Lame can carry the day; at least midweek.
There’s a set of parking lots that are kind of on the way home. We used to live really close by, and I skated them all the time. An upper parking lot connected by a downhill drive to a wide open sloping lot below. At some point, it became a bust- which is sort of funny, I suppose. There was nothing special about the spot and I certainly was not maximizing all the features. In short- what I’ve always done there, is lame. But it carries just enough speed to dig deep turns all the way down. The wide open aspect of the lower lot feels a lot like snowboarding; a flowing speed with lots of room to think. And maybe room to think is what it’s all about.
Lately, I’ve incorporated one and done. Almost more of an exercise than a session. Way more akin to a sketch than the final piece. There’s something conceptual about it. It is so brief, that it feels more like an idea. The entire premise, is that the work day is long and usually has an unhealthy amount of focus and decision making. And afterwards, there is an impetus to keep moving, drive home and get ready for the next work day before the sun comes crashing back around the sphere. This is where the one and done comes in; a highly regarded punctuation. Skate down through the run, lay out the turns without thinking too far ahead, and hop back in the truck at the bottom. Don’t walk back up for another. Be the soft flutter of a passing bird’s wings, a ghost.
To say that a tiny nugget of flow time is cleansing totally sounds cliche, and maybe even privileged. But flow time can be anything. And it’ll probably change over time. It can be watering your favorite plant. Taking one photo a day of the same location to see a pattern over time. Strumming fifty five power chords with your Marshall stack at eleven. Even dreaming of an idyllic place free of the confusion of mankind while sitting on the toilet. What is important is that your chosen activity is a predetermined waypoint at which you stop and retune your strings. A choice to which you are committed that releases you out of the back eddy and into the stream.
I am an aging skater and snowboarder. My mission these days in these regards is to always be thinking about ways to age gracefully while still enjoying these activities. I’ve done them for so long, they make up part of who I am. Part of my identity is woven into that mix. I suppose to the layman, this sounds ridiculous. The skateboard is so obviously the realm of unbreakable teens. It’s a wooden toy with rubber wheels. But fuck how others see this. The same assholes who see it this way, see it from the morass of their sedentary ways.
I am trained as an artist. My mind has become accustomed to seeing the world in shapes, gaining pleasure from making a simple mark on paper. Photography and music found their way into the mix a long time ago as well. I see no definitive difference between rolling my skateboard down a sidewalk, pumping up on banked driveways and reaching for a blank expanse with a mark making tool. Each is set of aesthetic choices, akin to the way a dancer occupies a space with their body. If our life is a river, then each tributary coming in to the main stream flow are our pursuits. To the person that inhabits this river, they are all part and parcel- and when I stopped seeing the difference between all my pursuits, it was a freeing moment.
I slap the board down and give it five hard pushes. It gives me enough momentum to carve out several turns, each one a cosine through a painted parking spot. I know the security guard’s eyes are upon me. To him, am I just passing through, or am I here to slide handrails? Am I a commuter or a potential desecrator of private property? And if we look at the arcing curves that a skateboarder can lay out upon the asphalt, we might as well also look at the board as an erasure - wiping away the thinking and overthinking that the work day has inspired. As I flow into the downhill section between the lots, the increase in speed is very much like the slow meniscus of water at the top of a waterfall before the consolidation of movement. My speed carries me through the lower lot, and out onto the sidewalk. The wide expanse of pavement gives way to the percussive ‘gedunk gedunk gedunk gedunk of my wheels rolling over the expansion joints and the essential line weights to the freehand scribbles that define the easy rule: one and done.