Hélène is an archivist at LACMA, but she will never give you credit for anything. And honestly, think about it, I really think she's just a tinge envious that they send me checks, checks and clothes, plane tickets, you know, for I myself being associated with, repped by my coupe de foudre pro-rida firm, because Hélène like always, like, you know, all the time, like totally tries to cultivate a similar aura with herself—Hélène always branding herself slyly, but conspicuously: I'm a paprika girl, Hélène once said, when she was cooking in the kitchen. Ok, great, paprika's your song. I'm a Twizzlers girl, Hélène said when we went to the drugstore to sneak candy into the New Beverly. No, Hélène you're like not on team Twizzlers, they don't even have a team. Other fake sponsors Hélène bestowed upon herself: Hélène was a Phaidon girl, an Estee Lauder girl, a Michelin girl, a Container Store girl, a Burt's Bee's Wax girl, a Pugeot girl, an Issey Miyake girl, a David Yurman girl. If she wasn't vegetarian, she'd say she's a Ketchup and French Fries girl.
I, on the other hand am a Girl, girl. You might have heard of us, yeah Girl. My name's Fast Eddie Feltson, but they call me "the Kid". I wasn't on Plan-b, like all the founders of our venerated venerable Sf based upstart were, but I didn't have to be. You see, by inscribing my name into and onto the infamous legendary fuck-you-and-literally(actually)-everyone-in-the-industry-except-us inaugural ad they put out in Trash May issue '93, was just their little way of saying, oh I don't know, how they had all the gear (gear was the word for swag in nineties)—so much had softgoods did they, they didn't even have to flow an actual like good am on, and that didn't-have-to-be-good-am-on was me!
Let's just say with my shirking the conventional expectations of duties that comes along with one being on Girl, I make Stephen Cales look like Bucky Lasek. Feltson don't deserve the rank of Girl, boy scouts of the Industry would decry, as if Rick didn't know the fuck he was doing. I never fifty-fiftied anything in my life, can barely regular stance ollie. I'm only good at two things and two things only though: shopping and crookin', and what a two good things . . .
The pollution burning around the 405 makes these accretions waft into tenebrous promiscuous forms kinda like Claus Oldenberg Geometric Mouse effigies (and drawings) from the 1960's and early1970's. I shift the battered silver Porsche from third to fourth and it always makes a gnashing grinding grind, slightly delaying before accelerating. I was at first real concerned about it, but I never did end up taking it to the mechanic, and now I've kinda gotten used to it, it actually feels real good on the drag.
Running late to LAX speeding through streams of competing insect cars being driven by soft human worms, trying to chronic lit bake to blaze for for through airport security, and Hélène is driving me in the red again, like more than usual. I have to escape LA, so I in rare form, I am actually, can you believe it?, going this time as am (well paid am, paid am, who actually has a small-run board out) to pro-ho invitational down in Pampa.
Check in bag at the airline check-in because I have all my dope in hallowed out compartment of shoe goo'd sealed shoe—check (the only best practice to get drugs through transit). Wade to my seat and I feel like McCrank at the beginning of the End, except now I'm about to have midday cocktails. I've always thought there's something just simply majestic about combining the technology of spirits with the modern world marvel of flight, and I never understood humans complaining about flying. An intoxication drip seeps to fill me with wanton optimism as I look out at the panorama of the sky, over the clouds, where the weather is always Clearly Canadian same.
I let myself get drunk off of the thing that happened with Swank. You see, I got my silver prize-whipp Porsche as un-signed bonus to crooks on as associate am for Foundation. Mulder had left and they needed a tech stalwart because Creager had left also. I told Rick I was offered the Porsche, he said to quit, get on Foundation, take the Porsche (and the outlay of cash), and then get back on Girl, and prankstar Rick would handle the PR and all the respective media accoutrements. Swank wasn't actually a vampire, though it would be easy to think he was. Foundation, at the time was still seemingly a perfectly reputable outfit, but like Berra (and unfortunately libertarian LA Jason Lee), something un-nameable was aloft with Swank, which would only reveal itself, expose it's true underlying conditions, when it later would devolve into some Baker wanna-be Bozo the clown scrEaMO spencers-punk dot littering what's quickly becoming a dwindling, once (neo)avant-guard landscape of what was otherwise fin de siècle graphic innovation detournemont advertisements, incorporated videos, performance gesumkunstwerk practice of a tiny cluster of entities and pushing the drug envelope shell companies. Besides with Swank, no one with full sleeves can ever be a real artist anyways.
Women cared more about who could make their life easier and less about looks and Hélène was no different. Hélène is a real vampire though, most captains of their chosen sphere are (her's museumology), but of course they or, shall I say, we wouldn't, we couldn't let the humans know. Though not as talented as me, Hélène was certainly much more powerful. She even started sleeping with the mortal Florine, a pre-doctoral resident fellow in her building, just to let me know who was ladyboss. She telling me apparently, just to gauge my response when she did it like that, that weak afternoon, and I clenched my hand tight there in the kitchen, leaving dents on the skin of my palm, not realizing it. As time grew pointless, sucked slow into hault, the glass terrarium in the perfect Cali-light was otherwise absolutely sparkling beautiful, now condescending, like a lyric sheet to a love song Hélène had written for somebody else. Shaking, I was shaking, just trying to play it off, doomed now. I loose control over my dead body, growl pathetically Florine?!
Three drinks in, calms me down and I can make some peace with my recent cataclysmic and eternal defeat. I look out through the port hole. Old Earth, no more lies, I've seen you, it was me, with my other's ravening eyes, too late. You'll be on me, it will be you, it will be me, it will be us, it was never us. It won't be too long now, how I gaze on you, and what refusal, how you refused me, you so refused. It's another cockchafer year, next year there won't be any, nor the year after, gaze your fill.
When I get like this, the very last thing I can do is get clips, which really is the thing, the only thing I should be concentrating on. Instead, I slip further deep beneath undertow, recede from my duties of remembering the tricks to tricks, regress from the forward momentum needed for ascendance, ascendance which now gets ever more beyond my lock. For anything great to manifest, a great situation must unfurl to where focused practice rides and collides and crashes into opportune situation. Greatness is of a situation, a situation unattainable by all the sorry rest. But this very proprietary methodology though now brimming in stagnation, I have committed to and mastered (chiller formalist tech am stalwart), has thus become my signature, and what do you know? I'm my favorite blade runner.
Getting over Texas, I order two more small bottles, one for now, another for smuggle jet off, so I have something to ride on for the taxi to motel. In the terminal, I see other Pampa invitees milling about, and I could say hello, because I kind of know them, but I just dart off to baggage claim. Waiting for my bag on the carousel dump, it never comes and the anxiety steadily reaches its anxiety thermostat. I look over at the baggage office, and see my suitcase dreadfully on the counter on the other side of the glass. I could easily escape without incrimination, without Hélène's suitcase, and I see no one is inside the office behind the counter, I go in and grab her, swiftly move to the landing like Gary Busey trafficking in the movie Blow, and get the first taxi that comes stopping my way.
The organized confusion of the poststructuralist heterotopia of the machinations of an industry which revolves around the discovery of no waves and urethane, brings us to an event site to the couldn't be more random, Texas city of Pampa. The littered freeway from the airport is like the road to Jerusalem, reminds me of the drawing The Absent Man (L'homme a l'absence) by Matta, a reminder that this is a write-off rite of passage, the toll all the serious players at one point or another would have to all pay.
A lone line of electricity wire lines the side of the road bordering desolate stubby growth hillock off out into the distance. We pass a piece of a tree stump section that had been ingrained twisted into the electricity telephone wire, and it was cut top off bottom off to stub, just hanging like it was threaded on there. They apparently removed the whole damn tree, but the scalloped stump lay dangling in the wire, like they, someone, was going to get to it later.
Instead of going to Paradise Inn motel near the park, like I had originally imagined, I feel impatient, just tell the driver to take me to also near-the-airport Skate Park of Pampa, he knows where it is, I lean forward lurching optimistically carriaged in the backseat holding my mini bottlee xactly like an out of towner would (for some reason I think of DMX going to Jamaica in Belly).
We stop at the mote in front of SPOP, I realize grabbing my bags not going to the hotel first was a bit of a faux paux, but whatever, I'm like here already okay?? Walking bags sans skateboard, with buzz waning insufficient, my mind flashes to Hélène again. Lovesick, I feel exactly like, I keep imagining a rectangle has been cut out of the span of my chest, hallowed out by mellon baller jack-o-lantern, and the rectangle meat chunk of my chest, stitched back onto me with cartoon like dotted stitched rectangle, mellon balls from my chest blue.
Smokers are congregated outside near the entrance of the pre-fab metal ribbed building. I immediately see some spine collector, Big Baby, Little Nate, little Little Nate, Nate Sherwood, Nathan Smith, Devin Brankovich and Steve Kindle. Everyone's pant game was full wind jammer, even those wearing cheap non-skate monoculture surrogates still looked pretty good, hyper colonized in the low end.
I see Billie Whitelaw. Billie, occupies a category between pro-wife and groupie. It's immediately annoying that she's here though, but also her presence kind of verifies the contest's legitimacy. I don't feel like talking to her just yet, walk past, do a move where I'm looking at her and then she turns her head at me from whom she's talking, and then in a flinch I look right away awkwardly, accidentally exposing myself.
I bury I-bury-the-living Billie, keep walking. I hear conversation, two are talking too loud.
I mean, I'm like really, who the hell does he think he is? It's like who died and made you Jason Adams?
Jay Adams, who died and made you Jay Adams . . .
What . . .
Jay . . . Jay, Adams . . . Not Jason Adams, Jaaay, Jaaay Adams . . .
Don't tell me what I meant, I mean Jason Adams . . .
Anyone Tilt Mode is fourth rate hipster now, C'mon . . .
Not feeling like going into the neither am nor pro shop, I just profile out front, uselessly take measure of the rest of the citrons.
Billie flakes over, I'm surprised so quick, her otherwise love sick at first sight beauty is disarmed because of the territory Hélène now occupies with me. Billie, glittering in eyes sparkle soft like downtown sidewalk, wild green eyes like shards in the wild sea, now like a neutered monster that has been shrunken in a cartoon to thumbsize. . .
With everything going on behind my scenes, I feel like now just wiping the past past, just say heyyyyy like Billie never ever once had happened that time, which Billie will probably take for as weakness by me, instead of my easy going-with-the-flowness generosity that I'm now performing.
Christ you look, um rather jetlagged, you know they have a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different . . .
Yeah, well Bill W. never read Lacan: repetition is not reproduction, its seriality, like my, it's just like my kunstwollen, ya know? . . . Fortifying myself with defiant nip.
Well, no, you do look like hell, you really do Eddie . . .
Yeah, well, I'm not doing so hot, babe . . . Finally saying it out loud for the first time now, after all what just happened with Hélène, makes my voice accidentally creank,
What . . . happened, Billiejane showing immediate concern overriding her antagonism.
Ah, nothing . . . Well, everything . . . Hélène,
Hélène Fourmena?, I heard she's crazier than a beedle bug burrowed into banjo, well actually you told me that . . .
The master of noirs, oh, crazier than that, punctuating with vodka wince that seems satisfying, but is actually not.
Felston! Rick flags my gaze.
Rick is talking to Jeremy Schaefer, the proprietor of SPOP, two other guys I don't recognize, who no doubt work there, and also Thomas Knox, Chet Thomas, Jamie Thomas, Charlie Thomas, Chet Childress and Brian Childers.
Hey, man . . .
Fast Eddie Felston! Jeremy addresses, sparkle of psyched.
Hey, yo, like what the, like what tha, the Don Dillz, man . . .
Rick claps his hands on my shoulders way too hard, starts massaging me like prize fighter to the squad . . .
Ya see this kid, this kid here, the mascot! This kid, is, IS embodiments . . . is Girl . . .
Howard beaming Jack Nicholson eyescape. This kid works so not hard, he makes, he makes what?. Trilogy chillin' Gino look like, like, well, like mid-early to early-mid . . . Carroll . . .
Matt Beach, I correct.
What?
Beach, Matt Beach, I was saying, my output is so scarce, rarefied, I make Sb Gino practically look like Matt Beach performing at a contest . . .
Totally!
When we going to see full length from you, Charlie Thomas encourages . . .
Ah, you know me, I don't like, like DO like video parts, ahhh, ya know?, looking back at Rick in a way that confirms me and Rick being on the same page . . .
No video parts, Jamie jumps off and in, scrutinizing like a music tutor who hasn't been touched by human hands in the last decade . . .
Jamie as alpha male for the entire state of Oklahoma, tries to stake over the conversation, you can totally tell he's used to such lead in his little bubble, but here's the thing about Pampa—this ain't his bubble!
Did you even remember to bring you board Feltson, the way he says my name sounds like we are on the same team (surely, we are not.) He rings with an absolutely obscene and appealing to everyman's sympathy Wisconsonian twang.
Are you even going to skhaate in the chontesst, mannnn, Jamie trying to be funny, doing his instantly played out Tom Penny impersonation, that he has already demonstrated in the last On Video, which we saw last month, and no one's laughing at all now.
I give Jamie a look like I just caught him sniffing the saddle of my sister's bicycle.
The fakie kid! Chet Thomas proffers.
Yeah, yeah, that's, like, like me, man . . .
Yeah, what is up with that, you can only skate *backwards*, Jamie Trumpy coming back with the seemingly typical regressive elbow jerk pragmatic skepticism that's commonly confused with being common sense.
No no, only fakes, backwards, I go,
Rick jumps in, classic Howard instigating situation form . . .
Yeah, you bring your backwards board, Rick with his signature facetiousness, as if he almost wants to hear my answer is no . . .
What? Pausing too long, Oh, nahhhh . . .
Contemplating divulging personal info, I hold the otherwise impossible to hold attention of the group a five seconds too long more, gratuitously, and I'm so into myself . . .
I'm like in the middle of, in the middle of something with, with, my girl,
Hélène? Rick asks back optimistically, like he didn't just hear me say we were having problems . . .
What can I say, when I'm blue, I just don't want, don't want to, um . . . to really ride,
Right, right, and we'd never dream of, err, asking you to, really, but for real you and Hélène are having trouble in Hell-A, trouble in paradise, huh . . .
I know that its over. You know the last song on the last Smith's record was? I Won't Share You.
Pausing for too long in excess, costing expiring, spending everyone's cheap attention on me needlessly, continuing,
And what can I say? There can like, be no like, no poetry after Auschwitz, ya know?
He's quoting Adorno now! You know it must be serious! Well, perfunctory Adorno that is at least, Rick bringing the pace back up to the level it was before I spit in the shed.
You could tell Rick wanted to get back to whatever it was he was discussing with the group, segues by questing me one last exit question, cuing me to exit.
Hey Eddie, wanna ride little mini in a little, oh wait, but you didn't bring your board. Rick, like we aren't at a skateboard equipment hardware manufacturer's convention . . .
No, no that sounds fun actually, I'll just go buy a new set up in the not-quite-am-not-quite-pro shop . . .
Rick's comment of perfunctory Adorno, I should say, I mean really! Besides, everyone knows the two major theoreticians of postwar European aesthetics to emerge were Debord and the former. Is it really my fault his most well known dictum, proclamation, can directly be ascribed to perfectly describe such my Kafkaesque plight? And yeah, I know what you're thinking: Kafkaesque is an obvious and somewhat trite literary allusion to make here, and also, really, only but just refers to nightmarish administrative clerical dystopia (which can most certainly also still apply in my case), but really, I say Kafka because of how Kafka also regarded bachelorhood as mark of alienation from communal happiness (I mean, yeah, I'm not exactly trying to commune with the humans. And with vampires, we're all like cats, we, for the most part, steer clear the Transylvania hades away from each other and stake out our own parts of the world to lord over, cloistered away from each other—there are like no vampire movie clubs or softball teams. It's not exactly logical, but the feeling of loss with Hélène gives me the same unbearable sensation of what's-the-use-of-going-on-alone grief that which the human Kafka describes).
I mean, I'm not so dense as not to understand why, say, a mortal women would not pair off with me. I do realize, maybe, perhaps, i dunno, their intuition tells them something is not quite right, like the sensation when you're talking to someone, but to actually mention something is aloft would be to slightly miss the plot in tactlessness, I mean, yeah, I can understand it, I really can (even though there are vampires married to humans). But for one of my very kind, Hélène, to pick such an unremarkable specimen of a lower life over me, over meeee, and considering how much we indeed do, did like, have so so much in common, is absolutely self-eye-gouging maddening, is hell horse than death. (Never mind, that like a vampire, she has adopted my interests, how I talk and what I'm into and thrown the rest of me away to use on someone else.) Like, help me Peneus! Open the earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger! Like, let me be free of this Vipress from this moment forward! You know what I mean?!!
The problem with SPOP's not-quite-am-not-quite-pro shop, is you can tell (well, at least I can) all their equipment and riding attire is exactly what they should have, should have, in terms of exactly what the industry wants them to order. You can tell they make it all too easy on their reps, they so happily acquiesce to becoming a dumping ground for overstock. Nevermind, having a shop where the owners actually exert pushback, where a shop distinguishes itself with some ethereal, yet distinct sensibility with which they carefully select manufactured goods, instead of exuding, celebrating the crisis and noise in which we all live now. I decide on a Three Murderers deck.
A checking for daggers journalist who's useful but pretty, accosts me in the hallway, which is also the underside of a ramp, asks for interview, but with an unwarranted and unjustified antagonism, as if she's expecting a bad penny to drop sooner or later. Despite a demeanor from which I sense a misguided hostility by her, I, just to be game still agree, and this, despite such the presupposition of her knowing airs.
Everyone interviewed for her piece is asked the same set of questions and the interviews are going to be printed next to each other in the article, she explains and, oh what a novel idea—it's as if the writer simply wanting to be a writer is good enough requirement for most who hire working journalists.
She exhaling sharply with clapped eyes, is taking way too long to set up, and I'm trying my sorry best to remain patient, but I only feel like I'm just accommodating her incompetence.
Is this your first time skating Pampa Pro?
I'm not skating, and actually, I'm not pro.
Wait, but you have a board out on Girl.
That's just promos, like, like why can't a board commemorate an am, ya know?
Pro-mo as is pro-model?
No no, promo as in promos,
So, you don't get paid for the board with your name on it?
No, no, I do get paid. I get paid, I get paid for sure.
So you have a board, you do get a check, wouldn't that make you . . . pro?
No, because I'm not, like, like expected to, like skate, ya know? I don't have to get clips, I don't have to, surely never take photos. I owe skateboarding and the public nothing.
Oh, so you don't want to take part in the duties even associated with being a pro.
I'm not pro! But to answer, not, really. Not particularly, dear.
But you still want to reap the rewards, benefits.
Well, I've earned it haven't I?
That's debatable.
Skateboarding owes me a living. It thinks it does and it does and then it gives me money.
Come with that again.
Skateboarding. Owes. Me. A. Living. My value increased by someone else's poor judgement—Swank wanting to take me from Girl and all, ya know. As we all know, it backfired spectacularly on him, but I still don't want to ever really turn pro, but I'm still worth that amount. And now I'm also further worth an even greater amount now, now because Swank can't have me, and so I become a bit of a trophy. I serve a symbolic function, and anyways is that not what a pro is anyways? Some sort of abstract symbol? Isn't that what bands are?
But don't you think you're taking the place of someone who really wants to be pro, who actually wants to like actually perform the duties associated with such?
Again A, I'm not pro, and B, jump through hoops? No not, not really. In real life, I don't have time to like worry about hypothetical stranger who doesn't exist's needs. In reality, I fit in with everyone at Girl, and they like me and that's good enough. Getting on Girl is not demo democracy. Is everyone being asked these questions??
Yeah, but imagine if they put on a talented athlete who wanted to actually work hard and who would take their role seriously.
Are you even listening to what I'm saying? Do you even hear me? Se compredne Engles para ustedes? Look, we're not, I'm not, here to cater to a naïve public's expectations. The public has to be told what to like, they surely cannot make these decisions on their own. They cannot on their own invent the riddles that need answering in order to power and propel a meaningful culture. The public is incredibly, they're just incredibly, well, naïve, that's all. They are a misguided value system. Your "athletes" P-Rod, Jeremy Rodgers, Brandon Biebel, Marc Johnson, Brian Anderson, Kenny Anderson, Ty Evans, Rick McCrank will all kill Girl in the future, scar my words.
I find that an incredibly pompous statement and what are you even talking about??
May not be what you want to hear toots, but it's true. It's true. It's true and it's only going to get worse. Culture needs protection, from getting ransacked from the free for all, something a lot of people can't grasp or even refuse to grasp. When mobb mass of the greater public will gain more control and freedom over aesthetic decisions, we will only be subsumed more into a debilitating pluralism, and see how bad taste rules everything around me. And, but isn't that what artists should do, give people ideas, give them cues.
Um....Okay? Lets just end it with our Rapid Fire.
Favorite skatemoment
Quitting Foundation, getting back on Girl. Smoking caps with Guy. Talking to Girls.
Favorite Sports Moment
Are you kidding me?
Favorite Skater
Barnaby McCleod, Joe Gruber
Favorite Teammate
Rick.
Least Favorite Teammate
Carroll, Carroll, that poor sod, what can I say, his life is hard, it's hard to be him . . .
Last person to have on a session
Out of towners
Most illegal trick
Anything on transition higher than five feet, footplants, handplants, christairs, tricks not in Trilogy, normies who skate,
Worst Style
Hosoi, Jamie Thomas, Tommy Guererro, Me
What's the one that got away
The time I played lap dog,
Biggest claim to not go down
Is it true you can't libel the dead?
I met Rick at the shrunken half pipe almost touching the ditch. I didn't feel like skating, but we got into a rhythm, and I forgot how fun it could be, when otherwise, such under different circumstance should be well obvious. Rick hit back heels at about coping height, I always forget how good old Rick actually is. Skating myself sober, I was just hitting switch crooks to fake fakie regs really forwards, but where I bash my tail in on re-entry real hard, a wall lick so sweet as to practically vie for second in command to take Carroll's rank.
A few lungfulls now of the sour milk like bar air is at first fowl, but then grows so seductive. There was a bar in LA, Dublin's that was kinda like Best Times. You would associate the smell with fun and wool, and then begin to even crave it, and if it was ever gone, you would come to miss it . . .
I scan Best Times, feel my first wave comedown real abruptly, my wish, I wish, I could order a water bump coke back at the bar, and there's no line.
I see Rick, fall in with the rest of the squad Pitre from Metorie, Bertino, Sanchez, scrawny Hotchkiss holding court tout court at the black formica table, just off to the side of the dance floor with just mobb standing, not dancing. Cult of pleasure on full display, though the squad, our squad seems not to full part take and with such becomes so a dignity characterized by stately restraint, and Carroll, Carroll is such a bore. Otherwise, anything elegant reflected in the magazines or videos is no where to be seen here, and if anything, the spectacle overrides, way over cancels it out now, though everyone is so excited no one seems to see this.
Carroll is talking to someone I don't know: It was real weird, they just stuck all the Chads in one heat he was saying, I suspect just to get them in one place and out of the way. Chad Muska, Chad Bartie, Chad Tim Tim, Chad Bowers, Chad Fernandez, Chad Vogt and Jimmy Chadwick—no one won, it was all a draw, they voided themselves out, and none to the finals.
Who's Chad Bowers, forcing myself into the senior staff conversation.
Carroll pauses and looks at me like I'm a fool, resumes talking with Jeron, Sanch, Jessee, Duane.
The rumble of the reverb collides into everyone there, while still serving as backdrop, decorating and embodying the scene here. The gangster rap had an enterprising game show like allure, was exactly a quarter campy.
Talking to Bertino, and then Rick moves over,
I’m speaking coherently for the first time in days, I say optimistically to Rick, trailing the coke line with follow up snorts now . . .
Conversation unfurls naturally between is, smooth as a roll of Jessup tape rolling down California Street in downtown San Francisco. Rick the only one not to be taken back by my drug use seems to connect with an inherent wisdom in his cosmology.
Me and Rick isolated cloistered in the corner outside where it wasn't as loud, not sitting in the built in booth, but sitting on the outer frame that connected it to the fence. Detatched from the scene and knowing every subculture is evil in mass. It could be a Red Cross convention and the women will still chew your face off, but there weren't many girls here, and the few scraps of who were, were becoming more inflated the longer the night shed on.
Straining with a self important, but forever casual princely wincing slurp of TexMex beer Rick went, With a woman, you have to hold back, up to a certain point, well then if you made it to the other side successfully, then you have to divulge everything, and I do mean everything chap, and all the time, assurance takes precedence to the precocity required for romance Rick says with surprising wisdom typical of him, Rick really was advanced.
Well never that, never is. We were never that far, maybe we were, well Hell I don’t even know now, I guess we weren't old chum . . .
Well look, we’re going full course with the Firm, I don’t know, I don't know, but it may be Profile, Profile or Cream . . .
Oh, Profile! Profile I like that . . .
We'd rather sit at the plaza, so we just Profile!, I go lamely, describing in an all too obvious way, as if how one would imagine exec mimesis projecting consumer's reaction would in turn internalize the board co name,
It will be tailor made like bride’s satin towards you Darling, Rick proposes . . .
I don’t know, I probably, probably can’t, cannot . . .
This is precisely the thing that would help most in a time like this!
I know, I know . . .
It’s what we have been talking about, Profile, mystification, inactive pro to counter all this horrific, ludicrous progression we now have here before us now . . .
Yes, yes, I know, I know. . .
Oh, you know. . .
I don’t know. I’m thinking of retreating to RI like anyways,
You’re going to art school, Rick with flat expectancy . . .
No, no. Certainly not. Dear, no. Promise. It’s way late for that anyways . . . But there’s this group of kids, there's this group I been keeping track of. They incorporate the banal, they don’t like have spots, the use what they can, real pragmatic though, real smart, and surprising, they are adept to incorporating their use of new media forms, they run a website that is part documentation, part experimental archive and . . . And it's preposterous for me to expect Rick to entertain this train of thought, as it exists well against his wishes, but I'm doing the thing where I'm telling it like it's good news to him,
An archive?, Rick exasperated
Me, answering naively and insensitively spracked high, An archive, as if they are anticipating spectacular explosion of practitioners in the future, archivist will be the new auteur and the practitioners only mere subjects: death of the artist writ large, archivist as the next artist . . .
I think I understand what you’re talking about. It will take a good decade for that to ever catch on even if it ever does! And what about now? And what about you? Now is so poised, so ready for this. And you know it, you know it, Feltson . . .
I know, I know, old boy. But I’m always on the move, always onto well, onto —onto,well next, a risk at the gamble even of such guaranteed certainty, and what can I? You know that’s how, how I am, and I can never, cannot change, I’d never expect you to ask such of me . . .
Profile. New video coming out soon, probably never. C’mon!
I’ll think about it, but I can't be so, I’m not sure, old chum . . .
Why pass this up?
Well, I got bad news but worse news,
What . . .
The bad news is is ten, twelve years from now, direct to consumer technology will effortlessly fall into the hands of the public and the landscape will become saturated with new players, JohnnyRamoneteeshirt-come-newbies, that standards and epistemological innovations once hard wrought by the fragile subculture, will become overriden, bastardized and fricasseed, absolutely fire bombed in creating a new degraded standard in which this diminished standard all but becomes more popular than ever, presented most popular, like really more popular than ever, but under the worst conditions now. Kids will be skating better than ever, like way better than ever, but what the technology they will be unable to master is nuanced, subtle editing techniques and montage sequences to create the illusion of wonderment that would ostensibly project an ambient, meaningful, idealized, romanticized version of the activity that would create a document of beauty to reside that shields us from the hell of the chaos, and of which we need so dearly. Paul Rodriguez low rider Vegas plush, I dress like an IT technician, Latino Christian death of skateboarding anti-aesthetic.
Ok, I, I'll bite, What's worse, and who's Paul Rodriguez . . .
Pouring dust onto the table with measured pragmatic air, Rick looking at me with an expectant deferral, as if I was an auditor or his attorney,
The bad news is is, you're going to put Birdhouse, Toy Machine, Planet Earth and Maple riders onto Girl. You're going to get someone else other than Spike to make the videos and Girl films will be completely indistinguishable from Transworld Transmission. Instead of Motown, you are going to have Interpol. Somehow a no-comply becomes acceptable in a damn Girl video.
I would never allow . . .
Oh, trust me, you most certainly will, old horse . . .
Anyways, Mouse is really going to be the last meaningful video you ever produce, though Chocolate Tour will have it's moments.
That's the thing about telling someone the future, they can actually feel the reality of the future hit them as if spraying them backwards from ahead. Rick stares into the black air dazed. Not only that, but he will forget I even told him this, and it's just going to happen anyways. The future is information that does not exist, so although real words in the present create symbols for describing the future, the germ of future inside those words becomes soaked up and obliterated by all that encompasses the present. Real life doesn't work like Back to the Future.
Still pink, baby blue, bible page yellow coke lines sprack out in the open on the black formica now not sitting on the fence ledge, I motion to hand poor Rick the straw in my hand . . .
No, no, no I'm fine, Rick trails off absentmindedly, as he is reconciling, stave shaking off future death . . .
Billie's mascara lashes to bat askance her victims into pillory (every straight man on the planet she comes across, minus the 100 or so she would ever grant access to) in the seductive hangover shadow of the irresponsible refuge of the bar. For all her charms, her backside never made any apologies, her backside that only made threats as it walked away, (and it always walked away), does nothing for me now as she stakes her claim onto the scene.
Billie is the kind person who would fit in with the faceless consumer who would purchase an Infinity automobile though - the car company explicitly for the consumer who's preference was no preference (kind of like Primitive((Maro-A-Lago Postmodernism)), Real's useless coupon literalism, April((Diet Pepsi postmodernism))—not having a preference is popular, and then that very same non-preference is confused by the general culture as being simply great aesthetics).
One woman saves you from another, so through the impenetrable screen of Hélène, even as drunk off drugs as I am, still Billie has shrunk from power now, something you totally know Billie now senses more than ever.
The place is old, dark, hot and unnatural. A circle of lots with towers surrounded by a ditch of dead leaves. A dog was inside, sat in the corner scratching itself and coming it's ears off.
I don't remember exactly what the lead up was, but near the billiard room, the pool room, I come across Billie Whitelaw drunkenly attacking Vegas Dynamite in a ruckus. Me and someone else are pulling Billie off of Vegas, while she is clawing and all the women scorned dialogue at him goes down in a way that seems completely unnecessary and uncalled for. It seems prosperous why she would be making such a scene here, but there she was.
You think you're someone, you think you're someone,
You have a shoe, but you're still nothing, you're, shut up shut up shut up
Girls got in line to fuck Vegas Dynamite, Billie Whitelaw was evidently one of them. It didn't matter that he had an infant's trick selection, an idiotic foot plant heavy trick selection (the point of skating, not having one's limbs contaminated by touching the outer world), Vegas Dynamite mostly only scuttled frontside. His entire piano keyboard scarf wearing thing revolved around the aesthetics revolving around, reflecting the band Cheap Trick.
They pulled Billie off Vegas, and I'm now suddenly left with just me and Vegas standing there alone after the chaos left in Billie's wake.
He was so damn used to being in the spot light, he then just tells me to keep her away from him, you better keep her away, as if I'm somehow automatically responsible for Billie. Keep her away from me, keep her away he says, I got scratches on my chest and he pulls up his shirt, exposing Billie's white claw marks. Keep her away from me, I have a wife at home and she'll see this now. I didn't bother to mention or suggest he could have just told his lucky little wife they were from skating.
Anyways later I ended up checking on Billie, and she was cold bone chillin' with some people near the bar, she was actually pretty normal now, scooped by the reins as if nothing had transpired. I ended up splitting the rest of my pink bag with her, stayed at Best Times for a while.
We ended up actually talking into close. I spilled my vampire guts, I mean, I like told her, told her about being a vampire and all, gave her the whole rehearsed having supernatural powers isn't what you would imagine monologue which I've been telling for over a couple hundred years now. I was really slipping in my game from major existential despair by disclosing this, but, yet, yet, I don't know, I guess, I just also felt a confidence in her.
I made a deal with the devil a long long time ago in Poland, I knew it was not a terribly great idea. But I was bored, I was bored. And you know, the lesson, what has now become so painful to reconcile the knowledge of is, is it really matters not, like it doesn't matter what powers you have, because it's your desires, it's your desires really, your desire is your weakness. The trick the devil played was swaying us by making power seem attractive, when it ultimately matters not. Just for reference, in the future, just wish for a good mood!
We all are a slave 2 our desires, Whitelaw echoes, a grim assessment, but coming from Billie now affirms with a certain reassurance.
No, yes, yeah no, exactly! That's what, that's what like, what I'm saying, trying yeah,
Controlling the way you feel, is a superpower no one really possesses, and if they can, surely there are limits . . .
But imagine how weightless it would be here, there would be no stakes, no gravity
You want gravity, Billie with a sex insect in purgatory glance
Meow Billie goes just minutes from dusk, while I'm trying to comedown toy machine into the suspended animation of Ecuadorian hiking powder-paste chew sleep . . .
Diiiiing dong! Billie chimes.
Annoyed adjusting head on pillow with back at her, I pretend not to hear, now trying my sorry best to fall asleep immediately.
Diiiing dong! Billie again,
What!
I said ding dong, house call! At your service don't be nervous . . .
Okay . . .
You have to answer the door,
No one's home, go away!
You need to tell me the password . . .
The password is I-don't-know, care . . .
Well, that's not the password, sillybeans . . .
The password is cut-it-out-Billie-or-I'm-making-you-sleep-on-the-floor,
The password is is . . . I'm-Not-Wearrrring-Underwearrrr. Billie able to muster at this hellish early hour in chime song speak . . .
Ok, now I'M going to sleep on the floor . . .
What's the password Sir?
Billie, I'm serious, I need to get at least thirty minutes of sleep before the invitational . . .
Oh, like you're even going to be in the contest, hmph . . .
Just because I'm not in the contest, doesn't mean I'm not in the contest, sweetie,
Belle of the ball Billie is real used to getting her way and you can really tell now. She could be in anyone's room, even Daxter Lussier's if he was here.
I'm-Not-Wearing-Underwear, now please for the love of infant Christ now, go to sleep Billie!
Oh, you're no fun cranky head . . .
Billie, I'm just super depressed. Okay? I'm, I'm not like playing hard to get this time, I just DON'T feel like horsing around. I'm really just really . . . just sad.
Nature is right here laying right in your bed, asking you as a man do your duty, pathetic . . .
I'm not up for it, I'm just not up for it, okay? I'm feeling terribly homesick right now. I . . . just want to go . . . home . . . I wish I could see my mom . . .
Oh, Hélène again, isn't she . . .
Precisely . . .
You know the quotient of her feminine instinct knowing you're sleeping with someone else on an unconscious or conscious level, ups your chances of her coming back to you Billie proffers helpfully . . .
Hélène is smarter than that, but even if she wasn't, I'm just too blue to make love okay? Even if I knew it would get her back, I don't even want to now. . .
Boy, you sure are wrapped, wrapped, wrapped, wrapped all around,
Demolished,
And you can't even bed me down right now, you're pitiful, you know that?, simply pitiful, I'm going into Jamie Fortune's room . . .
That would be great, unfortunately his bed time is 10:30 pm . . .
I dreamt for five minutes. There was a ride at some theme park, the ride was a Sea World like tank about half as deep as a skyscraper, which was occupied by a single jet black killer wale. The ride involved swimming through the cold blue tank alone, alone with just the killer whale, submitting to the completely vulnerable experience, as if the rollercoaster thrill appeal was translated into some kind of swimming safari. The tank was so vast, you couldn't see the whale the entire time, but there was a even-keeled terror that went with the swim and sometimes the whale would swim by— this was terrifying enough that you would want to panic escape by finishing the swim to the other side, getting it over as quickly as possible. But getting the swim to the other side over with to safety was not possible, because the swim was too far, you would have to rest in a shallow connected pool that was maybe midway, and even then while resting in the attached kid pool like lagoon, the whale beached/waded itself into the rest area and I was still not safe, as if the rest stop brought the entire interaction to a pneumonia pitch. As I was in the resting pool, the wale never attacked me though, and then it just swam off back into the deep man made waters. The line to the ride was also theme park installation integration decorated, creating the dire survivalist mood lead up for the ride. A part of the path of the line was next to the engine room area that powered the tide, and it was partly sunken into the ground of the manicured small hill, as the activity of running the machines was done in a basement like level. The exhaust shafts were black metal and futuristic, like in the style of some David Cronenbergh teleportation seductive stealth garish machine gun honeycomb style and through the exhaust shafts, also pumped a subtle, ominous, and menacing generic electronic music, that most people wouldn't seem to notice, but definitely could effect the park goers without them really noticing it. There was something barbaric about this kind of brutal level thrill seeking, that seemed so typical to the slightly exaggerated hyperreal humans who occupied my dreams. There was something about fleas being injected into the water, to bite and inoculate the swimmer from some disease that could be passed on from being in contact with the whale. I turned to whoever I was with, sometime after I had swam, and pointed out that the subtle sexy generic background music was so so low key terrifying to me but also brilliant. I had to tell them this, how the music was such an effective devilish subtle touch to the ride's grand design.
I awake to the television on, broadcasting depressing and banal local commercials, which only seem to reflect the nulled nothingness that forever folds in the other side of our existence here. A world war had apparently also began yesterday, according to the news,
There is something reassuring about seeing Billie's hair still wet from the shower, though. I can tell she never went to sleep, but she looks invigorated as she stands in front of the chiffonier applying war paint, in the unconscious way women do—they are putting it on for the world, even though they ostensibly shouldn't need to because they are ostensibly with you, but they always do anyways.
Rising from the memory of fragmented dreams which pour out of my head with every step I take, a fresh thought replaces it, as if my head cannot juggle or absorb information from two separate dimensions. I'm feeling exactly like Dracula now.
I say nothing. A pill rests on the chiffonier between the clock and the bed, I roll it with my finger and sturdy it on its curve. I knew it was for me.
Take it, Billie says reading my mind.
What is is that . . .
Moonbeams. Super clean, not too much Drain-O. These go for one hundredy in NY, and even that seems cheap. Good thing pharmaceuticals work on vampires too, right?
I swallow without water, for no clear reason.
You'll thank me later, you'll feel so good you won't thank me. You know Rick rigged you up to qualify for finals today.
I don't, well, I don't have to . . .
Yeah, Eddie, of course you don't have to, you don't have to but Rick wants you to. He knows you won't, but he staked you anyways. You at least owe Rick that.
Riding to the park, I miraculously feel better than I have ever. I'm making plans in my head to go to right to Manhattan to procure more of these as soon as the contest is over. I have a stupid look of happiness on my face, like Muska adjusting the jam box, as the impossible mountaintops loom in the background for eternity.
I'm late to arrive, but you know the drill: full bleed skateboard orgy. In the late 80's, a giant monster a sky scraper high, had arrived on the land, and instead of stomping on the first vertramp it saw (like it should have), the zilla' monster picked it up and put it in her mouth and tried to eat it. Once the monster tasted the un-tasty waves, she spit it right back out onto the ground, accidentally inventing what we now know as the modern day street practice course. Masonite ledge is chewed up from dusty vert deck, handrail bent spaghetti coping al dente. Right away Gotcha Ocean Pacific and Vision Street Wear reps came and painted fake street zips, fake caution and fake toxic spill signs, hand stenciling breaking out of the brick wall logos.
Then it happened. I don't remember how I got here, dim with the platform gloom Billie was holding the mirror and euro up to my nose standing on the stage of the quarter amongst pros, I said no no no, I’m snorking the damn line of coke backwards okay!?, as she guided the rolled up euro again towards me, Billie contemplating the face that she had overlaid with a helpful look of enterprise, she was swept aside by a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence, climbed in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest of symbols and the throbbing cry of the sea of spectators, pros, industry heads filmers and all the wannabes.
someone picked, puts on to play for my contest run . . .
(press tube to listen and read)
This kid here, the master of ceremonies announcer goes,
This kid . . .
Fast Eddie Feltson, Fast Eddie showed up to SPOP yesterday in tears and a suitcase, tears and a suitcase yo, lookin real rugged yo, real ragged, you know, you know, you know it's okay sunnnn! It will be ok yo!
You know what they say quel ennui, quel ennui, eh?
No Show Jones, that's, that's it yo, really . . .
Son here, no, no doubt, bustin' breaks, bustin' them breaks, rides for Girl, DC, DUB, Venture, Spitfire, ZOO Bearings, coming from, comin' straight out of Silverlake, pro ridah Fast Eddie Feltson!
Billie feeds me another line, as if she were groupie squire, all eyes on us. Someone hands the board I forgot about.
I drop into the seven foot quarter swissstance. Coke hit creeps, but it's not just the coke, not just the splendid Moonbeam, it's also all the roll, all of the attention of the crowd, the gaze of the crowd that mixes in with a strange alchemy, I've yet to, nor ever would feel like this again probably. The resolve I felt was purest now, that's the best way to describe the rush: Pure. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this kinda coked up, its all just a special, a real special sentimental coke moment now . . .
The existential vertiginous vertigo nervousness that goes with blading a contest run is not there at all, but is instead replaced with a now supremely impetuous resolve. Pure switch push, gets me backwards to the six foot quarter onto the other side. Not knowing what to do, I on the fly, half cab above the coping, accidentally puffing too high, landing front wheels close right under the coping, nose slapping, banging the nose too hard, rolling away with a twist and pointed finger just like, exactly like Guy and I didn't mean to do it like him this time (despite always trying to skate like him), and also coming down with a slouching lackadaisical roll away like my body has no fucking idea what's going on.
Kating is also about how you pose your arms to help you wing balance, how you look at what you're doing in just the right way. Have you ever tried something that you can do every try, but your heart isn't in it and you never land it?—its about the cockiness resolve with which you ride through it.
Trans moves, fakie to fakes Feltson lights it up!
The crowd rests in the silence of it's focused attention.
Back backwards to smaller qp, fakie front pivot to fakie, truck grapples coping like a metal bone, and the music makes me better.
Contest runs never get judged by flourishes of nuance, only pyrotechnic stunts in fronts of crowds, crowds roaring of all unformed, ill-formed criteria cheers and jeers. An ocean's fathoms depth away, I have a random thought. With a woman you can tell how a situation has gone awry, the weight of its twisting complications, complications that may or may not be combined with your poor behavior, but that which has nonetheless brought you to the impasse you both find yourselves, you can tell with the weight in their demeanor, that look on Hélène's soft stony face, as they, the final judge sympathetically resign to your termination.
Skating street course like mini, that burned up some time sunn.
The disintegrating statue of my body that neither my will nor my love cannot, can never fortify from this death, as my will, my love, cannot make things on the outside altogether change. Hélène, Hélène, Hélène. Why live now? I may as well be on Jamie Thomas' team, I so care nothing now here without you.
Indignant and angry now, almost even slightly fed-up bored, I turn to forwards in the cocky way that expresses it (kinda like the Chico schoolyard line in Mouse).
Moving up the ramp, up to the big platform, I decide just to approach straight to the artificial stair climb rail of the postmodern street course simulacra. Anger raising like a lash with every push, although precipitated by Hélène: I'm not just mad at her, I'm mad at everything, I hate everything, I simply hate everything that has ever existed here in this ocean of dimension that all touched to play it out to where the final fucking end outcome is me without her here now; this is hell and there is no escape.
Love and death, love and death, loss of love connects us to death,
Usually frightened by rails, I don't even know what to do now, and on a lark, I just front nollie out further, out into the void. The trick to handrails is is flying out far enough, and I don't care if I fall down and now, and now, it's so easy. Tucking back truck contact, switch backside nosegrind lock, back oneeighty out automatic onto the floor and the crowd roars.
I should have gotten first, but no one is getting first with just two amazing qp warmers and one extraordinary Luger (though, one that has not even been in a video yet), it's all too obviously nuanced for the judges to grasp. I won the contest, though, I don't remember who got first or second (well, actually I do), but it's no one you're going remember five years, or seventeen days, or nine months . . . .
At the motel, with the television is still on, with the AC full on, with the room too cold, with the feels still good, with the certain pending finality that comes with packing before check out, Rick storms in all unexpected, in a rush, like he's close to missing his flight. He's for once not pleased.
Eddie, Eddie
Hey man, what's up brotha,
In my own zone, lackadaisical, I return to continue a conversation from hours ago. The thing about P-Rod, the thing is is, unconscious Trumpism. Slash and burn. Steal or like, use graphic artists, Pendelton from Workshop for example, and then have the rest of the motifs blatantly lifted from all the other competition to have all bases suposedly covered to attempt a foolhearted monopoly. Then even attempted a coup to undercut all the small skateshops, the skateshops, the heart of it all, to replace with his own mail order subscription service. How could I make this up?
Rick exasperated, What are you even talking about? P-Rod, P-Rod, what's P-Rod
So I need, need to know, like, we're going forward with Profile and I need to know. I need to know right now, today, if you're with us or not with us . . .
Rick, Rick, I told you, I'm sorry old chum, I just, I jus can't
You mean you, you won't
I can't, I have to keep moving, I have to stay underground, it's the only way to survive, for me to survive,
And what's the deal with Hélène?!
And what's the deal with Hélène what?
The deal with Hélène, Billie said she's like no longer alive. Like she was married to Peter Paul Rubens in the seventeenth century, the fucking seventeenth century or something, she says.
Well Rubens was much too old for her . . .
What? What are you talking about,
No, I'm saying it's not true, it's simply not true. That's, well, that's prosperous, Hélène is alive, she's totally alive! She works, works as a conservator, a conservator, a conservator at the Broad.
Billie says Hélène is dead, Hélène is dead, dead, you know dead, like death . . .
Rick confronts this, and it confuses me, knocks me off balance. I suddenly feel like I'm in a dream. It's like I'm in a dream and I'm trying to remember details in my real waking life, but I can't grasp my thoughts. I can't hold my thoughts in my hands.
Hélène? Hélène? No she's, she's,
A halting look of disbelief ambles upon Ricks scowl.
No, no, look, I'll call her. I'll call her right now, I'll like call her right now!
Picking up the phone I dial a number,
Rick at the end of his chord, flabbergasted, walks out.
Rick, no wait. Rick, just wait now! I'm calling Hélène. I'm calling her right now! I'll call her. You'll see. Rick c'mon now. It's just a, a misunderstanding. That's all. I really don't know, don't know what Billie could have,
Dial tone signals.
Practicing saying Hélène's name out loud.
Hélène,
Dial tone signals
Hey Hélène!
Dial tone signals
Hélène, Hélène it's me
Dial tone signals.
Hélène
Dial tone signals
Hélène where are you
Dial tone signals
Hélène where are you
Dial tone
Hélène, I'm here
Dial tone
Hélène
Dial tone
Hélène
Tone
Hélène
Hélène
Hélène
Prologue
Before I physically met Hélène, she always came at night. I received her from the dark. I had to bear everything bad being seen. In the beginning, I would send her away after five or six minutes. Till she learnt to go on her own accord, once her time was up. She consulted her notes by the light of an electric torch. Then she switched it off and spoke in the dark. Light silence, dark speech. It was five or six years since anyone had seen me, to begin with myself. I mean the face I poured over so, all down the years. Now I would resume that inspection, that it may be a lesson to me, in my mirrors and looking-glasses so long put away. I'll let myself be seen before I'm done. I'll call out, if there's a knock, Come in! But I speak now of five or six years ago. These allusions to now, to before and after, and all such yet to come, that we may feel ourselves in time. I had more trouble with the body proper. I masked it as best as I could, but when I got out of bed it was sure to show. For I was now beginning, then if you prefer, to get out of bed again. Then there is a matter of its injuries. But the body was of less consequence. Whereas the face, no, not at any price. Hence Hélène at night. When she forgot her torch she made shift with matches. Were I to ask for example, And her gown that day? the she switched on, thumbed through her notes, found the particular, switched off and answered, for example, The yellow. she did not like one to interrupt her and I must confess I seldom had call to. Interrupting her one night I asked her to light her face. She did so, like briefly, switched off and resumed the thread. Interrupting again I asked her to be silent for a moment. That night things went no further. But the next, or more likely the next one, I desired her at the outset to light her face and keep it lit till further notice. The light , bright at first, gradually died down, to no more than a yellow glimmer which then, to my surprise, persisted undiminished a little while. Then suddenly it was dark again and Hélène went away, the five or six minutes having presumably expired. But here one of two things, either the final extinction had coincided, by some prank of chance, with the close of the session, or else Hélène, knowing her time to be up, had to cut off the last dribs of current. I still see, sometimes, the waning face disclosing, more and more clearly the more it entered the shadow, the one I remembered. In the end I said to myself, as unaccountably lingered on, No doubt about it, it is she. It is in outer space not to be confused with the other, that such images develop. I need only interpose my hand, or close my eyes, to banish them, or take off my eyeglasses for them to fade. This is a help, but not a real protection, as we shall see. I try to keep before me therefore, as far as possible, when I get up, some such unbroken plane as that which I command from my bed, I mean ceiling. For I have taken to getting up again. I thought I had made my last journey, the one I must now try once to elucidate, that it may be a lesson to me, the one from which it were better I had never returned. But the feeling gains on me that I must undertake another. So I have taken to getting up again and making a few steps in the room, holding on to the bars of the bed. What ruined me at the bottom was wind ride. With all the jumping and pushing when I was young, and even long after in the case of certain events, I wore out the machine before its time. My fortieth year had come and gone and I'm still throwing around the javelin.
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