that what I look like when I skate?


Here's the article:


http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-ftr-skateboard22.html


Last week we were skating and a reporter approached us for a story on girl skaters. He kept asking about getting vibed in the park by boys.


"Only douchebags do that, we just skate," I kept telling him, but he had a strong concept of what he wanted the article to be about.

But at least I finally got some skate pictures after bumming about the fact that I never had any a few weeks ago.


Tomorrow and the next day and the next day there will be new news and photos of different times in other people's lives but for this moment its my strange reality.

Ode to True Love: Skateboarding the Summer Solstice

Ode to True Love: Skateboarding the Summer Solstice

I almost rolled past the skate park as I biked north on the lakefront path on because there were so many things to look at as we approached Wilson and I had a lot on my mind. The air felt like it was melting onto my skin and sweat dripped into my eyes as crews of skateboarders came from every direction. I kept my balance with my board strapped to my backpack and just focused on not crashing. In the middle of this beats started bumping from stacks of speakers very close by and I wondered where the party was at, when I glanced to the right and almost fell off my bike when I saw the thousands of people swarming the park packed into every corner mob deep.


"Are you fucking serious?"


I switched gears and rolled through the grass up to the fence, where we paused to gape before me and Corinne locked our bikes to it and jumped straight into the frenzy.


"Are you for real going to skate this craziness?" I asked Corinne as we dropped our bags to the ground.


"This doesn't bother me. In Paris sometimes the skatepark gets so packed that we have to wait a half hour to skate. I'm used to this. Besides, its a holiday, we gotta skate!"


Yeah, she had a point. Holidays exist for the purpose of celebrating with the people you love. And here, conveniently, was all the elements of a party. In the midst of the massive crowd there was a tent set up with turntables, where our homies just happened to be djing surrounded by speakers taller than me standing on my skateboard. Skaters swarmed all over every inch of concrete and as I looked around the crowd as a whole appeared to be like a faceless hollering streaming blob of pulsing life.


"Have I ever even seen you out in the sunlight before?," I wondered as I hugged and kissed my old friends who just happened to be hanging around the dj tent like it was just another open mike night, and was genuinely happy to see every one of them. I love Chicago. I found the awesome locals skaters I see everyday and bumped knucks and felt just a bit more at ease seeing those familiar faces like this is just what we do for fun and stepped up to the lip of the pool. Normally it might have been hard to skate in front of hundreds of people, but everywhere around me I found people that are close to my heart. I don't think I realized that until I found myself in this situation.


I shouldn't have hustled so hard down the bike path on such a sunny day. I was still out of breath and my face felt like I was emanating waves of fire, my heart was racing with white heat while my blood pounded from the bike ride. My legs felt like jello and my mouth was so dry I couldn't even swallow as I gasped for breath, and the moment I stepped on my board my knees were shaking like battery acid was running through my muscles. I wondered if it had been such a good idea to get so blazed before I jumped on my bike - could this moment have blown my mind any less? Oh well. Do or die, whatcha gonna do. While I was regaining my bearings, I sat in a puddle of iced tea. The park was so packed you couldn't even tic tac around or get any sort of flow and it smelled vaguely like a rotten wet towel.


Between the chaos of the crowd, Alo and I-Ron dropping beats on the decks, Junior squatting up in a tree over his hammock with a cooler of budweisers, and the colors changing shifting in the sky by the moment, it felt like the convergence of my night life meeting my day life in a surreal mashup. It was the summer solstice, when the daylight runs the deepest into the night on the longest day of the year so it was bound to be the strange sort of evening when the line blurs between time. I did not go gently into that good night - I took Dylan Thomas's advice, and burned and raved at the dying of the day, and raged against the dying of the light.


The crowd in the street course roared, there was no way to even get in there. I just couldn't look over to that side, there were so many bodies that I had to block that whole side of the park entirely out of my consciousness. Over by the bowls it was an aggression session, I just started going whenever I could. Skaters were snaking each other left and right and dropping in on each other like frenzied bats as the beats pounded through the air. At one point Corinne and I were skating doubles in the bowl and three other skaters dropped in it with us and we were skating a line of five or six. Radness! No one crashed!


The chaos of the scene was overwhelming and it would have had me weeping on one of my more sensitive days, but the facts remained that:


1. Everywhere I turned I saw a familiar face


2. I didn't think I'd even get to skate at all today but the rain let up


3. We were still fucking ripping the bowls in spite of it all


4. Music!


I saw Christina saunter up to the fence with Bijou and Ozzie's leashes in her hands, so I took a break from the havoc to hang out with them for the only moment of calm and peace that I had the entire day.


There was an exponential amount of the usual people to watch the stupid things that I do when I skate, and as I looked down at my legs and hands for the first time I wondered what I looked like when I am skateboarding. I just decided that this was not the time or place to start contemplating that or be neurotic.


I had the rare bonus of having a various assortment of old-school Chicago thrashers give me tips on my kickflip as I practiced in the only two foot square circle of empty cement uninhabited by human bodies. It was a miracle that no one got hurt.


When the music turned off as the sun relented its hold on the day and finally dipped slowly below the horizon, my body felt wrecked like a class of kindergartners had gleefully bounced around on my back and my spine like a trampoline all afternoon, and I still hadn't found any water. I was covered in a thin coating of sweat mixed with dust, my hands were tore up and sticky and I kept walking into clouds of gnats. Gnarly. I hydrated with a popsicle before contemplating just passing out under a tree in a panic. There was still the bike ride home ahead of me though, so I curled up into a ball at Corinne's feet gasping and clutching my skateboard and rolling around and told her that I thought I was dying.


Later when we were sat down for dinner and had settled down, Corinne named her skateboard and proclaimed her undying love as she gazed at her Tony Trujillo high heeled legs Anti Hero deck and ate her french fries.


"His name is Clement, after my first love."


I flipped the deck under my feet to look at Mark Gonzales sweatpants smiling happily nestled in a bed of red flowers, and I saw her point. I marveled at how fond a person could be of an inanimate object. Our skateboards have always loved us back, unconditionally with no Oedipal issues or any skeletons in the closet. Even when I broke my ankle; I would blame the dunk highs that were a half sized too big for me before I would ever blame the Marc Johnson flying V guitar board I was riding (even though I retired it that day). It's more loyal than anything - no one else ever rides my board, and it would never cheat on me with my friend while I went out of town on a business trip. I spent time with it alone, and in front of hundreds of people. Last year we circumnavigated the globe together and hit the streets in five countries I'd never been in before and I believed that its presence kept me safe, as I wandered with it strapped to my back. It responds to everything, and gives back more than everything that I put into it. Devotion.


I realized that I too was in love.




*************************************************************************************




Then today our pictures are in the newspaper, on the cover of the showcase section of the Sun-Times. Oooh, the Sun times. There's an awesome photo of Corinne, and the one of me makes me cringe. Is that what I look like when I skate?


Here's the article:


http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-ftr-skateboard22.html


Last week we were skating and a reporter approached us for a story on girl skaters. He kept asking about getting vibed in the park by boys.


"Only douchebags do that, we just skate," I kept telling him, but he had a strong concept of what he wanted the article to be about.

But at least I finally got some skate pictures after bumming about the fact that I never had any a few weeks ago.


Tomorrow and the next day and the next day there will be new news and photos of different times in other people's lives but for this moment its my strange reality.

The Whole Thing About Living the Double Life...

... is that it requires a hell of alot of inconvenient shoe changes and wardrobe adjustments.

It's Never the Same Place Twice

Life is good right now, but it still boggles my mind how quickly things can change. Just like the sea, deceptively peaceful and harmonious one moment then violent and deadly the next never the same place twice. Its not about avoiding storms but steering through them. People keep telling me that darkness purifies the soul, and I am beginning to not trust any person who has never really suffered through anything in their lives. Until then, how could you take life seriously? How could you otherwise rid yourself of the stupid impulses and compulsions that waste your time and life until you start being serious about living well? It makes me appreciate the things in my life that are the most solid and enduring - like my family with all of their flaws and all our strange traditions and our culture and the house I've lived in for the past eight years more or less (minus short stints living elsewhere having crazy adventures). With all other facts of life transient and fleeting those are the things that will keep you on an even keel, what you come home to.

My legs feel strong, I've been racing them. Skating hard, riding bikes, dancing. My ankles are the same size again and my brain has been springing with endorphins.

Whenever it rains pain shoots up and down my leg. Those aches are so abstract to me now, because as long as I can move my leg I will. There have only been a couple of times in the past couple of months that I've felt crippled by the pain, like when I tried boardslides four days in a row and didn't land most of them. The next day I was reminded of that horror when one block suddenly feels like four because you have to limp down it at less than one mile per hour. Thats when I got back into healing mode and slept a lot and ate food for a few days and just chilled. But otherwise I keep my joint loose by soaking it constantly compulsively stretching it, alternately working it.

Dedicated Skateboarder For Life

Stepped onto my skateboard for the first time in 4 months and 25 days!!! The longest stretch of time off the board in years. Dropped back into the pool after making the sign of the cross and right away I remembered why. I can't help that I was born and raised in Chicago and the only things we have to surf here are concrete waves.

I still got it, and I was more than ready.

A big fuck all ya'll to anyone who ever thought that the broken bone would break me, and stop me from skateboarding again. And a punch in the face to anyone who assumed I would never find the will to get back on the board. I know its not the most ladylike thing to say, but its insulting and unsupportive to be doubted. The only people who said things like that were people who either don't skate at all or have never really skated with me, i.e. people who don't know what they are talking about. Ya'll don't know me and you don't know my style.

And if I fall again and have to get pulled out of another ramp or pool with a broken body, I'll be on the stretcher giving the finger to them and it would still be worth it. I skate for love, for no other reason and I am dedicated when it comes to the things I love.

Plus, I'm insured now bitches!!!!!

Hello from the BVI's

From the Leeward Island chain, Virgin Gorda, the British Virgin Islands:

There goes life being stranger than fiction again.

For the 2nd time in as many years, I've been summoned to a faraway tropical island ostensibly for the purpose of business. Hilarious considering that I've made it my business to avoid all matters of serious business, and have been quite successful in this throughout my life. I wasn't even really looking for a serious job this time, but it found me. What has actually happened is that I have spent a small percentage of my time discussing matters of importance, and the rest exploring the coral reefs and ocean life. It has always seemed to happen at just the right time, and I feel that the ocean calls me.

I'm diving wrecks - and getting sponsored to do so. Around this particular island, there are 200 documented shipwrecks. Its not a very big island either. The pirates of the 1500's used this group of islands to exit the Caribbean and sail out to the Atlantic. Many fierce battles ensued, and the pirate ships were sunk. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island about this area.

Its a very odd twist of fate considering that at this time last month I was freaking out about my leg still being in a cast and wondering when I would ever walk on my feet again. Now I feel whisked away to be in the element where I feel most happy, beneath the ocean water flying through the deep pressure of inner space exploring the colors that wash through the diffusion of the light. Divers call it getting off the rock. My body springs back to life in the water. I traded the fiberglass for fins, much more suited to my well being, and the swimming is way better physical therapy than anything anyone can devise. I've slept on the water and been lulled and comforted by the waves of the sea. Everything has been falling into place as if by some grand orchestration, I've been meeting all kinds of people who have become instrumental in healing me. Life is not just crazy, its ridiculous and mine continues shift surreally between the extremes of absolute beauty and absolute misfortune. As usual.

Got the Cast Off!!

I had my eleven week visit to my orthopedic doctor today, and as I entered the hospital I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross.

"I am sorry God, but if they tell me that they're wrapping my leg up and that I am going to have to be on crutches one more time, I am afraid that I am not going to be able to stop myself from just breaking out of here."

I was inspired by the story that a girl told me at Stephen's house about her friend whose arm got wrapped up, and got so frustrated by the debilitating aspect of being in a cast that he just cut it off himself and just let his broken bone dangle. Fuck it. At least he was free. At this point I was willing to deal with the consequences. This situation was starting to feel unnatural.

The P.A. sliced into the fiberglass shell with a small 1 1/2" circular saw, I could feel the heat of it close to my skin as it barely grazed the gauzy underwrapping of the cast. They pried it apart, and I lifted my leg out and started laughing.

"It looks like it belongs to a mummified leper with anorexia!"

You don't want to know what I mean by that, lets just say that I am due for a long session with the foot scrub and pumice stone. I hobbled over to the x-ray department. The x-ray technicians know me by now, they find me and my story very peculiar, but we're cool - one of them even gave me a ride home last time. I high fived them and posed for my shots.

He came back with bad news.

"It's still broken. It's probably going to be a year before its fully healed up. You broke it bad, girl. This ain't no greenstick fracture, this was a real break. They're probably going to cast you up again, you're fixing to be off your feet for a while still. But you didn't hear it from me. I'm not the doctor."

That was the last thing I wanted to hear, and I grabbed the x-rays and moped back to the orthopedic office, fighting back the tears. I drew the images of my bones in my sketchbook as I waited for the doctor, and eyed the door as I hatched my escape plan.

Finally my doctor came around, and picked up my x-rays. He looked at them for just an instant, looked at my chart, and felt up my ankle.

"You've been off your feet for eleven weeks now, I think we can start you walking now."

"Shut up!"

"No, seriously."

"But my bone is still broken in the x-ray."

He launched into an explanation of why that was, bones heal slowly, it takes time, blah blah blah; while I adjusted to the idea that he was really giving me the go ahead to walk without a cast. The P.A. strapped an aircast around my ankle.

"Go ahead, stand up!"

I felt like the Little Mermaid and held onto the doctors hand as I placed my foot with wobbly assurance onto the ground, and on the way out of the hospital I made the sign of the cross again; this time I prayed with much more humility.

* * *

During the darkest moments of being off my feet, I consoled myself by remembering better times. Nine months ago I was on the other side of the world on a tropical island spending weeks exploring and studying the mysterious vibrant coral reef, swimming in the color and life of the ocean, alone except for the cute guys from all over the world. I fell into that experience just as I fell into this one - headlong fully unexpectedly and by chance.

Through my sadness, I told myself the same thing that I remember telling myself the day I scuba dived with the whale sharks: this moment is going to pass, and you'd better experience it fully now because it isn't going to last, and it will never come back. Nothing lasts, everything will definitely change. It is the only physical fact.

I wish that I could say that I handled this experience with grace and dignity, but that would be a total lie.

Last month I found myself bubbling over with frustration over the restrictions my injury imposed on me. Skateboarding is the only thing that I can do in the middle of a shitty day that will neutralize my anxiety; if I am pissed off and I go and skate, chances are that when I return I will be totally stoked out, or at least I'll have been able to brush off what it was that bothered me. If I can't go out and skate, then I'll go out and dance.

As I hobbled around feeling like a robot, with the prosthetic freakishness of my crutches and hard cast, my reality spiraled into a bleak and desolate dream.

I remember a string of days of waking up to the hard repressiveness of that fiberglass prison and closing my eyes wishing I could go back to sleep for a thousand years. I slipped down the stairs and busted my lip when I stubbornly tried to do my laundry by myself, resulting in the corner store guys gently urging me to "take it easy" when I hobbled in for some vitamin d milk.

My boyfriend broke up with me the week before Valentines day, just a few days after I had quit smoking cigarettes for the first time in ten years. I think you have to be a girl to see the horror in that. I couldn't drink coffee or ingest any refined sugar, and drinking alcohol was out too - all that stuff is bone robbers. Everything that I loved and was all about was suddenly on the other side of life. All I could do was lie back and contemplate it all, it felt so unbearable. Then later that week I went to the doctor and found out that my fracture was complicated because of the way that it broke, and that I wasn't going to be healing up as fast as I had hoped and be off my feet indefinitely. It was absolutely sadistic fortune, and it was then that I learned the meaning of the word despair. I also gained insight into such lovely terms as 'nihilism' and 'existential angst' - they were no longer just academic concepts, that shit made sense in a terrible way that it never had before. One interesting thing that I learned about myself was that while I could bear the physical pain of my broken bone with no problem and no painkillers, the emotional effects felt overwhelming and those were the times that I wanted an anesthetic for my heart.

When a few beats had passed, all of the bogus things that went down started to seem ridiculous. Like there was no way that life could get any more absurd or preposterous if you tried to engineer it that way. It dawned on me that shit was so bad, it was funny. There is a fine line between tragedy and comedy in the human experience, which is why the masks of drama are laughing and crying. And it is very characteristic of my life to have things shift in such an extreme, for events to unfold in a fantastically exaggerated way. I couldn't really laugh about it until today, because until now its just been too personal, but I could see the humor in the whole situation.
On the brighter side of things, I finally quit smoking after being a dedicated tobacco enthusiast for half my life. I never even wanted to quit smoking before, but now that I feel the difference I am so glad that I did. I weaned myself of my vices, switched to green tea, ate fruit instead of candy, took vitamins and hydrated like a motherfucker. Almost every vice: chocolate and herbs have healing properties so I figured I owed it to myself to continue to enjoy those, but after Ash Wednesday it was in moderation.

Things changed when I realized that the only thing that I had any control over in this situation was my attitude. It took being around a few good people who set a shining example for me of the difference between being a nurturing force for health and life as opposed to one of negativity and destruction. The one conclusion that I've come to at the end of the experience, on this day that they cut off that freaking cast - its going to sound really dopey to you if you have never been hurt, but fuck it one day you'll understand - but its this: what it all comes down to is that its really just all about love.

Love heals everything. Even if you have to generate it yourself and you feel like you don't have any reserves. I am not a hippie, and I am more sober minded than I have been in years and I'll still say it. I don't care how trite that is. Love is the only thing that can heal you and until I die I hope to always be a force of love.

Crrraaacck Went My Bone

Last August I turned 26, and with a straight face determined that this would truly be the year that I would pack away all the youthful frivolousness and whimsy that I have celebrated in my life since I was way too young, tone it down and take off on a new threshold of maturity. I went out and bought a new suit and high heels to acknowlege how serious I was about growing up, and then proceeded to charge like a hothead through a series of very adult situations. 

So its kind of odd that five months later, I find myself adapting to a new routine of drinking milk, napping with my foot propped on a teddy bear, crawling on my knees up the stairs and crushing on a comicbook superhero. I mean, there were times that I thought I was regressing into childishness before, but it now appears that I've devolved all the way back to the crib, living the lifestyle of a little baby.

The bad omens

The day after the New Year, I went out to the skatepark with the grlz to skate off our weekend hangovers and start the year right. We braided our hair and danced in our seats all the way down there. It was a progressively rowdy car ride. At one moment I found myself simmering down and laying back staring up at the sky, watching the rhythm of the passing electrical poles. I noted the assembly of small black sparrows perched on the electric lines, there was like four miles of uninterrupted bird sitting alongside the road perched wing to wing. As we sped further forward, the birds started to flock in bigger groups, clustering in from smaller groups coming from different directions.

We turned the music off and marvelled. After a couple of miles they were flying in massive clouds of black and looked like liquid shapes that shifted directions, funneled twisted and spun. The bird formation was at times hundreds of meters wide, groups would break off and come back, flying faster and faster. They surrounded our car, got close, flew straight to the windshield and spun away, came back and swirled around us. We were getting closer to the skatepark and the black birdcloud was still escorting us.

We were just a few blocks away from the skatepark and I was still staring transfixed out the window. My rapture was broken with a jolt when my eyes landed on the sign for the ambulance company that screamed *emergency!* and was situated unfortunately just a few blocks away from the skatepark. I sat up and shook myself back to reality and hoped I might never have to be in one of those.

We entered the skatepark, our usual spectacle of disorderly femininity and immediately aroused the ire of the girl at the front desk, wearing head to toe skate gear and the mug of a gargoyle. "She must not skate at all," we collectively thought at the same time as she glared at us with beady eyes, and possessively placed her hand on Bob, the guy at the desk. She smooched him, while staring at us with a peripheral sideways glance. We shifted uncomfortably. "Nice shoes!" I said. She ignored me. A girl skater would have been excited to see us, at least as excited as her boyfriend was. My cousin rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue in her cheek lewdly. We signed in and bought our way into the new girls skate free! Tuesday club that Bob agreed to start there on the spot.

Yippeekiyay

We warmed up in the pool and loosened our muscles. It was slippery with waxy masonite and required a lighter gentler touch than concrete. It took a while to grow accustomed to the feeling of the pool, but I was getting stoked out more by the minute. It had been such a long time! I had a few tentative runs and realized that this bowl was small enough for me to get up to the lip consistently and had enough compact curves to speed me around endless lines. I worked my way up from just hitting the back truck for a 5-0 and then I finally found a place where I can stick a long 50-50. I've been wanting to do that. I started experimenting and seeing if I could get my front wheels over the lip and try a feeble grind. Yeehaw! Almost! I took a break and called my boyfriend to brag that I was skating and he wasn't. That bowl was fun.

Hours past and we were skating hard, we moved to the street course and did some wall rides. I made some miserable attempts on the manual pad and got super frustrated with my stabs at landing my flip, which I have sometimes then lose. So I snuck back to the pool and did some runs, my heart was beating hard now and I was having so much fun, I was almost delerious.

Here's when it happened

A girl came up to the platform and started talking to me, Corinne and Cheryl. We high fived her and just started chatting while we took turns skating. She asked me how to drop back into the pool from a 50-50 and I couldn't explain it. "Uh, you just twist and drop? Do you know what I'm talking about? Here, let me show you."

I waited for the last skater to leave the pool and balanced my trucks onto the lip. Something felt wrong from the moment I stepped on the board, but I just did what Mariah does and I shook it off. Something felt wrong as I pivoted on the back truck, but I pushed down with the front anyway because I was explaing something to someone. Something felt wrong as I was sliding down, but I figured it might be salvageable...

As my back wheel hung up on the lip, I dropped forward five feet to the ground, where at some point along the way the edge of my shoe by my pinky toe caught the ground as my leg and my body twisted the exact opposite direction, crushed on top of it. I heard a snap, inhaled, said "FUCK!", and knew that whatever happened it was serious. My foot had bent beckwards, the wrong way. It hurt so bad I couldn't hide it, or get up; the two things I normally do immediately when I fall. My leg spasmed and shook and inwardly I screamed, and as I got onto my elbows to look up, I saw three helmeted rollerbladers and two bikers gaping at me. I thought for a moment they heard my silent scream, before I realized that they were just shocked because they saw it all. I summoned my best glare and shot them with it, then looked for my friends. They mobilized into action, Cheryl took off my shoe as I tried not to cry and I hopped out of the pool with my arms on their shoulders. I realized that for the first time in my life I had to be carried out of the bowl. 

I'd never sprained my ankle before or broken any bones. I've donated blood to the concrete, and lost a lot of skin, but my skeletal frame has always been intact. The only other time I had ever been injured somewhat seriously was the time that I got a concussion from skating in the rain like an idiot at Wilson, and me and Whitey crashed into each other head on - our skulls hit the ground and I was seeing stars. That was painful more for how stupid it was than actual nervous system trauma.

"I never thought I get broke off in a pool this small!" I said as they got me onto the bench and ran for ice.

"That's happened to me before. You're talking to a professional ankle roller. We just have to get ice right away," Corinne said.

I'd never sprained my ankle before so I didn't know how that was supposed to feel, and looked dubiously at my foot, which now dangled at freakish angle. "Do you think its sprained?" I asked.

"Yeah. The same thing happened to me before. You should get an aircast. In two weeks you'll be fine."

"Two weeks? I can't waste two weeks of my life hobbling around! I have all kinds of shit to do!"

"Well maybe you could get back on it in a week and a half."

"That sounds better."

Bob the guy at the front desk came over. "Its probably a sprain", he decided and I was relieved that that was what they though it was. A different girl was with him, rubbing his ass.

"You think its a sprain? Does that girl want to kick our asses now too?" I asked my cousin. "I hope its a sprain."

"Hey," she said, "do not ask me. I am not a doctor."

"Yeah. It has to be a sprain."

But there was no way that I was going to take a single step on the foot, and when Cheryl asked if I could walk to the car I refused. I knew I couldn't.

I looked around in a panic as the cold blood from the ice seemed to trickle through my body. Everyone here was like thirteen years old! I needed help! Then I spotted Brian C. walking up the stairs, he just got there and was tying his shoes. He was a family guy and the father of several small children and I trusted him as a responsible adult and recalled the time that he broke his wrist at Wilson. I was so glad to see him.

"Brian Carly! Could you please please please carry me out to the car? I weigh around a hundred pounds! I don't want to try to make it down the stairs!!!"

He saw the ice pack and winced. He picked me up and carried me as I tried to remain calm and make small talk. "So, how's your wrist?" I asked. "Oh my wrist, that was so long ago. Its fine. Don't worry, it's probably just a sprain. This happens to me all the time," he said. We talked about pain and sprains and I hugged him before we sped off.

Bloody aftermath

A few days later, my foot had swollen to about the size of a small loaf of bread. I wrapped it and had been taking ibuprofen, which didn't help at all. I had tried very hard to remain calm, but the pain was so intense and there seemed to be no end to the swelling. I started to worry that it might explode, because it felt that thats what it wanted to do. My brother the medic examined at my foot and felt a weak pulse in it, which was a good indication that it wasn't badly broken. He diagnosed a type III sprain, or a fracture. Fuck. I was still going with the sprain. 

Dave D. had come over to visit and brought over some crutches. "I'm out of here!" I proclaimed as I bounced out of bed to stand on my leg. I felt something shift just under my knee from my ankle movement and got the chills. I continued to bury that thought, then proceeded to crutch around town.

I was lying propped up with ice tucked all around my ankle, which was throbbing and still swelling. I looked at it in horror and felt my blood grow colder. My emotions were bottoming out and I don't actually remember much of that evening at all, but was told later on that I was cranky beyond belief, picked several fights and insulted my boyfriend's art. I am still ashamed of it. It was the pain! All I can truly recall was the feverish sweating and the deepest agony in my bones, drifting in and out of dreams that started with the sound of that *SNAP* that I heard when my ankle twisted and evolved into a gallery of terror and dread. In one of my dreams, I was a galloping black horse and I heard a sharp crack, then collapsed in a pool of cold icy blood as I was shot in the leg. In another, I was a person in midstride hearing battle cries, then cut down fallen to my knees when an axe swung fast at my ankle and it crunched, in a red and orange swirl of heat. I woke up sobbing, at which point J. picked me up and carried me into a cab headed for the emergency room.

A couple of vicodins later things were still unreal, but at least my nerves were calm. My temperature was a few degrees colder than normal. I looked at the x-rays of my foot with the radiologist, who pointed out the place on my fibula where the bone had broken cleanly. The prognosis was 6-8 weeks with perhaps a surgery to repair the broken tendons by the small bones in my foot. "So it was broken!" I said with wonder. Denial is strangely comfortable, but coming to the bottom of things is way more satisfying. No wonder why I couldn't walk on it, duh. The emergency room doctor came around with strips of plaster to splint my leg and told me to roll over on my stomach.

"You want some more painkillers? I can get you some."

"No thanks. I think I'm going to puke from the ones I already took."

"You know, this splint is going to be pretty big when I finish setting it. Do you want a, uh, hospital gown? Because otherwise you might have to cut your pants off with some scissors when you get home." 

"There is no way I am going to traipse around here in a hospital gown," I said, eyeballing the gangbanger moaning in the bed across the hall with his chest wrapped up around his stab wounds, and the old man lurched up next to him gaping across the way. "I would rather die, and I will sacrifice my pants not to have to do that. Could you just fix my foot and make sure to set it straight, please?"

The events proceeded with an awkward silence until I could finally get up and hobble away. I felt like Sophocle's punchline to the Oracle of the Sphinx's riddle to Oedipus, the "What walks on four feet than two feet than three feet?" I've healed fast from every injury I've ever had, and look at this as a good opportunity to make my ankles more solid, and stronger. I come from the sort of people who maniacally think that abusing the fine lines between life and death is loads of great fun and the only way to live, and that painful situations are useful as ninja training. I'm using all the hopping around that I'm doing on the good leg to build up strength so I can nollie on it and the balance to help do better nose manuals.