Influences: skateboarding

It is fun to develop obsessions, fascinations.  By that I mean interests that can be described as “nutritive”, that absorb attention and make your life better.  And at the age of 43, skateboarding has become one of a few such nutritive obsessions. It is because of the anarchic nature of at least the way the videos are filmed and the attitudes of the skater’s - I really liked to hear skateboarding described as the demimonde of outsiders.  I am struggling to deal with my status - do I embrace my inner outsider or do I hide it, repress it in some way?  Up to now it has been the latter especially since I started at the cemetery. In an easily approachable sense my job is outre with the routine placing of human corpses or ashes in the ground or in columbarium wall niches.  My wife feels it is neat and I do too - it makes me comfortable in a place in society that is necessary and in some ways (intentionally?) overlooked, shuttling bodies off to these repositories, a social need for the post-death respect that we hope we all may merit. 

So I’m in what is an outsider profession - is that right?  What of my colleagues at the cemetery? I would say they definitely are unique and wild in their own outsider-like ways.  I will leave it up to them if they would actually regard themselves as outsiders. Dudes down to have a good time and keep things “ladish” on the job.  And that is an aspect of the lives that skateboarding videos capture - a community with smiles on their faces, allies in something outside of the mainstream - yet a society at peace with itself.  I accept that mirror to my own life and I accept that in my private life this vibe is modified yet still resonant - off work I am a different person yet still one who revels in being different. 

I’m sure skateboarding has attracted many, many paeans, odes, etc.  And I seek to add to that because, when you are moved by something - especially unexpectedly moved - you want to understand it.  And just as with graffiti - that fellow traveller of skateboarding - it only counts when it is seen. So I might publish this - always a debate about what to share. 

I feel the pull of sport and consider myself to be an amatuer athlete.  Whatever psychological needs are satisfied by my athletic endeavors I get similar, sympathetic satisfaction through watching sport.  American football, basketball, baseball. Even tennis, hockey and rugby I have spent time in front of the tube watching. But no sport have I watched more of than world football/soccer.  I’ve played a bit of footy - one of the main reasons I like soccer, along with for me, its innate watchability, is that I look like the guys playing - they are runners. Yes, they perform a string of near-miraculous touches and passes in a match but this comes on a foundation of mobility with the more speed the better. 

Skateboarding’s recent appeal must be similar, that I see myself as close to the prototypical skater.  And I’ve skated a bit too so, as with soccer, I have a sense of the difficulty involved and thus how hard it is for a football forward to score a goal or a skater lands a difficult trick - both are movement-based and both rely on fancy footwork.  Bodies in soccer, skateboarding, running must conform to demands of speed and balance: a certain grace is attained, success relying on this grace. In running this is seen in the runner’s gait, how they move and how they meter their effort over distance.  In soccer this is seen in the timing of runs and the player’s deftness in bringing the ball under control. In skateboarding this grace is seen in the body positioning, how the arms provide balance as the skater ollies up to a rail and then complete some complicated board-flipping trick when they dismount. 

It has been slightly jarring to come back to skateboarding after a couple of decades and hear the skaters describe what they do as “tricks” - sympathetic with my interest in magic, I suppose.  A series of tricks to unlock a goal, a recorded video segment that lands a skater sponsorships, the rolling and clacketing of skatewheels an incantation. If magic is intended to change the world in accordance with one’s will then what is skateboarding?  Whether a busy city streetscape or a graffitied swimming pool in some atrophied suburbia, skateboarding is a melding of a person with an environment - skateboarding is a re-interpretation of the built environment, an altering of the landscape to suit one’s will. 

When I see a skater do some trick that utilizes an odd, slopey bit of infrastructure I marvel at how a bit of canal or sidewalk or whatever it may be takes on a new meaning, a meaning different than the people that designed it and built it intended.  Handrails are now urban downhills. Stairs become chutes seemingly purpose-built for providing a corridor to sail through. Unseen back alleys with loading docks and concrete poured to suit commercial needs are now gathering sites where the skateboard crowd meet to share acts of bravado and serve each other as surrogate families in lieu of perhaps problematic or non-existent real families.  The demimonde of the outsider, the outsiders who re-create the world in their image. 

  

Old or new, normality is our home

What is happening to the average American?  What about the exceptional American?  What about me?  What is happening to all of us with what is going on now?  Changes to the waist lines of all those successfully sequestered.  Americans staring at their hoardings, their hoarding staring back and saying “Eat me!”  I’ve seen an increase in people outside recreating which i assume means these are people whose jobs allow for working from home - professionals who I see riding their bikes on Hill Road.  And what of those that have been laid off - are they also self-quarantining only waiting for the arrival of unemployment checks, their subscriptions to various streaming services about to run out - and the free previews of all the services that “stepped-up” to give these people something to do.  But weighing on their minds at some level they must be wondering when the freebies will be revoked. What then?  Where is the money going to come from? The other side of the paywall.

I’m glad to get out as much as I have.  One thing I take note of is a hope that the US will return to normal.  I say this because of my desire for stability for my family and I ask my ancestors to help protect us … and to make us stronger.  I want to go out and eat with my family when we feel like it.  I want to take my kid to new bike parks.  I want to buy beer from Jackson’s without feeling like I’m imposing on the clerk’s health.

We will return to normality - normality is our happy place.  It may be a different normal or a new normal but it will be our ever-present home room soon enough.  What will change? It is being studied right now.  A social science experiment is being conducted on a mass scale.  As we seek to return to a semblance of the old normal, pundits are already asking what that will look like.  And linked to that “what” is a “when” - if our attitudes of proper social intercourse are being altered then when will it be deemed satisfactory to sit in an office, venture out to restaurants, or attend sporting events?

When will we be ready to pollute more?  This is a topic being studied and commented on right now, roads populated by essential commuters - if the old normal traffic can be allowed again it will surely return.  If people can live less simply in order to satisfy manufactured needs they will and though pollution and consumption are kind of looked at as negatives they really symbolize success - in our society - and will absolutely be abided.

The ruling, what, cabal?, are still ruling.  I say (and don’t just about all of us?) I want a return to (the old) normal, that place of stability, that place of the known and somewhat predictable.  And this desire does also accept some negatives associated with the way “business was done” in pre-pandemic days.  Not just things like pollution and materialism but other things that more completely exemplify the social structure, that are sadly more essential features of the system.  And their essentiality/essentialness is marked by a commensurate level of opaqueness, hiddenness, things partially visible but mostly existing in the shadows, the American Shadow in a Jungian sense.  I.e. the air we breathe.

These are the meaner parts of our civilization, the parts that are discussed in broad philosophical-religious-psychological terms yet manifest in very real ways.  Progress becomes pollution and free competition becomes gross materialism.  And this “becoming” has now “become”.  Progress is pollution, making money is a desire to wastefully spend.  I remember the Kyoto Protocol, in the 1990’s, how the US would not be subject to measures to protect the environment because it “would seriously harm the economy of the United States”.  Two decades since then and during those intervening years the knowledge of damage to the environment has increased while the US as a money maker (in different proportions) for all classes has flourished.

We know but we still do it.  We deny facing this contradiction and place it in the bag of shadows.  We then lose the ability to talk about these issues and cannot find the words.  But perhaps not finding the words is actually a skill.  Perhaps it is a good thing.  We block out the things that challenge us and settle into our “normal”.  Which is feeding the shadow.  This is the structure of the world.  This is the social structure. Our system of government.  Our system of finance.  Our system of acceptable mores and conventions.  Our fallible human natures cast upon the American landmass.

The dancers in the wings

The dancers in the wings

“We are in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic right now.  Three billion people are on lockdown so hopefully we understand there is some bigger issues involved now” - Dan Carlin

The big topic is the big topic.  How much government influence should there be? Like prising apart an atom or like trying to look at the back of your own head.

To my mind some sort of sea change is necessary and I’m being uber-utopian here.  The current shit going on would require a shift in the public, private, corporate segments of society - all of society.  The shit we are in dependent on mutual cooperation, a confederacy of dunces. New, sea change-inducing mechanisms may be put in place.  New ways of doing things that would symbolize and make real new attitudes that would seek to make a more stable world. At the government level, say, a pledge would be made to be a True Public Servant, to dutifully uphold the Public Good.

And “the public good” would be different, the current covetous spirit exorcised - and now may as well say it - my values would be the ones by which most lived by - less cars, more travel, no giant Winnebagos - and damn, maybe hard work would somehow be de-incentivized and the whole thing collapse.  Whatever. I will be the solitary philosopher king.

The meanness that lets the average American support policies of genocide reverberates through our American life.  Meanness with its best friend and travel partner Stupidity.  I’m for a more engaged and informed populace. Less bad television, more history books, diminished valorization of the automobile and an increase in muscle-powered pursuits, running, hiking, biking and rowing.  The mountains being so popular that climbing reservations years out would be made - smartly peopled nature a good thing. More smart engagement, less stupid meanness.

And too a vow in corporations to care aoub the society at large that this business wants to go about acting in a corporeal way within.

Alas, I feel the current shit isa  manifestation of the trained inability of masses of people to actively self reflect and make changes.  This obviously goes beyond seeking change through current political channels yet in the mass-mind the dance between Republican and Democrat is the only dance capable of being perceived.  Change must come from without and that means coming from the world of the unseen. Republicans and Democrats dance in the spotlight as though the spotlight was more a projector generating reality.  Change exists in the shadows among the other dancers in the wings. Occluded from the current reality tunnel.

The current shit has already had a narrative placed on it, those that have a little more intelligence (i.e. those that are in positions of power and have money) seeing what may extend the status quo/their existence.  The rich and powerful are suffering at a level they deem acceptable - not to villainize this class really, just noticing the vibe right now. We don’t blame that class, instead we blame the government.

The plebeian counterpart to that pledge of the politicians are mass movements, people taking to the streets, people deciding what the parameters of allowable obedience-disobedience are, voting with the public presence of their bodies.  And, interestingly, currently as we are in the shit of this virus the main response is to ban gatherings of more that ten people and urging people to just outright stay inside. Not deliberate, maybe more an artifact of actual real treatment fo the Covid-19 pandemic: it's not like some critical mass was about to be achieved.  Current (pre-pandemic) public policy concerns weren’t near to even getting close to the threshold of what would make Americans take to the streets.