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.