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.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
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.
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.
Monday, June 5, 2006
The Whole Thing About Living the Double Life...
... is that it requires a hell of alot of inconvenient shoe changes and wardrobe adjustments.
Thursday, June 1, 2006
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.
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.
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