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!!!!!
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Thursday, April 20, 2006
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.
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
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.
"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.
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