The Persistence of PVC

What is left of my collection of action figures is mostly stashed away in boxes in the basement. A couple of years ago I went on an Ebay selling spree and drastically reduced my holdings, but I kept my prized pieces, like Cobra Commander, and the lovely, red-headed intelligence agent, Scarlet. Then Revenge of the Sith came out, and I just had to get some of the new toys (you can read about it all in the Milk Archives). I've been careful to collect only the toys that really seem worth the investment (they're expensive!) but yesterday at Wal Mart I bought a figure even though I didn't really want it, just to get that "new toy" feeling.


No ants were harmed in the making of this photo.

Part of the appeal of my toys is that they bring back happy memories of childhood, of playing in the garden or basement and creating my own miniature world of fantasy and adventure, of transforming the couch or the flower garden into a volcano or tropical jungle, and just generally having a good time. Another part of the appeal of these toys is that they have aesthetical design elements that are pleasurable to behold in their own right.

But I've also long suspected that my toys could be something of an entanglement or distraction--at least when they start receiving too much of my attention and creative energies. For instance, there are the dreams--likely common to compulsive collectors in general--of stumbling into an enchanted grotto, garage sale or discount store, finding an untold wealth of rare and exotic, endlessly fascinating, toys, and wanting to take home more and more and more of them. I've had many variations of this dream over the years.

Last night I dreampt the following:

I am in a room that looks much like my childhood bedroom. There are a couple of boxes stacked on the counter, full of my toys, and a colony of ants has made a nest in them. There is a hole in the top of the top box, and the ants are carrying my G.I.Joe figures (just the bad guys) in and out of the nest in a strange and amusing kind of pantomime. The insects go through a certain routine several times, bringing the different action figures into their nest in certain combinations, and I am trying to discern some sort of meaning in the pattern. Then I pick up one of the toys to find it is covered in a thin, sticky film. I find this even more startling and amusing than the dance, and I go to show my friend. He looks concerned, and says, "It looks like you've got an infestation of Prairie Ants." We go together into the room and jostle the boxes, which causes the ants to swarm out of their nest. There is now a cloud of them flying around and my friend and I are scurrying to get out of the room, but the door has closed.

How fascinating, Mr. Flatlander. Now tell me about your father.

Godly Obedience

I took my housemate's kid out for a stroll to the downtown mall today, and the place was simply flooded with people of many different races, all dressed up nicely in suits and dresses, and wearing name tags that said "Godly Obedience" at the top of them. I myself was feeling underdressed in my swim shorts, t-shirt and sandels, and our baby stroller is so dirty it looks as though it could have been through the infamous Children's Crusade of 1212, but it was nice to see so many good-looking people in the middle of a downtown population best characterized by a general lack of regard for things sartorial.

I wasn't shopping for anything, just taking a leisurely walk through the air-conditioned mall with my housemate's child who still doesn't talk because of his autism. So I got to thinking about just what the term Godly Obedience could mean. Since Godly is used as an adjective, it could mean "God-like Obedience", or that obedience was making these people more like gods. But then I remembered the Garden of Eden story, and how Yahweh kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden specifically because he wanted to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life and becoming like unto gods. So I ruled out that interpretation.

Everybody knows what obedience means; it means the ability to follow rules or orders. Dogs are famous for obedience, and soldiers are trained to be obedient, and cats are generally know for their disinclination to obey anything beyond their own whimsy. The etymological roots of the word come from Latin "ob audre", to hear or listen. So obedience has to do with listening.

After ruling out the possibility that these people were becoming God-like through obedience, I could only assume that the catch phrase was celebrating one of the attributes of God Himself. What their name tags were saying was, "God has perfect obedience, and that's cool".

But then, if God is the Supreme Being, to what could He possibly be obedient? To Himself, that's who. Godly obedience means that God is listening to, and obeying Himself, and I was happy to see so many well dressed people all gathered together to celebrate this theological principle. To extrapolate some, I guess this also means that cats are more Godlike than dogs, since the felines have perfected the art of listening to themselves, and they don't care what anyone thinks about it.

As to the question of whether dogs have Buddha nature, the answer is

Skateboarders Jumping the Shark?

Thank you to Michael of Spilt Wine for pointing out that sometime tomorrow, professional skateboarder Danny Way is going to attempt to jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard. You can check the ramp plan and details for yourself by clicking crazyman rolling.

Skateboarding, like the great mother ocean that our surfing brethren love so much, comes and goes in waves. In the forty-odd years since skateboarding's origins, it has gone in and out of style at least four or five times, and I'm wondering if Danny's attempt to clear the wall could be another high water mark, signifying a coming plunge into obscurity for the sport.

I suppose it will partly depend on whether Danny pulls off the stunt or not. Here's hoping that he does. But even given a successful run, the attempt has something of an air of desperation about it. Perhaps for skating to survive, the industry will have to ease up on the "extreme sport" image they have been pushing for the last decade, and return to the fun, wholesome, rollin' down the street and hopping curbs image that attended the sport's inception.

How about a "Top of the Great Wall Flatland Skateboarding Tour"?

Bleeding Gums Jello Treats

If you like sugar as much as I do, then you'll love these tasty summer Jello treats. I used Strawberry Jello (real and artificial flavouring), but any reddish variety, such as cherry, will do (for the "bleeding" effect).

Despite actually being a vegetable, and consisting of 92% H2O, watermelons were ranked the second most healthy fruit by a recent study (the most healthy was Guava[!]). Chop up some of that luscious pink pulp (kinda looks like gums, don't it?) and fill your glass receptacles about half full of the veggiefruit.

Fill the glasses up with the Jello, leaving a little space at the top for the miniature marshmallow "teeth".

Let chill for a suitable length of time and--Presto! You've got yourself a refreshingly cool batch of Bleeding Gum Jello Treats. Don't forget to brush afterwards. You also might want to include a strand of (peppermint) dental floss at the bottom of each cup--as a friendly reminder to floss. Enjoy!

Dream Catcher

I dreampt I found a baseball glove lying in the middle of an empty room.

It's strange, because I don't really follow baseball, and I've seldom ever played the game. In public school I was chewed-out by a gym teacher for throwing the bat after hitting a ball. I wasn't angry, just excited that I had finally made a hit. So I didn't get to run to base, and I think that the incident discouraged me (in the same way that farting in the middle of my first Judo class made me too embarrassed to ever go back).

It was so satisfying to have that big leather glove on my hand.

A Pound of Fruit

photo by Bunda

Fresh raspberries from the garden:
Impossible soft red garment of life

First Home

"I was born here and I'll die here
--against my will." -Bob Dylan

When we first moved into this house it was a real dump. My prognosis was to tear it down and start over from scratch, but my housemate had a vision. Two years later it is almost complete. We had to rebuild a foundation wall, tear out rotting floor joists, remove aluminum wiring, old insulation, and hundreds of those antique square-top nails. The house was built in 1889, and there is a whole history of renovations visible in the basement. The floors slope and shake when the trains pass, and there was a precariously poised unused chimney in the attic--a kind of appendix to a long gone hearth--that we had to remove piece by piece.

At one point, lake Ontario would have been very close to our back yard; now it is half a kilometre away, with artificial extensions made to the shoreline to accommodate the factories and piers. The north end itself was once a satellite harbour town to the main city, and there were wild parties, bootleg liquor runners (smuggling hooch into the States across the lake) and gangsters using the bay as their personal clandestine morgue. Something of that energy remains and gives this part of town its particular feeling of being a place to lay low, to hide out, and a solidarity that is both generous and wary of strangers.

We moved in at the beginning of winter, 2002. The house had been empty for several months, and it had a haunted kind of feel--even after we ripped out the moldy carpets, cleaned the child's crayon of the walls, and replaced a flimsy bathroom door that someone at some point had attempted to kick in. Half of the house was uninsulated, and we spent a cold, drafty first winter huddled in the kitchen (where a tree was in the process of growing through the wall), drinking tea and trying to keep warm when we weren't in the basement buttressing the crumbling foundations.


I found some photos. Note the strange bedroom shower installaion we removed from the corner.


The following summer, my housemate's seventy year old mother came from Poland to visit and help out with things. She was just recovering from treatment for cancer of the eye, but this didn't stop her from digging a long trench for a wall that needed to be built under the kitchen, carrying the earth up out of the basement, bucket by bucket. She was also up laying shingle when the new roof was being done, and won the admiration of our neighbours, who were so impressed by the old woman's fortitude that they came over, unasked, and helped with the clean-up. My housemate's mother doesn't speak much English, but she transmits a spirit of warmth and openness that transcends any language barriers.

It was at this point that the neighbourhood started accepting my housemate. For me it took a little longer. It's only really been this summer that I've started to get to know the people who live around us, but I'm truly happy that I have. The whole place has come to flower for me this year, and I no longer feel like a stranger. I remember seeing the area for the first time, during a particularly cold spell in November or December, 2002. I had come to Steeltown on my own, without my housemate, to try to install some temporary heaters and prevent the pipes bursting from the cold. The gas furnace was in the process of being replaced, and I was unsuccessful in even finding the proper valve to turn off the water supply to the house. I found an icy pay phone out front a corner store and called my housemate to tell her of my failed mission. In the grey light of dusk, under all that snow, with those smoking factories in the distance, the whole place seemed so alien and forbidding. Now it feels like home. I've spent two years thinking how I just want to get out of here, and the time may be drawing nigh, but I'm not sure now that I really want to go.

The Wilds at Night

It seems the wasps are sleeping in the shed where we keep the beer. Are the ones clinging to the outside guards? Emma across the way says Murphy Murcurio was in her garden this morning, stalking the birds, and that she will feed him anti-freeze if he keeps it up. She has moments of rage, but is actually a really great neighbour. Murphy is a lovely cat, and I hope nothing untoward happens to him, as happened to Pearl the cat a couple years ago.

Dream

I return with a friend to my childhood house. It is a mansion with polished, hardwood floors--maybe even some kind of historical building. It turns out gangsters lived there in the twenties. Nobody is home, and we are looking around. We find a safe in the wall, and a burglary device to open it. I reach my hand in, but my friend dissuades me, saying we have to go. Next door is another expensive mansion, but this one was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The outer walls of the house have sheets of water running down them--it's a fountain house! I know that there is an artist who has been living there since I was a kid, and I pay him a visit. He is obliging in talking to me, even though I just show up in his studio, which is full of many very large canvases with Picasso-like paintings. But the paintings are not as good as I remember them being as a kid, and I tell the artist as much. He shows me new respect for speaking my mind, as success in his field has made all other critics soft and blind towards him. But the real reason he lets me stay in his presence so long is that he is interested in the device I still carry in my hand for opening the safe. I'm a little sad for the artist, though I can see that there is still a resilient fire within him. He has conquered the world, but not himself. Then my pager starts beeping, and my friend tells me that we have to go because a storm is approaching. When I awake the beeper is still sounding, but it is only the alarm clock that has fallen into one of my dresser drawers.

Stealing Nothing

For some reason we have started getting premium cable service (though we don't even pay for regular). This means we are getting seventy or so stations rather than the ten we used to receive. At the same time, the remote control is lost, so we spend all our time manually flipping through the programming wastelands, hoping to stumble upon something worth watching. My housemate likes the home reno station. Now, not only do we have endless renoavtions going on on the house, we can watch about it on TV as well! I just hide in my basement laboratory.

Down by the Bay

I went down to the waterfont park to cool off this afternoon. A large red cargo ship has been moored there for the past few days, filling its holds with steel. The giant cranes make a thrillingly impermanent backdrop to the location. It was still hot, despite the influence of the water. Some local kids were fishing and I put on a little skateboard show for them.

In the middle of a small waterside square, there is a pair of bronze statues of a naked woman and man, slightly larger than life in scale, postured heroically on one knee and holding representations of the sheets of a giant sail made out of steel tubing. It's not a horrible statue, though I think it has a slight tinge of kitsch about it. The kids were perched on the bronze man and steel tubing, watching me like a flock of seagulls while the statue wavered slightly under their combined weight. A large man in a wheelchair was sitting in the shade, talking to a friend and swearing occasionally.

Later, one of the kids caught a big turtle and put it in a tupperware container to bring home. I tried to persuade them to let it go, but the kids were too enamored with their new find. Matthew, whom I just met today, was climbing dangerously high into the "rigging" of the sail, and I had to tell him to come down several times. He deftly slid down the last few feet of the metal tubing on his sneakers, like an animated young Tarzan from Disney. Matthew is a daredevil, and wiped out on my skateboard several times, skinning his knee.

On my way back, there was an older woman sitting in the shadow of her SUV with a large tub of colourful plastic beads. They shimmered in the sun like jewels and I asked her if she was making some necklaces.

"All for the glory of God," she said, "but I won't be making anything resembling a bracelet or necklace. The market is flooded with those things, so I need to make something more original. I don't think God will mind if I make a little money while using the gifts He gave me"

"What he seems to have given you is an awful lot of beads!" I said, but not in a sarcastic way. Just then her husband or boyfriend appeared, a fishing rod in hand from which dangled a rainbow coloured plastic fish-shaped lure.

I talked for a little while longer with the woman, who repeated several times her desire to glorify God. She was sorting out the beads, putting them into a variety of emptied pharmaceutical containers that God had provided for her earlier that day. Sometimes it feels like everything is charged with metaphorical meaning and significance, even (especially?) strange old ladies by the waterside.

On a side note, the city has half a million dollars allocated to build a new skatepark, but they can't settle upon a location. Allot of skaters and councillors seem to be pushing for a location "on the mountain"--meaning the escarpment, but I think the waterfront park is the logical place for it. It's sufficiently remote to avoid annoying any homeowners, parents would have a pleasant environment in which to bring their kids, and the adjacent Marine Heritage Museum and Coffee Shop would flourish. As for the argument being made against the waterfront by one skateshop owner: that he likes to skate in the morning, and if the park is by the waterside it will be covered in slippery dew; this seems to be a case of "the needs of the one outnumbering the needs of the many". Who the heck skates in the morning, anyways?

Living Underground

The Fakiegrind soundsystem, "Wheels of Steeltown" has been moved to the basement, where it is actually quite cool, dark and agreeable in the midst of the summer heat wave we have been experiencing. My housemate's son has started the early intervention therapy for his autism, and the operation has taken over what used to be my bedroom. It's going well. Pretty, young women show up at our place twice a day and shower their attention on my young friend, who isn't always appreciative, but seems to be coping well enough.

I'm setting up a primitive recording operation featuring my Candle turntable and a couple of tape recorders. Having read Yes Yes Y'all, an excellent account of the beginnings of hip-hop, I discovered that some early pioneers like Grand Wizard Theodore (the inventor of scratching) was making music mixes on one turntable only, by picking up the needle and moving it to different positions on the record. I was up all last night working on this technique, and it takes considerable skill. Luckily, skateboarding experience has taught me to persevere. I only hope I don't break my needle because I'm not sure you can buy replacements for such an old machine.

Thrift Shop Insanity

I've been culling the record collection of the local Goodwill store for a couple months now. It's funny how good records seem to grow or materialize in amongst all the crappie ones that have been sitting there forever, that I've gone through a dozen times or more. This morning, I was talking to a woman who was looking for punk records for her daughter. I've never seen any punk music at the Goodwill, but another fellow I talked to claimed to have picked some up from time to time (perhaps that's why I've never seen any). Personally, I like to buy up anything strange or unusual: Scottish dance albums, east coast ditties, dancercise albums. I'm not exactly indiscriminate (no Barry Manilow, for instance), just eclectic. Honestly, I don't even know why I buy some of the records I do.

However, sometimes you come across a gem, something that I would actually pay good money for in a record store--if I had any money. Like the 1979 Rapper's Delight 12" I found today, scuffed and missing its sleeve, but still playable. Rap music simultaneously was born and died with that record, so it's good to have a copy. Today records were on sale, five dollars for a bag, so I was busy scooping up all the disks I've been eyeing for a while, but never got around to buying because I didn't want to pay fifty cents for them.

The lady with the daughter who liked punk was specifically looking for Blondie. Strangely, the woman said her daughter hated disco, but I guess that Debbie Harry is something of a crossover artist. While I was busy contemplating an odd German pop organ recording, the woman pulled out a pristine copy of the 1984 K-tel Breakdance compilation from one of the bins that I had already been through. How could I have missed it?! This is the record that includes The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, the track that first opened my ears to the wonders of hip-hop so long ago.

In hindsight, I should have said to the lady, "That's a disco record. Your daughter will hate it." Instead I said, "Wow! That's a great album!" Actually, I already have a copy of the album, but mine is all scratched while the one the woman found looked like it had never been played. Furthermore, I checked it out and the record still had the original instructional breakdancing wall poster with directions on how to do "the wave" and "the moonwalk"! Well, I already know how to do these moves, but I would have liked to have the poster anyways. Still, I kept my cool and told the woman that if her daughter didn't like the record, she should sell it on Ebay. I pretended to be above the whole situation, while really I was dying inside.

On the upside, I got some other excellent records, like a 1965 Bongo Rock collection, scratched but still fabulous to hear. This record was pointed out to me by a strange European man who told me a long story about how he was ripped off by a Reader's Digest record club for thousands of dollars. He pulled the record out, said it was scratched but had a neat cover, and then stuck it back into one of the piles. I tried to listen politely to the man and his rambling story for several minutes, but all I really wanted to do was dive for the record he had just shown me.

When I got home, I couldn't stop thinking about the Breakdancing album, and how silly I was not to even ask the woman if she really wanted it. Fixating on bygones is a bad habit of mine. I've discovered you have to find a way to outsmart yourself. I remembered that at the beginning of the Grandmaster Flash song on the Breakdance album, there is a ten or twenty second clip of Blondie mixed in, from her song Rapture. Blondie is what the woman had been looking for in the first place, and maybe her temperamental punkster daughter will get a kick out of it. Occasional close (but no cigar) calls with your heart's desire are part of collecting. A similar thing happened to me last year with a Dead Milkmen record, but I guess this is just the way things go from time to time.

Rockin' the Box

Inaugurated the new grinder box at the Bease park tonight. Last year's box was destroyed by the elements, and the elemental action of the skateboarders wearing away at the wood and steel like the waves of some wheeled ocean. The new box is identical to the old one: about two feet high and twelve feet long. Maybe I have the dimensions wrong, but it's high--almost too high for this flatlander. But I managed a few grinds along the metal edging, laid down a few boardslides, and my trademark no-comply tail-slide. It's all good training for skatecamp. I signed up for all five days at the end of the month. That means I have three weeks for training. Computer is busy tonight. Gotta go.

Guilty Guilt

Back in university (the first time I tried making it through) I worked for the school paper as a cartoonist, and the editor--a fine, frenetic fellow with Muppetesque charm--dubbed me "the least Machiavellian person I know", this epithet being the hook to a popular song on the college charts at the time.

I heard through the grapevine that another of my friends saddled me with the title of one of Douglas Adams' books: Mostly Harmless. While I'm still curious as to the context in which the last comment was made, I more or less felt honoured to be seen as a gentle, considerate "nice guy" even if that means finishing last (another concept in which context counts for everything).

But the fact is, I do have an aggressive, vindictive, vengeful, malicious and Machiavellian side, though any half-serious study of the writings of Machiavelli will show that, like the Marquis deSade, he was really not as bad as the popular press makes out.

When the weather gets too hot, as it has been lately, I start to swear. Mostly at the television, but sometimes at my housemate, at cars, mosquitos, and at the dog turds that the girl who rents out the front of our house lets lie on the lawn for days, attracting flies and the errant sneakers of hapless kids or mail deliverers.

I try to cultivate an air of detachment toward my wrath. Turds, after all, are just turds, and flies may be the spies of God. I try to laugh at myself for my folly; self-reproach just doesn't seem to be a path to freedom, though I indulge in it often enough.

Guilt, as Neitzsche pointed out, is another useless emotion. I've been feeling guilty most of my life, and when I don't have a clear reason to do so, I make one up.

Karla Homolka, the wife and accomplice of serial killer Paul Bernardo is someone who has a clear reason to feel guilty. She is being released from prison today and the media is abuzz with the story. In a television interview she said that even though she is free from jail, she will likely never be free from the prison of her own mind. She spoke in passable French, which she must have learnt in prison, and I doubt that many people will look for any kind of wisdom her words, but I found something compelling in them.

The world is full of all kinds of prisons; both physical and mental. Is there any way to be truly free? I'm so glad that in moments of wrath, delusion and confusion I have never killed anyone, or seriously harmed or injured another. I think that through carelessness, ignorance and willfull mischief I have sometimes hurt people's feelings, and I'm sure that the karmic balance will bring opportunities to make good on some of my misdeeds.

And I'm sure as well that I'll make a thousand more mistakes before the round is through. Is there a meaning to it all, some great end toward which we all must strive? To say that the journey is the meaning is a hopelessly tired cliche, but some questions are like the threshold before a void at which all words turn back.

Stephen's Poem

the happiest things
have no duration
erasing time
like a bad dream
already forgotten
before waking

Wildlife Update

I gave Murphy Murcurio the cat back to my neighbours yesterday, thinking that their four kids might be missing him. They have another little kitten, but it's not the same as a cuddly orange tabby. This morning, however, he had somehow escaped and was back in our yard. I like to put water in the kiddie pool to create a Serengeti kind of setting. At dusk, Murphy and our older grey cat come out to drink and lounge around in the cooling grass. I sit in a lawn chair and pretend that I'm king of the watering hole.



My housemate found this cluster of timberfly nests in the shed the other day. It looks like two of them are still sealed, meaning that the larval insects might still be growing inside. I put the whole thing in a plastic container with air holes punched in the lid. I'm not sure if they will hatch or not, but I'll keep you posted.

Happy Interdependence Day

I like to take July 4th to celebrate the Buddhist doctrine of pratityasamutpada, or interdependence. Closely related to the experience of Sunyata, or void, realizing interdendence is a movment beyond the illusion of self-being, to see that the existence of any given thing in the world is dependent on the existence of all other things.



Here's a toast to my homeland's interdependence with our neighbours to the south, without whom we would probably be part of Russia.

Punk's Not Dead

Last weekend at a garage sale, while picking through some collections of sentimental east coast folk songs, I came across the classic Canadian punk album, Frantic City by Teenage Head. Head singer Frank Venon still lives here in Steeltown, and, though no longer a teenager, both he and the band are still part of the local music scene. A older guy was walking past the house wearing a TH shirt the other day. When I complimented him on his attire he started telling me about the various members of the band and what they were up to. Partying mostly, it seems.

Last night I went to a friend's housewarming party and was talking about records with a woman. She told me she had a large collection of Ramones albums and t-shirts, and I was delighted to find that she also liked and collected albums by the Forgotten Rebels, another southern Ontario early punk band whose songs fueled the skateboarding of my friends and I, back in the day.

Like Teenage Head, the Rebels are still rocking after almost thirty years. Lead singer Mickey deSadist can allegedly still sometimes be seen walking these Steeltown streets--when he isn't busy touring Europe with his band. I tried, but was unsuccessful to get a Rebels song nominated for the list of the 50 essential Canadian tracks recently composed by the CBC national radio corporation. While the classic Vancouver punksters D.O.A. did make the list, others like Teenage Head, Forgotten Rebels and the Dayglo Abortions were absent.

The streets, clubs and record stores of Steeltown are heavily laced with the spirit of Punk. When we moved in to this house, I found a gnarley old Metallica flag in the basement (featuring a Pushead illustration from the pre-Enter Sandman era). When our neighbour moved out--a friendly, older lady who, it turns out, had a metallic blue pet tarantula living in a terrarium in the kitchen--I inherited a collection of Ramones cassettes from her. I'm not actually that crazy about the Ramones, being more of a Velvet Underground sort of guy when it comes to the early punk sound, so I sold the albums.

A couple years ago, the local label Sonic Unyon re-released the classic proto-punk album Cyborg Revisited by Simply Saucer. This band was a Canadian version of The Velvet Underground, lacking only an Andy Warhol, and a sympathetic audience to champion their sound.


homemade t-shirt c.1988

I'm still an undercover punkster, and I was heartened to meet someone who knew some of the same, obscure Forgotten Rebel tunes that still delight me when I give them a spin. Steeltown may be lacking in decent bookstores (any bookstore larger than the sickly Coles chain would be nice), but where else are you going to run into people with ears corroded enough to appreciate the adrenaline and drug fueled punk dirges of the seventies and eighties, the likes of which seem to have died with Kurt Cobain in the nineties?

A Farmer in the Gravity Fields

Yesterday night I went to watch the fireworks from the park they built last year at the harbour. It's a great skate spot, replete with large, smoothly paved and usually empty parking lots, curbs, trees, water and a great view of the Dantesque sprawl of the steel mill. Add an excellent coffee shop to the mix and you pretty much have a Flatlander's paradise.

My ankle has been sore, so I've been taking it easy, but last night I was busting moves with a vengeance. Well...I was actually going slow, but doing pretty well. There were lots of people around, and freestlylers like myself--though we might act oblivious and self-abosrbed--actually thrive off an audience. Flatland skating is a kind of dance, a magic show performed with the feet, and while people tend to grimace at the foolhardiness of trying to balance on a little rolling board, I suspect that they are also morbidly curious, and secretly amazed when instead of falling we manage to perform graceful and intricate movements.

But it didn't really matter who was watching, I was just glad to be rolling again. The fireworks were nice, going on for about half an hour. The temperature was cool. The only glitch in my evening, besides a certain loneliness, was that I kept on hanging up on tiny pebbles. The wheels I'm riding are vintage Bullet 66s (graciously supplied by Em). They are just the right hardness for street skating, and generally plough with ease over rough, pebble-strewn surfaces. I also thought that the board was rolling slower than normal, but chalked it up to rusty ball-bearings.


They don't make wheels like this any more.

Hanging up on a pebble is one of the worst fears of a street skater--that and car doors. All it takes is one tiny, strategically shaped bit of stone to send you flying into oncoming traffic. Remember this the next time you see one of us cruising nonchalantly down the street. I, for one, am usually nervously scanning the ground ahead of me, praying to the rollergods to clear the way of debris. Skateboarding can make you feel a thousand shades of elation, but it can also be very humbling. When you step on a board you enter into a kind of pact with gravity--one that can be revoked with a moment's lapse of attention.

Last night I must have hung up on pebbles about five times. The first time, the stone left a metre long slide mark along asphalt, and I was sent stumbling forward, doing a kind of Neanderthal walk with my hands and feet until my kinetic energy was sufficiently dispersed. I didn't hurt anything, but it was kind of embarrassing in front of the crowds.

Today I was rolling toward a garage sale down the street, and my skateboard was getting slowed down almost to a halt every time I hit a patch of sun-softened asphalt. It suddenly became clear why I was encountering so many tiny stumbling blocks the night before. I thought that maybe someone had placed a hex on my board--either that or all of my blasphemous ways were finally catching up with me. Actually, it was the heat we've been suffering through lately. Even though the temperatures have cooled, the pavement remained in a softened state, making it more receptive than usual to pebble-grip and wheel-bite. My primitive voodoo brain was assuaged by this scientific rational for the situation. No longer was I the hapless victim of mysterious, possibly occult forces. I had only to keep to concrete and tile over tarmac to avoid the humiliating spills I'd been experiencing.

But I'm still hopelessly superstitious. If the force of gravity really is a curvature in the fabric of space/time created by heavy objects, as Einstein postulated, then harnessing this force for personal locomotion and edification can be a precarious endeavor. With up to 90% of the universe being constituted by an unidentified "dark matter", who knows what the true nature of the massive object generating my personal and idiosyncratic experience of gravity might be. The Great Way remains mysterious and unnamed, so it's best to proceed with caution, not ruling out any possibilities. Perhaps through a balanced blend of attentive living, rational investigation, and the occasional concept-shattering wipeout, one can glean some small portion of wisdom and enlightenment out of the nebulous process we call our lives.